Congratulations to Brenda Volk of Lafayette, California, the winner of our first short story contest! She completed the few initial paragraphs that Linford wrote, and gave us a troubled but hopeful heroine who found the courage to embark on a spontaneous journey within, and emerge with the new suspicion that she was sane and strong. Lines like "the slight seeping from where he had ripped the flower from its grounding she felt as a tiny spit of wetness", and "With each step, she was making ash..." won us over, and made us care deeply about a girl who had been damaged much like all of us. Brenda won the entire Over the Rhine catalog of CDs as well as a copy of Michael Wilson's book, First Kind Sight.

You can read her winning story, "In Scent", here.

It was enjoyable and surprising to read the vastly different entries. Thank you to all who contributed so imaginatively. We received fistfulls of entries from across North America and from as far away as Ireland and Australia. Shelly Ross, our former neighbor and behind-the-scenes hero, surprised us with a Stephen King-esque entry in which the lilac bushes strangled unsuspecting passersby, luring and ravishing them against their will into a dark impenetrable world of unknowable dimensions. And in a different entry, when Catherine Claire's protagonist stumbled across her mortality unexpectedly, she discovered she could breathe. "Tasting time, she rolled it luxuriously back and forth across her tongue." Ryan Laughlin gathered an unlikely group of folk into Old St. Mary's Garden, each drawn by a different irresistible force, each ultimately discovering that death was informed by a rare, numinous grace that was somehow rooted in their warmest memories. We could go on and on!

We had no idea what to expect, and you made this initial attempt a success. Maybe we'll do it again this winter, after the first snowfall. In the meanwhile, keep writing.