PUPPY IN PERIL: The audience gasped when the puppy went out the truck window. Alyson Hagy paused briefly, and then resumed reading her story “Border” to the crowd at the Oct. 1 Casper College Literary Conference. We were rapt, consumed by the puppy’s fate. Did it survive? Was it just a smudge on the Colorado highway? In the story, the truck’s driver braked to a stop and fought his passenger, a drunken fellow rodeo cowboy, the guy who had tossed the puppy from the moving truck. Meanwhile, the story’s main character, a 14-year-old runaway, fled the back seat and ran back down the highway, afraid of what he’d find. Alyson’s pace was measured, building suspense, while I sat, wanting her to hurry up. I might have been on the edge of my seat, but can’t remember because I was one with the story. If Alyson had stopped there, a riot might have ensued. But she continue, and we found that the puppy survived, a satisfactory ending, but most likely a foreshadowing of what’s to come in the last half of the story, which she didn’t read because her 20-minute time allotment was up. “Border” is part of a story collection “that attempts to explore conflicts that ‘haunt’ the West as images of cowboys and outlaws fade.” The story earned Alyson a Wyoming Arts Council creative writing fellowship in fiction. She teased us with the first half of the story, making at least this one reader anxious to buy the collection whenever it comes out.

- posted by Michael Shay @ 9:17 AM