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Gina Ochsner

Gina Ochsner
Gina Ochsner

Dark horse writer

Success has come as a surprise to Gina Ochsner.

One paragraph.

For Gina Ochsner that's a good day's work.

"I like to think about what I'm writing," she says. "I typically only work two to three days a week. It's slow going."

The fact that she's writing at all continues to amaze Ochsner. After graduating from a small Quaker college in her native Oregon, Ochsner decided to enroll at Iowa State in the Department of English's creative program.

That was a huge leap of faith.

"I loved writing," she says. "I still do. It's really exciting to see worlds collide and see a story start to emerge.

"But I didn't know if I had any talent as a writer. So I had to get away from everything that was so familiar to me. Iowa was a good place to go. If I would have stayed here (Oregon) I don't think I would have continued writing."

Ochsner struggled at Iowa State and surprised herself (and even her professors, she says) by graduating with a master's degree in English in 1994. "It was a challenge," she said. "I almost didn't make it."

That self-doubt continued even after she moved back to Oregon and started writing short stories and getting them published in such publications such as Prairie Schooner, Iron Horse Review and Phoebe.

She also started winning awards including the Ruth Hindman Foundation Prize, the Raymond Carver Prize and the Chelsea Award for Short Fiction.

So when she got a phone call one day she didn't give the person on the other end an opportunity to talk. "I thought it was a telemarketer," Ochsner said. "I was changing a diaper and hung up on him."

But that person didn't give up. He called back.

"I thought 'what the nerve,' " Ochsner said. "But he said 'don't hang up, I'm an editor and you've been selected for the Flannery O'Connor Award (for short fiction)."

Still Ochsner didn't believe him.

"We have a family friend who likes to joke and I thought it was him," she said. "Then I thought they wanted another Gina Ochsner.

"I didn't believe it until the book was in print."

That book is The Necessary Grace to Fall, a series of 11 short stories that takes the reader "from the Czech Republic to Alaska, from Siberia to West Texas as they stake out territories straddling the border between life and death."

Since that book Ochsner has published a second book, People I Wanted to Be, published by Houghton Mifflin.

Her success in publishing got her thinking. Could she help other similar aspiring writers at Iowa State?

"My dad and I were shooting the breeze one day and we talked about creating an award for people like me," she said, "students that weren't very good academically but who have a lot of heart and were hard workers. I wasn't the first person you would tap on the shoulder and say would have a lot of promise."

With the creation of the Dark Horse Award, Ochsner hopes to encourage other Iowa State writers.

Maybe someday they will make it in publishing like Ochsner. She's working on a full-length novel that has gotten a jump-start from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is one of 50 writers awarded a 2006 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship.

Even with all her success, Ochsner almost didn't apply for the fellowship. "I was nervous about applying for a grant from the NEA," she says. "I had tried several times before without success and each time I received news that my material was passed over I interpreted that as a sign that my work was not worthwhile, that my continuing to write was a silly and vain pursuit."

She decided to give it one more time and was awarded with a $20,000 fellowship. Ochsner used the funding to travel to Latvia to research her novel-in-progress The Persuasion of Water and also to Russia to research another novel in progess tentatively called Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight.

"I had to go there and look at the landscape," she said. "I thought it was important to go there if I was going to write about that part of the world."

If it's like her other works, The Persuasion of Water is sure to be a critical success.