Most Minnesotans reading Nick Healy’s short story “Uncle Ed’s Packard” will understand the brief reference to Armistice Day in the context of an impending storm.
Suddenly, the date is clear: Nov. 11, 1940. The events about to unfold are also clear: Unseasonably warm conditions will cause hundreds of Midwesterners out enjoying the weather to be trapped in a raging blizzard that set in so quickly many didn’t have time to seek shelter. Trains collided, boats sank and 154 people died.
But just as Healy, a Mankato resident, had hoped, the story — which won the prestigious 2009 Tamarack Award, presented by Minnesota Monthly, and appears in the November issue — works whether the reader understands the reference or not. This is a story about a teenage boy and his decisions, much more so than it is about a blizzard.
The story follows the boy, Farrell, who steals his uncle Ed’s black Packard near the site where Ed and a friend are hunting and takes it on a joy ride with his girlfriend, Lenora. The focus flips back and forth between the teenagers and the hunters, Kowalska, as the blizzard sets in.
“In a way, the story is about how innocent decisions or actions can have deep and devastating impacts — the decisions of teenage boys, in particular,” said Healy, an editor for Capstone Publishers who was honored at a ceremony for the award last week. “So often they do things without calculating what the results could be, or without having any sort of fear about the worst case scenario.”
The Tamarack isn’t Healy’s first honor. His short story, “And Other Delights,” won the Speakeasy Prize from the Loft Literary Center in 2005. He has been published in the North American Review, Water Stone Review, Blueroad and the Great River Review.
Still, the Tamarack, which comes with a $1,000 prize, is a special honor celebrating superior short fiction by Midwestern writers. And Healy had been trying for it for the past 10 years.
Read the complete Free Press story at http://www.mankatofreepress.com/local/local_story_298005644.html
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