I was happy to discover this morning that my college classmate Gina Ochsner has a piece of fiction in the current issue of The New Yorker. Entitled “The Fractious South“, it is set (as is much of her short fiction) in Russia. Though Gina has in the past won the Flannery O’Conner Award for Short Fiction, the Raymond Carver Prize, and the 2002 Oregon Book Award (among others), this is the first work of hers I’ve seen in a major magazine. Her stories have also appeared in publications such as Prairie Schooner, Iron Horse Review, and Phoebe. Her first book of short stories, The Necessary Grace to Fall, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002; a new collection, A Cloud For a Carpet, will be published by Houghton Mifflin next spring. Gina and I both attended George Fox College in the early nineties, where we took part in an intensive writing seminar taught by the late Laurel Lee.