Dees News: South's Million Writer Award for Toggling the Switch

Friday, April 01, 2005

South's Million Writer Award for Toggling the Switch

Alicia Gifford

An excerpt from Alicia Gifford's "Toggling the Switch"...

ON TUESDAY TONI MEETS HER LOVER, Gordon, for dinner at the Water Grill, downtown. They each have a martini at the bar while they wait for a table. They get seated, both order salads, she orders blackened salmon, and he orders Maine lobster. They get a bottle of chardonnay.
They make small talk while they eat their salads. He’s fidgety and distracted. She drinks her wine and wonders what his problem is.

The winner of this year's Story South Million Writers Award for best online short story is Alicia Gifford's "Toggling
the Switch" (published in Narrative Magazine).

According to storySouth's editor, Jason Sanford, "The purpose of the Million Writers Award is to honor and promote the best fiction published in online literary journals and magazines during the past year."

Preliminary judges from the list of Top Ten Stories of 2004 selected the award winners.

Laila Lalami, MoorishGirl blogger interviewed Gifford on her story and the award.

Alicia Gifford: "Toggling the Switch," published in Narrative Magazine.

"Toggling the Switch" is the result of a moral dilemma I liked to pose to friends: What if you hit someone in your car, and killed them? Say, you'd been drinking. Maybe you'd smoked some pot, too. Say, no one saw it. Say, the accident was unavoidable. Say the victim was dead dead dead and nothing you could do would change that. Say, you had everything to lose. Would you turn yourself in? If you could get away with it? Would you be tempted?

All my friends unequivocally said yes, they'd turn themselves in. But I wasn't so sure. The drive for self-preservation is a strong one, and it's hard to say what anyone would do once confronted with the circumstances. And so I wrote this to explore it some, to pose the question.
Was Toni wrong to do what she did? Are there absolutes?
What would you do?

Click on the title to read this great story in its entirety.
So so good. Kudos, Alica!

posted by Unknown @ 1:42 PM

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