WWU Associate Professor of English Wins Prize for her Road-Trip Story with a Twist

Contact: WWU Office of University Communications, (360)650-3350 or news@wwu.edu

BELLINGHAM – Western Washington University Associate Professor of English Kathryn Trueblood, an accomplished novelist and short story writer, recently won the 2011 Red Hen Press Short Story Award for her dark, quirky tale of a mother-and-daughter road trip.

Trueblood’s “Fuck You! Till Next Christmas,” won $1,000 and will be published in the “Los Angeles Review” in fall 2012. The fictional story features a middle-aged narrator who drives her mother from Seattle to the San Francisco Bay Area while conducting “a kind of ruthless assessment of her mother’s inability to extend from her own point of view, to feel empathy,” Trueblood says. “At the same time, there’s a note of real pathos, because the daughter loves her mother.”

An excerpt:

"My mother and I have a complex relationship. It's not exactly Mommie Dearest but it's definitely 'Fuck You! Till Next Christmas.' We patch things up in time for the holidays, but the payback is intolerable. A week after, she'll be calling me every day in the middle of fixing the kid's dinner. By the clock. Right now we're going for a long drive, but she is giving me the silent treatment. What do I care? I'm up for it."

“It’s a tough story,” says Trueblood. “I think that some people have parents who have a kind of character disorder that makes it very difficult for them to love their own children. … If a parent didn’t build a bond of trust with a child, what happens later in life when that parent needs to be cared for? What does a child owe a parent at that point?”

In addition to the difficult questions, “Fuck You! Till Next Christmas” offers a bizarre plot twist, one that’s even weirder considering it’s based on a news account of an actual mother-daughter road trip Trueblood read a few years ago. But the surprise isn’t the point of the story, she says. “The point is, this drive with the mother allows the daughter in some ways to put this story away, to find a place where she can keep this story, emotionally.”

Trueblood, who has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley, has taught at Western since 1991 and teaches courses in creative writing, editing and publishing, and literature. Her most recent novel, “The Baby Lottery,” was named a Book Sense Pick by the American Booksellers Association in 2007. Her first book, “The Sperm Donor’s Daughter,” received a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize in 2000. “Fuck You! Till Next Christmas” is one of several short stories in Trueblood’s next collection, “The Medicated Marriage.”

Trueblood also notes that she has a “very nice mother.”