Welcome

This site is a window with a view. Look through it and you’ll find stories that offer a glimpse of a small peninsula in the Pacific Northwest. You’ll also see excerpts of works in progress, and entries about the experiences of the writer herself. The view will change as the work and writer progress, so come back again to see what you can see. 

About the Writer

I am currently working on a collection of related short stories primarily set on an imagined version of the Key Peninsula where I grew up. In early elementary school I began writing stories, but more than writing I enjoyed inhabiting stories through make-believe. The make believe was always rooted in place and inspired by what the landscape had to offer. If it was the beach, then the giant driftwood log below the neighbor’s house was the ship on which I sailed and the oyster shells became plates for seaweed salad. If it was the backyard, then the cedar tree was a secluded cottage where an old woman dwelled. If it was the neighbor’s woods, then it was time to dig out mom’s old shawls and dresses—‘70s apparel is a great stand-in for pioneer garb—and become an orphan-escapee circa 1850. But sometimes it was wiping the mirror and scrubbing the toilet, so the bathroom became a room in a castle, and the cleaner was, naturally, good and humble royalty in disguise. If it was picking-up after the dogs in the yard, well, you get the picture. 

Writing now isn’t so different from make-believe back then. The source is still the landscape, the beach and trees and inlets of the Key Peninsula, and it’s still dramatically re-imagined into a place more separate, wilder, and slightly outside of time. Through story writing, as through make-believe, I select from what is present in the physical world, blot out what distracts from the scene, and then move through that space, describing it to myself, telling what’s in it, until the version in my mind is powerful enough to have its own existence, inspired by that driftwood, but not limited to it. The trick is, make-believe is self-absorbed, whereas writing is communication. The challenge is to create something authentic to oneself, and yet relevant to others, something that not only transports, but illuminates. 

Publication History

Gretchen Flesher Duggan was the winner of the 2010 Wordstock Short Fiction Competition and was awarded 2nd place for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in 2007. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod International, Portland Magazine, The Wordstock Ten Anthology, Bellingham Review, and Drash: Northwest Mosaic.