My email interview with the O. Henry Award folks is up on their site. I don’t remember it coming off so glad-handing and formal, but what can you do. (PS—The O. Henry Award is now the PEN/O. Henry Award.)

It’s really not too common for recognition to come to writers without a little begging, a little self-punishment in one form or another. Magazine submission, and its stacks of miserably-licked envelopes and form rejections, or the horse-racing of annual fiction contests demanding hard-to-rationalize “processing fees.” (Process into what, I’d like to know.) At the very least, you usually have to write a lot of very humble cover letters.

One of the nice things about the O. Henry, obvious prestige aside, is how it comes to you, rather than you to it; no horse-racing, no pageantry, no peptic ulcers. There’s never a reason to believe that you’re any more or less likely to receive it than anyone else: writers publishing their work for the first time are placed in the same arena as the most prolific and well-regarded writers in America. That’s not lip service: “Water Shield” is my first publication. Which is to say that for me, it’s an immense honor.

Read the rest here.