Guest Judge Jim Shepard selected Carol Keeley’s “Wind and Embers” as the first place winner in our Winter Short Story Award. Read the story here and then check out this interview in which Keeley talks about “imaginal empathy,” how place impacts the people who live there, and the importance of details.
First, a big congratulations on winning the 2025-2026 Winter Short Story Award! When we read for contests, it isn’t always immediately obvious to us editors which stories our judge for that particular contest is going to gravitate towards—but I think in this case, it felt like a foregone conclusion as soon as we read your story that “Wind and Embers” would at least be in the top three. There’s so much authority, as Jim notes himself in his intro. Some of that comes from the specific, minute details—the bungee cords in the plastic mayonnaise jar, for instance, or describing the metal as “origamied.” How many drafts did this story go through to get to this level of authority?
Thanks so much for the kind words, which mean even more knowing how competitive this contest is. I’m still buzzing with surprise and gratitude.
I honestly can’t say how many drafts this has undergone. I revise endlessly. “Wind and Embers” is extracted from a novel. Most of that manuscript has either been overhauled completely, tinkered with on a line-level, or just tossed. I think editing is where the alchemy lives. Rewriting, for me, also has to do with refusing to be beguiled by something that excited me when it fell out onto the page, or that came from labored research, but doesn’t serve the story.
That said, Val Barbeau was unique. He’s wholly invented, but has felt real to me since he first stepped into view. Some details were things I noticed and kept in mind. Specifics are often what bring fiction alive for me, so I keep notebooks of oddities or delights. And I research exhaustively. My first job in publishing was as a fact-checker. Accuracy matters a lot to me. But there are no words for the surreal aftermath of a wildfire. When you witness it, language fails. I wanted to convey the shock of it, the displacement, the violent newness. Hence invented words.
For me, the best writing comes from a quality of attention and presence, and to imaginal empathy. Because Val feels so real to me, all of that was pretty easy.
Obviously, there’s a big emphasis on place in this piece. Some of that authority I was calling attention to above is apparent in the opening paragraphs, where we’re getting all these little historical details about the area—the flood in ‘69, the naming of the street. How much does place play into your other work?
This question startled me, as I’ve never thought about it consciously. It seems that place matters less in my nonfiction, except for incidental scenes. But it’s vital in most of my fiction. I’ve moved from Canada to Michigan to Chicago to Colorado. Each place left an imprint. I wrote a collection of linked short stories set in a small Midwestern town. That fictional town became the soil and stage for all the rest, which is often the way it is in small towns. And I wrote a novel based in the jazz scene in Chicago. Every sentence in that book is infused with the textures and scents of that gritty, big-hearted city. Thanks to your question, I’m realizing that, for me, people are inseparably part of their landscapes, just as they are in “Wind and Embers.”
But the past is differently present in a mountain canyon than it is in a city. Extreme weather and tenacious people and, too often, greed, leave their mark on wilder places. I think that’s why I excavated more historical details of this particular setting. I wanted to understand how it lives in the tissue still.
This is a tense story all the way through, as the fire is a constant presence, always getting closer. The prose really helps with this, too, with the abbreviated sentences (e.g., “He lurched to mental checklists. Close the windows. Start filling the tub with water—it took forever. No water pressure. Shut off the gas.”). We can feel Val’s anxiety as he seesaws in indecision. I’m not sure I have a real question here except that I wanted to call attention to the effect of the prose throughout, and the smart choice to keep the psychic distance so close on Val. Was there ever a version of this story that had more distance?
Again, a generous question that sparked my own curiosity. The scene where the fire is licking close to Val’s home as he delays evacuating was one I experienced viscerally as I was writing it. “Before you can convince the reader, you have to convince yourself,” as Wallace Stegner said. I felt Val’s blend of shock and disbelief, that fugue state of having to function despite a wash of numbness. It’s something a combat vet would probably handle better than this, but I was moving through it in my own mind, hence the breathlessness. It felt acute in Val’s case because his home represents so much to him. It tethers him to life still, though often in the form of ghosts. And his home is deeply rooted in that place, that half-wild and stubbornly loved part of the mountain. So there was never a version of this scene that had more distance. The urgency and very real threat demanded its immediacy.
What I didn’t remember until now was that I hadn’t yet been evacuated myself when I first wrote this story. I’d interviewed many who had, which is where I got details like filling the tub (which becomes an emergency water reserve in the aftermath of a fire), and closing windows (to prevent smoke damage and stop embers from getting in), as well as how common it is to grab random things because you’re not thinking clearly. When the fire that informs this book was happening, I was at a safe distance in town. As we stood in lines at the grocery store or while delivering donations, everyone asked, “What would you save?” It was a stirring question. But it was still hypothetical then.
Now the entire West is consumed with wildfires. We all have “go bags.” I’ve been evacuated a number of times since first writing this scene. A brutal fire ripped through here recently that destroyed more than a thousand structures in minutes, including a concrete shopping center full of super stores. And that was in late December.
But I’ve never experienced war or anything as harrowing as what Val endures. Nor am I as brave as he is. One of the things that drew me to writing this book was wondering about the people who run toward danger—veterans and firefighters and first responders. All I do is sit at my desk making shit up and guzzling coffee. The people who rush into danger amaze me. And how differently people respond to tragedy and trauma interests me. I also wondered about the older mountain folks who’ve always stayed behind to protect their homes. They haven’t changed, but wildfires have. That felt poignant to me, and important. So does the fact that many people pay a lifelong price for war, and for climate catastrophes.
All of this year’s finalists take big swings. It’s extremely tricky to pull off what you accomplish with ease here—Val is basically the only character in scene for large parts of this story. Other characters intrude here and there, and of course the phone calls are a constant presence, but mostly it’s Val and Ginger. How do you see Val’s solitude operating in this story?
This question made me teary. When I was first conceiving the book this story contains, I interviewed a lot of mountain residents. I knew I had a steep learning curve to get it right, to really honor it, not impersonate it. People were very generous with their time and stories. That’s when I discovered how many veterans live in such settings—remote, rugged places. So I began interviewing combat vets to try to earn the right to invent one. It makes sense that anyone with a high level of trauma tends to isolate. It also makes sense that they’d be drawn to nature.
The first vet I interviewed was an Army medic, who told me that trust is an act of courage for any vet. He meant talking to me. Armoring in solitude seems common with many vets I’ve come to know, and love. This wary solitariness is often paired with immense generosity. The vets I know are the first to help neighbors or strangers, as Val does. And, statistically, many have fractured relationships and other markers of trauma, as do first responders.
I felt a lot of tenderness in Val’s solitude, in his way of being with others, and his depth of reflection and affection and insight about them, while solitary himself. That’s very true to the vets I know, though Val is not a composite or a doppelganger of any of them.
Another vector of Val’s solitude here is the shadow of passive suicide. This, too, is a motif with many veterans and first responders. It’s unclear if Val’s reluctance to leave and his ultimate return is denial and avoidance, his feeling relationally unmoored, a complex weariness with life, or simply the gravity of habit. Maybe all of these are present. That’s for the reader to decide.
At least twenty veterans a day die by suicide. That rate is higher in the West. This number doesn’t include things like overdoses, motorcycle accidents, and suicide-by-cop—or Val’s choices—all of which blur the lines. That was something I wanted to probe.
Who are your big inspirations? Who are the writers whose books you’re always reaching for?
Jim Shepard is one, for sure. In addition to a shelf full of his books, I have notebooks filled with brilliant, hilarious things he’s said at workshops and lit conferences over the years. Lately, I alternate contemporary writers with classics I’ve not yet gotten to, like E.M. Forster. I’m embarrassed to admit I hadn’t yet read him. I have this tic—if I read a book I love, I’ll read everything else that writer has done, in order, just to bathe in it. That’s what I just did with Forster.
There are so many books to get to, I rarely reread, but I did revisit Dostoevsky recently, just to see if he lands as he did in my infatuated twenties. It was surprising to see the passages I underlined then versus what sings to me now. And splendid to see how a book keeps revealing itself over time. And there are many First Nations writers I love. One I often revisit is Richard Wagamese. He trues my soul.
I recently savored The Glorians, by Terry Tempest Williams—speaking of books infused with place, and grace. I was on an Irish streak before that—Sebastian Barry, Sally Rooney, Anne Enright, Edna O’Brien. And I was gobsmacked by Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, recommended by a niece who lives in Kenya. I try to read lots of writers from other cultures and continents. I’m always reading books on the Dharma, plus whatever odd thing I’m writing about at the moment.
When a writer I love dies, I reach for their books and have a private ceremony of some kind. So I’ve been rereading Wendell Berry, with fresh astonishment. Several of his books were right by my desk, always within reach, including a collection of interviews with him.
“Whether we know it or not, whether we want to be or not, we are members of one another,” he said in one interview. “The work of the imagination, I feel, is to understand all of this.”
I believe this deeply.
What are you working on now?
I’m revising the novel that “Wind and Embers” is from, and finishing a memoir-in-essays, some of which have also won awards.
Interviewed by Cole Meyer