Miller's Deer
I am pleased to announce that my story, "Miller's Deer" was the runner up for the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize and is under consideration for publication in the Thomas Wolfe Review. See prize judge and novelist Ashley Warlick's comments on my story here.
Ms. Warlick said “Miller’s Deer” (is) a story “written in (a) clean, compelling style and supreme confidence. Every so often you can hear a writer’s career in a single, sharp line — ‘Miller’s Deer’ is made whole-cloth of just such self-possessed work.”
Almost 30 years ago I was a young lawyer working in a firm in Milwaukee. I was newly married and had my first child on the way. And I hated my work. I was good enough at it, but I was facing a nervous breakdown or an early heart attack. I wasn't cut out to be a hard-nosed corporate lawyer. My senior partner didn't see it. He thought I had partner written all over me--he didn't know I was puking in the bathroom between meetings. He asked me on a deer hunting trip. It was a coveted honor. It was also a final hurdle to making partner. I'd never held a gun in my life, much less stalked deer in the north woods.
It took me a long time to write a story about that time of my life.
Of course, not a word is true, except in the larger sense that fiction is always truer than real life.
I'll post it on my website once it's clear who has what rights to it.
Gary
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Reader Comments (3)
Fortunately, nobody ever invited me to go hunting with them. Just skeet and "sporting clays", which are a neat variation on skeet. My firm's advertising agency had an annual event over on the Eastern Shore, very elegant and nice. We even got embroidered hats.
I was able to score well, thanks to some early shotgun training. From my father, of all people. Little did he know that it would serve me well in such a macho hunt club setting.
I know why I was never invited to hunt. Picture me, in a a cold, dark woods, early in the morning, without having taken a shower to wake me up, holding a lethal shotgun in my hands. Sitting up in a tree, perhaps. Does this sound like a safe situation? Or fun?
I'm all for culling the deer herd, but I don't want to be there for the act. I get shivers putting a worm onto a hook. And I hate dealing with angry fish, too!
Personally, I prefer to do my skeet shooting off the fantail of a cruise ship, as the sun sets in the distance. Then sit down to a nice dinner on the aft deck. (I think they use steel shot now, instead of lead, for environmental reasons. In the shotgun, that is.)