Lori Ostlund’s story collection,The Bigness of the World, won the Flannery O’Connor Award, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda Finalist. Stories from it appeared in theBest American Short Storiesand the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Her second book,After the Parade(Scribner, 2015), was a B&N Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Ferro-Grumley Award. She has been a teacher for around twenty-five years—in New Mexico, Spain, and Malaysia—and lives in San Francisco, where she has (almost) finished her second novel and is working on third novel and a second story collection.
Mentor Statement
Lori is interested in the ways that character and place intersect. She is also interested in the ways that humor is created on the page, voice, and sentence-level craft. In working with new writers, she is most interested in helping them see what they can’t always see because they are too close to the work and in developing a better understanding of scene as the basic building blocks of fiction. She loves the one-on-one format that mentoring involves, believing that it allows her to develop a keener understanding of a mentee’s voice, preoccupations, and intentions.