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Greg Price’s short story “The Pilgrimage” was selected as one of three winners in the short fiction category this year. Greg developed this story in Professor Matt Lany’s creative writing class in 2007. While the events in the story are fictional, Greg explained that the characters, their motivations, and their emotions are all “based in personal experience.” The simple concept for the story “just popped” into his head, and from there he worked to embellish the characters and develop the plot. According to Greg, Professor Lany critiqued the ending originally presented in the workshop because it didn’t include both characters sufficiently —Greg revised to arrive at the current, more satisfying conclusion.

Greg tries to write daily but admits it’s usually more like once a week. He has started a book based on his own experiences, but he reports that progress is slowed by hard decisions about narrative perspective and the difficulty of sustained work on an emotional project: “it’s really personal…it gets to me.” And though he posts some poems on MySpace, he maintains a sense of humor and humility: “I figured out in [Lany’s] class that I’m really bad at poetry.” For now, he says, “I’m slowly making my way towards some sort of degree” at FCCJ, with plans to take more literature and writing classes and possible major in English at a four-year college.

Though he has only recently begun to think of writing and literature as a possible career choice, Greg has enjoyed writing since he was quite young. He still has a comic book he created in elementary school. The unique manuscript is held under lock and key, but the author reveals it has something to do with a frog and a dog who find themselves under attack when Kamikaze Karrot emerges from the television. Even in the fourth grade, he routinely wrote stories to share with friends.

Greg’s advice to developing writers: “be open-minded and try to tell people who you are.”