A brief rundown of this year's essay contest winners.

Amateur Adult

Third Place: "Scout's Honor" by Karin Becht, Summerset, SD

Karin Becht grew up in Bay Village, Ohio and her family had been heavily involved in Scouting since her early childhood years. Camping, canoeing, and hiking in the backcountry of New Mexico and Canada were activities enjoyed by Becht and her family. At the age of eighteen, she attended the University of Miami, School of Nursing. She later changed majors and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from Kent State University. Becht earned her Master of Science in Social Administration degree from Case Western Reserve University, and is currently employed as a Social Worker with the VA Black Hills Health Care System. Becht has lived in the Black Hills since 2003, and continues to enjoy hiking.

Becht's fictional short story, Scout's Honor, weaves a tale of survival for two hiking partners faced with a medical emergency in a remote forest location. An unusual encounter tests their courage to continue on the quest to find help while challenging their code of conduct for hiking in the backcountry.

Second Place: "Medicine Iron's Woman" by Frank Owen duBois, Rapid City, SD

First Place: "Judgment Day" by Anton Kaiser, Rapid City, SD

Professional Adult

Third Place: "Thieves' Weather, 1996" by Leif Nikunen, Brookings, SD

One of my stories, 'Black Star Out of Heaven,' can be downloaded at no cost from the online literary magazine, The King's English, in the summer 2007 issue. Another of my stories, 'Sacraments,' has recently been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of Dark Sky Magazine, another online journal easily accessible to readers. Both of those stories are set in the James River Valley of South Dakota.

Second Place: "You Don't Know Jack" by Adrian Ludens, Rapid City, SD

My name is Adrian Ludens. I work full time at Borders Books and Music as the store trainer and part time at Rushmore Radio as an on-air announcer. I am involved in Uncle Monkey's Melodrama and went to my first Black Hills Writers Group meeting last month. My wife Crissy and I have been married ten years and we have three kids: Taylor, Ashley and Victor.

I have been writing for two years. I won a flash fiction writing contest two consecutive months, with my work appearing in the May 2008 and June 2008 issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. I have a short story in "Glassfire Anthology" available from Peg Leg Publishing, and will appear in "The Best of Trail of Indiscretion", upcoming from Fortress Publishing. A total of 23 of my stories have been published in mostly small press publications, and another 24 have been published online.

I write what I call dark fiction. Elements of horror, mystery and the supernatural seem to find their way into my stories.

First Place: "Frozen in Time" by Maureen Blake, Spearfish, SD

Genesis of a Contest Entry

Maureen Blake, editor for hire maureeenab@yahoo.com

In the summer of 1998, I take a break from homeschooling my three children and sign up for a week's intensive creative writing workshop, part of the Fine Arts Institute held at Black Hills State University. Having no experience writing fiction, I leap into the deep end with a prompt from the instructor. He's gotten it from a fellow teacher who'd had her kids conduct interviews with older folks in Belle Fourche as part of a unit on oral history-this is one of the stories they collected:

There's a New Year's Eve dance sometime early in the century. A girl lives out in the country and is picked up by her boyfriend to go to the dance. A blizzard comes up. They stay to the end of the dance and then decide to try to get home. On the way, they are stopped-reason unknown. The boyfriend decides to walk for help and tells the girl to stay in the carriage. By the time he gets to a farmhouse, his feet are frozen. The people at the farmstead can't go for help until the fierce blizzard ends. In the morning, they contact the girl's father, who then goes with a neighbor, only to find the girl dead, frozen in a sitting position. The wagon they have is a short one. The only way they can take her into town is to lay her on her back on the bed of the wagon, with her feet on the seat between them. They take her that way into Belle Fourche, to the undertaker's, who has no idea how to get her into a coffin, so he puts her into a chair in front of his fireplace and builds a big fire. As she thaws, she starts to twitch and blink.

The instructor tells us: "That's it. That's all the 'facts.' Now turn it into a first-person story, using one of four possible narrators: boyfriend, father, neighbor-who-helps, and undertaker. Take any starting point, any narrative situation, any emotional stance, etc. Detail the story and tell it from that point of view." I'm able to generate a few pages of credible story, exhilarated by this momentary venture into the world of make-believe, fascinated by having begun with something that supposedly actually happened.

Several years later, children grown and almost gone, I enroll in a semester's class on creative writing from the same instructor. Those first few pages bloom into a short story, still more fiction than I've ever produced. My main character now lives five decades later than the time of the blizzard, haunted by memories and unaware of how crippled he is from the events he witnessed.

Fast forward to March 1, 2008. My writers' group has hired this same teacher to guide/nudge/push us to ever more strenuous editing. Soon after, I hear of the Laura Bower Van Nuys Creative Writing Contest. Despite still considering myself primarily a nonfiction writer, I once again leap without looking and wrestle with this story, using everything I gleaned from the editing workshop. Sentences tighten. Words disappear. Details shift into focus. Oddly, I have to tone down the "facts" from the original prompt, unable to verify their possibility according to modern forensics.

I messenger the contest entry to Rapid City one day before the deadline.

Two weeks later, I take receipt of a letter informing me I have placed in the contest. Kudos to Kent Meyers, the writing instructor who teaches by the example of his own vigorous writing life. Endless thanks for Bearlodge Writers, for their matchless support over the last dozen years. Special thanks to the handful of them who spared time and energy to answer my plea for last minute critiquing of the entry. Lastly, bottomless appreciation to my daughter and fellow writer, who believes in me even when I can't.