Presented to: Michael Fillerup
For: "Lost and Found"
The awards committee stated, "Michael Fillerup's stories are often about Mormonism in that direct way that subverts probity with good intention--or would, if the writing were any less wary than his, or any less open to complication, ambush, or misgiving. A kind of home teaching perhaps, but here set fobiddingly far from home. His characters are often profound loners, people twice estranged. They find themselves marginalized in a culture--for them--already marginal, where what they do and are is sustained by religious commitment, and religious commitment is imperiled precisely by what they find themselves doing and what, in fact, they have become. Faith in these stories, is a terrible gift.
"'Lost and Found,' published in a Christmas anthology of mostly far-too-well-intentioned writing, is just such a story, a kind of counter-Christmas tale, in which a painfully unwise man is called on a starless Christmas Eve to bring his foreign gift, not to mark the miracle virgin birth, but to find something not unlike miracle in the long-deflowered ordinariness of death. As in Fillerup's other work, the story plunges along with seeming artlessness where careful shaping would surely not seem to take, and all the while it draws us deftly on with urgency and realism. It is a hard=nosed, rawly detailed, icily coercive read. And ends however improbably still quite believably in magic. In revelation.
"With 'Lost and Found,' Michael Fillerup has braved a labyrinth of sentiment, all the more treacherous for its familiarity, to achieve a story whose probity might even make the world safe again, if only momentarily, for Christmas. That too is a terrible gift."