Debra’s first short story, “Yardsticks,” won the 1998 Kay Snow award sponsored by Willamette Writers, and was published in the Winter 2002-2003 issue (no. 37) of Image. It will soon be available here as a download.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

By my family’s standard of measurement, it was a Super-sized year; the year my Dad, Bill Riggs, married Tennis Pro Barbie from the country club, and opened his own cosmetic surgery practice in Lake Oswego, and we all moved into the big ugly mansion overlooking the lake, and my new stepmother Barbie demolished Lydia Karl at the regional ladies tennis tournament, and my older sister Cassie married the Seattle real-estate whiz in a fifty-thousand-dollar wedding at the cathedral, and my older brother Judd quarterbacked the Oregon Beavers to a Rose Bowl win, and finally scored with that leggy red-headed cheerleader. Not that anyone was paying attention, but it was also the year I got the short end of the stick; the year Lydia Karl’s daughter broke up with me because I was a Loser “with a capital L”, and I got straight D’s and a couple of F’s in my pre-med classes at PSU, and my Dad first called me a Congenital Bungler when I even bungled the idiot-proof razor-blade-in-the-bathtub routine because I forgot to lock the door.