Biography

Gina Ochsner lives and works in Keizer, Oregon, with her husband and three small children, and teaches part time at George Fox University. Her collection, The Necessary Grace to Fall, was selected as the Flannery O’Connor Short Award for Fiction and was published by University of Georgia Press in March 2002. She is at work on a second collection of short stories, a novella, and a novel.

Current Projects
February 2002

“I like to keep the bathtub full of carp and have always been in the habit or working on at least two, sometimes three different projects at the same time. I feel like the more time I spend with the short story form, the more I have to reconsider the challenges and limitations of the form. I suppose this is where the desire to tinker comes from—the simple curiosity to know, can this be done? I’ve always been a big fan of short shorts, those flashes that look like prose but sound more like poetry. And I’ve been wondering if enough of them were stacked together, could a larger story emerge? To that end I am at work on a lexicon style encyclopedia of Romanian legendry, mythology and lore. Each entry starts with a definition of the word or phrase (salt or ghost, for instance) and is then followed by a fable or scene that further explains—via a fourteenth-century Romanian point of view—how or why that has such an enduring cultural meaning. As the reader moves from entry to entry, a larger narrative begins to develop and arcs between and among the entries, regardless of what order one might read them. In this way the dictionary is an experiment in form, but also an attempt to translate the untranslatable: all the superstitions, deep-seated beliefs and sensibilities that are not carried in mere words, but in stories.”

“My interest in Romania and Romanian culture sprang from the discovery of what a unique linguistic history Romania has. Romania has been called the most pure of the Latinate languages by etymologists and linguistics. This is something of a miracle as Romania has always been bordered by Slavic countries to the north, Hungary to the west, and Turkey to the south. The majority of the population speaks Hungarian, a language belonging to the Urgu-Finneic language group, and Turkish languages (Anatolian, Persian, Hittie language groups). I have been researching the Orthodox Church fourteenth and fifteenth-century Romania and studying a phenomenon called “Hesychasm” or the way of silence that monks maintained while they lived in the lavras—the only safe place for them to write and preserve their language during the Ottoman invasions. The survival of the Romanian language in written form is attributed solely to the activities of these lavra dwelling Hesychast monks who kept their manuscripts under lock and key. However, their history, which is meticulously documented in orthodox literature, points by way of conspicuous absence to a thriving oral tradition of storytelling among the women. While the men wrote in caves, the women wove myths and superstitions around the hearth. The women’s tradition of oral story keeping flourished quietly in the form of prayers, recipes, imprecations, and old wives tales, while the men, as official keepers of language and letters, were away. Thus the dictionary is a complication of stories from and about both men and women. It is also a whimsical examination of language—of the duplicates and subtleties between English and Romanian—as well as a canon of mythology that coincides and diverges from the canon of saints and legendry maintained in the Orthodoxy tradition of the lavras and sketes.”