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�My brain dances with ideas� Photo by Jim Craven Writer Molly Best Tinsley of Ashland is the first professor emerita in the history of the U.S. Naval Academy and she�s the winner of this year�s Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction. Ashland author�s collection of stories wins top fiction prize By Bill Varble Maybe it�s not surprising that Molly Best Tinsley taught at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md. After all, she grew up an Air Force brat in Sweden, Germany and Japan. And maybe it�s not surprising that Tinsley writes award-winning short stories that appear in literary magazines. Ideas roll out of her with a writer�s precision. What is surprising is the mix of military and literary worlds that Tinsley embodies. The Ashland woman is the first professor emerita in the history of the U.S. Naval Academy, and she�s the winner of this year�s Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction. She left the academy after 20 years of teaching English and creative writing in 1997, to the gasps of colleagues who thought she was crazy to leave before qualifying for a full pension in just a few more years . She won the award, which is sponsored by Ohio State University, for "Throwing Knives," (OSU Press) a collection of stories. Tinsley plans a book signing at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, another at 7 p.m. June 22 at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Medford. She and her husband came to Ashland to visit a friend a couple years ago, fell in love with it and bought a place near Emigrant Lake. "My husband is a country boy, and I love the theater," she says. "This is about the only place in the country where you can have both. "I�d had enough of the military. It was time to move on." Time, she figured, to get on with the writing life. "I�m left-handed," she says. "I read somewhere recently that we (left handers) have a life expectancy of 68. ... My brain dances with ideas. I�ll never live long enough to write them all." She�s 56. She figures writing a story can take a month or two, a novel, years. The stories in "Throwing Knives" were written over a span of 17 years. They are shimmering snapshots of the pain and emotional violence of relationships in the cauldron we call the family. Tinsley�s laser eye again and again catches her lonely, isolated characters in acts of striving for connection. A 15-year-old girl struggling with bulimia senses that her mother�s new lover�s way of grabbing life by the throat could be an alternative to her artsy mother�s laid-back fecklessness _ or maybe not. A widow signs up for a figure-drawing class. A cancer survivor in a bad marriage dons snorkel and fins to slip into the ocean. Fully five of these stories, one shy of half, are about a Navy brat abroad. Tinsley was a hardly a typical military brat. Her father was a Princeton grad, her mother a graduate of Barnard. Her father was a mathematician and meteorologist who joined the Army Air Force because that was the frontier where the best meteorology was being done in the days of World War II. "We didn�t have duty rosters on the refrigerator," she says. "My parents felt alienated from the military." The family traveled. Young Molly went to a dozen schools. The five Stockholm stories in the book are autobiographical in texture, but not event. There are themes of home, absence, alienation. "You know how it feels and smells and tastes," Tinsley says. These days she has time to write, to read (quantum physics, chaos theory, anything but fiction), to reflect on the tension that exists between military training and education. "The main focus is on military training," she says. "It�s anti-intellectual. Everything they do conspires against thinking creatively. You�re always subverting the mission." She grants that when a young officer is given an order, the Navy doesn�t want him to take time out and think creatively about it. And yet she says some cadets do begin to question the military life. "Some leave," she says. "Others manage to balance the two things. "Many are good kids and oriented to service. A lot are there to get a free engineering degree, get out in five years and make big bucks." Tinsley got out in 20 years. She has few illusions about big bucks and literary short stories. She�s working on a couple, though, and on a play about an old man in a nursing home, and she�s working fast. "We each," she says, "have a limited sense of time." Obituaries | Sports | Business | Classifieds | Tempo | Prime Times | So Oregon Sites | Outdoor Journal | Subscribe | Contact | Movies | Advertise | Real Estate Showcase | Archive | Editorials | Letters to the editor | Religion | Wake-up Call | NIE | Cyber Chef | Job Network | So Oregon Weather | WSJ Northwest | Forums | AP Wire | AP Money | F.A.Q. | Awards Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. The Community Newspaper Subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co, Inc Copyright �The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA