Western Oregon Journal

Good things come from Oregon. Gina Ochsner is one of them. The author, who visited Western's campus Oct. 11 for a reading in the Hamersly library, successfully captivated the audience with her reading: an unpublished ghost story within a ghost story, fitting for the autumnal months, she explained. But this was not the average spooky Halloween tale.

"The City of Mausoleums" begins when Russell, a mysterious shaded man driving a bottle-brown car who eventually becomes a grim-reaper figure, picks up a hitchhiker. He then proceeds to tell her a meandering ghost story, set in the City of Mausoleums. Ochsner, who has a self-proclaimed preoccupation with death, sets up the City of Mausoleums as a town anxious for fresh blood and eager for the opportunity to tend to the dead. She uses the setting to make some subtle social commentary about the eerily pristine and manicured nature of cemeteries. This ghost story concludes with Ruth, the main character inside the embedded story, realizing that she hasn't moved to a new town, but to a new cemetery, as she is deceased.

The second half of the ghost story focuses on Russell and the fact that he has metaphorically come to drive his passenger to her death. While relating a spooky tale, Russell also becomes the deliverer of horror. When Russell concludes his tale, the hitchhiker realizes his implications, but instead of accepting her death, like Ruth in the story, she picks up and moves on, choosing life over death.

Ochsner read the story clearly and with appropriate pauses for the chuckles her wit induced. Her descriptions were engaging and her dialogue believable, making her story not only a good piece of fiction, but also a good choice to be read aloud. After the conclusion of her reading, Ochsner took questions from the audience in which she described her own creative process, her fascination with cemeteries, death and the business of mortuaries, and other projects she has in the works.

Ochsner is the recipient of numerous awards for her first collection of short stories, 2002's The Necessary Grace to Fall ($24.95, 181 pages, U. Georgia), including the Oregon Book Award and the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her second collection of short stories, the much-anticipated People I Wanted To Be ($12, 192 pages, Mifflin), was published in May 2005.

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