Heidi Stallman, who received her graduate degree in animal ecology from Iowa State, is a third place winner in the second quarter of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest for her short story titled “The Winds.”

Stallman wrote “The Winds” at a fiction workshop during her last semester at ISU for Stephen Pett, an associate professor of English.

“Well, I’m thrilled for Heidi. I’m not surprised she won an award,” Pett said. “It is very difficult to get recognition as a creative writer and most students probably stop taking it very seriously when the class is over…but Heidi was intent on trying to do something with her writing that would find a better audience.

“She is extremely hard-working in developing ideas beyond what students ordinarily attempt in undergraduate writing workshops,” Pett said.

Stallman’s idea for her award-winning short story formed when she was walking around the ISU campus on Earth Day, where she saw many tables about conserving non-renewable energy sources. Stallman began wondering what would happen if the earth’s gas and fuel supplies were low, and decided to write about it. Her piece depicts one possible outcome of a shortage in gas and fuel supplies.

Stallman said “The Winds” takes place 30 to 40 years in the future with a lot of strange twists and is more about her main character’s struggle than the future.

“It is about a rural Iowa woman who decides to stay on her farm without gas and against government opposition,” Stallman said.

Her character, Betty Wiliams, remains sane throughout the story despite her desperate situation. All others have left, including her family, and she must face loneliness and the haunting memories of the past. “The winds are pressing in on her,” Stallman said, which is how she found her title.

“When I lived in Iowa I saw the fast, hard winds over the plains. There was nothing to stop them,” Stallman said. She uses the winds as a symbol throughout the story.

Pett said Stallman is interested in science fiction writing, which is normally a pitfall for student writers, but said Stallman is well on her way to mastering it. “She always took her characters seriously, as people first.”

“The Winds” is Stallman’s first published story. She began writing at the age of 10 after reading the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.

“I thought those were the most incredible books. I read them over and over,” Stallman said. “I tried to write a novel in the same style and got about eight or nine chapters written.”

Stallman continued to write poetry and in journals and won some awards in seventh, eighth and ninth grade for her work. People began noticing she was a good writer which caused Stallman to stop writing.

“I was scared away because I loved it so much,” she said.

She began writing again when she took graduate classes at ISU and also when she started learning tae kwon do. Stallman was involved the Karate Club at ISU, which renewed her confidence in herself as a writer.

“I thought to myself, ‘Hey, maybe I am not wasting my time,'” she said. Stallman began taking English classes at ISU where she wrote her speculative fiction piece “The Winds.”

Stallman enjoys writing speculative fiction because it includes science fiction, fantasy and horror and is not at all like what is on T.V.

“There are so many opportunities, because we have no idea what the future is going to be like,” she said. “There are spiritual elements, natural phenomenons. You can explore and do anything you want.”

Stallman has a particular purpose in mind as she is writing. “I want people to be left with a sense of wonder,” she said. “I want to spark creativity and imagination.”

She likes to get some of her ideas from people she knows. Though she has never directly written herself into a book, she does put habits of other people into her characters. “I like to make notes of people with really quirky habits to put into my characters,” Stallman said.

Her work also incorporates environmental themes, which is derived from her major in animal biology. Stallman would currently like to write and have a job in ecology, but she is having a hard time trying to find a balance of the two.

Stallman was living in Ames when she received the phone call that she had won the award. “When I got the call I said: ‘Oh, that’s really neat,’ and it started to hit over the next hour,” she said.

As a quarterly winner, Stallman will receive a $500 cash prize, an all-expense paid trip to the contest’s awards ceremony and also participation in the contest’s famed writers’ workshop. The ceremony and contest will take place in June at a location yet to be decided .