Eugene's bunch of Wordos continues to find success.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran March 22, 2007): A story on Wednesday omitted Blake Hutchins from a list of local winners of the international Writers of the Future contest. Hutchins won a first place award in 2006 for his story "The Sword From the Sea."

As president of sci-fi powerhouse Galaxy Press, Los Angeles publisher John Goodwin is no stranger to the idea of paranormal phenomena.

So he knew Eugene was bucking the odds by producing winners in Galaxy's annual Writers of the Future contest six years in a row.

The contest draws 15,000 entries a year, from writers all over the globe. It features "blind judging," with stories identified only by assigned number, not author name or locale. This year's 12 winners hail from Paris and New York, Australia and Canada, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

And - cue "Twilight Zone" theme - Eugene and Eugene?

Two local writers, John Burridge and Damon Kaswell, will receive awards, compete for a grand prize of $1,000 and have their short fiction published by Galaxy in this year's "Writers of the Future" anthology of fantasy, science fiction and horror stories.

"I saw that they were both from Eugene and thought, `There must be something in the water up there!' ' Goodwin said.

Or something not in the water, mused Burridge, a full-time writer and stay-at-home dad.

"Maybe the lack of fluoride keeps us alert," he said.

Or maybe the seeds of inspiration arrived by air.

The Indiana-based Mutual UFO Network lists several reports of Oregon sightings since the early 1980s, when the late L. Ron Hubbard started the contest with proceeds from his best-selling fiction.

And Burridge does remember a not-so-close encounter with a strange, flying object as a Corvallis High School student about that time.

"There were no little green men," he said. "But there was this very bright light moving very low over Bald Hill just after twilight, and then it just disappeared."

There's also a less mysterious explanation.

Both Burridge and Kaswell are members of The Wordos, a Eugene writers group whose members include Nina Kiriki Hoffman, a winner of the first "Writers of the Future" contest in 1984. The group has nurtured subsequent local winners Bruce Holland Rogers and J. Steven York (1990), Eric Witchey (2001), Leon West (2002), Jay Lake (2003), Ken Brady (2004) and Steven Stanley (2005).

Kaswell, a Symantec software engineer, credits the group with inspiring him even before he joined it two years ago. His wife, Loreen Heneghan, was a member before he was. "She would come back from Wordos telling me about all the wonderful stories she'd read," the 1994 South Eugene High graduate said.

The Wordos, who meet weekly at Tsunami Books, focus on fantasy, horror and science fiction. Kaswell places himself in the latter genre.

"I'm more interested in the speculative aspects of sci-fi, how technology will affect people in the future," he said. His winning story, "Our Last Words," is about a soldier who loses everything in America's last great war, only to regain his soul in a strange and distant future.

Burridge prefers fantasy.

"Using it, you can talk really well about social issues and religion," he said. "Plus, I like the magic. It's fun."

"Mask Glass Magic," his winning entry, is an urban fantasy set in Eugene. His heroine's glass-blowing equipment is seized by police as drug paraphernalia, forcing her to work for an employer with unsettling powers.

Both men plan to travel to Los Angeles in August for the "Writers of the Future" awards festivities, which include free travel, lodging and a weeklong professional workshop run by leading authors and publishers. Galaxy Press is not affiliated with the Hubbard-founded Church of Scientology, Goodwin said, but focuses on his literary legacy. Hubbard's books, including his "Battlefield Earth" and "Mission Earth" series, have sold more than 164 million copies in 50 languages.

While there's no entry fee for the "Writers of the Future" contest, there's currently no entry at all to The Wordos.

"We've gotten so big that we have a membership wait list in effect," Kaswell said. "Folks who want to join up will have to wait until our active membership goes down a bit - that could take anywhere from a few months to a whole year."