Polly Buckingham, of Spokane, will visit Eagle Harbor Book Company at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 30 to discuss her new short story collection, “The Expense of a View,” the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction in 2016.

The stories in “The Expense of a View” explore the psyches of characters under extreme duress. In the title story, a woman who has moved across the country in an attempt to leave her past behind dumps an empty suitcase into the Columbia River over and over again.

In another story, a woman who wakes up mornings only to discover she’s been shooting heroin in a night trance, meets her doppelganger on a rainy Oregon beach.

Most of the characters are displaced and disturbed; they suffer from dissociative disorders, denial and delusions. The settings — Florida, eastern Washington, Seattle and the Oregon coast — mirror their lunacies.

While refusing to look at what’s right in front of themselves might destroy them, it’s equally likely to be just what they need.

Chris Offutt, the final judge for the Katherine Anne Porter Award praised the collection: “’The Expense of a View’ is a carefully rendered examination of memory, loss and sadness. The emotional reality of the characters is riveting and stayed with me long after finishing each story. These are the people we see every day, strangers suffering, ones we are too busy to worry about, that we ignore. The stories in ‘The Expense of a View’ are reminders that everyone is important.”

Buckingham is the author of “A Year of Silence” (winner of the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award for Fiction from Florida Review Press). She was the recipient of a Washington State Artists Trust fellowship and of Hubbub’s Kenneth O. Hanson Award for poetry.

Her work appears in The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, The Poetry Review, Hanging Loose, Witness, North American Review, The Moth, New Orleans Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere.