Muse Times Two is an annual series of poetry readings, which takes place at Collected Works Bookstore. The series includes a contest open to students from Santa Fe’s four local colleges, and a winner is selected from each school. This year, SFUAD’s winner is Creative Writing senior Marina Woollven.

Marina Woollven, a Creative Writing junior from Texas, recently won third place in Playboy Magazine’s annual College Fiction Contest. Playboy has long had a prestigious reputation for publishing short stories by some of the most notable authors of our time, and it is an honor to have Woollven’s work recognized out of the thousands of submissions for the contest. Jackalope Magazine sat down with Marina to discuss her winning story, “Atlas,” and her life as a writer.   Jackalope Magazine: Please tell us a little bit about yourself. Marina Woollven: I’m from San Antonio, Texas. My interests are TV, lots of TV! I’m a huge TV junkie! I like TV series much more than movies but I do love movies. I dabble in photography. Sometimes I draw. I collect dolls, so that’s a thing!   JM: Why did you want to become a writer? MW: I’ve always been fascinated and addicted to storytelling. I just felt that I had things to say. I love to read, and I wanted to put something out there. I’m very grateful I chose this path.   JM: Could you tell us about the story that you won third place with in the Playboy College Writing Competition? MW: It’s called “Atlas”, and essentially it’s a sci-fi piece set in the future and it focuses on this very young housewife named Marcy, and she’s recently married but her husband has just decided to go on a trip for six months. So, she’s getting lonely, and she ends up purchasing a very human-like robot that she calls Atlas, and the story is kind of focusing on the relationship, but really, it’s about the human desire to not feel alone and the different ways in which we fulfill that.   JM: How did it feel when...