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The very title of Kelly Magee's debut collection of short stories indicates the author's interest in the ways we try to communicate.

Body Language, the winner of this year's Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Short Fiction, is full of characters who are struggling to make themselves understood. Throughout the book, they face a variety of challenges -- language barriers, cultural differences and the myriad other mysterious ways people fail in their attempts to connect with each other.

"I think the crisis of each one of the stories comes when a character wants to make themselves understood, but can't," Magee recently told ThisWeek. "So each of the stories are about communication, or the connection that comes through communication, and not being able to make that connection."

The dilemma of many of the characters is summed up in a line from "The Ni?a, The Pinta, The Santa Maria":

This is how people lose each other. They find themselves in the wrong place, calling things by the wrong name.

As the passage indicates, language isn't the only issue. Location also plays a significant role in each of the stories, and in the life of the author, who lives near Clintonville but grew up in Orlando, Fla., tourist mecca and home of Walt Disney World.

"Place is very important to me," Magee said. "Growing up in Orlando, Fla., of course, is a very unique place itself, and the ways in which people are shaped by places really interests me, the ways in which both people are products of a place and then the place is also a product of the people themselves.

"So making place into a character in my stories is really important to me, showing how the places can kind of rear up in some of the stories and attack the people, and how people are also sort of attacking the places that they came from and how they're a product of those places."

In many of the stories, characters who are disenfranchised or marginalized for racial, cultural or socio-economic reasons battle vainly to hold on to the places they call home in the face of such forces as natural disaster, development and gentrification.

"I like flawed characters and characters who are pushed into some kind of critical decisions, so characters who have been disenfranchised often are desperate in a way that other kinds of characters would not be," Magee said. "I think there's an imperative to their stories that they have to act in these situations or they're really going to lose everything. Not only the places they live, but they're going to lose their identity in some way. So I'm always drawn to that kind of story."

Magee, now a visiting assistant professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, moved to Columbus to pursue an M.F.A. from Ohio State University's creative writing program. She graduated from the program in 2003 and has remained in the area since then.

"I loved it," she said of her experience at Ohio State. "I didn't want to leave. It was great. I learned a whole lot, and I made a lot of connections with other writers that I'm still keeping up with. I made a lot of good friends and also people who I can send drafts of things to.

"And I also got to meet a lot of good writers who came as part of the visiting writers series, who just came to read and things like that. So I got to be in touch with lots of people in the writing world even outside Columbus."

Many of the stories in Body Language were written during the author's stay at OSU, and one, in particular, reflects her anxiety over leaving the comfort of the program.

The collection's final story, "Heat Rises," is an apocalyptic vision of a spring break trip gone horribly awry as vacationing students find themselves stranded on a sweltering beach with limited food and water.

"Part of it is the whole culture, and especially in Florida beaches, of people who come to sort of use up a place and don't care about the place," she said. "I'm frustrated by that, and so I like to write about it."

"Also, that was the last story I wrote for this collection, and so it was happening at the end of my M.F.A. program here. I was about to have a whole new view on life, a whole new change, and I had to go out into the real world and actually make a living for myself, so it sort of felt like my whole world was falling down. So I think part of it came from my lived experience during that time, and part of it came from my experience in Florida with all the spring-breakers who really do come down there."

Magee is working on two projects now, one of which will take her exploration of the significance of place to a new level.

"I'm working on a novel and also working on a series of very short stories, all under 1,500 words, that try to give places their own points of view, so they're places that are active in each of these stories," she said. "It's a nice mixture for me to move between the two because I've got this really long form and then a very short form to kind of balance each other."

Readers will have an opportunity to hear Magee read from her work this spring when she participates in the faculty/student reading series at Ohio State University. The event will begin at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 3, in the commons room of Denney Hall.