Tom Barbash, a former Stegner fellow and Jones lecturer who has published fiction and nonfiction, judged our ninth annual Stanford Fiction Contest. He selected a winner and two honorable mention stories from 13 finalists chosen by Stanford editors from 65 entries. Barbash is the author of On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, & 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal, and a novel, The Last Good Chance.
Kathleen Founds, ’04, received $750 as the contest winner. For her story, “One Useful Thing in My Life,” Barbash offered this praise: “The voice is both tough and beautiful, the sentences graceful, the dialogue crisp and believable. That so much is revealed and that the reader is so moved would likely come as a surprise to the story’s emotionally guarded protagonist”—a disappointed young woman who works at a nursing home.
Founds, who grew up in Freedom, Calif., wrote the story while she was a senior majoring in religious studies. After graduation she moved to Edinburg, Texas, where she worked for a year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.
The honorable mention stories are “Bombshelter” by Phoenicia Vuong, ’92, MS ’97, who lives in Palo Alto, and “Tamarindo” by David Stein, ’99, MA ’99, who lives in Baltimore.
Vuong, a biology major at Stanford, is studying traditional Chinese medicine and tai chi with the goal of becoming a tai chi teacher. In 1999 she received a Truman Capote fellowship in creative writing at Cornell University. Her story about a child’s perceptions in war is autobiographical: her family fled Vietnam, when she was 9, on a boat that sank. (Thirteen of its 200 passengers were lost.) Barbash praised “Bombshelter” for its “rich and evocative” details and its “extremely vivid and well crafted writing.”
Stein, who grew up in Los Angeles and studied English and psychology at Stanford, is working on an MFA in writing at Johns Hopkins University. His story “Tamarindo” is about a young American who tries to woo a sophisticated Mexican woman with a taste from home. Barbash notes that the story “darkly and humorously captures a time of wayward longing in a young man’s life, while it deftly explores issues of class and identity. The story has an appealing oddness, fueled by the narrator’s impulsiveness, and his burgeoning cynicism about the nature of love.”
