Our sixth annual fiction contest drew nearly 100 entries from alumni of Stanford’s undergraduate, graduate and fellowship programs. The judge was Eavan Boland, Stanford’s Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities. Boland, the distinguished Irish poet profiled in “She Was Radical and She Was Right” (May/June 2002), teaches literature and poetry and is a director of the creative writing program.
Here’s what she had to say about her pick: “This story, with its thrifty eloquence and sparely drawn feeling, opens out into one of the oldest narratives there is: the story of going home, of time and generation and loss. The narrator’s voice is taut with disappointment and powerlessness in the face of what is altered. Memory is a presence here, but it never hijacks the economical elegy of the writing. The remembered and suppressed relations among family members are beautifully described. Above all, this story has what every good story needs: the painful ring of truth.”
Submissions for the next competition are due by October 1, 2003. For details, visit www.stanfordmag.org.
