They arrived slowly at first, one or two stories a day mailed in plain manila envelopes. As the deadline approached, the pace picked up -- as did the number of submissions delivered by FedEx. In all, 140 authors entered our first fiction contest, vying for a whopping $600 in prize money and a chance to be published in these pages.
The titles alone beckoned: "Under the Influence of Elmore Leonard;" "Sally Didn't Sleep Here;" "The Vegetables' Funeral." Most of the entries had polite notes attached. A few authors encouraged us to recycle the pages if they did not win. One wrote simply: "I hope I win." There was a story from a 10-year-old, a two-pager written in pencil on lined paper and called "This Island Isn't Big Enough for the Four of Us." Some of the envelopes bore logos suggesting the day jobs of our authors: Smith Barney, Equitable, Charles Schwab, McGill University.
The idea of sponsoring an alumni writing contest came to us last spring, when we noticed that four Stanford authors had just released short-story collections. But the trend, we learned after a bit of research, was going in the other direction. The short story, which had enjoyed a renaissance in the 1980s, was fizzling in the '90s. One reason: a dearth of magazines that publish fiction.
So we decided to do our small part. We announced the contest and hired some judges. Four Stegner fellows in creative writing agreed to screen the entries, and English Professor Ken Fields, PhD '67, signed on to make the final decision. A poet and author himself, Fields recently confessed that, prior to reading the manuscripts, he privately harbored the same fear that I did: "What if they're all awful?"
In Berkeley, Donna George Storey received last year's May/June issue and turned right to the books section, as she always does. There, tucked in next to a review of a new biography of Wallace Stegner, she saw our box advertising the contest. Storey, who holds a 1993 PhD from Stanford in Japanese literature, had not written any fiction since her undergrad days at Princeton in the early '80s. But she was determined to try -- and she had an idea. An at-home mom, she was intrigued by the woman in her mother's group who had given birth with a donated egg. So she sat down at the Mac she bought seven years ago at the Stanford Bookstore and, she says, "took a shot in the dark." Her story explores the meaning of motherhood in the age of fertility technology.
Robert Croken had just finished writing a story when he saw our ad about the contest. A public relations consultant in western Massachusetts, Croken, MA '65, has been fiddling around with fiction since the early '90s. "I started by writing a short story, but it got so long it became my first novel," he laughs. He credits Stanford's Bill Rivers, a longtime professor of journalism who died in 1996, with teaching him the importance of clarity in prose. The story he submitted to us, "Estate Planning," is a melancholy but humorous tale about an older man looking for companionship in a senior center. It's based in part on the experiences of Croken's elderly uncle. "But I made most of it up," the author says.
Both Storey and Croken were among the 20 authors whose pieces were forwarded to Ken Fields for review. His fears melted after reading them at home last fall. "There were a handful that really stood out," Fields says. (The quality of the entries was so good, in fact, that we've decided to make the contest an annual event.) Fields declared Croken runner-up and awarded first prize to the aptly named Storey. Deanna Carlyle received third place.
To be honest, I wasn't very excited at first about publishing an entry on fertility and family. I was worried about overkill. In the previous few months, we had profiled an alum with quintuplets, excerpted a book about a woman's struggle with infertility and published a controversial cover story on the dilemma women face between work and family. Enough is enough, I thought.
But the subject is unavoidable: septuplets in Iowa, a guy in Chicago who wants to clone humans, a 63-year-old woman who gave birth with a donated egg. No wonder Donna Storey was drawn to it. Still, the topic alone isn't what makes her piece succeed. Fields lauds Storey for achieving "a kind of psychological and stylistic momentum" and for taking a "surprising and eccentric view of an unremarkable situation." But you don't have to accept his word for it. Donna's story appears on page 66.
Cover subject Scott Parazynski, '83, MD '89, is one of the few humans to walk in space. But he's the only human to twice grace the cover of Stanford magazine. His first appearance came in our Winter 1987 issue, for a story on how he was preparing for the Calgary Olympics luge competition. Welcome back, Scott.
You can send e-mail to Bob at bobcohn@leland.stanford.edu.
