Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > March-April 2008	Print View

The waiter refilled my cup of jasmine tea and glanced at the stack of stories near my elbow. “Grading papers?” he asked. He must think I’m a T.A., I quickly deduced, reading essays for a University of Minnesota professor’s class. He must have heard me erupting in laughter and seen me wiping tears from my eyes in between bites of imperial chicken. I looked up at the man who had waited on me dozens of times before but with whom I’d never spoken to other than about what I’d like to order and whether I needed change. He was in his early 20s, tall and slim, and slightly disheveled. He had wide, observant eyes behind glasses that were so unhip they were hip. I noticed that when he handles something—picking up an empty rice bowl or setting down the bill and a fortune cookie—he does so gently, as if these objects have feelings. And he walks and talks softly, but also as if burdened with great troubles or too much knowledge.

He reminded me of several English majors I’ve known.

I explained that I was reading entries for a fiction contest and then watched his eyes grow wider, as if he’d just found his long-lost tribe. I suddenly recalled that on other occasions when I’d come to lunch here he would pause or cock his head when setting the glass of ice water down on my table so as to glimpse the title of the book I had brought as company. I also remembered that catching his attention is typically nearly impossible, because when business is slow he retreats to a corner table in the dining room and gazes forlornly out the window at the parade of people so blissfully unaware of the problem of the human condition.

Definitely an English major.

The waiter wanted to know more about the fiction contest, who could enter and what the rules were and so on. He was a U graduate—in English lit, he explained—but didn’t know what he was going to do next, thus the restaurant job.

I’d been there, waiting tables after college, and was gratified to learn that not much had changed in the two decades since I’d shelved my Milton and Melville, that students still studied English lit in college even if doing so didn’t always readily lead to employment with health benefits.

As our fiction contest deadline approaches each year, I fear we might finally need to write an unhappy ending for our contest, killing it off because the entries have slowed to a trickle. I’d taken this trend as evidence that fewer alumni are pursuing the literary arts. But every year—it’s been nine now—we receive enough entries to field a real horse race. We read every word of every story and argue their themes and executions as if in a college workshop. After a battery of tests, a few are left intact and sent to an outside judge who further tests their endurance. We’re pleased to present this year’s winning story, “Kalispell,” by John Jodzio (B.A. ’99).

While reading and critiquing dozens of fiction entries takes weeks, writing a winning story often takes years. Jodzio says the roots of “Kalispell” reach back nearly a decade, to an undergraduate class at the U. The best writers make the craft look effortless.

And the best fi ction writers accomplish something more. They make a reader care about imaginary characters and their made-up conflicts. They cause a reader to lose herself in a crowded, clattery restaurant. They compel her to laugh out loud, flush with dread, and cry over loss.

While we are able to choose just one winner, we applaud all of the fiction contest entrants who captivated us.