Writing Badly Must Be Easy For Contest Winners

When is bad deemed good? When Laura Bloxham says it’s so.

After much deliberation, the Whitworth College English professor has chosen the winners of the 1995 Bronson Alcott Bad Prose Contest. And this year, the very best of the worst comes from Idaho.

The community category winner is Elizabeth Nordeen of Sandpoint. The student winner is Jason Shanley, a North Idaho College student who lives in Coeur d’Alene.

Community runners-up include Tad Wisenor and Dale Wile. There was only one student also-ran: Lewis and Clark High School’s Erin Dressel.

Bloxham, who looks for entries whose “winning elements are simplicity: a crisp image; surprise or a twist; a show-stopping quality,” stresses that “losers overdo everything.”

Apparently, Nordeen and Shanley avoided the pitfalls. Their winning efforts are as follows:

Nordeen - “‘Cripes,’ intoned Agatha, as she noticed the trio of angels wafting purposefully toward her down the supermarket aisle,’ ‘not another near-death experience.”’

Shanley - “I know it must be the janitor in me, but her eyes were as bright as the color of water after a Tidy Bowl crystal had been placed into the cool, freshly bleached toilet.”

The winners both win $50 gift certificates from Auntie’s Bookstore.

Laura’s All-Star list

Whitworth’s Bloxham (see above item), whose specialty is literature, compiles an annual recommended reading list for summer and, she says, “other mental vacations.”

This year’s list is as follows: “Crossing to Safety” by Wallace Stegner, “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Souls Raised From the Dead” by Doris Betts, “The Robber Bride” by Margaret Atwood, “The Shipping News” by E. Annie Proulx, “Animal Dreams” by Barbara Kingsolver, “All the Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy, “Can’t Quit You, Baby” by Ellen Douglas, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” by John Berendt, “The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction” by Susan Ketchin and “A Personal Landscape” by Kenzaburo Oe.

The full two pages of Bloxham’s list includes some 44 other books. For a complete listing, contact Bloxham at Whitworth, 466-1000.

Another decent read

If you’re looking for something emotionally powerful to read this summer, you might try “Ever After” (Newmarket Press, 246 pages, $22.95) by William Wharton. But be warned: This is no light summer read.

It is a nonfiction book, of sorts, based on Wharton’s experience of dealing with the death of his daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters in a fiery 1988 pileup on a stretch of Interstate 5 in Oregon.

Wharton has constructed the book in three sections. The first has him imagining life through the eyes of his daughter (this is what I mean by “of sorts”); the second is his struggle with grief over her death; the third is his attempt to fight the cause of the accident, field burning by Oregon grass farmers.

I’ve never read a more compelling treatise on the power of grief.

A look at war

Former Spokesman-Review writer and editor William F. Boni has published a small book titled “Want to Be a War Correspondent? Here’s How …” (Rainbow Books, 64 pages, $10 paperback).

Never mind the title. The book, written 50 years after the fact, is less a “how-to” manual than it is a memoir of Boni’s years as an Associated Press war correspondent. It is a tightly written reminiscence of such World War II theaters as Europe and the South Pacific and personalities such as Douglas MacArthur and Ernest Hemingway.

Boni now lives in Vermont.

On the shelves

Seattle mystery writer K.K. Beck, author of the Jane Da Silva series, has a new novel out. “Cold Smoked” (Mysterious Press, 294 pages, $18.95) takes Da Silva, a combination lounge singer and private eye, on the trail of a murderer with a curious connection to salmon.

The reader board

Ione Jensen and Julie Keene, co-authors of “Women Alone: Creating a Joyous and Fulfilling Life,” will read from and sign copies of their book at 7 p.m. Saturday at Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington.

Jerry Dolph, author of “Fire in the Hole,” will sign copies of his book from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Book & Game at Silver Lake Mall in Coeur d’Alene.

, DataTimes