CSI staffer’s bad writing wins

TWIN FALLS – A few words scribbled during spare time in a dull class have won a College of Southern Idaho employee a dubious honor.

Camille Barigar, a 33-year-old course planner at CSI’s Community Education Center, is the winner of the Fantasy Fiction Division of the 24th annual Edward Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The contest, put on by the English Department faculty at San Jose State University, challenges entrants to “compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.”

Her perfectly horrible prose? An homage to the Hobbit series by J.R.R. Tolkien.

“It was within the great stony nostril of a statue of Landrick the Elfin Vicelord that Frodo’s great uncle, Jasper Baggins, happened to stumble upon the enchanted Bag of Holding, not to be confused with the Hag of Bolding, who was quite fond of leeks, most especially in a savory Hobbit knuckle stew,” Barigar wrote.