I'm thrilled and humbled
to announce that the editors and judges of the Bartleby Snopes 6th Annual Dialogue Only Contest chose my short story "Everyone Smiles" as their
second place winner. The story will be available online and in the semi-annual
print magazine in January 2015.
"Everyone
Smiles" was a first for me--a short story entirely in dialogue without
even speech tags.
The seed for the story
was planted two years ago when I made a return visit to Lake Lure, North
Carolina, infamous as a filming location for the 1987 film Dirty Dancing. I had originally been to the area when I was a young
teen, and I have a photo of my sister and me standing on the green-carpeted
outdoor steps to the hotel. As I sat in the car on that second visit in the
pouring rain, I squinted through the foggy windshield, trying to recapture the
excitement I'd felt on the previous visit years before, but it just didn't look
the same. Oddly, I couldn’t get over the fact that the hotel had removed
the green carpeting. It was in that moment of incongruity between what I
remembered (or perhaps what I had created in my memory from that photo) and
what I was seeing, that the story “Everyone Smiles” came to life. It would take
another two years, though, for me to make that kernel of an idea into something
resembling a story, and it took the Bartleby Snopes challenge for me to put it
all together.
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