First Place $30: Sophomore Ewan Steffen
Q) What is your story about?
A) My story’s about a train derailment in Alaska, during a blizzard.
Q) What inspires you the most while writing?
A) I think my inspiration came primarily from my experiences West in the mountains, and then also my fascination with the back country and Alaska.
Q) How did you come up with the idea for this story?
A) I came up with the idea because I read some stuff about small commuter trains in Alaska, and I thought it’d be a super cool idea, because these things wind around the mountains, so it’d be a good idea to incorporate into a survival story.
Q) Why did you decide to participate in the contest?
A) As soon as it was announced, it was like ’Yeah, I’ll definitely have to do that’ after my story last year.
Second Place $20: Freshman Sarah Majeskie
Q) What is your story about?
A) My story is about the golden record NASA sent in the sixties, and it crash lands on an alien planet. This planet sends a message back, and the story about decoding what was on the record.
Q) What inspires you the most while writing?
A) When things finally come together, after you’ve been stuck on something, and it kind of all comes together.
Q) How did you come up with the idea for this story?
A) We watched a documentary in science for a couple of days, and originally I was going to write about something else, but I liked the ‘what-if’ possibility of my topic. It’s Mr. Kvam’s idea, I suppose.
Q) Why did you decide to participate in the contest?
A) I won awards in my writing for poetry before, and it seemed like something fun to do instead of playing games on my computer, or I could work towards something more productive.
Third Place $10: Junior Taylor Van Ornum
Q) What is your story about?
A) My story is about a group of friends who go into a haunted corn maze, and this is the first chapter in what would be a longer story. At the end of the chapter, they end up getting lost. The date is significant, parts of the haunted maze are significant.
Q) What inspires you the most while writing?
A) I just really love creative writing, and I love using really intense descriptions when writing.
Q) How did you come up with the idea for this story?
A) I find it harder to write mystery stories; I also find writing short stories hard, so I decided I wanted to try challenging that. I just wanted a challenge, and you can be quicker and more climactic in a mystery, so I figured that’s why I’d write it.
Q) Why did you decide to participate in the contest?
A) I participated freshman year, and it was not a good story, and I didn’t participate my sophomore year, so I wanted to do sort of a redemption year.
**Judge’s note: Usually, the judges only decide to publish the stories that win a prize. However, all of the stories this year were of such high quality, that they recommended that they all be published.
