http://www.timesonline.com/articles/2008/08/13/news/doc48a38f32ec1f3765870537.txt
Moon grad is world’s worst writer. And he’s proud
Moon Township native Garrison Spik
ADVERTISEMENT
*
By Tom Fontaine, Times Staff
Published: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 10:25 PM EDT
Moon Township native Garrison Spik has earned international acclaim for crafting one brilliantly god-awful sentence for this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a literary parody competition that challenges writers to come up with the worst opening for an imaginary novel.
Spik’s entry was selected the best — or worst? — among more than 7,000 submissions from writers around the world. The contest, sponsored by the English department at San Jose State University, is in its 26th year.
“I think it’s the Nobel Prize of literature, except on the other end of the spectrum,” said Spik, 41, a 1985 Moon Area High School graduate who lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a communications director for a diamond importer.
Spik said he learned of the competition a decade ago while working as an advertising copywriter in Japan.
“I thought to myself: I can do this. I have a firm grasp on what is good in English, and I think that allows you to write what is bad in English,” Spik said.
But Spik didn’t submit an entry until this year, privately honing his craft instead.
“Whenever a bad idea struck me, either I’d scribble it down on a piece of paper or put it in a Microsoft Word document I created called ‘Bad Writing.’ I amassed well over 100 sentences in the last nine, 10 years,” Spik said.
Spik finally decided to enter the contest this spring, choosing his favorite bad sentence from his large body of work. He said he wrote the winning entry, a 44-word sentence inspired by New York taxis, “probably five or six years ago.”
Spik will receive $250 for winning the contest, but he said “it’s less about the prize money and more about the cache of winning. It’s a big deal around the world. This contest has a cult following.”
Spik wasn’t the only person with local ties to earn recognition in this year’s contest.
Moon resident Melissa Alliston, who could not be reached for comment Wednesday, received “dishonorable mention” for this doozy:
“Watching Felicia walk into the bar was like watching two fat Rottweilers in yellow spandex and spike heels that had treed a scrawny bleach blond cat at the top of a skinny flagpole that for some reason had decided to sprout casaba melons.”
Tom Fontaine can be reached online at tfontaine@timesonline.com.
THE ENTRY
Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city, their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”
— Award-winning entry for bad writing by Moon Township native Garrison Spik
WHO IS BULWER-LYTTON?
Contest organizers say the competition honors the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford” with this memorable line: “It was a dark and stormy night.”
