Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Every year since 1982, the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. This contest was started by Professor Scott Rice, who for a graduate school seminar wrote a paper about Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of books such as The Last Days of Pompeii. His book, Paul Clifford, opened with the words, “It was a dark and stormy night,” which inspired both Charles Schulz, whose Snoopy was constantly starting his own novel with the same words, and this contest.

This year, several contest winners submitted sentences that were directly or indirectly about birds. John Dotson, a U.S. Naval Officer from Arlington, VA, wrote one of the top placers:

“The flock of geese flew overhead in a “V” formation - not in an old-fashioned-looking Times New Roman kind of a “V”, branched out slightly at the two opposite arms at the top of the “V”, nor in a more modern-looking, straight and crisp, linear Arial sort of “V” (although since they were flying, Arial might have been appropriate), but in a slightly asymmetric, tilting off-to-one-side sort of italicized Courier New-like “V” - and LaFonte knew that he was just the type of man to know the difference.”

Harry H. Buerkett of Urbana, IL, wrote, “They say she carried her own warmth around with her, like one of those thermoregulating arctic mammals, say, a polar bear, or a baby harp seal (though not a penguin, which is antarctic, anyway, and not a mammal, but a bird), but she wasn’t fat or blubbery, which makes it all the more unbelievable why anyone would have wanted to club her to death for her fur coat, which wasn’t even white, I’m told, but black.”

A bird featured in the first person in this winner by Chris Esco of Miami. “I’d stumbled onto solving my first murder case, having found myself the only eyewitness, yet no matter how frantically I pleaded with John Law that the perp was right in front of them and the very dame they’d been grilling - the sultry but devious Miss Kitwinkle, who played the grieving patsy the way a concert pianist player plays a piano - the cops just kept smiling and stuffing crackers in my beak.”

London’s Sian Arthur came up with this winner, “When the time came for Timothy to fly the nest, he felt the best years of his life were ahead of him, if only because he had spent the childhood ones living in a nest.”

Barry J. Drucker of Wildwood, MO, wrote, “As darkening shadows skittered tentatively (yet progressively) atop the rainforest canopy the way telemarketers do when they know you’re on a no-call list, the proud parrot pondered avian atavism: “descendant of vicious Velociraptors, I am become the Chicken Kiev of the jungle, a curious cocktail of predator and prey;” and in the night, a jaguar howled like Godzilla on helium – the bird stirred, but was not shaken.”

Finally, David Kenyon of Toronto wrote, “’Failure’ was simply not a word that would ever cross the lips of Miss Evelyn Duberry, mainly because Evelyn, a haughty socialite with fire-red hair and a coltish gait, could pronounce neither the letters “f” nor “r” as a result of an unfortunate kissing gesture made many years earlier toward her beloved childhood parrot, Snippy.”

If you want to read these or other winners from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, there’s a link to it on my webpage, www.lauraerickson.com.