A wordy tribute to long-distance running that compared the Boston Marathon to "an onslaught of acne on a homecoming queen" beat similarly overwritten passages dedicated to beer-drinking and pro football in a William Faulkner write-alike contest.
Wendy Goldberg, a Stanford University lecturer who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the legendary Southern writer, trumped the field on her fifth try, becoming the first women to win Jack Daniel's.Goldberg, 44, said the winning formula was the right combination of "metaphors, similes and analogies . . . drenched in Southern-isms."
In "Dyin' to Lie Down," she described the marathon as "a vortex of vibrating vertebrae, an army of appendages assiduously advancing whose collective capacity for maximum motion makes the Indy 500 look like a Tinkertoy tourney, bringing something of the glory that was Greece to the ballyhooed bastion of Yankee ingenuity . . . "
Dean Faulkner Wells, niece of the Nobel Prize-winning author who died in 1962, said Goldberg knows his work "inside and out."
"She not only knows him academically but she has this wonderful gift, instinct, for taking it to another level," she said.
Contestants submit entries no longer than 500 words that are judged by a panel of writers in New York.
Finalists were attorney Walter G. Watkins Jr. of Jackson, Miss., and Michael A. Crivello, a Texas high-school teacher and previous winner.
Watkins set his "Light in August," in a bar and writes "apostatizingly, he raised the halcyon liquid known as Bud Light to his lips and drank the auriferous liquid brewed by the men - owners of the baseball team whose games pierced the night from the north (Although Missouri bordered the South, no true Southerner could forget its allegiance in The War in a time when loyalty to land, sanguinity, family overwhelmed any imagined duty to Country . . . "
Crivello's "As I Pay Deion," is a play on the Dallas Cowboys and multiposition athlete Deion Sanders. He wrote of the players "together crowing `We did it our way bay-bee!', but evermore doomed and damned by all time and ennui and pride and parity and injury and more pride and salary cap and assault charges and drug suspension and still more pride to try next year to do it their way once again."
Goldberg's victory brings a free trip to Mississippi to read her winning entry at a conference of Faulkner scholars. Goldberg, who previously finished second and twice placed third, was scheduled to read Sunday.