On Wednesday, January 15, 2025, the Word for Word Reading Series at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) featured the winners of the Penmen Review’s tenth annual Fall Fiction Contest. This year’s contest had more than 750 submissions, from which five winners were chosen: First place, “Train a Comin’,” by N. Ryan Tucker; second place, “Waiting for the Sun To Go Down,” by Jesse Teller; third place, “See,” by Amy Midgett; fourth place, “The Roller Coaster at the End of the World,” by Jenel Alan; and fifth place, “The Five Stages of Grieving My Attention Span,” by Megan Okonsky. Word for Word hosts Jacob Powers, associate dean of the BA and MA in Creative Writing programs, and Paul Witcover, associate dean of the Online MFA, discussed the winning pieces with the authors before moving on to an audience Q&A session, an edited transcript of which follows. Amy Midgett was unable to attend the event, though her prize-winning story was read by Paul Witcover.
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W4W: Neel, one of the most striking elements of your story, “Train a Comin’,” is the voice of your narrator. Can you tell us how you created this voice?
NRT: Sure. Really, it’s an amalgamation of people that I’ve been around my entire life. I grew up in Mississippi before moving to Texas. It’s just people I’ve been around my whole life that have kind of infiltrated.
W4W: And you said you were raised by a librarian. Is that correct?
NRT: Yeah, 
my mom was an elementary school librarian. So not some super upper-echelon librarian. But early on, The Sound and the Fury and The Reivers . . . You know, Faulkner. I grew up an hour and a half away from Oxford. So William Faulkner was a big presence in my youth. And not that I write like him or anything, but I started hearing that name early, and then my mother just loved words and books, and I found the importance of that through her. Billy Lutz, Fannie Flagg, Tennessee Williams, just all of these Southern people and writers. It kind of seeped into my soul, I guess.
W4W: Librarians at that age are super important. I mean, the most important people in my kids’ lives, I think, are the librarians at their school. Is “Train a Comin’” a piece of something longer that you’re continuing to work on?
NRT: It’s funny that question is asked, because the piece I read was a dialogue study between two characters from a novel I’m working on, with Dorsey being a secondary auxiliary protagonist from the novel. So it was really just an exploration in dialogue, and it actually kind of reads like a screenplay in a lot of ways, and that’s not indicative of how I write. I typically approach things from a more detached, omniscient aspect, with little snippets of this type of dialogue thrown in. So it’s interesting to me to see how it morphed into its own thing.
W4W: Jesse, your story breaks open the chronological flow of time in unexpected ways. When I first read that time break in your story, that flash forward, I wasn’t sure what I had read. I wasn’t sure if I was understanding it correctly. But as
I read on and found other moments like that, I felt it added such incredible resonance and depth to the story. It brought a new perspective to it. And I’m just curious how you came upon that narrative strategy.
JT: I
was going through a rough time because I had just finished a novel. There’s a huge emotional adrenaline surge when you finish a novel. And for that first week afterward, you just want to be writing. And then the second week you’re resting and preparing for the next novel. A writer friend of mine wanted to know what this was like. So “Waiting for the Sun to Go Down” is actually a metaphor for waiting to start the next book. With the time jumps and everything, I wanted to capture what it’s like to actually be writing a book.
All the stuff that takes place in the present is while you’re writing the novel and you’re experiencing things that happened in your past and things that are happening in your life, and it’s going into the novel. Then there’s a lot of things from your past, and not always nice things, but things from your past that you’re thinking about that also go into the novel. And then while you’re writing the novel, you’re thinking about the future of this book, and it’s not always—you’re not always optimistic about it.
So I wanted to have the story take place in the present, the past, and the future. Because that’s what it’s like to be writing a book. You’re thinking about your past, you’re in the moment, and you’re thinking about the future of the project at the same time.
W4W: That’s really interesting and illuminating. I think writers often have their own private interpretations of what they’re doing, their own structure or their own intent, but readers don’t need to know that. I mean, the information you just gave me deepens my appreciation of your story. But even without knowing it, I was knocked out by your story.
JT: Thank you.
W4W: This story is written in second person. Is that something you often do?
JT: Never.
W4W: Never? Well, you did an excellent job.
JT: I’ve never written in second person before, and I didn’t like it. I’m usually in third, and I like to be in the character and showing the reader what the character is going through. Like, if they see this, what it feels like inside their body, all this kind of stuff. I don’t like telling people what you’re doing. So no, I don’t usually write in second person. This is the very first thing I ever wrote in that particular way.
W4W: Well, you’ve got a knack for it, because I think a lot of people felt like they were the you when they were reading this and felt that strong emotional pull from the story. So, well done on that.
Let me ask Jenel a question. Your story, “The Roller Coaster at the End of the World,” is a story about a grandmother’s love and sacrifice, which really packs a powerful emotional punch—especially the ending, which, like Amy’s story, ends mid-sentence. I’m curious what inspired you to tell the story in a sci-fi setting.
JA: I struggle with short story ideas. My ideas always seem like they’re novel-length ideas. So I was doing a brainstorming activity I like to do, where I pull up some random pictures and then make a random word list and try to connect the dots. There was a roller coaster, and there was something about ostracized and scientist. And somehow my brain took all of that stuff and went for a run.
I like a lot of heart in my stories. And so I think that was the combination of, let’s take this really like classic sci-fi colony on the moon setting but use it to tell a story about a grandmother and her grandson. I like that juxtaposition.
W4W: I think it works really well. There’s all kinds of different approaches to science fiction, but this one is deeply rooted in character, in that relationship between these two. And I really appreciate how you’re able to do that. It’s fascinating to hear your approach here too, where it’s almost like a roll of a dice, and you say, well, here’s this, this, or that, and I’m going to combine these three things and roll with it. Was this your first science-fiction approach?
JA: I haven’t written a lot of sci-fi, but my thesis novel is sci-fi. This was my first science fiction short story.
W4W: Do you think you’re going to write more short stories like this?
JA: I’d like to try. My novel that’s out there is fantasy. Young adult fantasy. Totally like Girl With Sword fantasy. So, very different than this. But I’ve been really into science fiction lately. And so I was like, well, let’s take it for a run. And yeah, I’d like to do more.
W4W: What’s the title of your YA novel?
JA: It’s Rell.
W4W: Let me move on to our next winner, Megan Okonsky. Megan, I suspect you have a glimmer of what I might be asking you about. And that is the use of sound effects in your story. When I first read your story, I thought, “I have got to hear this read out loud, because I know it’s going to be hilarious.” But I had no idea you would actually bring a device in to do those sounds. So tell us a little bit about how you got the idea for that and what it was like to practice. I mean, it’s almost like a musical accompaniment to your reading.
MO: Oh, thank you. Yeah, when I started to practice reading it, I felt a little silly just saying bloop. I listen to a lot of podcasts where they have sound boards. They have certain sounds. There’s one, the dun-dun from, I think, NCIS or Law and Order. This podcaster likes to play it whenever he says something kind of silly. So I think because I’m always listening to these podcasts, the idea of just reading this out and having some kind of added texture to it was an easy choice. I just went into the settings of my phone, and that’s all. It was fun.
W4W: Yeah, it really was fun. I take it that this was inspired by a real-life job situation that you had.
MO: Sort of. I used to have this kind of crazy job where I would ghost-write dating-app messages. I would swipe for people. I would write their pickup lines.
W4W: Oh my gosh.
MO: Yeah, it was very interesting. I didn’t include that in the story, because when my writing group read the story, they said, “Don’t include that. That’s too interesting.” I took the job because I thought it would be good novel inspiration. So, that’ll come at some point. But I was using fifteen different phones at one point, and until I quit that job in September, I felt like my brain was mush, because it was just ding, ding, ding all around. And so that story just came out of my frustration with not being able to focus. I feel much better now that I’ve quit.
W4W: My God, fifteen phones at once.
MO: I know. It’s giving me PTSD just thinking about it.
W4W: I mean, I shudder when I hear the Outlook message coming in! And you have a novel coming out soon, is that right?
MO: On August 19, 2025, The Barefoot Followers of Sweet Potato Grace will be on the shelves. It’s set in Texas. I live in Texas, so yay for Texas writers.
W4W: There you go. The Texas contingent. I don’t know if it’s available for preorder yet, but hopefully our audience will take note.
MO: Yeah, it’s a fun story.
W4W: And with that, we have to bring our evening to a close. This was a wonderful night. I want to thank all of our winners—N. Ryan Tucker, Jesse Teller, Amy Midgett, Jenel Alan, and Megan Okonsky—for sharing their work with us today.
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