Student Earns Award From The Atlantic

By La Monica Everett-Haynes, University Communications Jonathan Walter's award-winning piece is seemingly a story of numbers, but not in the literal sense. The main character in Walter's story, high-school-age Ryan, is consumed with numbers. He keeps time by counting seconds, measures movements in length and eye balls the height and width of objects at whim - but seemingly in a compulsive manner. Walter, a first-year master of fine arts student at The University of Arizona, earned The Atlantic's first place spot in the magazine's fiction writing contest for his writing. The Atlantic, which focuses on coverage of international affairs, politics and literature, holds an annual competition for students who produce poetry, fiction and both personal and journalistic essays. "Submissions should be original, unpublished...demonstrating superior quality of expression and craftsmanship," the magazine's Web site notes. One of Walter's colleagues in the UA creative writing program, master of fine arts student Simmons Buntin, received an honorable mention in the nonfiction category. Walter's piece, "Happy People in a Diorama," is scheduled to appear in May in the Atlantic's fiction issue. "The award is pretty prestigious and gives me the confidence to keep writing," said Walter, who noted that the honor also came with a $1,000 award. "It's good to know when other people think your writing is good, worthwhile and entertaining to them," he added. He began writing his 7,000-word piece a little more than one year ago about Ryan and his interactions with his parents and teachers. In one instance, Ryan comments: "The most interesting thing, though, about the arrangement of objects and people in the kitchen at that moment was that the distance between my dad and mom (6 ft.) and the distance between my dad and I (3 ft.) added up exactly to the distance between me and my mom (9 ft., of course). We weren't even standing in a straight line; that was just how it worked out." While Walter had used the story as a writing sample for graduate school applications, he did not submit the story to any contests until The Atlantic's competition caught his attention in November. "Generally, you write something and no matter how good you think it is you need time to look at it later to determine if it is actually as good. Usually it isn't," Walter said. But there was something different about "Happy People in a Diorama." "I thought it was the best story I had; felt it was the strongest," he said about his first-person narrative. "It just felt like the tightest story," Walter described. "Every single line in the story had a purpose. There wasn't anything extra. Everything was all very connected to everything else."