WM Professor Wins NPR Short Fiction Contest

By Amber Lester Kennedy Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Williamsburg resident Christine Westberg was a child when she witnessed a brutal attack on her friend, Hossein. For nearly five decades, Westberg has had the incident in the back of her mind, trying to find a way to tell the story truthfully. She succeeded as the most recent winner of National Public Radio’s Three-Minute Fiction short story contest.

Westberg, a theater professor at the College of William and Mary, appeared on “All Things Considered: Weekend Edition” on Saturday to talk about her win (listen here). The program launched the Three-Minute Fiction contest two years ago; since then, the show has received more than 35,000 original short stories, all with 600 words or less. Guest judges supply the parameters and prompts for each round and then choose the winner, whose story is read aloud on the program. Westberg's story is posted here.

In round seven, judge Danielle Evans (author of short-story collection “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self”) issued the challenge to would-be authors: “Your story must have somebody arriving in town and somebody leaving town.”

Westberg said the theme of arriving and leaving instantly reminded her of her friend, Little Hossein, who died of diphtheria in 1963. Her story, also titled “Little Hossein,” captures a snapshot of her life on a compound just outside Tehran, Iran. Her father, a graduate of the William and Mary Law School, became the State Department’s regional legal advisor for the Middle East in the early 60s. Westberg’s family moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Tehran, where her playmates were the village boys. “I call them the ‘Artful Dodgers’ of the world,” she said.

In the story, Little Hossein and the narrator have a fluid friendship with “weird and shifting alliances” that come to a head when the narrator’s three-speed bicycle is stolen. Hossein tries to help get the bike back, but a bigger boy beats him up, shoving his tongue in the spinning wheel. The bicycle becomes a torture device, Westberg said in an interview Monday.

Westberg said she wanted to capture, in just 600 words, the confusion she still had nearly 50 years later. The real Little Hossein died of diphtheria, but in the story, it isn’t clear whether he died of his injuries or something else. She wanted to convey how, as a child, it was hard to process the violence she frequently saw. “These are all memories I’ve been trying to keep a record of,” she said.

Her story appeals to the senses, describing how Little Hossein’s father, Mashala, spent every day watering the plants before they could get dusty. But she wants the story to be relatable to people in all cities and climates. “The story is showing that the only difference is the landscape; there are always bullies and victims,” she said.

Westberg found out she won the contest at the end of her acting class last Thursday, when she received a message to contact NPR immediately. Her students, who knew she had entered, hung back to watch her make the call. When she received the good news, she gave the thumbs-up signal and her students began to cheer, prompting the NPR employee on the line to say she wished she had the reaction on tape.

The experience motivated her to sift through her memories for more material. She hopes next to write a romantic comedy about teenagers falling in love in the last days of Imperial Iran, before the revolution in 1979.

“I still have so much material,” she said. “That was the great gift of the contest. It gave me a word count and a structure.”