It is hard to argue with Longfellow, who believed that into each life some rain must fall, but enough is enough already. The summer of 2020 felt like a four-month cloudburst in the life of Amy Stonestrom.
While packing for a move from Wisconsin to Tucson, she learned her father was dying. When the move-in date was delayed, her family was stranded in the Midwest without a place to live. A region already smoldering beneath the pandemic was rocked further by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, 25 miles away.
“It was crazy. It just felt like the end,” Stonestrom recalled. “After we finally got settled in Tucson, I thought it might be therapeutic to write about it. Honestly, I was just trying to make sense of it all.”
The resulting essay certainly made sense to the judges in the Literary Awards Writing Contest sponsored by the Tucson Festival of Books.
“All the Broken Things” by Amy Stonestrom captured third place in the nonfiction division of a contest that received 705 entries from across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, France, Greece, Syria and Afghanistan.
Submissions were judged in three categories: fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Final judging was done by authors who will take take part in the book festival.
The winning entries came from David Mullins of Omaha, Elizabeth Flanagan of Waldoboro, Maine, and LiAnne Yu of Kailua, Hawaii.
It was the festival’s 10th writing contest, and it has become résumé-worthy for those winning awards. Novelist Maria Amparo Escandon, one of the judges, can see why.
“After reading and re-reading the manuscripts, I had a really hard time deciding on the top three in each category,” she said. “So many of them are astounding, on many levels. It’s hard!”
Interestingly, one of them came from a Tucsonan who has never attended the Tucson Festival of Books.
Stonestrom’s move to the Foothills was a long time coming.
“I’d lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin my whole life and decided 20 years ago I needed to get out of the cold,” but she finally became an Arizonan 18 months ago.
Her “day job” is landscape and interior design. She still has clients in Minneapolis and serves them remotely. When she isn’t focused on exteriors and interiors, she is a freelance writer. When she isn’t designing or writing, she takes photographs. Her love of the outdoors, and outdoor photography, ultimately brought her to Tucson.
It didn’t hurt that she had heard glowing reviews of Tucson and the Tucson Festival of Books while visiting … wait for it … Dingle, Ireland.
“A few years ago, I was able to attend a writing workshop in Dingle through Bay Path University,” Stonestrom recalls. “Two of the faculty members were (novelists) Ann Hood and Andre Dubus, who had just come from the Tucson book festival. They both said great things about it and said I needed to get to the workshop there.”
Now, since the top three winners in each category receive free tuition in the festival’s prestigious Masters Writing Workshop, March 14-15, she’s on her way.
“All the Broken Things” is a candid reflection on her challenges two years ago, from Midwestern politics to the loss of a father.
But in writing her story, she remembered being pulled forward by a small spark of hope. “It was just one small thing, but it kept me going and helped get me where I am today.”
Stonestrom has yet to finish her first book, but she’s getting there.
“I’m working on a memoir that sounds dystopian but comes from the dystopian world we’re living in now,” she said. “We know about dystopian fiction. This would be dystopian nonfiction, I guess.”
She is looking forward to attending her first book festival, scheduled for March 12-13.
“Since it was an online festival last year, I’ve never been to one at the university,” she said. “I want to see for myself what everybody has been telling me about!”
