What’s wrong with this picture (besides the clumsy photography)? Normally the three winners of the Hook short story contest, handpicked in a blind reading by our judge, John Grisham, would appear in this photo with Hook editor Hawes Spencer, the guy on the right.

That didn’t happen this year.

In a freakish convergence of fate and fiction, previous contest winner and published novelist Sally Honenberger, left, took second AND third place. Less-published writer Christy Strick, former catering manager at Farmington, takes home the grand prize of $700. Her story, “Moving,” according to Grisham is “Not the typical way to end a marriage, but a very funny scheme to divide the assets.”

Read it in this week’s Hook, which hits the stands March 27. Honenberger’s last entries to the Hook fiction contest will appear when the weather gets warmer.

Other parts of the opening were what we’ve come to expect: Rob Vaughan, head of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, makes his opening remarks and somehow manages to keep his comments fresh, despite this being the 14th time he’s done this. The youths who’ve won the Letters About Literature contest proudly read their epistles to authors whose books have changed their lives.

Also: The Big Read, which this year is To Kill a Mockingbird, is plugged. And an author says something profound about books and reading. Mercifully, Charles Shields draws laughs with a cautionary tale of his father’s reading, which had reached “a kind of mania,” and Shields notes that “after a life time of reading thousands and thousands of books, [his father] still had the working class prejudices of a man who’d never gone to high school.”

To cram as many bookish events as possible into the next few days, check out the Hook’s hot lit picks for this year’s Fest.

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