A lot of people have contacted us asking about the other contestants in the Literature Contest. We got over 200 entries, and a lot of good stories. I read all of them—they came in really handy when I stepped in a groundhog hole, injuring my Achilles tendon, and was denied bike riding for a couple weeks shortly after the end of the contest. (Insert joke about mind-numbing here. But really, I enjoyed reading them.)

Anyway, I picked the top dozen and sent them around the office for the staff to read. Everyone voted for their top four, with each place assigned a certain number of points, and so the winners were chosen. Here’s the breakdown for the top dozen:

#1 – Wallhangers, by James W. Crissman
#2 – Metric Bubba, by Stephen Gleasner
#3 – A Leader of the People, by Kevin Scott
#4 – Requiem for Frog Pond, by Lindsey Dickinson
#5 – No Man’s Land, by Marc Maurino
#6 – The Unraveling of an Idiot, by Keith Kowal
#7 – Bikelife, by A. Matt Wickenheiser
#8 – The Bicycle Garden, by Marcus B. Anderson
#9 – The Straight and Narrow, by Jeff Dick
#10 – The First Mountain, by Jayson Lorenzen
#11 – The Power of Suggestion, by Brian Bartell
#12 – I Have Monkey Butt, by José Rodríguez

We might put some more of these stories in the magazine, or here on our website, so keep an eye out.

By the way, second-place winner Stephen Gleasner’s close-to-local paper, the Bangor Daily News, did a story on his win recently.