College students are a unique mix of various states, countries, cultures, and desires, making for a robust community when the university recruits its students correctly. Take Stewart Berg for example, a student who managed to bring cold and wet Washington state into commonality with Texas through his novel, “The Hatchlings of ‘08: A Tale of Two Universities,” currently being published serially on fallingmarbles.com, Berg’s literary press based in Marble Falls, Texas.
Born in Snohomish, Berg lived in Washington state until he was in 4th grade, at which point his father “up and moved” the family to Texas in Marble Falls, about an hour west of the state capital, Austin. Despite spending the majority of his school years in Texas, Berg chose to pursue his college education at PLU because of both his early connections to Washington and the family he still had living in the Parkland/Tacoma area.
Berg recalls his time at PLU fondly, recounting how he came to PLU with the intention of getting a degree in Journalism, later switching to History as he lost interest in the way the field of Journalism was changing. “It was going from this format of..working on an article for three days, and then publishing, to focusing on how to run a Twitter page.” Berg did mention that he wished there was more of a “rivalry” between UPS and PLU, the two universities he later focused on in his book. “It adds a fun tint to everything,” he explained. This desire for a kind of rivalry between the schools is a main focus in his book and is why Berg likes to call writing “wishful thinking.”
“The Hatchlings of Fall ‘08: A Tale of Two Universities” tells the story of two friend groups—one from UPS, the other from PLU—and their adventures with the UPS hatchet that no one seems to have heard of. In fact, Berg didn’t know about the hatchet until a Wikipedia article bestowed the knowledge upon him. All he knew going into the writing process was that he wanted to focus on PLU and UPS students, and that rivalry he’d always dreamed they’d had. He was reading up on the schools on Wikipedia, looking for interesting information to incorporate into the book, when he came across a story detailing the beginning of construction at UPS. According to the tale, the hatchet was discovered in 1906 when students were digging up a barn at the old campus. They decided to carve their class year into it, which then became a UPS tradition, as the Seniors would pass down the hatchet to the Juniors just under them on Senior Recognition Day. Over time, a more secret tradition arose of trying to be the class that held on to the hatchet for as long as possible, which resulted in long periods of time in which the whereabouts of the hatchet were unknown. In fact, its longest disappearance was 15 years long, and only ended when a student anonymously returned it to the university via mail.
This hatchet was the missing piece in Berg’s quest to write a book about PLU, UPS, and that rivalry he had dreamed of for so long. Currently, it is being published bimonthly on the aforementioned fallingmarbles.com, but Berg hopes to have a paperback copy in publication next summer. “The Hatchlings of Fall ‘08” is very “UPS-heavy” in Berg’s words, but he has plans to write a second novel sequelling some of the characters in his current book which will be more focused on PLU.
