If you’re considering entering the 2019 Observer story contest, you could do worse than to write a story about a small Texas publication fighting an uphill battle. It’s no surprise we’re suckers for that kind of thing.
With “Ink Upon the Furrows,” contest winner Heath Dollar captures, in fewer than 2,500 words, the death of a newspaper, a language and an entire culture smack dab in the middle of the Lone Star State. Facing the end of his life, Daniel Zima, publisher/editor of Texaský rolník, the Texas Farmer, a Czech-language newspaper, delivers papers to his elderly neighbors in a nursing home while awaiting a buyer he suspects will never appear.
“I was taken by this story and its palpable sense of nostalgia,” writes guest judge Natalia Sylvester, “how it so…
