Only one student snored during last night’s short fiction reading hosted by the English department. After the long Homecoming weekend and his equally long day, sophomore Aaron King was exhausted.

“Tuesdays are busy,” King said about why he fell asleep. “This was the first time I slowed down all day.”

King, an accountant major, attends class from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays and attended the reading as part of his last class, English 1002.

After the reading, Jay Prefontaine, King’s English professor, fondly remembered another time when English professor Grahman Lewis snored at Prefontaine’s reading louder than King’s snoring last night.

Even though he was embarrassed about not being able to stay awake, King said he is looking forward to reading Hays’ book.

Prefontaine, Grahman and two other English professors especially welcomed the night’s featured author, Donald Hays, because he was their professor in graduate school.

Hays taught the then-graduate students and now-professors: Dan Tessitore, Prefontaine, Lewis and Bob Zordani at the University of Arkansas in the early ’90s.

Hays said the four were some of his favorite students as he, Prefontaine and Grahman joked around with each other after the event.

Hays was delighted to receive the invitation from the English department’s visiting writers committee.

“I would have come for nothing,” he said. Although, he quickly clarified that he would have just come to visit his old students and not done the reading.

Hays read two stories from his most recent book titled, “Dying Light and Other Stories.” The first reading was “Ackerman in Eden” about a crazy poet and the second was “Dyling Light” about the relationship between a father dying of esophageal cancer and his son.

The father, called simply by his last name of MacMahon, was based on Hays’ father.

“The hardest thing for me was to get enough distance so that I could write about the dying man without being either too angry or too sentimental,” Hays said about the story, which took him 3 months to write.

Hays is most famous for his 1984 novel “The Dixie Association” that was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

“‘The Dixie Association’ is probably the best baseball novel, I think, ever written,” said English Professor Michael Loudon, a member of the committee that invited Hays to campus.

Loudon ranked “The Dixie Association” above “The Natural” and “A Field of Dreams,” saying he felt “A Field of Dreams” is more for entertainment, but doesn’t have as much to say and can’t compare to “The Dixie Association’s” assortment of motley characters.

Michael Baird, freshman political science major, said, “It was interesting to hear the author read the story himself” because of the different emphasis given to different sections of the two stories.

Baird said he was glad when Hays finished “Dying Light” for two reasons. First because Hays was done, but mostly because Baird was happy for the father.

“All of his life .came to an end, he was released,” he said.