When tenters attempted to argue with line monitor Aaron Dinin about the tenting policy last year, he wouldn't have been kidding if he told them he wrote the book on Krzyzewskiville.
A Trinity '05 graduate, Aaron Dinin completed The Krzyzewskiville Tales before he graduated with a degree in English. The book, released last Thursday and modeled on Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, details the history and captures the spirit of K-ville through a fictional story-telling contest held in a tent on the eve of the big game.
"It started out as a project for a class on dictionaries," Dinin said. "I had to come up with a glossary."
Dinin decided he would use "Crazie Talk," the jargon used by the Cameron Crazies, for his project. He cited the now defunct K-ville listserv-which allowed all the inhabitants of K-ville to communicate-as source material.
During his work on the project, Dinin stood up at a K-ville town meeting in Spring 2003 and explained that he was working on the glossary before asking a question. The Chronicle reported that he was researching the history of K-ville, and Dinin said his mailbox was full of e-mails the next day from alumni interested to get their hands on his finished work on the story of K-ville.
"That's when I realized, 'Wow, there's a market [for a book] here,'" he explained.
So Dinin started researching.
He decided he would try to record a chronology of K-ville history, but when he went to the Duke Archives to look for material, all he found were newspaper clippings and some pictures.
"There was really no written record of K-ville," Dinin said.
Things got more complicated when, after e-mailing alumni for first-hand accounts of how K-ville got started, Dinin found that people's stories didn't match up. It was obvious that an accurate chronology of K-ville was impossible, Dinin decided.
That's when he decided to try something a little literary, maybe even a little zany-using The Canterbury Tales as a model for the book.
"The storytelling contest [in the novel] gave me the flexibility to incorporate conflicting accounts," Dinin explained.
He also was able to put in fictional stories that could plausibly happen. The Engineer's Tale, for example, tells the story of how a guy's girlfriend cheated on him in K-ville.
After beginning his drafts, Dinin approached Sue Wasiolek, assistant vice president for student affairs and dean of students, with the concept. For information, Wasiolek pointed him in the direction of Duke men's basketball head coach Mike Krzyzewski, which led Dinin to work with Associate Athletic Director Mike Cragg.
As a result of the cooperation, Coach K's wife Mickie Krzyzewski wrote the forward to the book.
"Duke Press was really receptive when I approached them with the book, and I think a lot of that had to do with me having the support of the basketball program," Dinin said.
It took about a year for the book to go through the editing and printing process. During that time, Dinin graduated and moved to Arizona.
Dinin, who is originally from Georgia, said that he wasn't a big sports fan before he came to Duke.
"I didn't even tent my freshman year, because I didn't understand it," he explained.
But after attending his first basketball game, he was hooked.
Dinin said his book was an attempt to explain that ultimately, tenting does not make sense-but when a student is there, it does not matter.
"When you're trying to explain it to someone, you have to say, 'It sounds stupid, but trust me, it isn't.' I just tried to take the 'Trust me' part and put it into the book," he said.
Dinin said his favorite K-ville experience was when fans-many of whom had tented together for weeks-flooded out of Cameron after a huge win.
"It's that moment when you think, 'Wow, that's why I waited for two months- for that,'" he said.
Since graduating, Dinin has been living in a hotel in Arizona, taking time to work on publishing the book and thinking about future projects before going to graduate school. He would like to write more books and one day be a professor.
Dinin will speak about The Krzyzewskiville Tales at Bostock Library tonight at 7:30 p.m.
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