the Prairie Schooner blog

Our 2011 Pushcart Prize Nominations!

We submitted Pushcart Prize nominations yesterday! Congratulations and best of luck to our nominees:

 

“Counting Sheep” by Linda Pastan, a poem from the Fall Issue.

“I'll Tell You about Speaking In Tongues” by Roxanne Beth Johnson, a poem from the Spring issue.

“Early Explorer’s Journal” by Desiree Alvarez, a poem from the Fall issue.

“Peach” by Nuala Ní Chonchúir, a short story from the forthcoming Winter issue.

“The Bird Lady” by Melodie Edwards, a short story from the Summer issue.

“How to Eat a Quince” by Patrick Toland, a poem from the forthcoming Winter issue.

 

Our Best Americans

So the Best American Series released their 2011 versions last month, and there are several Prairie Schooner connections to note.

-Eric Barnes' story "Something Pretty, Something Beautiful" (Winter 2010) was anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories. Way to go, Eric!

-Floyd Skloot's essay "Something to Marvel At" (Fall 2010, read it here) was a notable in Best American Nonrequired Reading.

-Katie Chase's "The Sea that Leads to All Seas" (Winter 2010, read it here) and R.T. Smith's "The Red Jar" (Spring 2010, read it here) were notables in Best American Short Stories.

-Janet Abbott Dutton's "Old Enough" (Winter 2010), Josip Novakovich's "Cat Named Sobaka" (Spring 2010), and Tracy Seeley's "Cartographies of Change" (Summer 2010) were notables in Best American Essays.

It was a pretty good year for us, we thought. This bears this feeling out to a degree, I suppose.

In addition, congrats to some other UNL/Prairie Schooner connected folks, namely, Carrie Shipers ("Ghost Traffic", from Zone 3), Joy Castro ("Grip", from Fourth Genre), and Sarah Fawn Montgomery ("Ekphrasis: What My Grandfather Saw", from Fugue) for earning notable status in Best American Essays. Excellent work all around!

 

Meddling grannies

Interview with Richard Spilman, by Marianne Kunkel

Richard Spilman has published two collections of short fiction, Hot Fudge and The Estate Sale, and a collection of poetry, In the Night Speaking. His short story, “Where He Went Under,” from the winter issue of PS, won a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award.

MK: Your story “Where He Went Under” tells about the self-destructive transformation of a failed stockbroker into a successful painter, a transformation that is encouraged by the main character witnessing the drowning of another man. How did you approach describing the art of painting? Did you pull from personal experience, research, or figure out the basics of painting as you wrote?

RS: I have no personal experience of painting, though I have friends who are artists. Luckily the fellow in my story is not a good artist but one who has found, through the midwifery of the drowned man, the volcanic core inside himself that can turn even technically bad art into powerful expression.

All the technical details I researched, which means any practicing artist would probably find something to object to.

After so much suspicion against the main character’s reasons for not immediately helping the drowning man, your story ends with the main character demonstrating almost a kinship with the drowned man as he imagines himself “falling and the water swallowing me up like flames.” Was this powerful conclusion your original intended conclusion?

When I changed computers last year, I lost some of my old drafts, so I can’t tell you exactly what my first ending was, but it was pretty close to the published one. I tend to come to my endings early and then find my way to them like a hiker trying to find his way to a landmark without the help of a map.

That can lead to problems. Often my “powerful” endings are the darlings that (following Faulkner) I must kill in rewriting.

Frequently near the story’s end you expertly, even humorously, capture the outside struggles of many successful artists—hangers-on, critics, and artistic labels such as when the main character states, “This, I’m told, makes me an expressionist, and it’s nice to know, as the top of my head breaks loose from its moorings, that there is a name for the malady.” Many writers struggle with the (mis)labeling of their work, and feel outside pressure to label it themselves; what advice can you give them?

It is foolish for a writer (or any artist) to expect to be understood, and anyone who seeks to be understood will inevitably become the servant of other people’s perceptions. Given the fact that we all want to communicate, this seems wrongheaded, but it is the truth. Every reader will rewrite your story to his or her own specifications, and there is nothing you can or should do about it. Content yourself with the fact that many readers’ misunderstandings create a story better than the one you wrote.

In “Where He Went Under,” it is not until the aftermath of the man’s drowning that the main character is inspired to paint his best work. What are ways that you motivate yourself to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

If I had to motivate myself to write, I would be in deep trouble. The only question of motivation, for me, comes when I need to re-re-re-rewrite. Five or six drafts always seem like enough and never are. 

The only advice I can give for writer’s block is to allow yourself to write badly and to write piecemeal. As G.K. Chesterton noted, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” If you don’t give yourself permission to write crap, you won’t write anything worth reading.

In the first class I ever taught (Composition I) there was a woman in her twenties, a very earnest person. She got an “A-” on her first paper; the next received a “B”, the one after that a “C” and the next one a “C.”  We talked for some time trying to figure out what could be the cause of her trouble. Finally, I asked her to describe her writing process. I said, “Tell me everything. If you use a pencil instead of a pen, I want to know. Everything.”

She said, “Well, first I take out all the papers I have written for you, and I look at what I have done wrong.”

I interrupted her at that point and said, “Burn them.”

She was indignant. She wanted me to take her seriously. After all, my comments must be there for a reason.

They are, I told her, but after she had paid attention to them, close attention, she needed to forget them and trust that she had internalized what was necessary for her. I had a time trying to convince her of this, but finally I said, “It’s like having your grandmother looking over your shoulder as you write.” Somehow that worked, and since then I have used that anecdote with students dealing with writer’s block because, usually, they will be able to identify some unrealistic demand that they are making on themselves—some granny looking over their shoulder.

You not only write short stories, but poems as well. In what ways is your writing process for the two genres similar? How do the commonalities between writing poetry and short stories compare to those between writing short stories and longer fiction?

There are probably more commonalities between poetry and short stories than there are between short stories and novels. You can write a short story that has no characters, no plot (William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”). It’s a little harder to write one with no setting because, like a poem, the short story needs those physical details to tell us what it is really about.

Of course, my poems tend to be narrative, so it may be that as a poet I am just a short story writer with pretentions to grandeur.

I do advise short story writers to try poetry. The poem won’t let you get away with a lot of blather, and it forces you, for the most part, to find drama outside of dialogue.

 

Poetic-fact and dream-logic

Interview with Kara Candito, by Marianne Kunkel.

Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. She has appeared in Best New Poets and has received an Academy of American Poets Prize as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

MK: Your poem “Epic Poem Concerning the Poet’s Coming of Age as Attis” (Prairie Schooner, Spring 2010) candidly, and at times unflinchingly, examines the experiences of a young boy. What drew you to elaborating on boyhood and what about this task, if anything, was challenging?

KC: I’ve always been drawn to art that blurs the lines between what we often see as fixed categories: male/female, heterosexuality/homosexuality, innocence/experience. In writing “Epic Poem,” I wanted to speak honestly and compellingly from the fraught place of adolescence. Entering into the mindset of a fourteen-year-old boy was a way of convening with my female self at that age through a different lens. In fact, many of the objects and memories that surface into the poem are my own—the TV tables covered with the presidents’ faces, the constant buzz of pop culture, and the obsessions with sound and solitude. This poem was actually a pure pleasure to write, because as I was writing it, all of the elements that matter to me as a writer—invention, memory, and imagination—seemed to coalesce on the page. I don’t have that experience too often!

Your imagery in “Sleeping with René Magritte” is stunning, a fitting quality since it is a poem that profiles the famous painter. The poem’s concluding simile in which you describe “watching / the weather gather like the hem of a dress / we trip over and back / into ourselves” is especially lovely. Striking imagery shows up in much of your poetry; how do you go about constructing an image, and does imagery serve the same purpose in each poem?

I’m obsessed with Lorca’s idea of the hecho poetico, or poetic fact. I love how the images in his poems can’t be subsumed or explained, how they become their own irrational, hermetic matrixes of meaning. I think René Magritte’s paintings are visual enactments of poetic facts. Each object in a painting like Homesickness (1941) is concrete and recognizable, and yet the associations between the objects—a man (with wings on the back of his tuxedo jacket), a bridge, and a lion—are simultaneously ambiguous and deeply emotional. They evoke the experience of homesickness without describing it. When I craft an image, I try to get at the irreducible, irrational dream-logic that governs any intense experience, as a way of circumventing explanation and offering the reader a less mediated version of a private reality with which he or she might identify.

This year’s Prairie Schooner Book Prize Symposium featured you reading from Taste of Cherry. Your poems bring such life to language through their arrangement on the page, how do you perform them in a way that does justice to their appearance in print?

Once, when I was particularly nervous about reading my work, my friend Anna Journey gave me some great advice: think of yourself as a devotee to the poems, and read each one the way it sounded when it appeared in your head, or as a draft on your computer screen.

Even if it means moaning “ooh-la-la!” or channeling my grandmother’s Italglish, even if it means embarrassing myself, I’m just the messenger.

You just completed your Ph.D. in creative writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Many creative writers might enjoy traveling to such a sunny, tropical climate to write. What about you—what is your ideal writing space? What does your current writing space look like?

I just moved to Wisconsin to begin a professorship, so my new writing space is still under construction. I really like to work on a big, flat desk, surrounded by a kitschy pastiche of familiar objects. I have this David Bowie poster that absolutely must hang somewhere in my writing space. In fact, I think of Bowie as my ideal self, if I were a musician. He’s audacious without taking himself too seriously, and unapologetically into sex and swagger.

It’s funny that I’m particular about my writing space, because I often “write” the initial drafts of poems when I’m traveling in a car, bus, or airplane. I also find the shower inspiring.  

Poets’ Quarterly’s Valerie Wetlaufer remarked of Taste of Cherry, “We are hypnotized, besotted, and we want to follow along with the speaker, past the end of the poem.” Currently, what creative works are you reading that are hypnotizing and besotting you?

I’ve been reading William Kulik’s translation of French surrealist poet Robert Desnos’ work. Desnos’ capacity for wonder and brutality really blow me away. In “Rope,” he writes: “If I like trains, it’s no doubt because they go faster/than funerals.” His work takes fragments from everyday life—observations, tastes, and textures—and makes them magical and disturbing.

Pushcart XXXV

Let me first say that I admire the Pushcart anthologies and the Super Bowl for keeping our collective Roman-numeral-reading skills alive.

More importantly, though, we are pleased to announce that one of our Pushcart nominees has won! Caitlin Horrocks, whose story “Steal Small” was in the Summer 2009 issue, will be included in Pushcart Prize XXXV.

Many of the informal rankings of literary magazines depend on two projects: the Best American series (in poetry, short fiction, essay, and other genres) and the Pushcart Prize Anthologies. While both projects come out with new editions each year, the volume of material that’s considered for each is almost oceanic. The Pushcart relies on editors of journals, the chairs of creative writing programs, an extensive network of contributing editors, and former winners of the award. If we consider that the number of literary journals in this country is huge (I got to one hundred on NewPages.com website somewhere in the early Bs, and their site relies on voluntary participation), that the number of creative writing programs is similarly large (AWP lists 808 such programs in 2009), then we can surmise that the number of nominations (six per journal and program) is vast, and that’s before we start to add the contributing editors and former honorees. Not all of these people will send in nominations, but it’s such an honor for both writers and journals that most of us who can nominate, do. It is very difficult to get a piece into one of the Pushcart anthologies, and we are thrilled for Caitlyn Horrocks that she won a spot in the 35^th edition. And we are very pleased to be the journal that brought her work before an appreciative audience. 

PS: She has a great site linked to her page (from the Et Cetera section) that needs your immediate study: Strange Maps. Tell them we sent you.

Our Own Red Carpet: Prairie Schooner Awards

Each year, we look over all the work we've printed and single out for special attention work that we think is particularly fine. This task is, in many ways, like trying to pick your favorite child: we really love all the pieces that we publish. But going back through the year's stories, poems, and essays is not so bad a project, and we always find pieces we'd like to share again. So join us in celebrating these fine writers:

The Lawrence Foundation Award of $1,000 was won by Lori Ostlund of San Francisco, CA for the story “Idyllic Little Bali” from the Summer issue. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Chico. She received the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for her collection The Bigness of the World (U of Georgia P), which includes ‘‘Idyllic Little Bali.’’ Other stories from the collection have appeared or are forthcoming in the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Hobart, and Blue Mesa Review. For eight years, she and her partner owned an Asian furniture store in New Mexico and took yearly buying trips to Indonesia, where her prize-winning story is set.

 

The $1,500 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award was won by Robin Becker of Boalsburg, PA for her many poems that were published in the Summer and Fall issues. Her sixth collection of poems, Domain of Perfect Affection (U of Pittsburgh P), was a finalist for the Audre Lorde and Lambda Book Awards. She writes a column on the poetry scene, ‘‘Field Notes,’’ for the

Women’s Review of Books. She’s currently completing a new collection of poems called ‘‘Snow in Summer.’’ This prize is made possible by the generosity of poet, publisher, and philanthropist Glenna Luschei.

 

Alicia Ostriker won the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing of $1,000 for her six poems in the Summer issue. Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic. Her most recent book of poetry is The Book of Seventy. Her 1980 poem sequence The Mother/child Papers has just been reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is also the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. She teaches in the Low-Residency mfa program at Drew University. The Faulkner Award is supported by charitable contributions to honor Virginia Faulkner, former editor-in-chief of the University of Nebraska Press and fiction editor at Prairie Schooner.

 

Linda Pastan is awarded the Edward Stanley Award of $1,000 for her four poems from the Winter issue. Her twelfth book of poems, Queen of a Rainy Country, was published by Norton. She received the Ruth Lilly Prize in 2003 and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award. From 1991 to 1995 she was poet laureate of Maryland. Her next book will be Traveling Light. Charitable contributions from the family of Edward Stanley, a member of the committee that founded Prairie Schooner in 1926, make this award possible.

 

 

The Bernice Slote Award of $500 for the best work by a beginning writer was won by Marly Swick for her story “Nothing Extra” published in the Fall issue. She has published two story collections and two novels: A Hole in the Language, The Summer Before the Summer of Love, Paper Wings, and Evening News. Her short fiction has appeared in O’Henry Prize Stories, Atlantic Monthly, Best of the Best of the South, and other magazines. The Slote Award is supported by the estate of Bernice Slote, Prairie Schooner editor from 1963 through 1980.

 

The Annual Prairie Schooner Strousse Award of $500 goes to Rebecca Aronson of Albuquerque, NM for her two poems from the Winter issue. She has poems recently published or forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Gulfstream, and Satellite Convulsions (Poems from Tin House), among others. Her first book, Creature, Creature, came out from Main-Traveled Roads Press. The Strousse Award is given in honor of Flora Strousse.

 

The Jane Geske Award of $250 is awarded to Stephen Dunn for five poems from the Spring issue. He is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including What Goes On: Selected and New Poems, 1995–2009, in which the poems in this issue appear. His Different Hours won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. He lives in Frostburg, Maryland. The Jane Geske Award is given by Norman Geske in honor of his wife, Jane Geske, a lifelong supporter of Nebraska’s literary arts.

 

David Graham wins the Hugh J. Luke Award of $250 for his two poems in the Fall issue. He is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Stutter Monk (Flume P), and an essay anthology coedited with Kate Sontag, After Confessions: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf P). He lives in Ripon, WI.

 

There were ten winners of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards of $250 each. These awards are made possible through the generosity of Glenna Luschei.

 

Lee Zacharias, of Greensboro, NC, for her essay, “A Grand Canyon,” in the Spring issue

Caitlin Horrocks, of Grand Rapids, MI, for her story, “Steal Small,” in the Summer issue

Susan Aizenberg, of Omaha, NE, for her three poems in the Fall issue

Sarah Kennedy, of Fairfield, VA, for her two poems in the Winter issue

Breja Gunnison, of Beloit, WI, for her story, “My Life Among the Bodies,” in the Winter issue

Joy Ladin, of Amherst, MA, for her essay, “The God Thing,” in the Winter issue

Jason Brown, of Tucson, AZ, for his short story, “The Flood,” in the Summer issue

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of Freedonia, NY, for her two poems in the Winter issue

Emmanuel Moses (tr. Marilyn Hacker), of Paris, France, for four poems in the Winter issue

Paul Lisicky, of New York, NY, for his short story in the Fall issue.

Here There Be Pushcarts

Each year, we are honored to nominate six pieces from the last volume of Prairie Schooner for a Pushcart Prize. And it's a challenge. We love every piece we publish, and choosing among the things you love... Well, it's almost unbearable. Nevertheless, we find a way to make our choices, sit back, and admire the glow. We'd like you to admire them, too, and join us is wishing them the best of luck in the next step of the selection process.

"Hospice" by Robin Becker (poem, Summer 2009)

"Nothing Extra" by Marly Swick (short story, Fall 2009)

"Steal Small" by Caitlin Horrocks (short story, Summer 2009)

"Witness" by Kristin Naca (poem, Spring 2009)

"Morality Play" by Paisley Rekdal (poem, Winter 2009)

"Why I Sang at Dinner" by Roberto Christiano (poem, Spring 2009)

Congratulations to each of them!

Watch This Space

We have some changes rolling toward us--not sharp shocks, of course, but some adjustments to our online presence. As you might expect, this is a tease, so I'll leave the announcement at that for the moment.

Two things I'd like to draw to your attention. First, the occasional William Saroyan International Prize for Writing is accepting entries until the 31st of January 2010. Prose is the style--fiction and non-fiction are both considered. There's a $5000 award up for grabs in each genre. Rush over to this site for full guidelines.

Secondly, and far closer to home, our Fall issue is out. Grace Bauer is the Guest Editor, and she's rounded up an all-star constellation of grooviness and sharp-eyed insight. I just can't help using that word when it comes to our baby boomer issue. We don't have the table of contents and selected pieces up yet, but I thought I'd put up the cover image--though I warn you step away from the monitor.

Award-Winning Weekend

It's a holiday, so hoist a beverage of your choice with me and celebrate Lori Ostlund for winning one of this year's Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards. Her book, which looks like this ,

has a tasty little story in it titled "Idyllic Little Bali." Why do I mention this? Oh, I don't know. You can read other excerpts at her website, but it's a holiday and you'll want to be away from your computer, right? So pick up a copy. Or two, and give one to a friend. And if you see this woman:   

 

congratulate her on a fantastic award!

Celebrating Taxidermy and the Ordinary

You might wonder who those people are at the top of the masthead. What do they write about? What do they do? At the top of our fiction and poetry staff we have two amazing people who not only have a keen eye for great work in their genres (and we rely on them for these skills), they also generate great work. I know this because I've heard them read at our local grad student reading series, the No Name, and because they have new work coming out in book form. Yep, books.

Dave Madden's exploration of taxidermy just got accepted by St Martin's Press, and Carrie Shipers' book, Ordinary Mourning, won the 2009 ABZ Press First Book Prize.

It's been an honor to work with these two over the past several years. When these books hit the shelves, rush out and buy several. You'll want to give them as gifts.