John C. Zacharis First Book Award

Ploughshares is pleased to present Claire Luchette with the thirty-third annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for their book, Agatha of Little Neon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.

This year’s judge was Ladette Randolph, Ploughshares’s Editor-in-Chief. About the book, Randolph wrote, “Agatha of Little Neon is a darkly humorous, beautifully written, and carefully observed novel. Thoughtful and thought provoking. Luchette’s Agatha is a misfit in a little band of displaced nuns. As the nuns care for outcasts who have lost more than they have, Agatha confronts her doubts and finds a new meaning of faith and sisterhood.”

Claire Luchette’s work has appeared in Granta, the Kenyon Review, VQR, and the Iowa Review.

What was the inspiration for Agatha of Little Neon?

I started writing about religious women in the summer of 2016, when I was thinking all the time about power and gender and money (I’m still always thinking about power and gender and money). I was broke and lonely and lost and eating expired yogurts. In my head was the voice of my high school economics teacher, a octogenarian Dominican sister who liked to proclaim, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” I thought it every time I peeled back the foil of a fruit-on-the-bottom. What was it like to have that conviction? Sr. Therese’s life seemed so different from mine—but it sounded kind of nice, the idea of living in a house with a group of like-minded women, with our own routines and rhythms. I had tired of writing about young women who were broke, lonely, lost, and eating Chobani, so I made a hard pivot: Nuns.

What did you discover or grapple with while writing the novel?

I’d been walking around with all sorts of ideas about what a novel should do, how it should look, and I discovered just how uncool and wrong they were. I had to keep struggling against my weird preconceptions—I don’t know where they came from—about chapter length, narrative shape, whatever. Every book that matters to me breaks those rules.

Walk us through your writing process for this project. What works for you as a writer? What do you find challenging, or even difficult, about writing?

The earliest drafts, I wrote when I lived nowhere. I was going between friends’ couches and writing residencies and driving around with all my books and pants. My car only played CDs; the sole CD I owned was Lemonade. I wrote with real urgency. After the book sold, I wrote a million more drafts. The novel and I both changed so much. It took me a long time to see the book: I had to see what it wasn’t first.

The beginning, middle, and end are all the hardest, but even more difficult than the writing, for me, is trying to talk about it—assigning language to the spooky stuff. Accounting for choices that are intuitive and idiosyncratic and resist explanation, even feel cheapened by explanation. It’s hard work, speaking. When I talk about writing, I sweat.

What authors or works have had the largest impact on your writing?

I’m staggered by the work of Louise Erdrich, Yiyun Li, Elizabeth McCracken, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Jamel Brinkley, Weike Wang, Miriam Toews—these writers make me want to keep writing.

Do you have any advice for new or aspiring writers? What’s the most valuable piece of writing advice you received?

Marjorie Celona, one of my favorite writers and people alive, gave me essential advice: “Don’t be afraid to live a weird life.” It set me free.