Maxine Swann, Cohen Award

Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best short story and poem published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners -- each of whom receives a cash prize of $600 -- are selected by our advisory editors. The 1998 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 1997, Volume 23, go to Maxine Swann and Mark Doty:

Maxine Swann for her story "Flower Children" in Fall 1997, edited by Mary Gordon.

Born in 1969, Maxine Swann grew up on a farm in southern Pennsylvania. She attended state public schools until the age of twelve, then an all-girls' private school in the nearest city, Baltimore, and, finally, for two years, Phillips Academy (Andover), from which she graduated in 1987. After a year spent in Alaska, London, and, briefly, France, she entered Columbia College in 1988 and studied, most notably, with Mary Gordon.

In 1991, Swann went to Paris on an exchange program, but then ended up staying, not completing her degree in comparative literature at Columbia until 1994. During these years in Paris, she worked sporadically as a translator and English teacher and, most significantly, began writing screenplays with Argentine film director Juan Pablo Domenech. In 1994, they received both a writing and a development grant from the European Script Fund for their first feature screenplay, Limbo. Also in 1994, Swann entered the graduate program in French literature at a branch of the Sorbonne, Université de Paris VII, from which she received her master's degree in 1997 for a thesis on Proust's style. Since November 1997, she has been in Punjab, Pakistan, staying with her friends Lauren Ingram and Tamur Mueenuddin, who have launched a project to provide reproductive health care to Pakistani women in rural areas. In Pakistan, Swann has been teaching English and sports at a village girls' school, continuing her collaboration with Juan Pablo Domenech, and writing her first novel. She plans to return to France this fall and then eventually move back to the U.S. "Flower Children" was her first publication. Besides the Cohen Award, the story has won a rare "triple crown" for literary prizes, selected for this season's The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, and The Pushcart Prize.

About "Flower Children," Swann writes: "All stories, I think, are in the end a very dense mixture of memory and imagination, with the doses varying each time. 'Flower Children,' I see now, was a story I'd been trying to write since I'd begun writing. It is, in a sense, a condensation of nearly all the stories, pages, and even poems that I wrote in grade school, high school, and then college. In her writing class at Columbia, Mary Gordon, taking my efforts seriously, pressed me further towards it, also introducing me to the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, whose work eventually led me to find the form in which to say what I wanted to say. The story itself I wrote a year or so later while in Paris. Its germ I discovered one afternoon when I was home on vacation in my mother's house. I remember feeling desperate that I would never write. I sat down at the table and, almost out of pure stubbornness, it seems to me now, came up with a refrain:

The children don't understand how the tree frogs sing . . .
They don't understand why their father was here and now is gone . . .
Although they kill things themselves, they don't understand why
anything dies or where the dead go or where they were waiting
before they were born . . .

"That found, the rest of the story came somewhat easily. In her essay 'My Vocation,' Natalia Ginzburg describes the first time she wrote a 'serious piece': 'It came from me like a miracle in a single night, and when afterwards I went to bed I was tired, bewildered, worn out. . . . I was seventeen and I had failed in Latin, Greek and mathematics. I had cried a lot when I found out. But now that I had written the story I felt a little less ashamed. . . . I had written my story on squared paper and I had felt happy as never before in my life; I felt that I had a wealth of thoughts and words within me.' When I finished 'Flower Children' -- and the last part I wrote in a rush one night late -- I felt much the same way. I knew that the story was true in the sense that it was the first thing I'd written that was whole and right. I felt, I remember, a delicious sensation of lightness, went promptly to bed, and slept very hard."