Chris Adrian, 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 1999 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 1998, Volume 24, go to Chris Adrian and Herman Fong.
Chris Adrian for his story "The Sum of Our Parts" in Winter 1998-99, edited by Thomas Lux.
Chris Adrian was born in 1970 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Florida, the youngest child of an airline pilot and a flight attendant. "I started writing in high school," he says, "after I realized that I had no talent for painting, and that I had better give that up before I hurt myself or someone else with my sloppy, gruesome studies of malproportioned nude women." After high school, he spent a year in Germany as an exchange student and did a great deal of writing, then went to the University of Florida, where Padgett Powell was his mentor. "He taught me, thank goodness, the difference between good writing and bad." After Florida, he received a fellowship to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and studied with Marilynne Robinson. Also at the University of Iowa, he worked as an assistant in a clinical pathology lab and an obstetrics-gynecology research lab. Since 1996, he's been a student at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia.
Besides Ploughshares, Adrian has published stories in The New Yorker, Story, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 1998. His first novel, still untitled, is due out next summer from Broadway Books.
About "The Sum of Our Parts," Adrian writes: "It's based, more or less (but certainly less than more), on my experience working in a pathology lab very much like the one described in the story. I was walking down to the neonatal ICU one night, on my way to draw blood from an infant, when a stray and apparently sourceless groan came wafting down the hall. Early the next morning (I worked the nightshift), I happened to see a little girl practicing at a piano in the atrium. The groan and the girl stayed with me in a way that was sort of horrible, and in order to be rid of them, I started a story which gradually drew upon other elements of the nightshift lab experience-receiving brains in Tupperware bowls, gossiping about a patient who leaped off the top of a parking garage, drawing and analyzing our own blood just for fun. Over successive drafts, a female ghost snuck in, replacing the sentient blood-analyzing machine, and commandeered the narrative, and the story came more and more to be hers.
"The final story bore about as much resemblance to the real experience of working in the lab as Batman does to a bat. In real life, there were no ghosts, no multiple transplants, no overheated love polygons. It's full of medical inaccuracies. But I hope the story reflects some of the terrible strangeness of the hospital, how it seemed not unreasonable, at three a.m., that a dissatisfied, ambivalent ghost might be wandering the halls, visiting friends who didn't know her and looking for a way out of life."