Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction

Ploughshares is pleased to present Kashona Notah with the twelfth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his story “Bettie Page and Jimmy Free Bird,” which appeared in the Winter 2022-23 Issue of Ploughshares, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John Skoyles. The $2,500 prize—sponsored by acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron, and member of the Ploughshares advisory board Alice Hoffman—honors a short story published in the journal in the previous year.

Hoffman writes of Notah: “His voice and his way of writing is very unique, really special. I think he’s going to be a major writer if he wants to be. There is real soul in his writing.”

Kashona Notah is Iñupiaq, a member of the Native Village of Kotzebue, and a NANA Regional Corporation tribal shareholder. He was additionally raised since birth within a Diné family through his adoptive father, a proud member of the Navajo Nation. He holds a BA from Stanford University, where his writing won the Mary Steinbeck Dekker Award and the Louis Sudler Prize, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where his writing won Hopwood Awards for fiction and nonfiction.

What was the inspiration for “Bettie Page and Jimmy Free Bird”?

I didn’t start college until I was twenty-seven. The story mostly derives from experiences I had while working before academia. During that before-time, the workforce and surviving in it without a degree was rough. That said, two things I came to value more than almost anything were storytelling and humor. Often, in my various labor jobs, coworkers and I would spin stories to entertain one another and get our minds on something different from whatever menial task lay before us. For “Bettie and Jimmy,” though, I was probably most inspired by a time when I was a temp employee for over three years in a warehouse that felt like it had trapped me. Writing the story has been a way for me to make that experience into something positive.

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

Albert is a recurring character in a story cycle that I am currently working on. I grappled with writing the story as a standalone because I knew Albert had a much bigger narrative arc. I found a way to make the story what it is today with some encouragement, particularly from Naima Coster (whose workshop I was in when I wrote the first draft), Julie Buntin, and Peter Ho Davies. I also greatly valued comments from my MFA cohort, who are too numerous to mention by name but all amazing.

I think the discovery for me was that I needed to keep locked in on Albert’s life in thewarehouse. For the story to work, Jim’s ruse had to be the escape that Albert was looking for. The ruse from “the enemy” had to make the hours go by. Getting too caught up in Albert’s exterior life weakened the allure, as messed up as it might have been, of wanting to find out if Bettie Page was truly up at Patton. The story was also meant to raise questions around ageism and mental health. After all, Bettie Page would be elderly if alive, and she is institutionalized when Jim tells the story, yet she is still incredibly attractive and still an icon. Her legacy is not lost. Albert and Dave ultimately want to know if she might possibly meet them at Patton’s gates too.

Finding a way to make that all work was a challenge, but by giving my characters the power of telling their own story—being true to Albert, but also to Jim and the others—was necessary. In other words, Albert relays what Jim said through his lens, while Jim tells Albert and the others what Bettie Page might have said through his almost opposite lens, and at the center of the story, Bettie Page shares what Jesus might have said at the train tracks through her lens. Ultimately, Albert is the storyteller though, to whom the reader has direct access. I had to remain true to every voice for the matryoshka doll style of narrative, where the story kind of spirals inward and outward in a nested way, to work. The characters had to tell their own stories, and I needed to step aside and let them. Writing is like music for me. I thought of the story as a blues, country, or jazz composition. But the crescendo had to stay true to Jim’s character, which is why I chose Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” to close it out.

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

I find that forcing myself to sit in a chair, with my phone set to airplane mode, and my WiFi router turned off, is the best remedy to any procrastination. My friends and family all know that I may or may not respond in general, and if I’m not responding quickly, it’s likely because I’m caught up in some writing. Sometimes I work on my project car, a 1974 Super Beetle, to find my rhythm, and then return to writing, although in true Indigibilly form, the car sits under a tarp in my driveway at the moment. I also take a lot of road trips. Often, I work things out while driving and pull over at a rest stop or whatever is closest, sometimes parking lots, to write when the answer arrives.

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

Adam Johnson and Peter Ho Davies have had a huge impact on a personal level. I was lucky enough to study with both writers during my academic career. They are both incredible human beings. As far as authors whose works inspired me to become a writer, or a better writer, a few mentions would have to be Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Edward P. Jones, John Steinbeck, Leslie Marmon Silko, Cervantes, Jesmyn Ward, Tim O’Brien, Langston Hughes, and Mark Twain.

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

My advice for new writers is simple: write what you know. I don’t mean for that to limit you in any way. If you have read science fiction or literary fiction your whole life, that can be what you know, too. I just mean, often what we know from experience can be transformed into the best fiction. Stories can and should be imaginative and uninhibited, but when you integrate the things you know intimately, you are likely to write a stronger narrative.

The best piece of writing advice I ever got was to pull stories from the ether. Someone said that stories already exist up there, and they just need a storyteller to bring them down to earth for interpretation. I’m not really sure who said it anymore—that’s been lost—but it’s advice I follow and share as my own.