Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction

Ploughshares is pleased to present Belle Boggs with the first annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “In the Shadow of Man,” which appeared in the Summer 2018 issue, guest-edited by Jill McCorkle. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a short story published in the journal in the previous year.

Throughout “In the Shadow of Man,” Ben, who is on furlough from his government job, grapples with parental concern when his young daughter, Olivia, is late getting back to school from a field trip. Her school, Sunshine Charter, doesn’t have a bus service or school lunch, but believes in project-based learning and plenty of field trips, so, as Ben and other parents wait into the night for their children, they denigrate the parent chaperone, calling the police and contacting his ex-wife, and examine the hallways lined with children’s art. “In the Shadow of Man” strikes a chord between the safety of home and the uncertainty of an uncommon, chosen education.

Boggs is the author of the new novel The Gulf (Graywolf, 2019); the essay collection The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood (Graywolf, 2016); and the story collection Mattaponi Queen (Graywolf, 2010). The Art of Waiting was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail, Buzzfeed, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Boggs has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. She is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, where she also directs the MFA program in creative writing.

What inspired “In the Shadow of Man”?

“In the Shadow of Man” takes place over a late afternoon at a hippie-ish, project-based charter school, and is inspired by some of my own teaching experiences at schools like that: the kids arriving or departing the school building wearing capes or other costumes (but not shoes), the general filth that accumulates when you put the kids in charge of cleaning the building, the strangeness (at first—you get used to it) of kids calling teachers by their first names. One of the schools where I taught had a similar approach to field trips as the school in my story—kids would just look for an adult with a car, and no one wrote anything down. Coming from New York City Public Schools, where I first taught and where there are so many rules, I found it kind of frighteningly cavalier. But we never lost a kid! Not that I know of.

I was also interested in writing about a man grappling with his own ego in a space that, traditionally, has been considered female. Ben, the father in the story, is struggling with the loss of a job, with his feelings of powerlessness about environmental catastrophe, and with what to do when he perceives that his child is in danger. His wife, a scientist, is never in-scene in the story—Ben has to deal with these fears on his own.

What did you discover or grapple with while writing it?

I wanted to write about how you transmit ideas about danger to children—the catastrophic environmental destruction threatening our whole planet, the danger of men. At a different school, in DC, we took the kids on an end-of-year field trip, and when a (male) teacher told the kids they’d need to find a police officer if they got lost, our principal added: “A woman. Find a police woman.” The kids all nodded—they knew.

When I was working as a fifth grade teacher in North Carolina, my class studied lemurs and primates, and even had a chance to see Jane Goodall speak. We were especially taken by her description of how little time she was able to spend in Gombe National Park since she became famous—she was too busy traveling and speaking up for the chimpanzees, for preservation. I read a lot of her book, In the Shadow of Man, to that class (it reads aloud really well), and thought it was a good framework for thinking about the contrast between danger and hope.

How does this story fit with the rest of your work?

I like writing about the environment, nature, animals. Schools and classrooms are interesting to me, because they’re good spaces for looking at power structures, identity, conflict. Some of the stories in Mattaponi Queen have educators as characters, or revolve around schools. My new novel, The Gulf, is set partly in classrooms (for-profit, Christian-writing-themed ones), and is also about danger and politics (and climate change).

What are you working on now?

I’ve started working on a novel that connects to some of these themes—current hippie/antiestablishment culture and classrooms and the choice to have children (or not) in a damaged and dangerous world. As a parent and an educator, I have a lot of notes.