Debra Spark, Zacharis Award

Zacharis Award 
Ploughshares and Emerson College are proud to announce that Debra Spark has been named the 1995 recipient of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her novel,
Coconuts for the Saint. The $1,500 award -- which is funded by Emerson College and named after the college's former president -- honors the best debut book published by a
Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between fiction and poetry.

Debra Spark, who is thirty-three years old, was born and raised in a suburb of Boston. She grew up in a family of professionals -- lawyers, doctors, professors -- with artistic inclinations. After graduating from Yale University in 1984 with a degree in philosophy, Spark attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she received her M.F.A. Her stories have appeared in
Esquire, Agni, Epoch, Prairie Schooner, and other magazines, and she writes essays and book reviews regularly for such publications as
The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and
Hungry Mind Review. She also edited the anthology
Twenty Under Thirty, which was published by Scribner in 1986 and which will be reissued, with a new introduction, in 1996. She has worked as a management consultant, a freelance editor, and a teacher at Emerson College, Tufts University, and now Colby College. She received an NEA Fellowship and was a Bunting Institute Fellow at Radcliffe College. She lives in Waterville, Maine, with the painter Garry Mitchell.

Coconuts for the Saint was published by Faber and Faber in November 1994. Set in Puerto Rico, the novel focuses on three teenaged sisters who are identical triplets; on their baker father, Sandrofo Cordero Lucero; and on the woman to whom he has proposed. In reviewing the book for
Ploughshares, Ann Harleman wrote: "Bright, wistful, and brash, Debra Spark's first novel,
Coconuts for the Saint, snares the reader instantly. On the surface it is a mystery story: Who is Sandrofo Cordero Lucero, and what is he hiding? Beneath lies another mystery,
the mystery, the one we all live out. 'This is the world,' says one of the novel's several narrators, 'the one we're so desperate not to leave. Our attachment seemed beautiful, but an endless puzzle. Why? Why do we want to stay here?' . . . Spark's language greets us from the first page with lavish gifts for the ear and eye-indeed, for all the senses. Her maximalist prose seems made of color and light, like Puerto Rico itself . . . the gathering desires of Spark's characters envelop us like a gorgeous fever."

The novel was inspired in part by Spark's grandfather, who exported bakery ovens to Puerto Rico and lived there for a time, and by her desire to explore the relationships of sisters, which she feels has been under-examined in fiction. Spark herself has a twin sister, Laura. A younger sister, Cynthia, died of breast cancer in 1992. Spark credits two major sources of support for the final shaping of
Coconuts for the Saint: Fiona McCrae, her editor at Faber, who has since moved on to Graywolf Press, and her writers' group, which includes Elizabeth Searle, Jessica Treadway, and Joan Wickersham.

After the novel, in its original form, had been rejected by several publishers, McCrae read the manuscript and suggested restructuring it. "She made a perfectly obvious observation that I hadn't been able to see before," Spark says. "It involved flipping the book over, as if it were a pineapple upside-down cake, removing the mold, and seeing if it would still hold together. After that, it was clear what I had to do, and I raced back to rewrite it."

As for the writers' group, which meets about once a month, Spark says: "It's a group I trust completely. We're all so sympathetic to each other as people, as well as to one another's work. We make great critics for each other, not only technically, but also on an emotional level. After we meet, I don't go home to recover from criticism or weigh advice, but to get to work. They read the entire novel, all the way through, and I took every single suggestion they made."

Spark is now at work on a new book, comprised of two related novellas. The first is about a woman living in Boston named Bertie, who has breast cancer and is struggling with a troubled friendship. The second section is from Bertie's mother's point of view and takes place in Barbados.

The Zacharis First Book Award was inaugurated in 1991. The past winners are: David Wong Louie for
The Pangs of Love; Allison Joseph for
What Keeps Us Here; Jessica Treadway for
Absent Without Leave; and Tony Hoagland for
Sweet Ruin. The award is nominated by the advisory editors of
Ploughshares, with founding editor DeWitt Henry acting as the final judge. There is no formal application process; all writers who have been published in
Ploughshares are eligible, and should simply direct two copies of their first book to our office.