John C. Zacharis and Emerging Writer Awards
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Christine Sneed with the twenty-first annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.
This year’s judge was Ladette Randolph, Ploughshares’ Editor-in-chief. In choosing the book, Randolph said: “Sneed’s Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry is a sophisticated collection. Linked by a common theme of male-female relationships—often sexual, always unbalanced—the stories are mature, beautiful, and devastating testaments to the ways we betray ourselves and each other. No word is out of place, no detail unnecessary. There isn’t a story here that isn’t a gem.”
About Christine Sneed Raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Libertyville, Illinois, Sneed describes herself as a “Midwesterner from birth.” Growing up as an only child, she was left alone a fair amount and ended up treasuring her independence—“but I had a lot of cousins, a lot of friends and neighbors,” she says, “so I wasn’t an only child outcast or anything like that.”
Her relationship with words began early: there were always books in the house, she says, and “a lot of respect in my household for literature.” Although she filled a few childhood journals with love poems and entries about unrequited crushes, she didn’t begin writing seriously until a time-rich year spent studying abroad in Strasbourg during college. “I realized that I could become a writer if I actually sat down and wrote frequently,” she says. “I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission—I could just do it.”
Sneed majored in French and International Business at Georgetown. When asked what she planned to do, she laughs: “I just thought I could get a job—some glamorous job working in a high-rise and wearing nice suits and speaking French, making money, and it didn’t happen.”
After graduation, she worked for a few years for a company selling highway safety products, and then went on to get an MFA in poetry at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Post-MFA, Sneed moved to Chicago to work at the Art Institute and began to focus on stories rather than poetry. She still writes the occasional poem, she says, and credits poetry with developing both her attention to language and her sense of writerly playfulness, a quality that she eventually learned could be captured in stories as well.
Over the next several years, Sneed endured streams of rejections and celebrated the occasional success. One of her breakthroughs, the inclusion of “Quality of Life” in Best American Short Stories 2008, happened only after the story had been rejected by twenty different journals, before finally being accepted by the New England Review.
After several years working at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sneed began teaching at DePaul, where she still works. On a whim, she bundled together some of her published stories with others that seemed to work well with them, and sent the collection to a contest. Allan Gurganus awarded it the Grace Paley Prize. “By turns funny and pitiless,” he wrote, “these tales amount to a vision.”
Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry has several elements that lend the collection coherence. All of the stories have an unmarried woman at their center, either single or divorced, and many of them
focus on an imbalance in a relationship, often a romantic one—between partners who are rich and poor, young and old, famous and ordinary. With bursts of humor and sometimes great sadness, the stories explore whether the imbalance might be overcome—as in “Twelve + Twelve” or “By the Way”—or if it is more likely to become a poisonous element in the relationship, as in “Quality of Life” or “You’re So Different.”
Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry ends with “Walled City,” a story that Sneed says has confused some readers. It is a futuristic parable about a city where more and more laws are passed to keep people safe, including banning all conversation. “I really like satire,” Sneed says. “It’s my natural mode, in a way.” Even with the apparent shift in tone, “Walled City” shares a theme with many of the stories in the collection: the human desire to rebel against its own excessive prudence (especially when sex is involved), the question of why, as Sneed says, “people are so willing to do things that they know are bad for them.”
A novel called O Husbands! is another fruit of this penchant for satire. The book, which Sneed says has proved too weird and possibly too feminist for most editors, tells the story of a female behaviorist who marries three different men. It is an examination of the mores of a society that manages—in the words of Laura Kipnis, one of Sneed’s favorite authors—to be “simultaneously hypersexual and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions.”
After writing two stories about Hollywood characters in Portraits—as well as a later story, “The Prettiest Girls,” published in the Winter 2010-11 issue of Ploughshares—Sneed recently completed a novel in stories, Little Known Facts, about an aging actor (a Harrison Ford type, she says, although not based on him) and his relationships with his grown children. As with some of her earlier work, Sneed tries to explore the problems beneath the surface of an apparently enviable existence, and turn these potentially monumental celebrity characters into real people. “I think we have the license to write about whatever we want,” she says, “if we can try to do it authentically.”
Little Known Facts will be published by Bloomsbury in Spring 2013. In the meantime, Sneed is full of ideas for more stories and another novel. “I like to know everything I can about people,” she says. “So instead of bothering strangers and my friends for private information, I can make all this stuff up. It’s really fun.”
Emerging Writer’s Contest Since 1971, Ploughshares has been committed to promoting the work of up-and-coming writers. In the spirit of the magazine’s founding mission, the Emerging Writer’s
Contest honors work by authors who are just beginning to publish and have yet to receive widespread recognition. Next year, we will be presenting Emerging Writer awards for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
This year’s winner, for fiction, is Thomas Lee for “The Gospel of Blackbird” (see page 123). Ploughshares co-founder and contest judge DeWitt Henry writes that the story contains “absolutely sophisticated narration in all regards, with genuine characters, plot, stylistic eloquence, and thematic focus. It has the thickness of a novel. It is also persuasively knowing about both the world of Korean Americans and medicine.”
About Thomas Lee Born in South Korea, Lee arrived in America when he was just three years old. After a short time in Queens, he spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Bergen County, New Jersey, in a small and somewhat isolated Korean American community, revolving largely around “one church and one store,” he says.
After college at Columbia, Lee went to Yale Law School, and worked at a firm in New York before moving five years ago to Northern California, where he continues to practice. Although Lee has been writing his entire life, he says that it is only in recent years that he has started to view it as more than a hobby, going to workshops at local universities and making time every day to write. Some of his literary heroes include James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly Flannery O’Connor—“not stylistically,” he says of O’Connor, “but the theme of divine revelation coming into ordinary lives…that’s something I try to capture in my writing.”
The first draft of “The Gospel of Blackbird” was written about three years ago and began with the line about the shampoo—about how you can cheat on your regular shampoo to make it work better. Years earlier, Lee had seen a Neutrogena commercial on the subject, and hadn’t understood what it was talking about (his girlfriend at the time explained it to him). The idea of shampoo infidelity came together in Lee’s mind with the details of a friend’s romantic troubles, as well as Lee’s own Korean Christian upbringing, and the story began to take shape.
In “The Gospel of Blackbird,” as well as some of his other stories, Lee says, he is exploring the idea that Korean Americans are in many ways a “self-secluded community.” Lee says that many Korean Americans have attempted to separate themselves from mainstream society “in a way that’s very self-conscious and very deliberate,” and not necessarily in response to hostility or discrimination. Korean nationalism, fostered by centuries of having to resist invaders, as well as the unique Korean vision of Christianity, both strike Lee as playing a role in the community’s sense of identity.
In the face of such apparent cohesiveness, Lee is naturally intrigued by people, such as Nancy and John in “The Gospel of Blackbird,” who try in both large and small ways to escape the expectations of the culture. “In a world of so many influences,” Lee points out, “you’re not going to find that you can completely seclude [yourself from] mainstream society,” and some of the children are obviously going to “want to break out of that mold.”
When asked how his family might react to this story, Lee laughs. “I wonder about this one,” he says. “There are themes which I think people will view as very critical of Korean culture, and of Christianity too…but criticism doesn’t necessarily mean you’re condemning the culture, you’re just pointing out issues…All I’m doing is looking at
certain individuals from a perspective that I’m familiar with, and saying that this is how they would view Korean culture and the environment they were raised in. And trying to turn that into a story that I hope a lot of readers can relate to.”
PEN Emerging Writers Award David Stuart Maclean, whose essay about losing his memory in India, “The Answer to the Riddle Is Me,” was included in the Winter 2009-10 issue edited by Tony Hoagland, has won a PEN Emerging Writers Award. He was nominated for the prize by Ploughshares editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph.