Jessica Treadway, Zacharis Award

Zacharis Award 
Ploughshares and Emerson College are proud to announce that Jessica Treadway has been named the 1993 recipient of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her short story collection,
Absent Without Leave and Other Stories. The annual $1,500 award -- which is sponsored by Emerson College and named after its former president, John C. Zacharis -- honors the best debut book of short fiction or poetry published by a
Ploughshares writer.

Treadway was born in 1961 in Albany, New York. She studied English literature and journalism at the State University of New York at Albany, and upon graduation, worked as a news and feature reporter for United Press International in Rochester. In 1984, after she published her first short story in
The Hudson Review, she decided to concentrate on her fiction writing and moved to Boston. Subsequently, her short stories appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and
The Agni Review. To support her writing endeavors during these years, she took part-time jobs as a baby-sitter, waitress, bookseller, legal secretary, and teacher.

Treadway credits her five-year participation in a writers' group led by Andre Dubus for her growth as a writer, but she says what has also sustained her is an absolute certainty that fiction writing is her calling, that it is a passion she cannot relinquish. She wrote her first story when she was four years old, and she can still recite it in its entirety: "Johnny likes to climb trees. He fell out of a tree and broke his leg. He ran into the house to tell his mother. His mother put a Band-Aid on his leg. The end." She remembers showing the story to her mother, who was encouraging, but asked, very seriously, "Honey, do you think if he broke his leg, he could run into the house?" Treadway recounts, "I'll never forget that moment of realizing that this wasn't going to be as easy as just saying that something happened. It was my first confrontation with plot."

In 1993, Treadway's collection,
Absent Without Leave and Other Stories, was published by Delphinium Books/Simon & Schuster to enthusiastic praise: "A deft debut," said
Kirkus Reviews. "This powerful, unforgettable collection of ten short stories will mesmerize the reader . . . highly recommended," wrote
Library Journal. "Treadway's stories reveal a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth," noted
The New York Times Book Review. And it's clear that the book found an audience as well: the entire printing sold out in less than six months (publishers interested in paperback rights should contact Delphinium Books at 212-362-1104).

The stories in
Absent Without Leave are emotionally raw, unflinching in their honesty and generous in their depth. Many of the characters in the book succumb to their weaknesses-frequently to alcoholism-in the absence of consolation, and Treadway is able to render the tragic and cruel things people do to each other with authority and compassion. Perhaps the final story in the collection, "Something Falls," which was originally published in the Fall 1992 issue of
Ploughshares, edited by Tobias Wolff, best exemplifies Treadway's prodigious skills as a writer. A law student reports she has been raped, but it is slowly revealed that the actual assault occurred many years before, that she had been abused by her father. Surprisingly, Treadway tells the story through the father's point of view, and it becomes impossible, as much as one resists, not to feel some empathy for him. Treadway does not ask her readers to forgive the father, but we begin to understand him. Throughout
Absent Without Leave, Treadway compels us to look at all of her characters in the same light-allowing for the common, fatal flaw of being human.  

Treadway, who currently teaches creative writing at Emerson College and is a Fiction Fellow at Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute, is at work on a novel,
Shirley Wants Her Nickel Back. The novel expands on another story in her collection, "And Give You Peace," which was based on an incident in her hometown: a man shot his teenaged daughter to death, then killed himself, leaving his wife and two other daughters to wonder why. Treadway, who knew the three popular sisters, was shocked by the murder-suicide, and has always wondered how anyone could survive such a tragedy. She is about halfway through the novel.

The Zacharis First Book Award was inaugurated in 1991, when David Wong Louie was the winner for his short story collection,
The Pangs of Love. Last year, Allison Joseph was honored for her poetry collection,
What Keeps Us Here. The award is nominated by the Advisory Editors of
Ploughshares, with Executive Director DeWitt Henry acting as the final judge. There is no application process.