Charles Baxter, Cohen Award
Cohen Awards Each volume year, we honor the best poem, short story, and essay published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of $400. The 1995 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares Vol. 20 go to:
Charles Baxter for his essay " Dysfunctional Narratives, Or 'Mistakes Were Made' " in Fall 1994, edited by Rosellen Brown.
Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis in 1947 and grew up in a town west of Minneapolis called Excelsior. (Baxter remarks: "An even smaller town on the outskirts of Excelsior was named Eureka -- exclamatory town names seemed to have been the rule there.") His first job during high school was at Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis, where he once wheeled John Berryman down to the physical therapy unit. He attended the Mound, Minnesota, public schools, received his B.A. from Macalester College, and then taught public school in rural Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and since 1974, he has lived in Ann Arbor with his wife and son, and has taught at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan, and Warren Wilson College.
He is the author of three books of stories, Harmony of the World (1984), Through the Safety Net (1985), and A Relative Stranger (1990); two novels, First Light (1987) and Shadow Play (1993); and a book of poetry, Imaginary Paintings (1990). His stories have appeared in most of the major magazines and have been widely anthologized. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. A companion essay to "Dysfunctional Narratives" called "Fiction and the Inner Life of Objects" recently received The Gettysburg Review award for best essay printed in that journal during 1993.
About "Dysfunctional Narratives," Baxter writes: "The essay began its life as a talk to the students in the M.F.A. program at Warren Wilson College. For some time, I had noticed (or thought I had noticed) that fiction writers in writing programs often refuse to let their characters make mistakes of any kind. They don't mind letting events happen to those characters, but they avoid situations in which characters initiate actions and indulge in interestingly adult bad behavior. I wondered why. Richard Nixon was in the hospital during the time I began to think about the essay, and on a whim, I began to read his memoir, RN. (I took it out of the library; I refused to buy it, and my wife wanted to get it out of the house as quickly as possible.) It was a rich and strange experience, reading that book, and I am the only person I know who has done so, although I don't recommend it. At about the same time, I began to watch Geraldo while I ate lunch. I did this for about two weeks. After I ran across C. K. Williams's phrase about 'dysfunctional narratives,' the pieces of the argument began to fit themselves together, and the essay pretty much wrote itself."