We are pleased and honored to announce the winners for the 2013 Gwen Frostic
Creative Writing Awards. Below you’ll find the results for each genre, as well
as comments from our judges. Please join us in congratulating the winners for
their excellent work and their success.
Fiction
Judge: Chicago born Peter Orner’s
novel Love and Shame and Love is now out in paperback. His first book Esther
Stories will be re-issued this spring. His most recent book, a new
collection of stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge will be
published in August, 2014. His
work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly,
The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and Best
American Stories. Orner has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Rome Prize
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a
Lannan Literary Fellowship. Orner has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’
Workshop, University of Montana, the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson
College, Washington University, Bard, Miami University, Charles University in
Prague. Orner is a long time permanent faculty member at San Francisco State
where he is a professor.
Undergraduate
Winner:
“Riding Parallels” by Tyler Smith
“An imaginative story that I found quite moving. Nice to be floating up
there. It’s the sort of story that you wish happened to you, and there aren’t
too many of these I come across. That woman in the green balloon. Wistful,
heartfelt, concise storytelling here, a writer with a joyful way of seeing the
world and its possibilities.”
Honorable
Mention:“Dead Puppy” by Nick Mears
“Good characterizations, and I could really see the setting, Northwood in
the snow. Strong descriptions throughout, such as‘Tentative gray light reached
through the industrial glass...’”
Graduate
Winner: “Lysol
Fights” by Dustin M. Hoffman
“‘Lysol Fights’ has got this wonderful narrative energy from that first
visceral punch of a sentence, ‘I hide under Tack’s bed.’ The story itself is
very seeable, spellcheck is alerting me this isn’t a word, but you know what I
mean (apparently spellcheck isn’t a word either), I can see this stuff
happening in my eye. It’s a great skill to make this happen, and, to my mind,
you can’t teach it. Whoever wrote‘Lysol Fights’ is a natural. The ending is
especially vivid. I’ve gotten to know April, Hector and Tack, and was sorry to
leave them on that concrete slab above the frozen river.”
Honorable
Mention:“Story” by Andrew Wickenden
“I’m especially appreciative of how the author uses time. Such a compressed
piece, and yet it takes you through a lot of years and life—sad, impressive
piece.”
Honorable
Mention:“If This Is Really Us at Our Best” by Rachel Kincaid
“‘If This Really Us at Our Best’really captures work, all those monotonous
hours, all those intense friendships. I’ve been there, and this piece has too,
hard to get on paper the truths, and the highs and lows, of the service
industry, well done. ‘Rob, Lorraine’s boyfriend, always orders an
Americano....’”
Gordon
Prize in Fiction
Undergraduate
(There was a
tie at the undergraduate level, so two winners.)
Winner: “Your
Love Speaks in Unspoken Terms” by Shaina King
Winner: “Dead
Puppy”by Nick Mears
Graduate
Winner: “One
of Many Off-Seasons” by Laurie Ann Cedilnik
Honorable
Mention:“Lysol Fights” by Dustin M. Hoffman
Poetry
Judge: Lisa Fishman is the author of five books of poetry (two are in press)
and four chapbooks. Her newest collections are
Current (Parlor
Press, November 2010) and
F L O W E R C A R T (Ahsahta,
May 2011). Her most recent chapbook is
at the same time as
scattering (Albion Books, Fall 2010). Fishman’s earlier books are
The Happiness
Experiment (Ahsahta, 2007);
Dear, Read
(Ahsahta, 2002); and
The Deep Heart’s Core
Is a Suitcase(New Issues Press, 1996). Her chapbooks are
Lining (Boxwood
Editions, 2009),
KabbaLoom
(Wyrd Press, 2007), and
“The Holy Spirit does
not deal in synonimes: a Transcription of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Marginalia in Her Greek and Hebrew Bibles” (Parcel Press, 2008). Fishman’s
poems are published in such magazines as
1913,
Colorado Review,
Conduit,
Volt,
A Public Space,
Free Verse,
Parthenon West Review
and elsewhere.
Undergraduate
Winner:“My Midwest Sequoia” by Alison Glismann
“I hear a fresh, distinctive voice immediately in this poem. What makes it
distinctive (indeed, what makes it‘voice’) is the unadorned believability of
someone just talking in the poem—but really there, present and candid.
Perception is articulated just as it is, via memory in this poem, but borne
first of observation: ‘the tree with a cut out trunk,’ ‘Janine and her sad
mother from Vienna,’ and the wonderful, yet brilliantly spare, richness of the
details of the latter (‘defiant in her crocheted bikini, unraveling, reading
Kafka’). The poem also has a freedom of movement so that there are moments of
turning and changing that feel unpredicted and unknowing (i.e., no ‘end’ or
point in mind, just what happens, what’s seen, what is).”
Honorable
Mention:“Bang!” by Andrew Conklin
“This poem begins with such power and brilliance—‘The trace of the path of
the small object / Is a sound as minimal and loud as’—and contains such truly
interesting and arresting language as, ‘[ . . .] like minor felonies / On an
otherwise beautifully trusted / Application writ in the wrong language / As
though it were sometime another place [. . . ].’ Dazzling and utterly
natural-feeling, generated by the author’s willingness to use language not just
for communication but more mysteriously and magically, for making: the making
of the sensation of being alive in the world—a real, observed world and
surroundings, however glimpsed. What gives this poem its power needs only to
keep going beyond where the writer may feel safer in stopping, at present, and
so: keep on.”
Graduate
Winner:“[Empathy cannot be learned]” by Andrea England
“This poem, in its way of moving and way of making, does what may be art’s
only purpose, a secret one: to create the conditions of freedom, and to do so
just by enacting them. This poem is an action, one that happens without the
writer having designs on the medium, the material, or the reader. It allows for
interruption, improvisation, exclamation, and change—what could be more alive,
and more true to how perception, memory, and being alive actually
work/happen/are? The poem has humor that is rooted, not glib or ironic [so
happy not to see glibness in any of the WMU poems!], and it allows itself, and
its readers, to be surprised, to be in surprise.”
Honorable Mention:“Landscape”
by Korey Hurni
“This is a uniquely vivid and haunting poem. The emotional life it creates
is admirably restrained and subtle, allowed to come from facts and the details,
which themselves are gorgeously observed with precision and accuracy that are
rare.”
Playwriting
Judge: Sean Clark is an award-winning playwright whose screenwriting career
includes the television series:
Early Edition,
Sliders,
Sirens,
Man of the People,
Evening Shade,
Northern Exposure,
Coach and
several series pilots, as well as the plays:
Eleven-Zulu,
Dog Explosion,
and
The Angeles
Crest. He wrote the script for the feature film,
Lenin and Us,
which was released in Europe in 2009. He has worked as a sportswriter, high
school teacher, and a soldier. He is currently the Head of the Writing for
Dramatic Media Graduate Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Undergraduate
Winner: “Sea of Trees”
by Amber Tselios
“Uses traditional bunraku puppetry to drive home the enormity of the tragedy
of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and makes us feel the emotional cost
perhaps more powerfully than a ‘realistic’piece could have. Dialogue, narration
and imagery achieve theatrical poetry.”
Honorable
Mention: “The 3M Diet” by Taylor Rinkel
“Eases us into a late night conversation between two college roommates in
which some slightly unusual behavior is dealt with in such a casual manner that
we feel the real weight of that which is unspoken.”
Graduate
Winner: “Joy
of the Worm” by
Brandon Krieg
“Rich with metaphor, it’s an exercise in rhythm and timing. Playful use of
language in satirizing more than one social convention. An obvious writer’s
voice.”
Honorable
Mention: “Sassypants”by Elissa Cahn
“An examination of how we look at ourselves, especially at one of the most
vulnerable times in our lives, as teens, and how easy it is to forget that
vulnerability.”
Creative
Nonfiction
Judge:
Robin Hemley is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship
for his work on
DO-OVER!. He has published seven books, and his stories
and essays have appeared in the
New York Times,
New York Magazine,
Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies. He is
the editor of
Defunct
magazine. Robin received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’
Workshop; he currently directs the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University
of Iowa and lives in Iowa City, IA.
Undergraduate
Winner: “Stag
Family” by Joel Newsome
“What finally decided it for me was ‘Stag Family’s’ language, simultaneously
blunt and evocative. Images such as this announce from the beginning this is
not going to be an easy ride: ‘The virus has made him skinny, his knuckles
bulge over the jar like wooden balls sliding on an abacus, ticking off the time
he has left.’”
Honorable
Mention: “Ending” by Miles Baxter
“In second place, ‘Ending’ toggles nicely between irreverence, fear, and
awkwardness surrounding the death of an old man and the father/son team who go
in the middle of the night to pick up the body. The narrator is observant and
mature, despite the patina of bravado with which he tells of this event. One of
my favorite parts is the his assessment of Larry’s life, told backwards from
old to young man, by a procession of family photos lining the walls of the
staircase on the narrator’s way to the bedroom where the old man lies. He
writes: ‘Every step had brought me a little closer to Larry’s beginning, and
Larry’s end.’”
Graduate
Winner: “I Am
the Pulverizer” by Brandon Davis Jennings
“‘I Am the Pulverizer’ stayed with me because of its complexity and depth of
emotion. There’s a raw and sometimes disturbing quality to the piece, mixed
with a sense of whimsy to which I respond well. It tracks and chronicles the
narrator’s feelings of rage and impotence back to their source in a pretty
powerful way.
Honorable
Mention:“Dusk or Rain or Echo or Lennon” by Laurie Ann Cedilnik
“Powerful and whimsical was the piece about the woman whose parents each had
lovers, and how no one could acknowledge the dysfunction of the family. This
was dysfunction with a cherry on top.”
Honorable
Mention: “Oklahoma City” by Glenn Shaheen
“‘Oklahoma City’ traces in a complex and haunting
way a persistent racist idiocy in America. It’s a lovely and depressing piece
about racism directed against the narrator, as seen through the prism of the
Oklahoma City bombing.”
