2019 Award Winner Interviews
Short Works Award for Fiction
All Welcome
Laura Levinson
Is putting a word limit on your piece constricting or helpful to your writing process?
When I start writing I don’t think about word count. I just write. Then I go back and edit and re-edit. I get feedback and edit some more. I’ve never had a piece that was better before I cut it.
Where do you find inspiration for your writing?
I’ve been a psychotherapist for more than 40 years so I’m saturated with stories. My life is rich with the intimate details of people’s lives. I often have the privilege of being trusted with my clients’ rawest emotions, but the truth is that a lot of conversations are about the nuts and bolts of daily life: favorite recipes, what’s cheaper at Hannaford vs Shaw’s, what embarrassing things weren’t told to the doctor, what happened when the lawn mower wouldn’t start, why the dishes did or didn’t get washed, and—maybe most central—the intricate mechanics of getting by with no money.
It’s a given that I never write about a particular client, but once I begin writing all the people inside me start telling me what the world looks like through their eyes. Everyone makes sense if you really listen.
Who is your first reader when you finish a piece?
My first reader is invariably my friend Shirley Glubka. Besides being an accomplished writer with two novels and six books of poetry to her name, she’s also a retired psychotherapist with a philosophical bent that matches mine. We can talk about anything. She’s been cheerleader, editor, supporter, sounding board and sharer of long conversations. Plus she has a sense of humor. What more could I ask?
Short Works Award for Poetry
Selected Poems
Jeri Theriault
Where do you find inspiration to write your poetry?
Family stories—my grandmother’s clever hands, my grandfather’s discarded name—have always inspired me. Myths, both ancient and modern, are great source material. Ariadne and Aphrodite, Demeter and Daphne speak in my poems. Mrs. Robinson and Barbie have also made appearances. I am currently working on a poem inspired by Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.
Visual art inspires. I have written quite a few ekphrases—poems that respond to artistic works. An example is “inukshuk,” a poem written in response to Celeste Roberge’s “Rising Cairn” for the 2018 ArtWord program sponsored by MWPA and the Portland Museum of Art.
I am drawn to the way the sounds and meanings of words clash or coalesce. For example, the word mother holds moth and other. It might also be written as mo[u]ther or [s]mother. Isn’t that the start of something interesting?
Where do you feel most comfortable in the world?
I came late to travel, but loved it. I taught and lived in Prague for seven years—first at a local Gymnasium and then at the International School of Prague. I spent some weeks in Paris, two weeks at the Writers’ Center in Dublin and lots of time in London. There were shorter stints in Istanbul and Cairo, Athens, Kiev and Bratislava. So, while I’d say I’m most comfortable in Maine, preferably near the coast, I still feel at home in Prague and central Europe. I have a fondness for European trains and airports. Oh, but I’m also “at home” in the Maritimes of Canada where I’m writing these responses. Phil Carlsen and I have a cottage on PEI. I love everything about the island.
What role does format play in your writing process?
Since I became a visual artist about twelve years ago, I’d say the white space on the page has become more important. I began more experimentation with formatting after Radost, my red was released (Moon Pie Press, 2016). My current manuscript (tentatively titled [sw]allowing) offers a wide variety of formats, from word-dense true narratives (such as “free-write”) to sparse more lyric sketches (“charm for a DuLac daughter”).
Since I want to emphasize or foreground multiple meanings, I am increasingly drawn to erasures and cross-outs, parenthesizing and blurring. So, for example “the girl with almost useless hands” ends:
I married
young [g]owned
[g]reedy & p[r]ettily
[g]loved.
Excellence in Publishing
Isako Isako
Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Alice James Books
How do you get inspired to write?
My writing rhythms vary, depending on the time of year. By choice, I’m home full-time with my kids during the summer months, which means that I’m not writing unless I absolutely have to; that is to say, unless an experience comes along that’s freighted with enough emotional complexity that I can’t move beyond it without thinking it all the way through, as Jorie Graham says. I’ve learned to recognize these moments–living poems, in themselves–because they’re engaged in conversation with me, of course, but also with history, with culture, with tradition and the ancestors, as well as with deeper questions around death and life and culture and beauty. I brought my daughters to an Obon festival recently, for instance, and watching them sit, riveted by the taiko drums, I just knew I had to write a poem. When I feel history reverberating through my body and the bodies of those who are closest to me, I know it’s time to sit down and write
What is the story behind the title, Isako Isako?
The phrase “Isako Isako” comes from a poem that appears toward the end of the book, as Isako is dying. In this poem, the speaker addresses Isako directly in a lament that opens with anaphora of her name, repeated twice. I was raised with the rhythms of Biblical text, both spoken and sung, in liturgy, which I think makes itself felt in my poetry, or even in the fact of my being a poet in the first place, someone who holds an almost sacred regard for incantatory texts that gesture toward unspoken realities. In this case, there’s something about a person’s name spoken twice that feels urgent, plaintive, and tender in a way that seemed right for this poem–and ultimately, for the title of the book. So much of the book is elegy, and so, tonally, the phrase Isako Isako felt appropriate. As for the word itself, it’s an amalgamation, like the character Isako herself; the letters I-S-A-K and O appear in the names of both of my grandmothers, to whom Isako Isako is dedicated, and Isako herself is an invention, a trick of generational memory–a mythological, matrilineal figure who stands in for the generations of collective female experience in my family.
Are there any other poems or literature that inspire you?
I’m currently working on a collection of lyric prose that explores childbirth, pregnancy, and the nature of dailiness in early mothering–or in living, more generally speaking. In my reading, I’ve found so many lovely accounts of dailiness and/or of parenting, all in forms that accumulate–or spiral, meander, or explode, which is what Jane Alison talks about in her fabulous book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, and what Kate Zambreno and Sarah Manguso examine in this amazing Paris Review interview on “Writing Postpartum: A Conversation between Kate Zambreno and Sarah Manguso.” Of course, this kind of genre-defying, miscellany prose has precedent in ancient Japanese forms like the zuihitsu, the pillow book, the travel diary, and even Kenko’s fourteenth century tsurezuregusa or Essays in Idleness, which are their own kind of wandering, accretionary prose form. Here are just a few of the books I’ve loved this year, in no particular order:
The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi
MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems by Jennifer S. Cheng
Loves You: Poems by Sarah Gambito
Home/Birth: A Poemic by Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso
Little Labors by Rivka Galchen
Days & Days: Poems by Michael Dickman
And of course, there are so many more, but this is what’s fed my writing recently… and it’s an ever-expanding diet, which is always the best part.
Book Award for Poetry
Midden Julia Bouwsma
How do you know when a poem is finished?
The work of writing poems is, in large part, the work of following one’s obsessions. And the thing about obsessions is that they never really let you go. Even when you think you’ve written them to completion, they come back later, often in slightly different forms. I frequently experience a little burst of accomplishment when I write the first draft of a poem, but I’ve learned not to trust this sensation and not to mistake it for closure. I know that later I’ll return to the poem and want more from it. So I tend to write in stages, letting the poem rest between drafts and revisions. Eventually I get to point where I don’t know what else I can do with a poem and I start to think of it as finished. But it’s never really an absolute. If an outside set of eyes can make me feel differently about a poem, I’m willing to open it back up again. And it varies from poem to poem too—some come to their final forms much more quickly than others. Ultimately, I never fully know where I stand with a poem until it’s printed in a book and there’s no going back.
How do you get into the mindset of writing like a different character?
You know, this is one of the big questions I had when I started writing Midden. My experience has been very intuitive, so it’s rather hard to describe, but there is a kind of sweet spot, a mental space where I start listening and hearing in a different kind of way. It happens when I’ve finally managed to push aside my own ego and my own insecurity, to empty my mind enough that I’m no longer forcing the voices I’m trying to write into and instead they start to come to me on their own. In the beginning, my persona poems were all terrible because I was trying too hard, trying to force it, and I would get in my own way. But after a lot of writing and a lot of research, the momentum of the project took hold and it got easier. Some of the earliest successful person poems in this book came to me in dreams; I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a voice and some lines in my head and just start writing. Surrounding myself with images and photographs as I worked also helped me move out of my own head and helped me focus on writing into the voices of specific individuals. And the weirdness of this whole process ended up becoming fodder for poems as well—the “dear ghost” poems, in particular, spend a lot of time contemplating this.
What made you choose to focus on the past of Malaga Island and the people that once lived there?
I think this goes back to the idea of obsession. As poets, sometimes it feels like our obsessions choose us rather than us choosing them. I first encountered the history of Malaga Island and its people in bits and fragments: a story my father-in-law told me about meeting a descendant in a bookstore in Hallowell; a ten-minute MPBN documentary I happened to flip across one late night; a photocopied and now tattered collection of 1900’s news articles given to me by a librarian at the local elementary school; a series of blurry black and white photographs that immediately transfixed me. Each one of these encounters left a shard under my skin— a kind of haunting—until I knew I needed to try to write into the silence surrounding this atrocity. As I did more research, I discovered how broken the Malaga archive is. Each time I thought I knew the whole story, I’d come across another inconsistency: a date or name or spelling that didn’t add up, a contradictory story, a new person I couldn’t account for, a family who seemed to have disappeared from the documents without a trace, some sentence I recalled reading but couldn’t locate when I went back to confirm it. This fragmentation—this sense of the ground shifting beneath my feet—lent itself naturally to poetry. It also reminded me of some of the patterns of silence and erasure in my own family history as someone of Jewish ancestry. And the more I worked on the book, the more I realized that the history of Malaga and its people remains urgently relevant. Because clearly we have not moved beyond either the virulent and systemic racism or the silence and complicity that allowed this atrocity to take place. So I believe Malaga is a story that needs to be told and told and told—in as many ways as possible, as often as we can.
Short Works Award for Nonfiction
“What a Bullet Can Do” Sue Repko
How did you begin to tackle such a raw and personal subject?
I first started to jot down what little I knew about my father’s unintentional shooting of a neighbor at least 20 years ago. One day I drove to my hometown library – I was living in New Jersey at the time – and looked up the news articles in the local paper on microform. I didn’t even know the exact date when it happened; it was a deeply-buried experience. I was writing fiction then, and after fumbling to write it as nonfiction, I realized I could only approach it as fiction at that time. I was so unawake psychologically that I just couldn’t get anything going, didn’t know where to begin. I got feedback on the short story at a couple of writers’ conferences and sent it out to some journals, but then stopped sending it out when it didn’t get picked up. I was still really fearful of it being in print. I continue to reckon with the implicit vow of silence I must have taken at some point. I felt so much shame and sorrow around what had happened, and I wasn’t even comfortable with it disguised as fiction. In that story, a father/gunsmith thinks he’s responsible for the death of a customer when a gun goes off unexpectedly, but the daughter and her boyfriend are actually at fault for leaving the weapon loaded. Yes, I was making the daughter character responsible and, ultimately, rescuing the father.
Your short piece talked not only about your personal story, but many other novels and pieces surrounding the same topic. How did the research process begin for this piece?
I’m not sure I can pinpoint the beginning of a research process, per se. The first time I saw a connection between the shooting of our neighbor and a work of literature – The YA novel The Rifle by Gary Paulsen – was when I came across it on a summer reading list for one of my children. The description of an unintentional shooting of a neighbor slayed me. Several years later, when I was ready to try to tell my own story as nonfiction, someone told me about the poet Gregory Orr’s memoir The Blessing, which is about his own unintentional shooting of his brother when they were hunting with their father as kids. I think it was right around the time I was applying to the MFA program at Bennington, which would have been in 2009. When I saw how Orr had made art out of his pain, I remembered The Rifle and wondered what other stories might be out there that confronted this particular type of gun violence. I began to be on the lookout for literature that would give me new angles into understanding what had happened, so this process was more about joining with characters and people who experience(d) something similar – one reason why we all read, I suppose, and why stories are essential. This accumulation of the texts went on over a period of years, and then I first drafted the piece in an online class with Michele Filgate in the spring of 2017.
Where do you feel most comfortable writing?
Lately, I’ve been a restless writer! I have a home office, but it needs a major de-cluttering, which I’ve been avoiding, so I feel too hemmed in by all the other stuff in the room – teaching materials, student essays, bills to pay, boxes of research material for the memoir I’m working on about the shooting. Sometimes I like to go to Lil’s Café in Kittery; I come from a large family, and I like being in the midst of the chaos and then go into my own place in my head. When I need quiet, I work in a small, more formal living room in our house – the kind of spot that’s only for “company.” There’s no clutter or chaos, and I get to see the apple trees bearing fruit or fawns romping on the lawn.
Short Works Award for Drama
Crash: A Collection (D3)
Kristin J. Leonard
What is the biggest difference between writing a novel and writing a script?
For me, it’s the emphasis on dialogue. In a play, a character must reveal who he/she is primarily through their words, so authentic dialogue is critical. I like to find the perfect “voice” for each of my characters (besides establishing their wants/needs). Does my character say “please” and “thank you” or do they use a lot of profanities, or simply say “Okay”? I like to listen to people around me: how they speak, what they say, and what they don’t say. This is also important in my novel, but here I rely on other tools – description, exposition, backstory, etc. I find it easier to write a rough draft of a script, which (for me) consists of lines of dialogue. When I’m working in prose (and in my novel) I get carried away with descriptions, so I have to do a lot of pruning in later drafts.
What advice can you give about working with the format of a script, as opposed to a novel or short piece?
I think writing a script is similar to writing a novel or a short piece. After all, at least one character must make an inner journey from point A to point B, or what is the purpose? A change has to occur for the main character, even if the change is negative, or a failed attempt. In novel terms, it’s “character driven.” Because dialogue is the primary tool, I find it helpful to listen to the script aloud, at every part of the process, using actors or readers. I tend to get carried away in the writing process, in the whole back-and-forth, action/reaction dialogue, so hearing the words aloud really helps me. When I get too “off,” I go back to basics and ask myself “What does my character want/need in this scene?” or “Why am I showing the audience this moment in time?” This is also really important in prose (novel or a short piece). If I can answer these questions, I’m off to a good start.
Your website says you can be found on your computer searching for the right word. Do you have any favorite words, either to use or to say?
I probably should have been more specific. I do search for the right word, but often I search for the right combination of words, punctuation, tense, syntax – everything! Right now, I’m on a verb kick. When I find a really juicy one – for example “push” – I slide it in everywhere: the water pushed through the rocks; she pushes her way to the front, pushing past the clouds. That kind of thing. In my first drafts I try not to worry about it too much. Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones, has a lot to say about the power of “first thoughts.” I try to follow this and let the words flow. I use my editing brain later, in my second and third and fourth drafts.
Book Award for Non-Fiction
Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro
Rachel Slade
(Ecco/Harpercollins)
In your book, Into the Raging Sea, there are parts written in a format similar to a play script, including a cast of characters and a dialogue. What made you choose that particular format?
The greatest challenge when writing about a fatal tragedy is the fact that the dead can’t tell their tale. Yet in a way, the lost mariners on El Faro could. In 2016, the ship’s black box was recovered from the ocean floor and it had recorded an astounding 26 hours of conversations on the bridge of the ship leading up to the very final moments before she sank. As a writer, the transcript of this recording was invaluable. It allowed me to use the actual words of those lost — the captain, officers, and helmsmen — to tell the El Faro story as factually as possible while revealing their underlying hopes, fears, and decision-making during those fateful days. The transcript ensured not only that the narrative was accurate, but also that the characters could take on more three-dimensional qualities through all the inflections, asides, observations, and hesitations captured on the recording. If at times the book reads like a script, it is because this transcript was indeed the closest that I, as a journalist, could get to the men and women who died aboard El Faro. It was the backbone of the work.
What other nonfiction novels have inspired you to write?
When it comes to writing, I don’t make clear distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. Both depend on the quality of the prose and strength of the structure for successful storytelling; the two have always closely informed each other. Therefore, my biggest inspiration wasn’t a work of nonfiction, but rather, a classic sea story, Moby-Dick. I have always been an avid reader — I’ll read anything, including the back of the shampoo bottle — so countless other books and magazine stories have also inspired me to write in general. But a few books that shaped this particular work include Typhoon by Joseph Conrad; Looking for a Ship by John McPhee; Death Ship by B. Traven; and Samuel Eliot Morrison’s The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860.
What was the biggest lesson you learned about writing a book while working on Into the Raging Sea?
I was never an outline person (I pretty much failed seventh grade “study skills” class), but when it came to writing this book, the outline became my talisman. I learned that yes, you can mess with the structure later, you can shuffle the deck after everything’s done, but the outline keeps you disciplined. Because I had it, I never had to worry about what I was going to do next — the kind of crushing anxiety that can break a writer’s flow. I also discovered, quite happily, that magazine writing is great training ground for book writing because most articles are about chapter length. Thinking about those bite-sized chunks made the whole project feel doable: I just had to write a few dozen magazine pieces. That was a task I could handle.
Book Award for Speculative Fiction
THE SCRIMSHAW WORM
Daniel Dunkle
Where do you start when working on a new idea?
After something triggers an idea for a story or book, I work it over in my mind for a while. A lot of my best work is done while mowing the lawn, or riding in the car. With this book, “The Scrimshaw Worm,” the genesis was watching a documentary on whaling, and after I had worked out some of the aspects of the story I wanted to tell set on a whaling ship in 1851, I had to do a lot of research. My family helped a great deal. My mother-in-law bought me some books on whaling; my wife Christine and the children went with me to the New Bedford Whaling Museum and Mystic Seaport to do research.
Has working as an editor changed the way you write, and if so, how?
I think there is a tremendous benefit to my experience as a newspaper reporter in that for the past 20 years, I have written for an audience and people give me feedback, good and bad, on my stories. I have also had the experience of working with writers, columnists and freelancers, though that has not really helped me navigate the publishing world as much as I would hope. When you are pitching a column or story for the newspaper, you can actually talk to the editor. When you want to publish a book, you have to send a message in a bottle and have little idea how well it was received unless someone writes you more than a form rejection letter.
Who or what is your inspiration to write?
When I was ten, I read “The Horse and His Boy” by C.S. Lewis. It was the first book I lost myself in, though I had enjoyed story time at school and watching movies before that. It was an “aha” moment for me. I thought the book was just about perfect, but had hoped there would be a dragon in it. I then had this thought, “I could write my own story with a dragon in it,” and from that moment on, I was a writer.
John N. Cole Award Winner
Return to Moose River
Earl Brechlin
(Down East Books)
How did you find the right balance of personal narrative and information on the environment in your book?
Sifting through a mountain of stories, memories and background materials to create a subtle arc in each essay, and from the beginning of the book until the end, was the biggest challenge. Because the personal stories that are the hooks upon which each essay hangs its hat are nearly all geographically specific, it was easy to use that as a jumping off place for what environmental, cultural and historic information to include. I knew where I wanted each story to begin and end. The writing challenge then was finding the point at which the narrative turned, and, much like veteran horses at a riding stable, headed back to the barn on its own. You can’t really preplan that; it’s really a process of discovery. It is always a joy when it happens.
What is your earliest memory of writing?
I’m not one of those writers who began at an early age. English and writing always intimidated me. In college I was fortunate enough to have professors who introduced me to the concept of writing as an open-ended process. That was the polar opposite of my misconception that in writing you only had one chance, kind of like a music recital where one chance to walk out on stage, stick to the original score, and hope people applaud when you are done.
Originally, I started out writing what would become “Return to Moose River,” as a novel, using that form as a framework to share outdoor adventure stories and people and places. Just before going on a 36-mile backpacking trip in Baxter I got a detailed rejection letter from an agent who had been less than unimpressed with my early chapters. During that trip I realized that after 35 years as a journalist writing fiction probably was not my strong suit. Sitting in a lean-to at Wassataquoik Stream watching the sunset, it dawned on me narrative non-fiction essays would be the way to go.
What’s your best piece of advice for anyone traveling through the woods?
People traveling through the woods need to look beyond the obvious tableau of rocks, trees, plants, animals, water, scenery etc. They need to open their hearts and spirits to what can’t be seen—the broader concept of embracing an entire landscape, not just physically and in the here and now, but across time. In Maine that landscape also tells the story of people as well. We’ve done a great job of conserving land and water here but the preservation of our cultural heritage and human history, from the Abnaki on down, hasn’t received nearly the support or resources it deserves. In Maine, natural history, and human history are intertwined and inseparable. You really can’t understand one without the other. To fully know the story of these places, you need to comprehend both.
Book Award for Crime Fiction
STOWED AWAY (A Maine Clambake Mystery)
Barbara Ross
(Kensington)
What were your influences when creating the character of Julia Snowden?
Julia Snowden is a classic amateur sleuth, so I have to acknowledge Jane Marple as the mother of us all. Julia is on the younger side, at least in comparison to Jane, so I’m sure there’s a little Nancy Drew in there, too.
When writing an ongoing crime fiction series, how do you make sure the plot continues to be surprising for readers?
The victim, perpetrator, and suspects bring a new world of personalities and issues to each book. As does the circumstances of the murder. That supplies the novelty. The recurring characters and setting are the things readers want to return to. Good series books are a mix of getting caught up on the doings of the familiar and experiencing the new.
Have you ever scared yourself with your writing?
Only the usual writer terrors. “Will I make the deadline?’ “Will there be enough words?” “Will this be the time it doesn’t all come together in the end?” “Will anyone read it?” “Will they enjoy it?”
Book Award for Fiction
THE FUTILITY EXPERTS
Margaret Broucek
(Schaffner Press)
In your novel, The Futility Experts, both of your main characters deal with failure in comical ways. How do you maintain a balance between comedy and tragedy in your work?
It’s not something I’m thinking about, really. I only have a story idea in mind, and I develop characters that I hope I’ll want to spend a lot of time with. Comedy really comes out of tension, not necessarily tragedy. For this novel, I did have one great tragedy in mind, however–a murder that would happen near the end, but as I approached that scene, it became clear that the man who was to do the killing would not pull the trigger. He just didn’t have it in him. So perhaps it’s the characters who determine the balance, in what they are willing to do.
How do you overcome writer’s block when writing a scene or story?
Funny you should ask since I opened the email with these interview questions in it while looking for distractions from revising a scene I’m finding boring. For me, it’s really frustration, not a blockage, that stops me. So now I need to determine the purpose of the scene and how I can serve that purpose in a more interesting way. Usually when this happens, I’ve started the scene at the wrong moment. Sometimes the point for the scene is too small or the scene is just completely gratuitous and I need to toss it.
What’s the last novel you read that made you laugh out loud?
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman and also John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies. Both novels have wonderfully eccentric (read realistic), surprising characters and delicious scenes.
Book Award for Young People’s Literature
THE LIES THEY TELL
Gillian French
(HarperTeen)
The last four novels you have published have all been young adult thrillers. What is the draw of that specific genre, for you?
I love the immediacy and vitality of coming of age stories; I think readers, whether living the teen experience right now or recollecting it, can appreciate the special pulse-pounding intensity that comes with all the “firsts” of that time: first love, first freedom from parental supervision, first break with friends from childhood. Adding the mystery or thriller element to a plot hopefully turns the dial up to eleven in terms of how high the stakes can rise for the protagonist.
Are there any other young adult novels that inspire you?
I recently enjoyed Michael L. Printz Honor Winner Jessie Ann Foley’s SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS (HarperTeen, 2019). She writes about family turmoil and grief with such warmth and humor, something much needed by readers of all ages, but perhaps especially by teen readers, who are most likely encountering their first painful loss of a peer. Her work shows a compassion that I really admire.
Is there anything you do when preparing to write a new piece?
I’m a pantser, who tends to rush into an idea without any hardcore planning or outlining; sometimes I write myself vague notes or dash out a paragraph here and there just to clarify my thoughts, but that’s the extent of it. The real fun for me is character development, forming dialogue, and strengthening my imagery, so bumbling into unexpected territory is all part of the adventure.