Townsend Prize nominees ponder the writer’s life
The Townsend Prize for Fiction
7 p.m. April 24, Atlanta Botanical Garden. Registration closed. 678-891-3275, www.gpc.edu/townsend.
It may not match the fanfare of the Oscars or the hysteria of March Madness, but for Georgia literati, the race for the Townsend Prize for Fiction ranks as no less a nail-biter.
The biennial award, named for Atlanta magazine founding editor Jim Townsend,
recognizes an outstanding novel or story collection by a Georgia author. Winners over the prize’s 32-year-history have included reader favorites Alice Walker, Terry Kay, Ha Jin and Kathryn Stockett.
“This year’s finalists — their incredible range of subject and style — are so impressive that the competition is fierce,” says Anna Schachner, editor of the Chattahoochee Review, which sponsors the prize along with Georgia Perimeter College and the Georgia Center for the Book. “I would proudly flaunt these finalists to pretty much any other literary award out there.”
As the April 24 award ceremony nears, we asked the shortlisted authors for their insights on the writing life.
Stacia Brown
"Accidents of Providence" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Describe the novel in your own words.
It’s the story of a woman on trial for murder in 17th century London.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this book?
Everything. It was my first book. I learned how to write a novel by writing a novel.
Who is your ideal reader?
Someone who doesn’t check their phone every five minutes while reading.
Amber Dermont
"The Starboard Sea" (St. Martin's Press)
Describe the book in your own words.
Set in 1987, against the drama of the Black Monday stock market crash, “The Starboard Sea” is about surviving the storm of adolescence.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this novel?
It’s a deeply personal novel. It took me years to give myself permission to write the story. I wanted to put everything I know and suspect to be true about the world and the human condition into the book.
What’s the most fun part of being a writer?
The work is the only reward. Writing that sentence fills me with joy. Writing this sentence fills me with dread. The hardest part is carving out the time for the sentences.
Charles McNair
"Pickett's Charge" (Livingston Press)
Describe the book in your own words.
“Pickett’s Charge” tells the highly improbable story of the last Confederate veteran, who leaves a nursing home in south Alabama to head north in the turbulent 1960s and kill the last living Yankee.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this book?
Distractions, distractions, distractions. Email is the enemy. Facebook is to a writer as the La Brea Tar Pits were to woolly mammoths.
What’s your other great hidden talent?
Avoiding writing.
Joshilyn Jackson
"Someone Else's Love Story" (William Morrow)
Describe the novel in your own words.
It’s the story of a virgin birth, a holy sacrifice and a resurrection, which may sound familiar to those of us raised here in O’Connor’s Christ-haunted South.
What’s the most rewarding part of being a writer today?
Knowing people are visiting my invented places and meeting my invented people. I am so grateful to have a readership.
Beyond writing, what’s your other great hidden talent?
I am a cat whisperer. True fact.
Sheri Joseph
"Where You Can Find Me" (Thomas Dunne)
Describe the book in your own words.
It’s the story of a kidnapped boy who is, in the figurative sense, raised by wolves. The novel opens with his return from that ordeal and is about how he returns.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this book?
It was probably the setting, which for some reason needed to be the remote cloud forest of Costa Rica. This was a place I had never visited and needed to figure out how to get to for some extended time in order to conduct the research.
What’s your other great hidden talent?
I can call owls.
Jamie Quatro
"I Want to Show You More" (Grove Press)
Briefly describe your collection in your own words.
Before the book came out, people would ask, ‘What are your stories about?’ and I would say: running, religion and sex. I realized that my answer would be more pleasingly alliterative with an “R” word for sex. A British friend suggested “rodgering.” So: The collection explores the various intersections of running, religion and rodgering in the New American South.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing these stories?
I struggle with endings. Getting the sound right, the cadence, so the piece “comes shut with a click like a closing box,” to quote Yeats.
What’s the most fun part of being a writer today?
I love the element of surprise in drafting, when I’m writing along and boom, someone does or says something I never would have guessed.
Josh Russell
"A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands, & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag" (Dzanc Books)
Describe the book in your own words.
It’s a captivity narrative set in the 1990s that reimagines “captivity” by considering how being a PhD student in an English department, a wife and a mother can make a woman a captive. And it’s funny!
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this book?
Sitting down and adding words every day when there are so many other interesting and not-so-interesting things to be done: I have a family, a job, various obsessions.
Who is your ideal reader?
Someone who seeks to be challenged by a book not assured by a book that what she or he already believes is true.
Susan Rebecca White
"A Place at the Table" (Simon & Schuster)
Describe the book in your own words.
The inspiration for the novel came from the real-life friendship between chefs Scott Peacock and Edna Lewis … That’s the story I began with, but as is often the case when it comes to writing fiction, the story took on a life of its own. In the end, it was not really a story about Scott and Edna but a story of Southern outcasts looking for fellowship and connection in a strange and exhilarating land far from home.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this book?
I wrote the bulk of it while going through a somewhat difficult divorce. I was worried about money, worried about starting over (relationship-wise) at 36, and worried that I somehow wouldn’t be able to write now that I was no longer with my ex-husband.
What’s the most fun part of being a writer today?
The best part about being a working writer is the writing itself. Though I can procrastinate with the best of them, when I am actually at my desk, in the middle of a story, typing away, there is no better feeling in the world. Actually, that’s not true. I just had a baby. Holding him is an even better feeling.
Philip Lee Williams
"Emerson's Brother" (Mercer University)
Describe the book in your own words.
It’s an epistolary novel that examines how the mentally challenged sibling of a great thinker might have seen the same problems his brother did in understanding the world they both lived in.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this book?
Almost nothing is known about Bulkeley Emerson, the brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the subject of this book. So I had to read essentially everything Waldo ever wrote.
What’s your other great hidden talent?
I am a composer with 18 numbered symphonies and concerti for a large number of individual instruments to my credit.
Anthony Winkler
"God Carlos" (Akashic Books)
Describe the book in your own words.
“God Carlos” is an attempt to portray an evil man doing evil things. The challenge is to keep the interest of the reader in this demonic persona.
What’s the most fun part of being a writer?
To come across someone who is reading one of your books with delight. I’ve had that happen several times, and I am always thrilled by it.
Who is your ideal reader?
Anyone who is interested in literature or in current events.
