the diary of antoine roquentin

I don’t think I mentioned it on here, but I won the William Paterson University writing contest (they offer awards for fiction, poetry, and critical essays) in the fiction category.

The story I submitted was one you have no doubt read in many different versions as it came together (many thanks for the feedback while this was in its early stages, Molly), called “Necessary Evils.” (You can read it on my official site.) It’s one of the advantages to being a writer that no matter how bad things get, you know that it’s, to use Molly’s term, “story fodder.” I attended the ceremony today where I got my award and read a section from the story. Jorge, Matt, Mom, Grandma, and Gail were there, as was my friend Jason from our creative writing class last semester with the inimitable Philip Cioffari. He won in the poetry category. The sound isn’t too good in this clip, but it’s me reading a portion of the story.

In this book we’re reading for my critical writing class, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, has this rather long meditation about this painting called The Wreck of the Medusa, which is loosely, tangentially, based on the wreck of this real ship called the Medusa. The writer argues that any artistic representation of a real event should be “true to life” not “true to art.” This seems a bit naïve. However, he does speak quite convincingly about what the requirements are to turn a tragedy into art. Putting Grammie in the home was such a horrible, traumatic act that I still haven’t really gotten over. And yet, it helped me win a fiction award. I need to meditate on this further.

So I got “29 Second Avenue” back. The teacher really liked it, and scrawled a bunch of notes on it (as is his practice) about his reactions. He thought it was very well written and conveyed the place very well. Most amusingly, he wrote next to the last line, where I admonish readers to not go to The Cock “Well there goes my summer plans!” He was at the ceremony, and gave me a look of shock and surprise when my name was called. That was worth almost more than the award itself, his look of “wow, go you.”

The final assignment for his critical writing class is really open-ended, but basically he wants us to reimagine some story or historical event in our culture and rewrite it from another perspective (possibly to comedic ends). I haven’t really thought of anything yet, but I’m sure something will occur to me. I would have loved to do something like last week’s “Shouts and Murmurs.” Genius.