UIUC Creative Writing

Folger Adam, Jr. Prize, $1,000 (sponsored by Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity): Eric Anderson, "Double-Helix."

This poem rollicks through the possibilities of language, exuberant in its plays on words: "how ionic,  "to be born and razed,  "trait lovely traitor.  While it visually intertwines and splits the two strands of its doubled voice, it also pairs and parts two predominant lexicons one religious ("cathedral,  "faith,  "pews ) and one biological ("nucleus,  "organ,  "mucus ) that culminate in a final word, "Salivation,  which carries with it the echo of "salvation.  As the poem progresses, the italicized, parenthetical voice that seems barely present in the beginning only sparing three or four words for each couplet the other voice utters begins to overwhelm the poem with more and more language, until finally it escapes its bounds, shedding its parentheses altogether. At the same time, the other voice, originally so confidently composed in declarative sentences, gives way to staccato bursts of language tenuously connected by Dickinsonian dashes. As the two strands play against each other, the poem questions the relationship between creation and captivity, between maker and made, examining how "the bondage of association  can both grow and divide. Thatcher H. Guild Prize, $500: Amy Lipman, "The ventriloquist who is about to speak on his own experiences abandonment.  Like a barker, the title of this poem calls us to step inside its tent, in which words are conjoined into surreal images ("The train hears two tongues and four hands boiling,  "she believes her nail-cradled joints to be quicker than coal ) and unexpected rhymes close stanzas with the force of a door kicked shut ("shakes the rudimentary magician down to his core  / he's not magical anymore,  "until you meet me at the carnival to stare at the other freaks, / [...] / we'll never really speak ). The poem moves with an illusionist's dexterity from its peculiar account of the relationship between ventriloquist and dummy to the more immediate relationship between narrator and beloved. Even at the end of the poem, though, a sense of the fantastic informs the landscape, and with a seduction as deft as Andrew Marvell's wooing of his coy mistress, this poem invites the lover and perhaps the reader, too to enter this strange world, a place where "I can love you all the way down to the fairgrounds. 

American Academy of Poets Prize, $100: Rafael Ibay, "Missing." This poem is remarkable for how much it accomplishes in such a short space. Its few, choice images create a sparseness among the vast whiteness of the page, which reinforces the sense of something or someone "missing.  The poem thrusts us through time: from a childhood that, despite its innocence ("we played hide- / and-seek. And these / the trees climbed ), is still marked by "knives  and "Rusted,  to the narrator's reflective "now,  and back again to a past moment "when / you fell.  An unexpected eeriness overtakes the second half of the poem, and much of this is made possible by the ambiguity of the title: Is the narrator simply "missing  a dead friend, or has something more insidious happened, after which a person might be declared "missing ? The poem never tells the reader exactly what happened, and instead leaves it to our imagination, allowing us to be haunted by the possibilities.

Honorable Mentions:

Angel Diaz, "I am sestina.  This poem offers a Whitmanian "Song of Myself  set in the barrio, creating an all-encompassing vision of the narrator that is as inclusive of lonely mothers as of lovers, of violence as of prayer. It portrays the self-as-surroundings with a confidence that suggests both toughness and empathy no mean feat.

Sarah Cason, "The Living Dead.  This poem transforms a meditation on the moment of death into a wild romp through a menagerie of frozen creatures. Despite the seeming stasis of its cast of characters, the poem itself moves swiftly, carrying the reader from the exotic to the familiar through its leaps of imagination.

Michael Clark, "Relativity.  This poem recalls the precise, multi-faceted perspective of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.  Through the various glimpses that this poem offers, which range in tone from yearning to cold calculation, and through its comparisons (of trains to "the hands of God  or to men who have been "derailed  from their "tracks ), it suggests that everything is indeed "all relative."

A general note from the judge: Getting this list down from the entire group of submissions to the top ten proved a lot less difficult than choosing the final four. Some of the stories I didn't pick had some technical mastery these winners did not match, but in the holistic way we respond to stories, sometimes, the ineffable wins out over the concrete. In fact, each of these stories has at least one device that usually causes me to dismiss a story outright, for its artificiality. They are the more transparent devices, the ones closer to gimmicks. In the wrong hands, these gimmicks can be atrocious, the lamest tools of commercial fiction. In each of these cases, though, these writers illustrated that a device in the right hands can sing well to the same degree the device can fall flat in less-skilled hands. The ineffable rescues the story from its own gimmicks, its inherent weaknesses, with the magic we hope to find any time we read a story.

John L. Rainey Prize, $1,000 (sponsored by Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity): Kevin O'Malley, "Blast Cells.  Usually, I am suspicious of stories that have an outrageous hook line, and this story's hook: "I hate cancer survivors,  certainly qualified as outrageous. The rest of the paragraph, though, was committed to that outrageousness, and with sharp detail, enough to keep me going. When I got to the opening of the second paragraph, and saw the writer was running parallel lines with the title, that it involves the anatomy of illness, and also engages the imagery of astronauts, I knew I had to see it through to the end. This writer has a tremendous command of voice, and the ways the writer flirts with politically incorrectness while pushing for a potentially accurate rendering of these situations were impressive. I found myself going back to this story to read it again, knowing already it was likely to be my first choice. I reread it for the experience.

Charles and Susan Shattuck Prize, $500: Lucas Sheahan, "Bleeding on the Highway.  "Bleeding on the Highway  uses the inner monologue I have come to dread, from too many years of reading Stephen King inner monologues involving characters thinking about candy bars, breakfast, the radio, etc., and when I saw Bruce Springsteen on the first page, and a protagonist communing with Bruce, I feared the worst. Again, though, this writer's talents proved to overcome this choice. The way this story is revealed in the protagonist's past life, and potential past life, was really satisfying. The obsessive second-guessing and "what if  scenarios allowed for the convincing depth of this protagonist's loss. I walked away, haunted by my own lifetime of "what ifs,  and this is the sort of re-evaluation I always hope fiction will allow.

Josephine M. Bresee Memorial, $400: Adam Mann, "The Sufferers.  "The Sufferers  was probably the story where gimmickry was least apparent. It has an obvious hook, the "thin trail of blood  that opens the story, but the story does not, then, fall into the usual places such an opening might suggest. There were times in reading this, that I felt it was going to be more of a set-piece than a full story, and yet, in those last lines, this writer pulls it to a satisfying end. This story was generally quite strong, and in the one area I felt it did not live up to its potential, it seemed a good instinct on the writer's part. There are mysterious circumstances going on in the antagonists' house that were not clear in the end. While not every plot thread needs to be resolved in a literary short story, these odd things--a missed conversation, some ambiguity over Christmas lights--seem important to the protagonist, and as a source of tension with him, the reader is left to wonder about the writer's choice to glimpse it, but then keep it veiled.

Leah Trelease Prize, $300: Lauren Wiser, "The Hard Way.  "The Hard Way  uses a gimmick I despise more than most. The writer uses a frame, an opening scene which is resurrected at the end. This is a commonly enough used structure, and often used to great effect. There is a violation, though, in the second part of the frame, that falls into a pattern I have identified among my students as "The Sixth Sense  Syndrome. There is a major piece of information missing from the scene as it plays out in the opening, which is only revealed at the end. It is not a piece of information that this narrator could have just forgotten. In essence, what we are left with is a writer willing to trick the reader for the sake of suspense. Some readers/viewers love this device. I am not among them. It is the literary equivalent of hiding behind a door and yelling "boo  when someone walks into the room. I would have absolutely walked away from this story on this account alone. However, there are other surprises, mysteries, in this story that do not rely upon gimmicks. I hope this writer will continue and commit to the more subtle end of the craft clearly already on display here. The beauty and subtlety in this story is in the manner with which the narrator does not understand the things she is reporting. The reader, still uncertain at the end, at least realizes that there is more to these events than the narrator will ever grasp. We are left with the recognition that we often know so little about even the people we believe we've chosen as companions. This narrator's blind spots remind us of the ones we have throughout our own lives. This writer has crafted this convincingly in a way that leaves the reader sympathetic to this narrator's loss.