It was announced to the world yesterday that my friend John just won the Norman Mailer College Writing Award. For those of you that are thinking "that's cool," no. It's not cool. It's absolutely incredible. It's possibly the biggest writing award in the country for a college student, and it comes with $10,000, a summer fellowship to the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony in Massachusetts, and a presentation in New York with a number of the world's best writers, including Toni Morrison. And he gets a trophy, as I understand. So not only are he and his wife tremendously better off financially for a while, he's basically going to be able to write his ticket to any MFA program in the country. Beyond that, he could veritably have publishers lined up at his door for years. Basically, he's got it made.
I hope it doesn't look like I'm hitching a ride on his glory, or embarrassing him, as he is a frequent reader of this here blog, but I'm just really excited about this--possibly more so than is necessary. So in order to assuage that awkward over-excitedness, I'll just start talking about me instead. Once I found this out yesterday, my own writing career has taken a slight turn--hopefully, anyway. I've been woefully negligent about my own creative writings since graduation. I submitted a couple things for publication at the beginning of the summer, but I've done very little since. Yes, creative writing is a huge part of my job, but that's completely different.
When I found out about John's good fortune, though, it really hit me all at once how lazy I've been lately. In fact, I became so obsessed with such thoughts that I made an excuse and left work (at about 10:30) and came home and spent the entire rest of the day polishing up an old essay and doing massive research on a few possible target publications for it.
I was happy to discover that, while I'm naturally envious of my friend's life-changing opportunity, the wonderful news has served mostly as a swift kick to the pants of hope. If he can do it, so can I. That's not to say I'm as good of a writer as he is (though we do share a number of similarities and tastes), and I've certainly never written anything as profoundly beautiful as his winning essay "Final Cascade," but let's just say I'm optimistic. Local boy makes good. I guess this is why we need those stories, to remind us that it could happen.
And at the very least, maybe he can put a good word in for me with Norman Mailer. Oh, that's right--he's dead. Thanks for nothing.
(Most of all, congratulations.)
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2 responses:
get famous so I can say hey, I know that dude. I taught him everything he knows about writing.
Thanks Jeff, I understand this excitement, and the kick in the pants feeling. It's quite absurd. I haven't been on the blogs, and didn't know you wrote this.
I'm changing to a wordpress blog, and putting my name to it. Hopefully I feel bold enough to invite facebook friends etc. to read it, unlike this last one, which I didn't really want friends reading.
I agree that we share similar tastes, and I think our writing is similar in a subtle way. In fact, in writing my new blog, I'm trying to make less typos and things, and suddenly I realized, "I sound like Jeff." haha.
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