Awards and all that Jazz

I’m not going to pretend that awards don’t mean anything. I''mpretty sure that they do. But I think it’s worth looking into what they really mean.

Saturday night, I picked up a literary award at the 55th annual provincial arts and letters awards gala in the short fiction category, for my short story, “Exit the Warrior”(excerpt at http://www.tcr.gov.nl.ca/artsandletters/winning_entries.htm). Every year, I make it a point to enter this competition for several reasons. One is that it’s probably the most prestigious literary award in the province. Without exception, every major author from Newfoundland has won several of these awards for fiction and/or poetry: Kenneth Harvey, Lisa Moore, Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Tom Dawe, Kevin Major…and the list goes on and on. It seems that if you want to be taken seriously—better yet if want to take YOURSELF seriously—as a writer in this province, you’ve got to prove you can make it in the arts and letters competition first. It’s a real proving ground, it seems.

And it’s true. The competition is fierce, simply because the prize money is incredibly good ($1,000) and therefore all of the best writers in the province, or most of them at least, enter the fray. I’m sure that some of them don’t (not every year anyway), but sooner or later they all do if they still live here. So you get a chance to judge yourself alongside some of these heavyweight authors. I’ve won four of these in the past seven years, including the big award, the Percy Janes First Novel Award (for an unpublished manuscript) and every time I try and put it in perspective: what does it really mean? Does it do anything for you to win awards like this?

They are prestigious, without doubt. They can make you feel good, definitely. It’s nice to be seen and nice to win some money, and nice to prove to yourself that you’ve got what it takes. As I said, I test myself every year: in January or early February, I challenge myself to write a new short story. That’s it. That’s the challenge. Just knowing that I have a deadline to meet and that what I write has to be good or it won’t make the cut gives me the incentive to just write something. That, as I’ve said before, is most of the battle won when it comes to successful writing.

When a story actually wins, though, that’s a whole different story, so to speak. Each of these new stories, especially the ones that have won awards, are part of the ongoing short story collection I’m writing, and just the fact that they’ve done so well already gives me confidence that they’re good. You need that if you’re going to approach a publisher with a proposal.

Anyway, my favorite part of the awards gala, believe it or not, is NOT picking up the award and shaking hands with the minister of tourism and culture (although he seems to be a nice guy). No, my favorite part has to do with the other people involved, especially the young ones. As soon as I learned two weeks ago that I was invited to the awards ceremony (which means you’ve won an award), my second thought—right after, COOL! I won—was that I was going to be in the privileged position of sitting in on one of the best nights of entertainment around. In the junior category, there are young people from all over the province, including as far away as St. Anthony and Labrador, who came all the way to St. John’s for this night. And many of them read from their winning entries or played winning musical compositions. And their talent is staggering. With many of the writers, I found myself thinking that there is no way that I could write that well at the age of thirteen. Forget it. And the musical performers were amazing. I was just enthralled for the entire two hours. As I said to my wife, who was with me, when you look around at all the talent, you can’t help but feel that you’re in the presence of greatness, in the sense that there is so much ability and it is so special and makes you feel so good about the people you’re with and the place you come from. As far as I know, this competition is unique in Canadian arts, and it’s one of the few things that J.R. Smallwood did right.

It was a great evening also to get the chance to see and talk to some people in the arts community that I either know or don’t know and rarely get a chance to see. It can really make you feel, as a writer, that you belong. And that’s all a part of actually belonging.

There’s other news about my writing, but I’ll share that next time. I’m tired of talking about myself—a topic I grow weary of pretty quickly.

Oh, and what do awards mean? It means you’re doing something right. Now it’s time to go back to work. That’s what it means. Because, in the end, it’s still about the work itself—the writing and the privilege of being able to do that and, occasionally, if you’re lucky, you get told that what you’re doing is worth something.

G