Ever since they met in the University of Michigan’s creative writing program, Cammie McGovern and Alyson Hagy have been friends in word as well as deed, exchanging early drafts of their short stories, offering advice on how to make them better, boosting each other’s morale in down times.
Their literary partnership got a huge boost last week when both McGovern and Hagy came up with winners in the Nelson Algren Awards for Short Fiction, sponsored by the Tribune. “An amazing coincidence,” McGovern called it-not an overstatement considering that their stories were picked (along with two other winners) from among 2,500 entries in the competition.
According to both writers, it mattered little that McGovern, 30, won the $5,000 first prize for her story, “Jenny,” while Hagy, four years older and McGovern’s mentor in graduate school, was one of three $1,000 runners-up for her story, “The Snakehunters.”
Like McGovern and Hagy, Elizabeth Oness, 34, whose story, “Rufus,” was another runner-up, has taken an academic route to fiction writing, currently working on her Ph.D. at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
The fourth winner is 49-year-old Joan Silber, a New York novelist, whose story, “Ordinary,” was singled out by the three judges, Shelby Hearon, Robert Boswell and Kathryn Harrison, who are themselves novelists and short-story writers. The prize stories will be published in a special edition of Tribune Books on Oct. 9.
If she had been a better bowler or a more successful screenwriter, McGovern, who now teaches in Salisbury, Conn., might never have written “Jenny,” a story centered on the odd coupling of a graduate student and a man who tries to improve her bowling.
Born in Evanston and brought up in Los Angeles, McGovern is the younger sister of actress Elizabeth McGovern (“Ragtime”), a relationship that led her into screenwriting. Although two of her scripts were optioned, McGovern said, “I was discouraged because they never got made, so I decided to go my own way into fiction writing.”
Enrolling in graduate school at Ann Arbor, McGovern found not only a friend and mentor in Alyson Hagy, the author of two story collections, but a bowling companion as well. “I was very bad at it,” McGovern said, an opinion with which Hagy diplomatically agreed. “Cammie’s not a natural bowler,” she said, “but she’s a great sport.”
Growing up in Virginia, Hagy frequently vacationed on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which became the setting for “The Snakehunters,” her winning story about a teenage boy whose life on an island is emotionally disrupted by the arrival of a group of summer campers, particularly a 14-year-old girl.
Neither Hagy, who’s a professor in the Michigan graduate writing program, nor McGovern was aware that the other was entering the Algren contest. “It’s great to win,” said Hagy, “but even better that I’ll know someone else at the awards dinner,” which takes place Oct. 5 in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall.
Before she turned to fiction writing, Elizabeth Oness spent a year with a New York ad agency and worked four years at the Taoist Health Institute in Washington, D.C., an experience that provided the background for her prize-winning “Rufus,” a story about the uncertain friendship that develops between a student and a homeless man living in the student’s car.
Like the three other winners, Joan Silber is relatively new to short fiction. She wrote her first story only four years ago, after publishing two novels, “Household Words,” winner of a PEN Hemingway Award, and “In the City.”
“Ordinary,” her Algren award story, is about the trauma of a lesbian couple after they take their infant daughter to live in an Upstate New York community.
Silber, who has supported herself by waitressing and teaching, didn’t take the news of her Algren prize casually. “It means a great deal to know that it was selected from so many stories,” she said. “For one thing, it means you’re not crazy.”
