Million Writers Award Winners Announced

Jason Sanford has announced the winners of the Million Writers Award:

1. First place (winner of $500): “The Fisherman’s Wife” by Jenny Williams (LitNImage)
2. Runner-up (winner of $200): “Fuckbuddy” by Roderic Crooks (Eyeshot)
3. Honorable mention (winner of $100): “No Bullets in the House” by Geronimo Madrid (Drunken Boat)

Congratulations to all!

He also kindly links here, which I appreciate. If you’re looking for my posts on the Million Writers Award finalists, here’s a list of finalists, followed by related posts:

• “The Whale Hunter” by Steinur Bell (Agni) – Stories Within Stories
• “Intertropical Convergence Zone” by Nadia Bulkin (ChiZine) – Making a New Myth
• “No Bullets in the House” by Geronimo Madrid (Drunken Boat) – Distance
• “Fuckbuddy” by Roderic Crooks (Eyeshot) – Second Person, Second Post
• “The Fisherman’s Wife” by Jenny Williams (LitNImage) – The Selkie’s Story v The Writer’s Story
• “Every Earth is Fit for Burial” by Cyn Kitchen (Menda City Review) – Fathers
• “Interview With A Moron” by Elizabeth Stuckey-French (Narrative Magazine) – Breaking Out of the Form
• “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri” by Peter S. Beagle (OSC’s Intergalactic Medicine Show) – The Pleasure of a Classic Tale
• “Grief Mongers” by Sefi Atta (Per Contra Fiction) – Excerpt to a Great Ending
• “Nine Sundays in a Row” by Kris Dikeman (Strange Horizons) – Nine Sundays, Ten Stories

If you still want more, you can check out:

And Now the Moment of Truth, Million Writers Finalists Posted, No More Teasing (which contains my nominees), Fantasy Magazine, Atomjack!, Million Writers Award Notable Stories. For a summary of last year’s results, see Congratulations to Matt Bell.

You can find even more from last year by typing “Million Writers Award” into the search box.

And Now the Moment of Truth

I’ve posted on all 10 finalists for the Million Writers Award, and now I have to decide how to cast my vote. Last year, I knew I would vote for Matt Bell’s story as soon as I read it. This year, it’s a much harder decision. From Jason Sanford’s blog, I know which stories were in the lead as of a few days ago, and it’s hard not to let that influence me.

I’m torn between Geronimo Madrid’s “No Bullets in the House,” Cyn Kitchen’s “Every Earth is Fit for Burial,” and Peter S. Beagle’s “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri.”

The strangeness of the Million Writers Award is that I actually find it pretty hard to compare the Beagle story with the other two. I struggled with this a great deal when reading through nominees. How do you compare Westerns, for example, with contemporary fiction? I decided then that the final measure, in that case, is supremely subjective. Which story will I remember longer?

I’m going with “No Bullets in the House” because it’s stuck with me for days, but it’s a tough, tough choice. I admire Jason Sanford’s taste a great deal, and of course he’s chosen a great list of finalists. May the best one win. If you haven’t voted yet, do it now. The polls close at 11:59 p.m..

Congratulations to all the finalists, and I can’t wait to see which story wins.

The Pleasure of a Classic Tale

Peter S. Beagle is an author wound deep into the fabric of my childhood. I’ll never forget the revelation of The Last Unicorn. He had a story on the finalist list for the Million Writers Award last year as well. This year’s story, “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri,” published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, is a twist on the trope of the animal wife.

To speak of the story on its own for a moment, it’s structured in the classic way of the fairy tale. Junko is the classic hero–a smart, handsome man of low birth who struggles with the glass ceiling he faces because of his class. As is the classic way, a beautiful woman is the vehicle for his ascension, in this case, an animal wife.

An animal wife story, however, is never one of contentment. The archetype, I believe, gets at the way lovers are always strangers to each other on some level. No matter how well two lovers know each other, and no matter how much two strive to be one, at some point two become two again. Sleep brings dreams that can’t be shared, and there are endless mysterious thoughts and glances that can never be opened to the other. To me, the animal wife story acknowledges this by having the woman take on other shapes, becoming an entirely different, and unknown, creature.

The ordinary story is of love and loss. The man can’t leave well enough alone and tries to claim the wife beyond what is possible, and so the wife slips away. Beagle, however, tells a different story. This is the tale of misguided ambition, and his animal wife takes on the role of Lady Macbeth. She reads his secret desires for murder and becomes the force of her husband’s id.

Beagle’s story is about the dangers of being understood, the dangers of the heart’s desire. It is about how the grace of love can conceal something much darker.

I’m talking about the story and its meaning and neglecting its lovely language. The story’s language functions to set a consistent scene, and to clue the reader to the archetypes in play. It then carefully guides the reader into the new territory that Beagle is exploring. A close analysis could do more by way of showing how this is done.

I found this story incredibly satisfying. It has a plot, it has emotional depth, it takes old, venerable archetypes and reveals something new about them. The ending is perfect. It’s great to be in the hands of a master.

I thought about “The Fisherman’s Wife” as I read this (I commented on that story here). The stories are in similar territory, doing quite different things. I prefer this more classic approach. It is easier, because the story can be read either lightly or deeply. I like stories that reward both sorts of reads.

I’ve scheduled several posts on the Million Writers Award today, since this is the last chance to vote.

I Would Be A Nice God

I’ve been going through the stories nominated for the 2008 Million Writers Award for Fiction, and, so far, the one that’s really spoken to me is Peter S. Beagle’s “We Never Talk About My Brother.” While there’s much to recommend this story, I’m going to talk here about language. My first experience reading Beagle, the lovely novel The Last Unicorn, I remember feeling compelled to read aloud. And a truly great writer doesn’t limit himself to what’s already in the words he uses — he adds things to them.

In this story, I noticed the way Beagle used the word “God”:

Anyway, Esau’s eyes filled up, which hardly ever happened, he wasn’t ever a crier, and his face got all red, and he stood up, and for a minute I thought he actually was about to come at me. But he didn’t — he just screamed, with that funny breaking voice, “I would be a nice God! I would!“

Something about the construction of this sentence focused my attention on the word “God.” First, I think the rhythm of Esau’s outburst, where the word is at the center, makes the word stand out to my ear. But there are other effects going on, too. The phrase “nice God” sounds like “nice kitten” to me, and strikes me as ironic. God is no kitten. He’s much too large and frightening for that. I also notice that God is capitalized. Esau says he would be a nice God as if there are a lot of people who could be gods, and yet the capitalization recalls the singular and powerful God of the Old Testament. This, in turn, draws attention to the fact that a little boy thinks he could be God.

I know I’m making a big deal out of this one little phrase, but I think Beagle was paying attention here. The things I pointed out in the paragraph above are all embedded in the story’s major themes. I think the careful language in this sentence supports the tone created by what happens in the narrative, and underscores the questions raised by the story’s plot.

When I read that sentence, it was like I’d never read the word “God” before. Never before had I lingered on the word so long to taste its meaning and its connection to the words around it. In this way, the technical details of the story mirror its narrative details, since the story is very much about lingering on the idea of God and pondering what it means.

In a final note, I want to say that I thought about Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven while reading this story. To say a few words about Beagle’s plot, it’s about a character who can say things and cause them to turn out to be true — things like, “You got run over.” The Lathe of Heaven has many similarities and raises similar questions, except that the main characters ability to change the facts of reality is involuntary, and happens in his dreams. It would be interesting at some point to think through an extended comparison of the two — I bet the different role of intention in the two stories would yield different ways to look at questions of responsibility and the truth of history.