Sherwood Anderson Foundation

Katherine Min

2012-09-01T15:31:52Z

The Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award winner for 2012 is Katherine Min, of Asheville, North Carolina. Competition judges selected Min's fiction for its wisdom, its insight into human nature, and its fresh, surprising, yet unaffected language. In short, hers is entirely brilliant writing--prose that's not only memorable, but also necessary.

Min's first novel, Secondhand World (Knopf), was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize for "an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work... represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise." It is about a 17-year-old Korean-American girl, named Isa Sohn, who struggles to understand her immigrant parents, especially her stern, ex-ROK soldier father. "The Korean War was the defining event of my parents' generation," Min says. "A third of my father's high school class was killed; the country was divided and decimated. Almost everyone my parents' age has a relative who was taken or happened to be in North Korea when the split was made, and many do not know to this day if these relatives are alive or dead.

"This is such an enormous tragedy. I wanted to explore the ways in which the history of our parents and our grandparents affects us, even when that history is kept secret. Isa's father believes he can start a new life in America, that he can deny his past and its painful memories, but the fact is that you can't really start over, ever, or not without cost." Those many costs are what Min anatomizes in her absorbing fiction.

Her next novel, "The Fetishist," weaves among the lives of three central characters: a Caucasian violinist with a fetish for Asian women; a Korean-American cellist who is obsessed with Alma Mahler; and a young Japanese-American stalker/would-be assassin. The work is different from anything Min has ever written, yet it also deals with her themes of attraction to the Other, the limits of intimacy, and self-hatred, interlaced with elements of black comedy.

Katherine Min's short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, River Styx, and Prairie Schooner, and have been widely anthologized. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from the North Carolina and New Hampshire State Arts Councils, and a Pushcart Prize.

Min was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and graduated from Amherst College and the Columbia University School of Journalism. She currently teaches at the University of North Carolina, Asheville.

Past Winner: William Lychack

2011-08-26T01:53:13Z

photo by Marion EttlingerThe Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award winner for 2011 is William Lychack of Stamford, Vermont. Foundation judges felt that readers of every ilk will read and enjoy the novel The Wasp Eater because of Lychack's diligent craft and honesty. No clichés, emotional or verbal, or hyper-inflated phrasing spoils the reader's waking dream here, but rather a poet's sentience and close craftsmanship come together in the service of an important story. Oddly, though, Lychack's slow, thoughtful novel is also a real page-turner.

His story collection The Architect of Flowers (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) limits the subject matter in each work so that the narrator can look closely at what he has mapped out and thereby open up his subject almost fully to the reader--reserving some mystery to himself, nevertheless. The reader's perception of that mystery is significant and part of the fun; thus, Lychack gives us fine writing and necessary, important writing at once. "The Old Woman and Her Thief," for example, is one of the best in this collection because it unites a realistic setting and characters seamlessly with subtle mythic elements to produce a single, lasting effect; no showing-off here for the sake of it, but simply, in several positive senses, a great story that contributes as well to American literary writing. Read this interesting book to see what we mean.

Lychack's work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other places, including public radio's This American Life. One of his more recent stories is titled "Chickens."

He was the Writer-in-Residence from 2006 to 2010 at Phillips Academy, and is currently a member of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has published children's books, corporate histories, and has worked as a teacher, editor, speechwriter, ghostwriter, journalist, lifeguard, carpenter, bartender, janitor, Mr. Softee Ice Cream Man, and a Judo instructor.

Lychack says he tells his students and himself often: "Learn that it's all about caring. You need to care so much that you don't care if anyone else cares. Which might make them care. Or might make you secretly care if they care. And might make you do everything in your power to get them to care. The writer and editor William Maxwell once gave me the following advice: 'Try to listen to your feelings as you would to the sound in a sea shell, and then put them down on paper.' That seems the kind of perfect, direct, and useful counsel that an aspiring writer (such as me) might ignore for a good decade. And one ignores it for good reason--it's difficult work--but your real job is to care enough to say what you feel about the world."

Past Winner: Tracy Winn

2010-09-07T10:40:16Z

The Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award winner for 2010 is Tracy Winn of Concord, Massachusetts. Foundation Judges found her work highly humane and imagistic. Winn writes with clear, precise imagery to depict a thoroughly believable yet remarkable world. She clearly doesn't write just for herself but for a reader, too. Though her prose is fresh, open, and edgy, it is also restrained, even-handed, and mature. Her entry, the collection of ten stories Mrs. Somebody Somebody: Stories (SMU Press, 2009; Random House, 2010), set in Lowell, Massachusetts, shortly after World War II and extending to the present, respects the fullness of each character, whether millworker or mill owner, with deep insight. Each person Winn focuses upon in Lowell is depicted intuitively so that we can well understand them, their decisions, and their actions.

For example, Mrs. Somebody Somebody and Luck Be a Lady, both excellent stories set out in strong narrative lines, weave raw incidents of injustice, difficult loves, family and social expectations, desire for autonomy and mastery in work, and the consequences of tenacious self-respect. That is, indeed, a great deal to bring together seamlessly, but Winn accomplishes just that, so the judges extend this award to encourage and support her continuing creation of interesting prose about things that matter.

Winn says: "For me writing is thinking, captured, and is as essential as breathing. I began the practice as a tongue-tied fourth grader when a teacher gave me a notebook in which to record my thoughts."

From that diligent (and fortunate) beginning, Winn became a teacher and continued her study of literature, taking a writing class at Middlebury College Graduate School of English. "I took a short-story writing class with David Huddle. I found that writing lousy poems and entertaining letters had trained me. I'd developed discipline and the understanding that failure is part of the work. I'd grown to appreciate words --the importance of the right word in the right place -- their sounds and their power. I discovered that when I wrote stories, I excelled at shaping and wielding that power."

Winn started writing in earnest and enrolled in the Warren Wilson Program for writers, earning an MFA. Mrs. Somebody Somebody: Stories is a Readers Circle Selection for June 2010 at Random House Trade Paperbacks. Winn is in the early stages of a new novel and like all smart writers she is not telling anyone what she is working on.

Images

2010-02-07T18:04:29Z

Click on images to zoom.

Anderson's grave stone has the inscription, "Life, Not Death, Is The Great Adventure." It sits in Round Hill Cemetery in Marion,Va.

This is believed to be the house that Anderson lived in as a child in Clyde, Ohio.

Marker in Marion, Va., where Anderson published the Smyth County News.

Line drawing of Anderson's face with the artist's name "Hyde Man" on it and probably done in the early 1930s.

Anderson built this house, called "Ripshin," on Ripshin Creek outside Troutdale, Va., in 1925.

Sherwood Anderson, A Brief Biography 1876-1941

2010-02-07T17:59:09Z

One day in Sherwood Anderson's life, Nov. 28, 1912, has assumed mythic proportions in the story of American literature. This was the day he "left business for literature," simply walking out of his office as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Co. (Home of "Roof-Fix Cure for Roof Troubles") in Elyria, Ohio, not only giving up a dream of becoming rich in American business, but also abandoning his responsibilities as a middle-class citizen, including a wife and three small children.

Although this account oversimplifies a process that took several messy, frequently unhappy years, it is nevertheless true in spirit, making Anderson the best-known archetype of the gifted American caught between the pull of riches, success, respectability, and family responsibility on the one hand and the call of creativity, probably to be accompanied only by penury and disappointment, on the other.

Anderson was born into a poor family in Camden, Ohio, on Sept. 13, 1876, but spent his formative years in the town of Clyde, Ohio, which inspired the setting of many of his stories. He worked in Chicago as a laborer in 1896-1898, then served in the Spanish-American War. He attended Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio, in 1900, then went to Chicago, where he soon gained some success as an advertising writer.

In 1904, he married Cornelia Lane of Toledo, fathered two sons and a daughter during the next several years, and displayed unusual talent for success in the mail-order paint business. Following a difficult period of marital and business problems, he suffered a psychological crisis, which led to his leaving this business and his family and returning to Chicago to pursue a writing career.
In 1916, Anderson divorced Cornelia and married Tennessee Mitchell. He also published his first novel that year, Windy McPherson's Son. Then he gained wide recognition with the publication in 1919 of Winesburg, Ohio. This book made Anderson a revolutionary force in both the form and subject matter of the American short story. During this time, he also published Marching Men (1917). Among the other notable books published by Anderson at the height of his reputation in the early 1920s were the novel Poor White (1920), the story collections The Triumph of the Egg (1921), and Horses and Men (1923), and the autobiographical A Story Teller's Story (1924).
His marriage to Tennessee was not a success, and in 1922 he left Chicago for New York, then Reno, Nev. After his divorce in 1924, he married Elizabeth Prall, and they moved to New Orleans. During this period he wrote Many Marriages (1923) and Dark Laughter (1925).

In the summer of 1925, the Andersons vacationed in Troutdale, Va. He liked the Grayson County area so much that he bought farmland beside Ripshin Creek, about four miles out of Troutdale, and built a house that he called Ripshin. In the fall of 1927, he purchased the Marion Publishing Company, in Marion, Va., 22 miles to the northwest, and became editor and publisher of two weekly newspapers, articles from which were collected in a 1929 book, Hello Towns. He and Elizabeth separated in late 1928 and in 1933 he married Eleanor Copenhaver, a Marion native and national YWCA official. Under her influence, he traveled throughout the South, touring factories and studying labor conditions. Their marriage proved to be a happy one.
In the 1930s, Anderson began to write about labor conditions in the South. Among his publications in the 1930s are Beyond Desire (1932), Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933); Puzzled America, a book of essays based upon his extensive travels throughout the United States (1935); and Kit Brandon, a novel (1936).
During this time, Anderson spent summers at Ripshin. He and Eleanor usually traveled extensively the rest of the year. They were en route to South America when he died of peritonitis in Colon, Panama, on March 8, 1941.Anderson's children saw him only occasionally during his busy life. And his grandchildren saw him even less when they were very young. Grandson Michael M. Spear wrote about one of these brief encounters.

Anderson never lost his zest for life, and his epitaph in Marion's Round Hill Cemetery proclaims, as he directed, that "Life, Not Death, Is the Great Adventure." The unusual gravemarker was designed by artist Wharton Esherick.
Sherwood Anderson was a major influence on a younger generation of important writers, including Faulkner, Hemingway, Wolfe, Steinbeck, and others, both through his writings and his acts of personal kindness. It was through his influence, for example, that first books of both Faulkner and Hemingway were published.

Past Winner: Lucy Jane Bledsoe

2009-08-04T00:27:28Z

photo by Phyllis ChristopherThe Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Competition Award winner for 2009 is Lucy Jane Bledsoe. Bledsoe lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes fiction and narrative nonfiction. The competition judges find her two entries "Girl with Boat" and "Enough" outstanding literary stories precisely because neither is "literary" or mannered but instead speaks with an honest human voice.

"Girl with Boat," winner of the 2009 Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction (to be published in that journal in Fall 2009), shows the conflict between loyal family love and the father's desperate, singular need to take them all to live in trackless Alaska; he is down on the world for all the usual reasons of its commerce and mediocrity. He craves absolute purity. Once the family is settled in the far north, the mother dies, but her daughter eventually escapes. This is the story of her return, thirty years later, and of what she finds at the old homestead. "Girl with Boat" is mythic in structure, simply constructed and expressed--clear and poetically precise, meaning not at all easy to write.

Bledsoe's second entry, "Enough" (ZYZZYVZ, Spring 2005), winner of the 2009 International Arts Movement First Prize for fiction, is set in Antarctica, "on the Ice," and depicts with unusual perception the conflicts, self-delusion, but nonetheless warm hopes humans take with them wherever they live.

Besides writing, the author goes sea kayaking in Alaska, backpacking in the Rockies, and skiing in the Sierra. She has been to Antarctica three times as a recipient of the National Science Foundation's Artists & Writers Fellowship, living and working at all three American stations--McMurdo Station, Palmer Station, and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. She also lived at field camps in the Transantarctic Mountains. Bledsoe's work with geologists, biologists, and astrophysicists concerned studying penguins, seals, climate change, and the Big Bang.

World Hum website calls her nonfiction collection, The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic (U of Wisconsin P, 2006), "layered, literary, and unflinchingly honest." Passport Magazine writes, "The Ice Cave is an exhilarating read. There's aching beauty to her tales." The book shows what it means to be simply one member of one species, trying to find food and shelter--and moments of grace--on our planet.

Publishers Weekly gives Bledsoe's novel, Biting the Apple, a starred review. Cited as one of Bookmark's 10 Best Books of the Year, Biting the Apple is "an intelligent, introspective, and smartly sarcastic story about the shackles of the past, the pressures of a present built on falsehoods, and the promise of reinvention and renewal. . . ."

Bledsoe's work has won the 2009 Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the 2009 International Arts Movement Prize for Fiction, a California Arts Council Individual Fellowship, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and has been translated into Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Dutch.

Her newest novel, "The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica," will be out in spring 2010. The premise is that a galley worker, a geologist, and a composer have run away to jobs in Antarctica, each trying to escape a life that has become unbearable. Kim Stanley Robinson writes: "Lucy Bledsoe has written a beautiful novel about living in that extreme space; vivid and suspenseful, it really captures the feel of the Ice and the intensity of living and learning there."

Past Winner: Nelly Rosario

2008-09-22T01:36:13Z

Writer Nelly Rosario of San Marcos, Texas, is the 2008 winner of the annual $15,000 Sherwood Anderson Writer's Grant, Michael M. Spear,co-president of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, has announced. Our judges in selecting Rosario had this to say: "Hers is fearless writing, and she's able to juggle several points of view credibly in her 2002 generational saga of Dominican women, 1916-1999 titled Song of the Water Saints. Employing rich imagery, whether lush or abominable, Nelly depicts a wide continuum of sensed life."

Rosario is a New York City native born in the Dominican Republic. The 1998 MFA graduate of the Columbia University School of the Arts submitted Airman Basic Training from her novel-in-progress The Three Eyes of Water, of which excerpts appear in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters and will be forthcoming in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas.

The Village Voice Literary Supplement named Rosario a "Writer on theVerge" in 2001. Her 2002 debut novel Song of the Water Saints won a PEN Open Book Award and was nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Pulitzer-Prize winner Junot Diaz called Rosario's Song of the Water Saints: "An electrifying debut."

Powerfully written, meticulously imagined, and arresting to its core, Nelly Rosario's novel is a flame for the mind and heart, the sort you areendlessly grateful for.

Though Rosario has an undergraduate degree in engineering from MIT, she said, "I never left [engineering] for literature, as literature has always been with me" and is grateful for the "passion-ahead-of-profit values" embodied by the Sherwood Anderson Writer's Grant. She has taught writing at Columbia University and currently teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.

In making the award each year, the foundation is carrying on a tradition started by Anderson in the last century when he helped both William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway get published initially, Spear said. Since the Sherwood Anderson Foundation started helping struggling writers in1988, it has given more than $165,000 in grants, Spear said.

For more about the foundation and the grant competition, visit this website: sherwoodandersonfoundation.org

Robert Garner McBrearty - Biography

2007-09-17T22:56:36Z

Robert Garner McBrearty of Louisville, Colorado, is the winner of the 2007 Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, for his three stories that are part of a book in-progress. Episode was previously published in North American Review, Teach Us was first published in Narrative Magazine, and The Bike is his most recent story.

"Of the many fiction entries in the Writer's Grant competition this year, we think McBrearty's writing is especially noteworthy for its blend of humor and pathos, and brings to American fiction many of the same strengths as Sherwood Anderson's writing," said Michael Spear, president of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation.

Episode serves as the title story for his new collection of stories and describes a young man's attempt to care for his bipolar brother. McBrearty says, "It's also about the way the past haunts us, and the different ways we interpret the past." For Teach Us, McBrearty drew from his days of working as an attendant at a mental hospital. The Bike explores a couple's way of dealing with grief.

McBrearty started writing as a teenager and in his early twenties moved to Mexico to write and study, earning a living by teaching English. A few years later, he graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and shortly after his stories began to appear in such major literary publications as: The Pushcart Prize anthology, StoryQuarterly, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, North American Review and Narrative. "A lot of those earlier stories were written late at night after working another job, or at dawn when the kids were small," he says. "I'd tried to write before they woke up." He often draws from his upbringing in Texas and the many varied odd jobs he's had. He lives with his wife and two sons, and teaches writing at the University of Colorado.

Publisher's Weekly noted this about his first book A Night at the Y: "The modern day Walter Mittys of these 12 humorous stories shuffle carefully from their humdrum existences into wider, more exhilarating, often quite humorous worlds." The Chicago Tribune said, "What threads through McBrearty's work is a humaneness toward his characters and a gentle, sometimes sad irony that pervades their world views." The collection was also featured in the 2001 Writer's Digest Novel and Short Story Writer's Market.

McBrearty's work has also been used frequently at large public readings at Stories on Stage in Denver and at the Dallas Museum of Art. "I love the direct connection with the audience," he says.

The award is "immensely helpful, both financially and in the way it boosts the writing morale. It's a tremendous reaffirmation. I believe it will inspire my work for many years to come." Currently, he is completing a collection of stories and two novels-in-progress.

You can see more of his work at his website http://www.robertgarnermcbrearty.com/.

Episode By Robert Garner McBrearty

2007-09-17T19:12:48Z

My older brother Len's off his meds again. I've felt his breakdown coming the last couple of days, though my father hasn't wanted to face up to it yet. This morning Len came into my bedroom and looked at one of my paintings on the wall, something I'd done in art school, an abstract southwestern landscape sort of thing, and not all that great. He stared at it, riveted, his eyes tearing up. "That's the most beautiful painting I've ever seen," he said. "That should be in the Dallas Museum of Art. That should be in the Louvre." With his strong arms, he drew me to his chest. "I can feel that horse between my thighs. That's me with the lance in my hands." He moved closer to the painting, eyes round and shiny. "No, I'm both. I'm the Comanche and the one being chased. God, that's brilliant! You're a genius!" I stared at my painting, but hard as I tried I could not see a single Comanche. At least I had not consciously included an Indian in the painting. There was only the prairie rolling away to the distance, and some trees and boulders and lots of colorful swirls. He released me from his embrace, then gripped both my hands and held them in his calloused palms. "Don't do manual labor with these," he said. "Don't be like me. I'll send you money when you need it."
He disappeared for the day, and now he's surfaced late at night, and we sit at the kitchen table as he sips whiskey, a vain attempt to calm himself. Every few seconds, his hand opens and shuts like a man giving blood. Len's thirty-two, I'm twenty-five, but since he started having his bipolar disorder a few years ago, I feel like the older brother. He moved back home with my father a few months ago, and I'm back home this summer after grad school, trying to get my bearings and move on.
He squints his eyes, cocks an ear, listening for something, listening maybe for the sounds of the horses' hooves, the horses carrying the Comanches back through time into a moonlight raid on our house in the hilly suburbs north of Austin. Len had a thing about the Comanches, even when we were kids; in a kind of love and hate he'd talk in awe of them as the greatest horse warriors who ever lived. He's been staying up all night this week, reading Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove trilogy, James Michener's Texas, and my mother's roots material about our family's frontier days, devouring thousands of pages of the novels and the family lore, apparently not the best reading material if you're manic.
I take a breath, trying to steady my voice when I speak. "Listen, Len," I say, "I talked to Dr. Wilson."
He lurches back as if stabbed, eyes widening at the mention of Dr. Wilson, the psychiatrist whom he's seen off and on for the last few years. "That old hack?" he says. "Doctor Electrode? You got anybody else on the list? I mean, Kenneth, really..." He leans in close, breathing his whisky breath in my face, eyes turning squinty and wizened, like a con man working a deal. "Do we have any back up? Do we have a fucking plan here or not?"
"I should drive you down to the hospital, Len. You know, just get checked out."
His voice edges into bitterness. "You mean checked in? Whose side are you on, Kenneth? Whose side?"
I feel my throat tightening. "I'm on your side, Len, you know that."
He takes another swig from his whiskey glass. "Hey, I'm feeling good. I can handle this. This will all be gone in the morning. We'll play golf. Do you want to play golf in the morning? Because I plan to play golf in the morning, and I'd like you to come." He smiles too widely. "It'll be great, playing golf with you again." He cackles with sudden laughter. "I'm not carrying your bag anymore! Remember the way you used to make me carry your bag when you got tired? You're old enough to carry your own damn bag this time!"
I sit there, not answering, until he demands, "So do you want to play golf or not?"
I shrug my shoulders. "Sure, Len, whatever."
He lets out a long breath between tight lips, and leans in, eyes anxious. "Seriously, do I seem a little weird or something?"
"Oh not, not at all. You don't seem weird at all, Len."
His shoulders shake with quiet laughter as he gets the sarcasm, knowing I think he's being weird as hell, but the opening allows me to tell him the truth. "Len, I think you're having an episode. We've got to get some help."
He lowers his head, contemplates the suggestion for a moment, considers the weeks ahead in the hospital, the medications, and he sits back, squaring his shoulders as if to ward off something coming at him too fast and hard. "It happened here," he says in a hushed voice. "Right here. Close your eyes. Listen."
I stare at him, until he hisses, "Close your eyes."
I close my eyes, and I hear a faint wind against the windows. I hear his breathing, a heavy agitated sound. I hear the tinkle of ice in his glass. "Do you hear it?" he asks. I keep my eyes closed. "Hear what, Len? Hear what?"
"The screaming."
I open my eyes. His lips tremble with excitement. "Do you get it now?" he asks. "It happened here, right here. Mother knew. She hinted at it. She was going to break it to me first. She knew I was the only one who could handle it."
"What are you talking about?"
"Her roots stuff she was always looking into. Great-great Uncle Ira, the one who fought the Comanches?"
"I don't remember anything about it."
"God, how could I have missed it? Can't you hear the screaming? People died here. That's what she was trying to tell me. The house is full of spirits. It always has been."
I shake my head. "I just hear the wind, Len. It's just the wind."
He smiles, nods his head with the pretend patience of one dealing with a slow-learning child. "Remember the arrowheads we found when we were kids?"
"Mom said those were from a peaceful tribe."
"Of course she would tell you that. She tried to protect you." He leans in close, eyes gouging into mine, his voice a rapid, hoarse whisper. "She knew. She referred to a ranch not far from here. A ranch where Uncle Ira lived with his wife and son. But it was here. Our house is built right over the bloody soil. This is where they fought and died." "In the kitchen?" I rock back in my chair, creating a little more space between us. "Holy shit, Len, you're freaking the hell out of me."
He stares at me, eyes glittering. "They killed his wife and made off with the little boy. He grew up with the Comanches, but he was ransomed back. Only he was never the same. He was wild. He could never adjust." Len's been hiding something in his lap and now he brings it up onto the table, a butcher knife from one of our kitchen drawers. "They were up in the hills watching. Then they rode in. It was pure adrenaline back then, Kenneth. Late at night, listening, wondering if this was the night they'd punch your ticket. It's coming clear to me now. My God, it all makes sense now."
He presses the point of the knife against the Formica table and spins it. He clasps it during its wobbly rotation. "I like knives," he says. "Do you like knives?"
"They're okay," I say, hearing the quiver in my voice. "I kind of like butter knives. Do you want me to get you a butter knife?"
"I've always liked sharp knives," he says. "The beauty, the power, the symmetry." He tests the air with the blade. Short and thick-muscled, Len's a pretty tough guy from his years of construction work and studying the martial arts. He's let his hair get shaggy and his ragged beard has got some streaks of blood or ketchup in it. He stands and swoops around the kitchen, doing deep knee bends, coming up, sweeping the air with the knife. "Come at me," he whispers to an imaginary enemy.
We hear a cough in the hallway, a clearing of a throat, and Len's face suddenly changes. He retreats to his chair at the kitchen table, and as if some calming wax has been spread over his features, his wild eyes sink inward, his agitated brow seals into a smooth surface, and with a quick motion he hides the knife beneath his shirt.
"You boys are up late," my father says, wandering in his old bathrobe into the kitchen, going to the sink for a glass of water. Maybe my father's seen the knife, but he doesn't let on. I think he tells himself he hasn't seen it.
Since my mother's death a year ago, he wears an eternally fragile, bewildered expression. He sleeps poorly, in his tattered bathrobe moves about the house like a ghost, checking doors and windows in the night. Lately, for the first time I can remember, he seems troubled by his Korean War experiences. He never talked about the war when we were growing up, and even now he says little, but sometimes he gets a far away look. A couple of mornings ago he stood at the sliding glass door, looking at our large, well-cared for backyard, and he said to himself, quite clearly and distinctly, continuing an interior conversation, "He's been dead all these years. He never had a chance."
I joined him at the glass door and asked him whom he was referring to. My father didn't start a family until he was older than usual, and even when we were kids, he kept his distance in a detached, kindly sort of way. But he likes being asked questions, and he always responds politely, even generously.
"Bill Richards," he said. "One of my friends in Korea." He took off his glasses and rubbed at his tired eyes. "Not my best friend. But a good friend. A sweet guy. Not a mean bone in his body. Nineteen when he got killed. I woke up thinking about him. I've been alive all this time and he never had a chance. He was just getting started." He made a kind of waving gesture out at the backyard, as if to indicate all the things in life that Bill Richards never got to experience.
He put his glasses back on. "When did that get so dirty?" he asked. His eyes had focused on the birdbath near the patio. "When did the birds decide to poop all over that?"
My father's become more philosophical and introspective since my mother died. He goes to daily Mass, and I go with him sometimes. He likes the 6:30 dawn special. The priest doesn't fart around at that hour; he gets the crew in and out in thirty minutes. Everybody there beside me is old, and they look beat up. With stiff hips they hobble up for communion. But I admire them. They endure. They go on.
My father sits down with us at the kitchen table, pulling up a chair between Len and me. "What were you talking about?"
Len pinches his lips shut. He clams up around my father. Afraid he'll give away his secret. That he's losing it again. My father's always the one who ends up signing the hospital papers.
"We were talking about the frontier days," I tell my father. "The Comanches."
"Oh," my father says. "That sure was a long time ago. Do you boys remember when this house was first built, all the mud instead of grass?"
"It wasn't so long ago, Dad," Len says with a quaver in his voice. "It wasn't so long ago. Do we have to pretend it never happened? Do we have to ignore the dead Indian on the table?"
My father blinks and squints at the table as if looking for the dead Indian, and Len's hand reaches out to clutch my father's robe near his throat. My father's pale, skinny chest seems to pulse. Len stares in wonder at the robe, running the fabric between his fingers. "That's the most beautiful robe I've ever seen, Dad."
My father chuckles. "This old thing?" But he sounds faintly pleased by the compliment.
Len's eyes mist over. "You're a beautiful man, Dad. You break my heart. You're Saint Francis of Assissi. I just want to take you in my arms and hold you."
My father draws his robe tighter about him, easing away from Len. "Say, let's have some pie," he says. "As long as we're up."
"That's a great idea, Dad." I follow him to the refrigerator. "Dad," I whisper, "I told you so. Len's having an episode."
My father leans in and out of the fridge and hands me an aluminum dish with some congealed peach pie in it. "Should we have some ice cream, too? Do you want to get some bowls, Kenneth?"
As my father ladles ice cream over the wedges of pie, Len's poised at the table. Listening. Watching us. Prepared to bolt.
We bring the bowls back to the table and my father sits between Len and me. "Didn't your mother have something about the Comanches in her roots stuff?" my father asks. "She used to love that old stuff, but I could never get very worked up about it. I wish I'd paid more attention to it now, for her sake."
"You're damn right she had stuff about the Comanches," Len says, his voice cracking with righteous indignation. "You're damn right she did! They came howling out of the hills, dragged Uncle Ira into the night, cut off his balls and staked him out on the plains."
My father swallows a big lump of pie. "My God," he says, "I never knew that."
"You had to read between the lines. They killed his wife and made off with his son. Uncle Ira survived. But he went crazy. He rode after them, became a vigilante. He did terrible things. Burned their villages. Killed women and children. He became a horror even to himself."
My father stares into space, holding his spoon in mid-air. Then he says, a little sadly, "Well, it was all a long time ago, Len."
"By the time they found the boy, nobody recognized him. Even his own father, Uncle Ira. The boy didn't know where he belonged anymore. He had a raccoon for a pet, but it got rabies and died. Uncle Ira disappeared in the Gold Rush. The boy became an outlaw, then a sheriff, or he was a sheriff and then an outlaw. Mother wasn't clear about that. She always wanted a happy ending. Finally he just disappeared too. You could read between the lines."
We look at Len and we realize there are tears splashed on his cheeks. My father touches Len's hand. "You miss your mother. I've been missing her too. All that roots stuff. It makes you think of her."
Len springs back from his touch, then smashes his fist down on the table. "Are you both out of your minds?" he screams at us. "Don't you understand anything I've been trying to tell you? Stop pretending you don't know what happened here!"
"My God, Len, easy, son," my father says. He reaches out to embrace Len, but Len shouts, "I will not abide it! This is an outrage! An outrage!"
He pushes my father away and ducks out the sliding glass door into the backyard. We follow him into the thick heat of a full moon's summer night in Texas. My father raises his hand to his mouth and bites at the flesh between his thumb and index finger. "Oh God, not again," he mutters. "Not again." He puts out his hand, tries to catch up with Len, who has retreated towards the flowerbed at the far side of the lawn.
"Watch it, Dad, Len's got a knife."
"He wouldn't hurt us. He doesn't have a mean bone in his body."
"We've got to get him to the hospital, Dad, before something happens."
"Len?" my father shouts across the lawn. "Len?" His voice sounds like something cracking in two.
Len strides back and forth on the far side of the lawn, near the flowerbed. We cross the yard, huge shadows floating before us.
"Wow!" he says happily. "Fireflies!" He grabs our shoulders like a school kid with his buddies. "Look at all the fireflies, you guys! Don't you love fireflies? God, I love fireflies!"
My father and I look around as Len points. "There! Over there! Do you remember putting them in jars, Kenneth? Putting them in jars in a dark room and they glowed?" He lightly punches my arm. "But you always made me let them go. You were so smart. You were so sensitive. God, I adore you. You're the best person I know. You are too, Dad. You're the best person I know. There's something sexy about you. I don't mean that in any weird sort of way."
My father rubs the side of his face, as if wondering if he's missed a shave. "I don't know why we don't have fireflies like we used to," he says. "We used to have fireflies all over the place, and we'd come out here, all of us, and your mother..."
Len chuckles as if listening to a child. "Don't be silly, Dad. We still have fireflies. Look at them! They're everywhere!"
My father and I stand in the warm, humid air; the yard looks much the same as always, the expanse of neat lawn, the flowerbed, the oak trees with their huge branches, the shrubs back by the alley, and the only thing amiss with the picture is that there aren't any fireflies. Not a one. If I were to paint the scene, I would have to imagine the fireflies.
"Don't you see them? Don't you see them?" He steps between us and looks desperately at us, as if we're playing a trick on him. "Are you guys blind?"
"Len," my father says heavily. He frowns down at his feet, his next words seeming to leak out of his mouth one by one. "We've got to do something about this, son."
Len recoils from us, making a cross with his fingers as if warding off a vampire. His shadow lengthens. As he whirls around to run, he stumbles and it gives me time to catch him. I try to tackle him, but he's twice as strong. He sends me flying. My father takes hold of his arm, but Len throws him to the ground. He pins my father's chest with his tennis-shoed foot. The knife comes out from underneath his shirt and he bends and holds it to my father's throat. "Don't make me kill you," he says. "Just ride off."
I ease myself towards them, afraid to come too fast. Afraid to startle him. I find my voice cracking. "Please, Len, it's Dad. It's Dad, Len."
He looks up at me, as if through a mesh screen, in the full moonlight blinking to get me in focus. His eyes fill with tears and he shudders and drops the knife, and I move in quickly to take it away and throw it up on the patio. He embraces my father, wedging his hands under my father's armpits and pulling him into a sitting position. "I'm sorry, Daddy. I'm sorry," he weeps. "Help me, Daddy. God help me."
"I will, son. I will." He cradles Len's head. "My sweet boy..."
"I can work through this, Daddy. Everything will be fine. You'll see. I'm playing golf in the morning. Just like old times. Like normal."
My father shakes his head, his voice coming out in a moan. "It's not normal, Len. Nothing's normal right now."
Len grips my father's arms, his blunt fingers digging into the flesh, his eyes wide and frightened. "I won't make it home this time, Daddy." He hangs his head. "Don't leave me there. Don't forget me."
My father's voice grows stronger. "We'll never forget you, Len. We'll make it home. I promise."
"I won't go back." He shoves my father away, and my father rocks back in the blue shadowed grass, thin pale legs beneath his bathrobe swinging up in the air like a rising see-saw.
I dive at Len, but he breaks for it. At the far side of the lawn, he springs nimbly over the chain-link fence into Mr. Robinson's backyard. My father sits up with a start, as if an alarm clock has blared in his ear. "The Doberman!" he cries.
Mr. Robinson's automatic floodlights click on and illuminate his yard. I help my father up and we hurry after Len to the fence, in time to see the Doberman, old Jeeter, eighteen now, go into his Hound of the Baskervilles' act. With the guttural snarl of an enraged drillmaster, he staggers stiff-legged across his turf. He's a horrid looking thing, one-eyed, with scabby patches of orange-tinted medicated fur. The old dinosaur moves on memory. One last glorious mission. One last neighborhood ass to chew.
As old Jeeter bares his teeth and hunches his shoulders to leap at Len, Len gives an ear splitting karate cry, reminscent of a man being skewered alive, and launches a sidekick at Jeeter's head. He misses, but Jeeter yelps in fear. Tangling his legs in the retreat, Jeeter rolls like a flipped wrestler, but rage gives him youth and he springs back at Len, who yells, "Yow!" and breaks for the trampoline. He jumps up on it, and Jeeter yaps proudly as Mr. Robinson, in his bathrobe, perennial drink in hand, comes out on the flagstone patio. He observes Len bounce up and down on the trampoline, and he gives my father and me a friendly wave.
"Hoo boy," Mr. Robinson says with a chuckle. "Calm down, Jeeter, you old asshole. Don't give yourself a stroke."
Jeeter stops yapping, but he patrols the perimeter of the trampoline while Len bounds up and down, going higher and higher. "Hi there, Mr. Robinson," Len calls from mid-air.
"Howdy, Len. You know, I don't know if that old tramp will hold you any more. Mostly just the grandkids use it now." He pauses, cracks ice between his teeth. "Little guys."
Len tucks, lands on his butt, bounces back to his feet. "Feels okay."
Mr. Robinson chuckles. He's got a way of cracking ice in his teeth and talking at the same time. "Glad to know it's held up. It just sits out in the rain. I think the kids oil the springs sometimes when they're in town."
"Hey there, John," my father calls. We lean over the chain-link fence and wave at Mr. Robinson.
"Hey there, Tom, Kenneth." While Jeeter stands guard over Len, Mr. Robinson joins us at the fence. His bathrobe, a thick, creamy beige, is in much better shape than my father's. He's a bullish looking man of seventy-two, with thick white calves beneath the robe.
My father clears his throat. "I'm mighty sorry to disturb you, John. We've got a kind of situation going on with Len again."
Mr. Robinson swings his head around to study Len bouncing high on the tramp, legs spread-eagled at the top of his flight. "I suspected that, Tom. Well, Len's welcome to bounce all night if it helps. Anything I can do?"
My father sighs. "Thank you, John. We're mighty obliged. He'll calm down and then we'll drive him to the hospital. He'll be ready to go."
"Come on over. Old Jeeter won't bite you. This has really sparked him up. He hasn't chased one of your boys in years."
I start to climb the fence and Mr. Robinson chuckles and cracks ice in his teeth. "You can use the gate now, Ken."
We go out our side gate and through Mr. Robinson's into his yard and we shake hands. His big hand engulfs mine and I feel my knuckles pop a little when he squeezes.
"How's Annie, John?" my father asks.
Mr. Robinson gets a tight sound in his throat. "Not so good, Tom. Not so good."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
He shrugs, the collar of his bathrobe shifting a little around his broad neck. "You know the score, Tom. You fellas want a drink?"
"No thanks, John. We'll just wait here."
"I'm going to check on Annie. She's restless tonight."
Mr. Robinson goes inside to check on his wife. I eye old Jeeter, but he looks nervous to be left alone with us. He retreats to the patio and hides under the swinging bench.
"Look at this!" Len calls. He bounces high and turns a flip, landing neatly on his feet.
"My God, Len, don't do that," my father says. "Do you want to hurt yourself?"
"I'm good," Len says. "Aren't I good?"
"Sure. But you don't need too prove anything."
"Drumroll please." He launches another flip. He stumbles as he lands, running forward a couple of steps, but stopping before he falls. "Tuh dah!" He holds his arms aloft, the Olympic winner on display.
Mr. Robinson appears with a fresh drink. "Len, you're going to give my insurance agent a fit."
Len talks to my father as he bounces. "How come you didn't give me gymnastics lessons when I was a kid? I could have amounted to something."
"I didn't know you wanted gymnastics classes."
"I did, but I just didn't know it back then."
"Would you like to come down and have a scotch, Len?" Mr. Robinson asks. "Or maybe some milk? Buttermilk? Maybe we got some old buttermilk around here, in a jar someplace. I fancy a nice cold drink of buttermilk now and then myself..." He frowns at his glass, jostles the liquid around a little and murmurs, "Though this works in a pinch."
"I could have been a flying Wallenda!" The springs creak in the old trampoline as Len flies higher and higher. He pulls his knees up, tucks his head to flip.
"No, Len!" my father cries.
He doesn't get all the way around, but crashes on his neck and shoulder. He lets out a moan and curls into a ball.
"Len!" Dad shouts. "Are you hurt, son?"
"Aw hell, Tom, you're going to clean me out," Mr. Robinson says with profound resignation. "I'll call my insurance agent. There goes the boat." He sighs, shakes the ice in his glass around. "Shit. I wanted to leave something to the kids."
I jump on the trampoline to help Len, but he rolls over the springs to the ground. Clutching his neck like a man waking up with a terrific charley-horse, he lurches over the lawn, falls into the swimming pool, and sinks straight to the bottom.
I do a moon-walk to the other side of the tramp and jump hard to the ground, falling and skinning my knees. As I pull my T-shirt over my head, my father pinches my arms with skinny strong fingers. "Don't! He'll drag you down!" He kneels on the edge of the pool and puts his face near the water and shouts, "Get up here right now, Len! I mean it!"
"I've got a long pole here someplace," Mr. Robinson says. "A cleaning net. I think I can hook him."
I jump in, feet first. When I sink down to the bottom, I see Len doing a kind of underwater ballet act. In a bluish light, he pirouettes, spreads his arms, operatic, Romeo beckoning to Juliet. His hair's blown back in the water. When he sees me, his eyes widen as if a fearsome creature has swum into God's glorious lagoon. He slugs me in the jaw and leaps on me. A long pole pokes into the back of my neck and a net wraps around my face. Len gets me in a headlock and kicks us toward the surface. He's seventeen again. A lifeguard once more. The best in the neighborhood. The best everything.
He drags me out and throws me on the tiles bordering the pool. He frees my face from the cleaning net, begins to administer CPR, but then jumps back in horror. His finger traces the long scar on my chest from my heart surgery when I was a child.
"They cut his heart out!" he shrieks.
As Len runs for the street side of the corner lot, Jeeter streaks out from under the swinging bench like a torpedo released from its chute. Len's a step ahead as he hits the fence. He leaps to hurdle it and howls as he lands. He's caught on the fence, straddling it, while Jeeter gnaws at his jeans. Len topples free and limps into the night, running beneath the full moon, a crazed scout turned loose on the neighborhood.
Mr. Robinson holds his cleaning net like a lance. "Well, this has been a hell of a night," he says.
He leads us to the gate. Old Jeeter struts behind. He growls low in his throat, gives me a last malevolent glare. Next time, punk, he warns. Next time.
Mr. Robinson shakes my father's hand. "Good luck, Tom. Come back for a drink sometime. Don't be a stranger, Ken."
An apparition appears on the lawn. A woman all in white, aglow in the moonlight.
"Are the boys home?" a trembling voice calls. "Is it the boys?" She opens her arms to us, her white nightgown full of billowy loose folds.
"Oh hell," Mr. Robinson mutters. "Go inside, Annie," he calls. "Go inside." He gives me a sudden, forceful hug, drawing me into a thick neck scented with aftershave. "Go find him, Kenneth. Find him!"
He turns to comfort his wife. She's on her knees, sobbing near the trampoline, and he lifts her gently under the arms and leads her inside.
We back my father's sedan out of the garage. I drive in my wet clothes, and my father pulls his bathrobe tighter about his throat.
We prowl the neighborhood. It's a nicely established neighborhood now, new when I was growing up, a mix of ranch and two-story brick houses. One house up the block has white columns in front, but it has always stood out as pretentious.
We catch glimpses of Len hiding behind trees, darting down alleyways. Our headlights zoom in on him as he crouches behind some trash cans. He shields his eyes with his arm, then runs.
He crosses Bandera Road into a rough part of town. Shotgun homes. Peeling paint. Broken machinery in the yards. The oaks and willows press hard to the road, branches untrimmed, and our lights sweep into the shrubbery alongside the houses, probe into the secret places.
A new brick apartment building has gone up. It has a gentrified look, an attempt to reclaim this part of town. But a keg party's underway on the balustrade and revelers spill in and out of open doorways.
My father adjusts the flaps of his robe over his thighs. "When did this all happen?" he asks. "When did it all happen?"
Our headlights catch up with Len as he races across a weedy, vacant lot. Deer-like, he freezes a moment before sprinting off again, and for a moment I feel like I enter his world. One oak ahead in the distance. A lone runner on the prairie, arms raised to take an arrow in the back, the hooves of the horses pounding after him.

Past Winner: Robert Garner McBrearty

2007-09-17T17:02:31Z

Writer Robert Garner McBrearty of Louisville, Colorado, is the 2007 winner of the annual $15,000 Sherwood Anderson Writer's Grant, Michael M. Spear, co-president of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, has announced.

"Of the many fiction entries to the Writer's Grant competition this year, we think McBrearty's writing is especially noteworthy for its blend of humor and pathos, and brings to American fiction many of the same strengths of Sherwood Anderson's writing," Spear said.

McBrearty, a native of San Antonio, Texas, and a 1981 MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, submitted three short stories from a book he is working on titled, The Bike, Teach Us, and Episode. The latter is the title of the book. Some stories from the new collection in-progress have already been published in the North American Review, StoryQuarterly, and Narrative Magazine.

McBrearty won the Pushcart Prize in 1983 and has received three subsequent nominations for that prize.

McBrearty's first collection, A Night at the Y, received glowing reviews from Publisher's Weekly and the Chicago Tribune, which called it a "warm and engaging collection."

McBrearty called the writer's award a reaffirmation of his work. "It will serve as an inspiration for my future work," he said. He teaches writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

You can see more of his work at his website http://www.robertgarnermcbrearty.com/.

Since the Sherwood Anderson Foundation started helping struggling writers in 1988, it has given more than $150,000 in grants, Spear said.

Among former Writer's Grant winners who have received significant recognition in recent years are Randall Kenan, Ron Rash, Jacob Appel and Karen Fisher, Spear said.

For more about the foundation and the grant competition, visit this web site: sherwoodandersonfoundation.org

Foundation History

2006-07-16T16:02:50Z

In the mid-1980s, first- and second-generation members of Sherwood Anderson's family decided to use royalties from Sherwood Anderson's books to help writers. It was an obvious decision that followed a course that Anderson himself took during his lifetime. In order to do this, the family established the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, a non-profit trust.
Anderson helped both William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway get published when they were getting started. Faulkner reportedly asked Anderson to read his manuscript and Anderson replied, "Look, I'll send it to my publisher, as long as I don't have to read it." Joke or not, he knew talent when he saw it and wasted no time supporting it. It should be mentioned that both writers later parodied Anderson's work -- Faulkner with Mosquitoes and Hemingway with Torrents of Spring. Faulkner and Anderson were later reconciled.

Anderson continues to incur writer and reader interest. An August 1998 issue of Newsweek, in commenting on the recent list of the 100 best 20th Century novels in English, called the short stories that make up Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (listed 24th) "our own favorite neglected masterpieces." Well-known writers when asked to lend their support to the foundation readily did so. Norman Mailer wrote back immediately, saying: "I would not hesitate to support something that was connected with Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg Ohio was one of the most important books in my developing life." Studs Turkel said something similar, and so it went.

The founding members of the foundation were Anderson's daughter Marion Anderson Spear, first secretary-treasurer; and grandchildren Michael M. Spear, first president; David M. Spear, first vice president; and trustees Karlyn Spear Shankland, Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret Anderson Stuart. Charles Modlin and Hilbert Campbell, scholars at Virginia Tech at the time, also lent early support to the effort.

The foundation has been giving grants and scholarships to developing writers since 1988. Deadline for grant applications is April 1 of each year. If you would like to be considered for a grant, see How to Compete.

The Sherwood Anderson Foundation, a non-profit trust, accepts contributions to help fulfill its mission of supporting writers. Your donations are tax-deductible. Please send checks or inquiries to:

Sherwood Anderson Foundation
Anna McKean, President
12330 Ashton Mill Terrace
Glen Allen, Va. 23059

If you have any questions about contributions, you should contact her at 804 249 3267 or by email: annaksmckean@gmail.com. The non-profit foundations's tax identification number is 58-1717970.

Other current foundation officials are Michael Spear, David Spear, Michael Abraham Anderson Spear, Karlyn Spear Shankland, Susie Spear Close, Elizabeth Anderson, Linda Hobson, and Robert Jolly.

Honorary trustees include W.D.Taylor, Kim Townsend, Paul Shankland and Tippe Spear Miller.

Sherwood Anderson Foundation Grant Writing Winners

2006-07-15T20:06:17Z

Valerie S. Golightly (1988)

An undergraduate student enrolled at the University of Richmond.

King Andrews (1989)

An undergraduate student enrolled at N.C. State University.

Gillian Kim Ashley (1990)

An undergraduate student enrolled at East Carolina University, and Pamela Johnson, an undergraduate student enrolled at Methodist College.

Karen Coats (1991)

A graduate student enrolled at Virginia Tech.

Patricia Snell (1992)

An undergraduate student enrolled at George Mason University.

Dawn Radford (1993)

A graduate student enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Debra Allbery Gildea (1994)

A graduate student at the University of Virginia who published a book of her poems Walking Distance in 1991.

Randall Kenan (1995)

A lecturer at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College who has published two books A Visitation of Spirit and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead.

Ron Rash (1996)

A lecturer at Tri-County Tech, a two-year college in Pendleton, S.C., who published a book of short stories The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth in 1994. He has also published a number of poems in magazines around the country.

Gail Pollock (1997)

A resident of Trinidad, Colo., she is working on a screenplay for Kit Brandon, Sherwood Anderson's novel, published in 1936, about the bootleg industry in the South during Prohibition. Pollock has had extensive experience as a film editor in New York and has been involved in the production of numerous features and documentaries.

Kamil Turowski (1998)

A native of Poland and a resident of Athens, Ohio, who has produced a film adaptation of Nobody Knows, a story in the Anderson book Winesburg, Ohio. Turowski hopes to adapt more of the Winesburg stories to film.

Tammy Greenwood (1999)

A native of Vermont, currently lives in San Diego, Calif., where she works part-time for a computer software company. Her first novel Breathing Water was published in May by St. Martin's Press. She is currently working on a second novel.

Paola Corso (2000)

A native of the Pittsburgh area, currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Michael, and son, Giona. Corso teaches creative writing at Fordham University and has written a story collection, Giovanna's 86 Circles, and two novels, The River in Me and San Procopio.

Doug Crandell (2001)

A grant writer and instructor of poetry and literature in a community mental health program in Georgia, is the author of numerous poems and short stories, including "If He Is a Slave."

Joseph Bathanti (2002)

An associate professor of creative writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C, has written most recently the novel, East Liberty, winner of the 2001 Carolina Novel Award. He is also the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which, This Metal, was nominated for the National Book Award.

Peggy Payne (2003)

Is author of Sister India, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and of a second novel Revelation, as well as co-author of The Healing Power of Doing Good, a Literary Guild selection. A resident of Apex, North Carolina, she has published articles, reviews, or essays in magazines including Ms., Family Circle, Cosmopolitan, Travel & Leisure, and has published in most of the major American newspapers. She offers consulting services to other writers on manuscripts and marketing through peggypayne.com.

Mary Beth Caschetta (2004)

Lives in Massachusetts, where she is finishing her first novel. She is the author of Lucy on the West Coast (Alyson Publications, 1996) Interrelated stories from her new collection, What's Not My Fault? have appeared in the Missississippi Review, the Red Rock Review, Bloom Magazine, and Blithe House Quarterly. A recipient of several writing awards, including the W.K. Rose Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2000), Ms. Caschetta makes her living as a copywriter in medical advertising and communications. She has been an adjunct instructor at Fordham University, Vassar College, and New York University.

Jacob M. Appel (2005)

Jacob lives in New York City. His short fiction has appeared in Agni, Colorado Review, Florida Review, Raritan, Southwest Review, Story Quarterly and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at New York University, and teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York City. His website is: http://jacobmappel.com.

Karen Fisher (2006)

Fisher writes and raises children, trains horses, and builds houses with her husband on Lopez Island, Washington. Her debut novel, A Sudden Country, in addition to winning the Sherwood Anderson Writer's Grant, was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award. It won the 2006 Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Best Fiction Award and the 2006 Virginia Commonwealth University's First Novel Award.

Robert Garner McBrearty (2007)

Robert Garner McBrearty lives in Louisville, Colorado, with his wife and two children. His short stories have appeared in major literary publications including The Pushcart Prize, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, and New England Review. His first book of shorts stories, A Night at the Y, received glowing reviews from Publisher's Weekly and the Chicago Tribune, which called it a "warm and engaging collection." His new collection of stories-in-progress is called Episode and includes a story by that title, previously published in North American Review, and "Teach Us, " which first appeared in Narrative Magazine. Those stories were included in his entry for the Anderson Award. Other stories from the new collection were first published in StoryQuarterly and Green Hills Literary Lantern. McBrearty teaches writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. You can see more of his work at his website http://www.robertgarnermcbrearty.com/.

Nelly Rosario (2008)

Nelly Rosario (2008) Nelly Rosario was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BS in engineering from MIT and an MFA from Columbia University. She has received numerous awards, including a 1999 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Fellowship, two National Arts Club Writing Fellowships, and a Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction. She was named "Writer on the Verge" by the Village Voice Literary Supplement in 2001. Her debut novel Song of the Water Saints won a PEN Open Book Award in 2002. Currently she teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe (2009)

Lucy Jane Bledsoe lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her fiction has won an Arts & Letters First Prize for Fiction, a California Arts Council Individual Fellowship, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships, a Helene Wurlitzer Fellowship, and has been translated into Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Dutch. Bledsoe's newest novel, The Big Bang Symphony: a novel of Antarctica, will be out in Spring 2010.

Tracy Winn (2010)

Tracy Winn's debut collection of linked short stories, Mrs. Somebody Somebody: stories was published by Southern Methodist University Press in 2009 and as a Reader's Circle Selection from Random House Trade paperbacks in 2010. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony and the MacDowell Colony, among others, Tracy works with Gaining Ground, a non-profit farm that grows and gives away all of its fresh produce for hunger relief.

William Lychack (2011)

William Lychack's story collection The Architect of Flowers (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) limits the subject matter in each work so that the narrator can look closely at what he has mapped out and thereby open up his subject almost fully to the reader--reserving some mystery to himself, nevertheless. The reader's perception of that mystery is significant and part of the fun; thus, Lychack gives us fine writing and necessary, important writing at once. He was the Writer-in-Residence from 2006 to 2010 at Phillips Academy, and is currently a member of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Katherine Min (2012)

Katherine Min 2012 Katherine Min's first novel Secondhand World was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2006, and was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Award. She has received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA grant, and fellowships from the North Carolina and New Hampshire Arts Councils. Min's stories have been widely published and anthologized. She is currently at work on her second novel, The Fetishist.

Past Winner : Jacob Appel

2006-07-15T17:51:41Z

The 2005 winner of the annual $15,000 Sherwood Anderson Writer's Grant is Jacob Appel of New York City, Michael M. Spear, co-president of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, has announced.

"Of the more than 40 fiction entries to the Writer's Grant competition this year, we think Appel's short stories “The Frying Finn”, “Measures of Sorrow” and “The Ataturk of the Outer Boroughs” best illustrate the thoughtful, quirky simplicity and the economy of effect that Anderson himself used in his "Winesburg, Ohio" stories," Spear said.

Appel has published regularly in the last half dozen years in publications that range from medical and law to literary reviews. He is the 17th recipient of the annual grant, which the foundation began awarding to emerging writers in 1988.

"The award will give me a momentary reprieve from the tasks of breadwinning and an opportunity to concentrate fulltime on my writing," Appel said. "I am currently working on a novel set on the barrier islands off Florida's Gulf Coast, also the setting of many of my short stories. When this project finally comes to fruition, it will owe a great debt of gratitude to the Sherwood Anderson Foundation for its generosity."

In making the award each year, the foundation is carrying on a tradition started by Anderson in the last century when he helped, both William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway get published initially, Spear said.

Appel teaches a course at Columbia University titled "Challenges in Bioethics," and a course at Brown University titled "Medicine, Law and Morality."

Among former Writer's Grant winners who have received significant recognition in recent years are Randall Kenan and Ron Rash, Spear said.

The Sherwood Anderson Review

2006-07-15T17:21:44Z

The Sherwood Anderson Review, now archived, was an expanded version of The Winesburg Eagle, which began publication in November 1975, edited by Professor Welford D. Taylor at the University of Richmond. Its appearance coincided with events in 1976 that observed the centenary of Anderson's birth. The announced purpose of The Eagle was "to help further Anderson scholarship and to broaden interest in the man and his work."

In 1987, the editing of the Eagle was assumed by Professors Charles E. Modlin and Hilbert H. Campbell at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. They have since retired and Modlin has since died. The Review continued into the 1990s in much the same manner as the Eagle with semi-annual (winter and summer) issues containing critical and biographical essays relating to Anderson and his circle, newly edited texts, book reviews, photographs and art work, an annual Anderson bibliography, and coverage of the activities of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation and other organizations relating to Anderson.

The Review is available from the list to your right.

Sherwood Anderson's Major Books

2006-07-14T17:09:08Z

Windy McPherson's Son (1916)
In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud of the fact.

Marching Men (1917)
It is evening and the people of Chicago go home from work. Clatter, clatter, clatter, go the heels on the hard pavements, jaws wag, the wind blows and dirt drifts and sifts through the masses of the people. Every one has dirty ears. The stench in the street cars is horrible. The antiquated bridges over the rivers are packed with people. The suburban trains going away south and west are cheaply constructed and dangerous. A people calling itself great and living in a city also called great go to their houses a mere disorderly mass of humans cheaply equipped. Everything is cheap. When the people get home to their houses they sit on cheap chairs before cheap tables and eat cheap food.

Mid-American Chants (1918)
Originally published in 1918, Mid-American Chants is Sherwood Anderson's first book of poems. Undeniably influenced by Walt Whitman, Anderson seeks in this collection to sing of the "heart" (geographically) of the United States, and to sing of the rising age of industrialism. The lines are long, and the rhythms almost prosiac; in fact, some view these poems as prototypical American prose poems.

Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the center is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's solitary figures. Anderson's stories influenced countless American writers including Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Oates and Carver. This new edition corrects errors made in earlier editions and takes into account major criticism and textual scholarship of the last several decades.

Poor White (1920)
"Hugh arose and stood in the moonlight in the cabbage field, his arms still going stiffly up and down. The great length of his figure and his arms was accentuated by the wavering uncertain light. The laborers, aware of some strange presence, sprang to their feet and stood listening and looking. Hugh advanced toward them, still muttering words and waving his arms. Terror took hold of the workers. One of the woman plant droppers screamed and ran away across the field, and the others ran crying at her heels. 'Don't do it. Go away,' the older of the French boys shouted, and then he with his brothers also ran."

The Triumph of the Egg (1921)
Anderson's, whose prose style, derived from everyday speech, influenced American short story writing between World Wars I and II. He directed the American short story away from the neatly plotted tales of O. Henry and his imitators. The stories in The Triumph of the Egg are characterized by a casual development, complexity of motivation, and an interest in psychological process. Anderson also made his name as a leading naturalistic writer with his masterwork, Winesburg, Ohio, a picture of life in a typical small Midwestern town, as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants.

Horses and Men (1923)

Many Marriages (1923)

A Story Teller's Story (1924)
A Story Teller's Story is Anderson's own tale of an American writer's journey through his own imaginative world and through the world of facts, with many of his experiences and impressions among other writers-told in many notes-in four books and an Epilogue.

Dark Laughter (1925)

Modern Writer (1925)

Sherwood Anderson's Notebook (1926)

Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926)

A New Testament (1927)

Alice and the Lost Novel (1929)

Hello Towns! (1929)

Nearer the Grass Roots (1929)

The American County Fair (1930)

Perhaps Women (1931)

Beyond Desire (1932)

Death in the Woods (1933)
Still fresh and strikingly contemporary, the stark realism of these stories carefully explores the dreams and emotions of Sherwood Anderson's unforgettable characters. In Death in the Woods, we travel deep into the heart of America as Anderson saw it, to find an introspective man, in a desolate landscape, questioning the very meaning of his world. "Death in the Woods is a signal junction in Anderson's career and is to my mind one of the finest stories in our language," (writes Jim Harrison.)

No Swank (1934)

Puzzled America (1935)

Kit Brandon (1936)

Plays, Winesburg and Others (1937)

Hometown (1940)

Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942)

Sherwood Anderson Foundation

Katherine Min

Past Winner: William Lychack

Past Winner: Tracy Winn

Images

Sherwood Anderson, A Brief Biography 1876-1941

Past Winner: Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Past Winner: Nelly Rosario

Robert Garner McBrearty - Biography

Episode By Robert Garner McBrearty

Past Winner: Robert Garner McBrearty

Foundation History

Sherwood Anderson Foundation Grant Writing Winners

Valerie S. Golightly (1988)

King Andrews (1989)

Gillian Kim Ashley (1990)

Karen Coats (1991)

Patricia Snell (1992)

Dawn Radford (1993)

Debra Allbery Gildea (1994)

Randall Kenan (1995)

Ron Rash (1996)

Gail Pollock (1997)

Kamil Turowski (1998)

Tammy Greenwood (1999)

Paola Corso (2000)

Doug Crandell (2001)

Joseph Bathanti (2002)

Peggy Payne (2003)

Mary Beth Caschetta (2004)

Jacob M. Appel (2005)

Karen Fisher (2006)

Robert Garner McBrearty (2007)

Nelly Rosario (2008)

Lucy Jane Bledsoe (2009)

Tracy Winn (2010)

William Lychack (2011)

Katherine Min (2012)

Past Winner : Jacob Appel

The Sherwood Anderson Review

Sherwood Anderson's Major Books

Windy McPherson's Son (1916)

Marching Men (1917)

Mid-American Chants (1918)

Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Poor White (1920)

The Triumph of the Egg (1921)

Horses and Men (1923)

Many Marriages (1923)

A Story Teller's Story (1924)

Dark Laughter (1925)

Modern Writer (1925)

Sherwood Anderson's Notebook (1926)

Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926)

A New Testament (1927)

Alice and the Lost Novel (1929)

Hello Towns! (1929)

Nearer the Grass Roots (1929)

The American County Fair (1930)

Perhaps Women (1931)

Beyond Desire (1932)

Death in the Woods (1933)

No Swank (1934)

Puzzled America (1935)

Kit Brandon (1936)

Plays, Winesburg and Others (1937)

Hometown (1940)

Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942)