Yes, Virginia, Adjuncts Do Win Guggenheims

by Chris Cumo

Andre Dubus III

The genes for prose run deep in the Dubus family. Like his father, Andre Dubus III writes award-winning fiction. His novel House of Sand and Fog (Norton,1999) was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction in 1999. The next year Oprah Winfrey made it an Oprah Book Club selection, praised it as her “favorite read this year,” and had him on her show. His first two novels sold 10,000 copies combined. House of Sand and Fog has nearly two million copies in print. He went from giving readings to ten or fifteen people to crowds of 500 The Boston Herald announced that “Andre Dubus III has hit pay dirt.”

“I was stunned,” Dubus admits. “It’s a strange experience. It’s a good strange, though. I’ll take it.”

This success is all the more striking for a man who majored in sociology in
college, read little fiction, and aspired to be an activist. He carried this
fervor to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was a Ph.D. candidate in Marxist social science. But he felt restless and petitioned for a year’s leave, during which he worked construction and trained for the Golden Gloves. At the time he was dating a woman who had a crush on a writer, and Dubus was jealous. One day he read one of his rival’s stories, only to discover beauty in what he had hoped to hate. He wrote a short story that summer, finding himself and his craft in the process.

“I was hooked,” he says. “It was kind of epiphanous.”

But celebrity did not come over night. He supported himself and his family as a carpenter, actor, private investigator, bartender, and bounty hunter. These jobs gave him mornings free to write and thrust him into the maelstrom of human experience, an immersion necessary for any writer. Now a lecturer in English at Tufts University, he can claim bourgeois respectability, though Dubus may be too much his own creation to find solace in a conventional life.

He recalls how he and his father got drunk together when Dubus was in high school.

“Drunk together, chasing women together, getting in bar fights together,” reminisces Dubus, “when fights were still something you could do without getting worried about getting shot six times.”

Although he denies any rivalry between the two, he has had to carve out a reputation in a field in which his father, who died in 1999, had already claimed the Dubus name. Andre Dubus II set the bar high, winning a MacArthur Foundation Grant, two Guggenheims, and two NEH grants. But his son never languished in shadow.

“My father had a very different vision than I do, and we could go on about
the dozens of ways that’s so,” he says. “But my larger point is that it’s dangerous to approach the creative act from a competitive spirit.”

Today he is too busy to dissipate energy in rivalry. He teaches as many as
four courses a term, grades more than 120 papers, sits on six thesis committees, and shepherds nineteen advisees through graduate school. Amid these demands, he and his brother, Jeb, are remodeling their sister’s house gratis. His wife and three children absorb him when he isn’t at work. He must squeeze writing into the interstices of life. The Guggenheim should give him space to write and couldn’t have come at a better time.

“It shocked the shit out of me,” admits Dubus. But he is not writing to top
House of Sand and Fog. “It’s very important not to try to beat your last
book, to try to write something better or just as good,” he says.

Dubus aims to write what naturally comes next, to discover his next novel in the act of writing it. Once cannot guide creativity; Dubus’s task is to let
his muse guide him. He admits, of course, that his celebrity leads people to expect a recrudescence of the style and characters they find in House of
Sand and Fog. After an apprenticeship of more than twenty years, he has
come to see the creation of a novel as almost beside the point. It is enough
for him to immerse himself in language. The act of writing is process rather than product. As grateful as he is to earn a living doing what he loves, he knows that the craft of writing fiction is its own reward.

Katherine Wentworth Rinn

Katherine Wentworth Rinne is a child of Los Angeles, a city with an insatiable thirst for water. She grew up with an intuitive understanding of water as central to urban development. This knowledge draws sustenance from a fascination with Rome, a city of fountains, baths, aqueducts, and the Tiber River. Rinne has a B.A. in English from UCLA and a Master’s in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and interests so broad that one struggles to classify her. Trained as an architect she admits to being an urban designer and urban historian, but she is too good a generalist to make these labels stick. She knows much about hydraulics, cartography, archaeology, topography, and gender studies. Best of all, she has been able to concentrate these talents, which might have spun off on their own from the centrifugal force that segments rather than unites disciplines, on a single project: an interactive, cartographic history
of how water has shaped Rome over nearly 3,000 years.

This project, published by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, has never given Rinne the staid life of a tenured professor, though she has taught architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture at several universities. This year she is a visiting assistant professor of architecture at Iowa State University. Along the way she has worked as a curatorial assistant, a park ranger, and an architect on archaeological digs in Sicily, Sardinia, and Rome. Her eclecticism, persistence, and diligence have paid dividends.

Rinne has won a Graham Foundation Grant, a Fulbright, an NEH fellowship, and now a Guggenheim for 2002. She won each of the last three on her second try, proof that no rejection is final. While on fellowship she hopes to spend eight months on research in Rome and the balance of the year writing a book, tentatively titled Water and Power in Baroque Rome. She will also continue to develop her Web site, http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/waters, which includes original 3-D maps, electronic reproductions of rare books, and an on-line journal for Roman water studies. She will also work with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative at Berkeley to create a GIS base map for Rome. At the moment, Rinne estimates that she has only some five percent of her data
on-line. What began as a year-long project in 1994 has blossomed into her life’s work.

She knows from experience how important it is to build a record of accomplishments in pursuit of a Guggenheim or any prestigious award and advises temporary faculty and independent scholars to begin small, perhaps with a grant from a regional institution or a lesser-known national organization. Craft a tight proposal, one that can be completed during the duration of the grant and that translates into publications, either a series of articles or a book. Demonstrate your fidelity to each grant by finishing the research you propose and publishing what you
promise. Get letters of recommendation from people who can describe your work and its importance in detail. A generic letter from a scholar, no matter how eminent, won’t help, believes Rinne.

Have the humility to learn from mistakes. After the NEH rejected her first
proposal, Rinne called a program administrator to learn what she could have done better. Their conversation helped her to write a stronger proposal the next year and to apply in the right category. Be willing to pare the superfluous from your life. If you can’t live without dining out four nights a week, Rinne notes, you may not be able to save enough money to supplement a grant or to do research in a spartan locale. Perhaps most important, believe in yourself and surround yourself with people who believe in you. She is grateful to friends who have let her live with them for six months when she had little income and who gave her their frequent flyer miles when she couldn’t afford a trip to Rome.
She is proof that one need not have a Ph.D., two books and a flotilla of articles, and tenure at an elite research university to win a Guggenheim. It is available to all scholars, even those who haven’t followed the well-trodden path.

Tom Franklin

Tom Franklin always knew he wanted to write. As a child he devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs’s series of twenty-four Tarzan books. He felt a connection with the jungle, the animals, and the primordial vigor of life and admits his first stories were rip-offs of Burroughs. A fast tale always enticed him, and he read all of Stephen King’s novels until Pet Semetary scared him away from King. The canon of Western literature didn’t beckon him, at least not right away, but even without Shakespeare as a guide, he came to understand that good fiction molds characters who are real, who are ambiguous in their shadings of good and evil, who are driven by desires even they don’t understand. He worked his way up to Steinbeck and Faulkner, and like Faulkner, is proud to be a Southern writer.

A native of Alabama, Franklin grew up amid men who found their tribal identity by hunting and fishing, and although he didn’t relish killing, he was good at it, bringing down the biggest deer in the family. Many of his stories are about men who carve out life from the primal earth. “Poachers,” the title story of his first collection (Morrow, 1999) tells of three brothers who raise themselves in the Alabama hinterland after their father’s suicide. They kill a game warden who harries them for not having a hunting license or the other trappings bureaucracy requires of us. A retired game warden exacts revenge, killing two of the brothers and blinding the third, who grows old in a South increasingly alien to him.

This new South is one Franklin knows too well. While an undergraduate at the University of South Alabama, he worked eighty-hour weeks in chemical plants and a sandblasting factory. This no-longer pristine South is the setting of his stories, a land both lush and toxic. His South has none of the antiquarian aura of pillars and patricians. He infuses his prose with too much passion for it tell of the staid life of Southern gentry. He writes every sentence as though it were his last, a lesson he learned from reading the fiction of Rick Bass, Barry Hannah, and Cormac McCarthy. Bass so moved Franklin that he drove 3,000 miles to meet him in Montana, only to discover that Bass had left for Utah. The two met there, and Franklin returned to Alabama convinced he had had an epiphany.

His craft draws sustenance from his wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly, who was Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before becoming an assistant professor at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. They spent their first year of marriage apart, a sacrifice neither liked, and when Fennelly went to Knox, Franklin followed in January, 2000, as an adjunct during the winter and spring quarters, making roughly half the pay of full-time faculty. The next year Knox elevated him to Visiting Writer-in-Residence, in which capacity he teaches three courses a year at full pay.

Nothing in his background prepared him for a Guggenheim, for which a previous winner nominated him.

“I never would have thought of applying,” says Franklin. “I thought I had no chance in hell of getting it.”

But he did, and now that he is on fellowship he aims to finish his novel, Hell at the Breach (forthcoming from Harper-Collins in 2003), which tells of a feud in southern Alabama, a story full of class conflict, of what Franklin calls “white-trash Marxism.” The manuscript already exceeds 600 pages, and he is struggling to impose order on the people and events that fill these pages. The novel consumes him to the point that he cannot see beyond it.

Franklin suspects he won a Guggenheim because three of his four referees had won the award, and all three Guggenheim winners are renowned writers. He urges temporary faculty and independent scholars thinking of applying to get letters from prestigious people. But prestige alone isn’t enough. They must know your work well enough to write in detail about it. Franklin’s other advice is just as sensible: be brave enough to take risks, invest yourself in your work, and do what you most cherish. This is good counsel, even for those of us who haven’t won a Guggenheim.

David Rivard

A Ph.D. candidate at one time in Princeton University’s anthropology department, David Rivard might have been a professor had he not quit to write poetry. This isn’t the decision one expects from the son of working-class parents, but his conversion to poetry had been long in gestation. A friend took him at age nineteen to hear W. S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich read poetry, and the experience encoded itself in his genes. He had discovered that language is music and that he could compose his own fugue from the fragments of everyday discourse. He found these
fragments all around him: in the seductive smile of a woman, the laughter of boys who intuit that life is play, the silence of fatigue that envelops a man who has lived the same threadbare routine too long.

He has written without pause for twenty years, many of them while a lecturer in English at Tufts University. He has published three books of verse. His first, Torque, won the University of Pittsburgh Press’s Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and his second, Wise Poison, published by Graywolf Press, won the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1996 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Graywolf Press also published his third collection, Bewitched Playground, in 2000. His poetry has garnered two NEA fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Massachusetts Arts Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Despite the demands of writing and teaching, Rivard has found time to edit the Harvard Review and to serve on the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center.

As successful as he has been, he holds no illusions about his craft. Capitalism, with its cadre of mechanical engineers and patent lawyers, needs few poets. This is a precarious time to write verse, he admits, for trade presses are publishing less of it even though the audience for poetry may be the largest in fifty years. But he is certain that poetry is as useful as molecular biology, though less glamorous. Every culture needs poets as much as architects and teachers, for poets articulate what matters most, to remind us of our shared experiences. So much in our culture deadens us, Rivard believes. Poetry’s value is to make the richness that is life apparent to all of us.

Rivard’s fidelity to poetry has now won him a Guggenheim. He applied in 1995 without success, and although some writers and scholars apply every year until they win or quit in frustration, Rivard feared the strategy would dilute his chances. Instead he waited until he had published his third book before reapplying, then lined up four recommenders who had themselves won Guggenheims. He admits that “the whole thing is shrouded in secrecy” and so cannot point to one factor that tipped the selection committee toward him. He knows, having been a Guggenheim recommender himself, that recommenders are free to rank their candidates and that gossip in literary circles has it that those below the top three on any recommender’s list have little chance of winning. He cautions writers and scholars against soliciting recommendations from people who are enthusiastic about their work but who can discuss it only in a generic way. For a recommendation to carry weight, it must discuss their work and its importance in detail.

He also warns Guggenheim hopefuls not to inflate their project proposal or to encumber it with jargon. He has reviewed enough grant applications to know the ruthlessness of selection committees in ferreting out applications full of sound and fury and little else.

As much as it may seem a cliché, Rivard views his winning a Guggenheim as “a watershed moment.” For the first time in two decades he is free from the lectern, free to write poetry that is a record of everyday life: poetry that need not swell with dramatic tension. The best poetry, he believes, is a record of one’s discourse with the world. This is the poetry that remains fresh for centuries. This is the poetry Rivard wants to write.