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Prized writer
A Tampa woman receives the O. Henry Prize, joining such literary giants as Faulkner and Updike.
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published October 11, 2005
 [Times photo: Chris Zuppa] Karen Brown, who is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of South Florida, poses for a portrait at her Tampa home.
EXCERPT FROM "UNCTION'
The main character in Karen Brown's O. Henry Prize story, Unction, pregnant 17-year-old Lily, is working a boring summer job with a group of other young people. In this excerpt, she finds a way to make it more interesting.
***
The notes came first. They were Lily's idea, grown out of the impossible state of her body, its languidness, its inconceivable separate heartbeat. It had been late afternoon. She had been asleep, and it began to rain. The rain on the shop roof was like something rising and building to a heightened pitch, the sound of it hollow and metallic. It woke her, and its thrumming made her lonely. She felt slighted by the condition of her body, as if it no longer had any other use than the one that now occupied it without her permission. She came around from the back of the rows of shelving and found Jamie with his cigarette at the counter. He gave her a look and then glanced over at Geri, moping on one of the ladders, her fingers flaying her hair.
I like that big head of hair, he said. I want to put my hands in it.
Lily tore a piece of the computer printout. She wrote this down with one of the pencils, in cursive script. Put it in a bin on her list, she said.
Add something else, he told her, grinning.
Lily wrote what she believed Jamie would want from Geri, what he wanted to do to her. I can't keep this a secret, she wrote. I am overcome with lust.
Jamie stubbed out his cigarette. He looked over Geri's abandoned list, and took off down the aisles. She didn't find the note at first. They watched her, waiting. They went off with their own lists, keeping an eye on her. Lily climbed to the top of a ladder and found the heat had collected there. She took the bin down to the floor and spent the afternoon counting and losing track and recounting three hundred and twenty feeder nuts, finally placing them in piles of twenty-five on the brick floor. At the end of the day lining up to punch out, they noticed Geri's face, flushed, distracted. Tendrils of her hair stuck to her forehead. She said nothing about a note. But Lily saw her eyes take in the fine sheen on Orlando's dark skin, the way Matthew's pants had slid down on his hips. She saw them sweep across the broad space between Jamie's shoulder blades. Lily saw her wonder what his back looked like without his shirt. In her eyes was lit a kind of startled heat.
The notes, unsigned, unmentioned, would become the mystery that kept them searching in the bins of parts.
TAMPA - When Karen Brown's short story Unction was published in the literary journal Georgia Review in 2004, she thought no one noticed it.
But someone had: Unction has been selected for an O. Henry Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for North American short fiction. It will be published in May as one of 20 stories in the anthology O. Henry Prize Stories 2006.
That puts Brown in the company of such previous winners in the awards' 86-year history as John Updike, William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Munro.
"I was totally shocked," she says.
A Tampa resident for more than 20 years, Brown earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing in 2003 at the University of South Florida and is working on a Ph.D. in literature there. Unction was part of the collection of short stories that formed her thesis for the MFA.
Its main character, a lonely, pregnant teenager stuck in a Kafka-esque summer job, finds a way to create romance in a bleak situation - by writing.
Brown says her fiction is not autobiographical. "I always hide under the characters. Maybe I went to that place, but I wasn't that character."
Certainly the troubled teen in Unction doesn't seem much like her creator. Brown is 45 but looks much younger, slim and long-limbed, with sleek blond hair. Poised and articulate, she speaks passionately about writing.
"I started writing poetry in third grade. I've never wanted to do anything else. It's weird."
Brown says the idea for Unction began with its setting: a bookbinding machine shop crammed with obsolete equipment stacked on seemingly endless shelves. The shelves create a dim, greasy maze where a crew of restless kids count gadgets caked with 50 years' worth of dust.
"I worked there one summer when I was a kid, and I remembered that place, that job. It was so pointless."
Her characters and plot, though, are invented. "I start with a place, usually, then I put people in the place and imagine their lives. I make something happen. Then I can leave and go complicate new people's lives."
The setting of Unction draws on her childhood in Connecticut, where she was born. Although she moved to Tampa in the early 1980s, she says that for a long time she didn't think of herself as a Florida writer.
"When I first moved here, I was very resistant to the landscape," she says. "I hated it. There was asphalt everywhere, the plants were alien-looking. It was nothing like Connecticut, what I was used to. I always felt I'd leave, even though I was married to someone who loved Florida."
Brown and her husband, Mark, live in a handsome Spanish-style house in South Tampa with sons Weston, 15, and Ethan, 9. Daughter Meriss, 21, is a dancer with the Sarasota Ballet.
"Now, my little neighborhood, I love it. I know when things bloom." And for the last few years, she has been setting much of her fiction in Florida.
Brown says she wanted to be a poet until she took a course in narrative writing as an undergraduate at USF. "We had to write character sketches. I was so intimidated."
But narrative intrigued her, and she signed up for a course in fiction writing with professor Tom Sanders. He pushed her to read contemporary American fiction because she was "describing too much."
"Of course, my next three stories sounded just like Hemingway. But he made me feel like I was on the route to what I wanted to be."
Later, Robert Pawlowski, then chairman of the USF English department, encouraged Brown to go to graduate school, she says. One of his poems, also titled Unction, was another source of ideas for her prize-winning story.
Brown began work on a master's degree in the creative writing program at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., but her family was "not happy there." They returned to Tampa, and she stopped writing for a couple of years and taught at St. John's Episcopal School.
When USF started its graduate program in creative writing in 2001, she says, "My husband said, "Don't teach, just write.' "
She did. When she submitted a collection of stories to professor John Fleming, her thesis director, "I originally gave him 200 pages. He freaked. It was supposed to be 60 pages."
Fleming says, "She was only about 11/2 years into the program. I said, did you write all this at USF? And she said yes.
"She's able to just crank them out."
Fleming says he isn't surprised Brown won the O. Henry award. "She has a lot of first-rate publications under her belt" in Georgia Review, Story Quarterly, Epic and other literary magazines.
The O. Henry Prize was founded in 1919 to honor the author of such short stories as The Gift of the Magi and The Ransom of Red Chief. O. Henry was the nom de plume of William Sydney Porter, who began writing in a Texas prison while serving a term for embezzlement and became the toast of New York literary circles at the turn of the 20th century with his lively style and surprising plot twists.
Laura Furman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of three novels and two collections of stories, is the series editor for the contest anthology, published by Anchor Books.
To select the 20 prize stories in each year's edition of the anthology, she reads a year's worth of issues submitted by about 350 magazines.
"That's a lot of stories to consider," she says.
When she read Brown's story, Furman says, "I think what got me was the vividness of each of the characters, and how they all revolved around the character of the girl, this kind of totem character.
"You really get an idea of this girl's strength."
The story's juxtaposition of a drab setting and "supercharged" emotions was especially effective, Furman says, as was its sophisticated voice. "Short stories are very personal, very organic."
This semester, Brown is teaching two classes at USF and another at the University of Tampa. Balancing the classes she takes and teaches with her family often leaves her struggling for time to write.
She is part of a group of women in the USF graduate program who are writing novels. They used to meet to critique each other's work, she says, but have switched to using e-mail. "None of us wants to give up writing time."
Brown has written two novels that publishers turned down, but she says she learned from writing them: "I never see it as wasted time."
She is writing a third because short story collections are such a hard sell to publishers. "Everybody wants the novel."
When she began writing fiction it took her three months to write a story; now she often writes one in a weekend. "On Saturday I get the first half done, on Sunday I finish it. Then I go back and revise.
"Novels are a whole other species. I love reading novels. I just don't know if I can write one. But I'm on page 300."
She has also returned to her first literary love, writing poetry. She says the class with professor Nick Samaras has her happily "right back where I started" in third grade.
"I think poetry is the highest form of writing. It's the hardest thing to do. I've never even tried to publish it."
Fiction, even short stories, is big enough to allow the writer to digress, she says. "Poems are just little spare things. It's really a challenge."
The O. Henry Prize doesn't carry a cash award, but Brown says she's delighted that her story will appear in the anthology.
Another story of hers appeared in a 1991 anthology, The Graywolf Annual: The New Family. "I was in the same collection with people like Tobias Wolff and Richard Bausch. That felt great.
"When I think about the people whose stories have been in (the O. Henry) collection, it's just amazing, like John Updike, who's my idol. I'm thrilled to see who's going to be in there."
-- Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com
[Last modified October 10, 2005, 16:45:03]
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