Oregon
Book Awards
Scottish Rite Center 79 SW 15th Ave., 227-2583
7:30 pm Tuesday, Nov. 23rd
$15
Oregon
writers don't latch onto the limelight often, but on Oct.
1, 1987, Portland's spanking new Winningstad Theater brimmed
with writers, publishers, poets and readers gathered to attend
the first annual Oregon Book Awards. All eyes were on Ken
Kesey, who wore an odd Peruvian hat as he presented a prize
to the Northwest Review. "Nothing inspires literature
more than money," Kesey declared, irreverent as a streaker
at the Academy Awards. "If you have a choice between money
and fame, take money. You can always buy fame." Kesey's remark
may have been flippant, but he encapsulated the driving force
behind the Oregon Book Awards: Give money to writers, and
fame will follow. But are monetary awards a formula for demolishing
our pleasant lit scene, or will they fuel the fire of accomplishment?
Oregon writers have long boasted of a tight, supportive
literary community that includes such permanent icons as
Ursula Le Guin, Jean Auel and Kesey. The Oregon Book Awards
were designed to support and promote that solid clan. Yet
in recent years, some high-profile newcomers such as Chang-rae
Lee and Peter Ho Davies have taken the award and run. Outsiders
may be diluting Oregon's famed literary community, but they
are also elevating it to national prominence.
A national literary star will host this year's Oregon Book
Awards. Susan Orlean, a New Yorker writer and author
of three books including her most recent, The Orchid
Thief, is one of a long line of Oregon writers who left
to find greater fame and fortune in the big city. Orlean
is "thrilled" to return to Portland, where she began her
writing career in the late 1970s, often working for Willamette
Week. Orlean believes she got a start in writing here
that she couldn't get in another city. "At my first job
interview," she reveals, "I took in my high-school yearbook
as part of my portfolio." Now Orlean comes full circle,
as a heavyweight New York writer returning to where she
started.
The Oregon Book Awards will also run full circle as Kesey
again takes the stage to accept the C.E.S. Wood Retrospective
Award for his lifetime achievement. Brian Booth, a Portland
lawyer, arts advocate and father of the Oregon Book Awards,
will present the award to his old college buddy. He recalls
Kesey's speech at the very first event in 1987: "I think
Kesey shocked a number of the audience members with his
language."
Booth founded the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts (OILA)
in 1986. He jokes that the acronym sounds like something
out of a Jean Auel novel, but his reference to a book is
apt, since he loves reading possibly even more than lawyering.
He may look like an average, fat-cat corporate attorney,
but Booth is pure Bohemian on the inside. By founding the
OILA, he used his lawyerly problem-solving talent to support
Oregon literature. "I felt that Oregon's writers and publishers
were in the back of the bus as far as arts funding was concerned,"
Booth says. He discovered that corporations and foundations
make donations to nonprofit organizations, but rarely to
individuals. His set up OILA as a nonprofit and recruited
an impressive number of donations to be funneled to deserving
literary artists.
OILA held the first Oregon Book Awards the next year. "We
wanted to have an event at which writers, readers and people
who like literature and books could get together," says
Booth. "It was sort of based on the Academy Awards or the
Booker Prizes. My wife and I came up with cool medallions,
sort of like the Nobel Prize, to put around people's necks
when they got the award. But it was obvious that most writers
write for money; we gave $1,000 to the winners."
Booth also wanted to celebrate Oregon's literary history,
so OILA named the awards after famous regional authors and
poets from the past such as Hazel Hall and H.L. Davis. "Most
of those people have now had books reissued or books written
about them," Booth says. His final goal was to publicize
Oregon's literary arts. "Except for Paul Pintarich's weekly
column, The Oregonian pretty much ignored
Oregon writers," Booth says, "I think the book awards stirred
up media interest."
The first Oregon Book Awards was everything Booth hoped
it would be, including a bit controversial. There were a
few disagreements in setting up the rules. "One of my ideas
was to have three judges," he recalls, "one of whom was
a non-writer. There was quite a dispute about that. There
are obviously a lot of people who aren't writers but are
great readers and are interested in literature." Though
the awards started with a panel of three in-state judges,
now, to avoid nepotism, each category is judged by one out-of-state
writer, though Literary Arts Inc. seems to be putting all
its eggs in one subjective basket by relying on the opinion
of one lone juror. The judges read each nominated book in
their respective categories and choose up to five finalists,
as well as the winner.
The books are judged solely upon excellence in literary
craftsmanship, which relieves the judges of kowtowing to
political correctness. "The first year, all the winners
and finalists were men," Booth recalls, "and Ursula Le Guin
didn't take that too well. She was a presenter and got up
there and blasted away." In her speech, Le Guin said that
in a state full of great women writers, she felt strange
being the only woman in the ceremony and hoped that it was
an unhappy accident and not a precedent.
Certainly women have since made their mark on the Oregon
Book Awards, but Le Guin's complaint actually underscores
the strict mandate to judge books on literary quality only,
which was evident the year Chuck Palahniuk won for Fight
Club. "It was controversial among the judges because
of how graphically violent the book is," says Carrie Hoops,
development director for Literary Arts Inc. who has overseen
the book awards for the last five years. "But they couldn't
get beyond what an incredible form he had written in; they
had to look past the content."
If Palahniuk is an Oregon Book Award success story, then
Chang-rae Lee is the poster boy. When Lee's novel Native
Speaker won the award for fiction in 1995, he thanked
Literary Arts Inc. for a fellowship it had granted him a
few years before. It saved him one summer when he was a
University of Oregon graduate student living on "lettuce
burritos" as he finished his book. Native Speaker
went on to win a coveted PEN/Hemingway award, and the New
Yorker recently named Lee one of 25 up-and-coming authors.
But Lee has since moved on to greener teaching pastures
back East. U of O professor Peter Ho Davies, last year's
fiction winner for The Ugliest House in the World,
also split town recently when he took a job at the University
of Michigan.
With the advent of creative-writing programs at the state
universities, the number of creative writing professors
up for Oregon Book Awards has increased. Though they produce
nationally renowned work, some people may complain that
these interlopers are taking valuable bucks away from the
Oregon writers who toil in the rainy gloom year after year.
But Hoops hasn't heard these criticisms. "The requirement
is to be a resident of Oregon, which is going to ebb and
flow, especially in academia," she says. "I think it's sad
that people like Chang-rae Lee and Peter Ho Davies have
now since moved."
This year's crop of nominees also includes creative-writing
teachers such as Oregon State University's Tracy Daugherty
and Ehud Havazelet in the fiction category. But Oregon's
literary mainstays are also well represented. Barry Lopez,
the winner of the very first Oregon Book Award for nonfiction,
is again nominated, this year for his book About This
Life. And then there is Oregon's favorite prankster,
Kesey, who may provide some outlandish antics at the event.
People watch the Grammy Awards to see if the musicians
will curse on live TV. People watch the Academy Awards to
see how skinny the actresses have become. In Portland, ordinary
people attend the Oregon Book Awards to rub shoulders with
the glittering literati before they move away.
Former resident Orlean believes Portland has slowly emerged
from "the town that time forgot" to a place more current.
"It feels so much bigger now," she says. "That dreamy quality
I remember was innocence. Now Portland is more modern and
of this world." The same can be said for the Oregon Book
Awards.
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Willamette Week | originally
published November 23,
1999
|
