During the 1980s and 1990s, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis sponsored a major arts competition for Indianapolis high school students--$5,000 to the winner in each discipline and an absurdly fancy banquet at a downtown hotel to announce those winners that made them feel as if they’d just won an Academy Award.
A number of my creative writing students won the Literature Prize over the years. I was thrilled for them, of course. But it also worried me, for a variety of reasons.
What if they assumed winning such a prize meant that their work was ready for professional publication—which, believe me, it wasn’t.
What if they felt like every single story they wrote from that moment on must meet the standard of that award-winning story—plus, make (serious) money?
What if putting that pressure on themselves freaked them out so much that they stopped writing?
What if, suddenly, they felt that writing—the act of writing (which had been so necessary to them) and what they wrote—no longer belonged only to them, which made them unable to write?
Then there were all those students who didn’t win, some of whose writing was at least as good (and sometimes better) than writing that was chosen. All too often, they took not winning to mean they weren’t worthy of writing at all—and gave up.
These things actually did happen to a number of my students.
It’s all about the process, I’d say—to those who won and those who didn’t.
I’d try to explain the weirdness of judging—how the good stuff floats up, but a different set of judges might pick a different set of winners from it. But it was hard for them to believe it.
There was another, considerably more modest high school writing competition in Indiana at the time, sponsored by Purdue University. There wasn’t one big prize, but first, second, and third places—and a few honorable mentions. The award money ranged from $25-$200.
The high school students who placed in the contest were invited to attend Purdue’s spring Literature Banquet to receive their awards alongside Purdue students and hear the keynote address by a prominent writer.
Over the years my student winners in the Purdue competition found themselves in the presence of Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, and others—so much more valuable than a fancy banquet all about themselves.
Their minds were blown, as they should have been. Mine was, too. There’s nothing I love better than to listen to a wonderful writer talk about writing.
My favorite of those Purdue keynote speakers was Louise Erdrich, whose kindness to one of my students I’ve never forgotten.
I’ll call that student B. She was an intelligent, imaginative girl with lovely strawberry blond hair—an excellent writer, both quietly thrilled and a bit mortified for having been singled out for her story. She listened to Erdich’s keynote with a rapt expression but held back at the prospect of joining the book signing line. She arrived at the table, head ducked, blushing.
“Oh!” Louise Erdrich said at the sight of her. “You remind me so much of one of my daughters. Her hair is exactly the same color as yours.”
She took the book B was holding and signed it, all the while telling her a story about how, when her daughters were little girls, she used to brush their hair (each a different color) then put the strands from the brush outside for the birds who’d weave them into their nests.
I thought of this moment, reading The Mighty Red, a book written by this woman who’d been able to, in an instant, look at a girl like B, know her, and so tenderly offer an observation that made her see herself as someone special.
I felt as if Erdrich knew every character in The Mighty Red this way, that she observed each one with a kind of tenderness that didn’t excuse their faults or terrible mistakes but made the reader’s heart hurt to think that those characters must suffer them. To root for them to work things out—even the ones who lesser novelists might have made into villains.
The book is set during the 2008 economic collapse and its aftermath in a small town in North Dakota’s Red River Valley populated with a mix of indigenous and white people. Kismet Poe is at its center, a high school senior, a lapsed Goth, who finds herself suddenly pursued by Gary Geist, a handsome football hero and the son of wealthy sugar beet farmers. Why? Kismet doesn’t know herself but it’s awfully hard to resist Gary’s devotion and, before she knows it, she’s agreed to marry him when they graduate in the spring.
Also at the center of The Mighty Red is the mystery of Gary’s involvement in something that happened not long before the story begins. Something bad—and this bad thing has settled over the whole community, like fog. Everyone knows what happened, though nobody knows why or how. At times, they come right up to the edge of saying what they know, then back away, leaving bits and pieces for the reader to try to wrestle into meaning.
Meanwhile, Kismet’s mom, Crystal Frechette, has a bad feeling about her daughter’s engagement to Gary but, hauling sugar beets on the night shift, she’s too exhausted to think about it. Worse, her husband, Kismet’s father, is on the lam, presumably with the funds he help raise for the town church renovations.
Gary’s mom throws herself into wedding preparations, convinced that marrying Kismet will restore Gary to the carefree kid he used to be. Gary clings to Kismet as if he believes this himself and, while he can’t go backwards, over the course of the book he begins to become a better person than he might have been. Kismet, a free spirit, goes a long way to healing both of them enroute to her own true path.
Ordinary people loving, struggling, longing, laughing, forgiving—living their lives—weave in and out of this story as people do in real life.
But who is ordinary, really?
Nobody! This is what Louise Erdrich knows and what she so miraculously conveys in The Mighty Red.
She gets what it’s like to be a teenager, everything’s so—urgent. She gets what it’s like to work the midnight shift, listening to late-night radio, watching out for angels. To be married to the son of the man who bought your family’s farm and destroyed what was left of your childhood there. To have caused grief for which you believe you can never be forgiven.
Back to my student, B, and what in the world (though I didn’t know it until just now, typing) connects those long-ago writing competitions with The Mighty Red.
In a seemingly simple, certainly brief moment, Louise Erdrich took the time to look at B, an ordinary girl. To see her. And I’m guessing that what she saw became one more puzzle piece in her picture of what it’s like to be human. Something that might—who knew?—connect with something else floating around in her beautiful brain and become part of a story.
The thing is, here’s what young (well, all) writers need to know: talent is a mix of love, need, courage and discipline. Patience, stamina, compassion. And, most important of all, talent is curiosity: the ability to yourself wide to the universe, letting it all in.
Actually, not so much the ability to do this but the impossibility not to do it.
So for those dead set on the absurdity of measuring the talent of high school writers, I propose a different kind of competition.
Put them in a room full of “ordinary” stuff. Say, “Jot down what you see and think until a sentence floats up, then follow it—and write and write and write yourself into a story.”
No prizes, other than, maybe, for the student most surprised by what they wrote.
Or who was most changed.
Honorable mention to the one whose hand hurt most from writing.
I just read The Mighty Red and yes to all of this. It was so gorgeous. So light and heavy at the same time, with tiny little hints of the bigger-picture-history of agriculture in the U.S. I loved the messiness of its structure, which was also perfectly controlled messiness. It was sort of a masterpiece.
And, good lord, yes about the weirdness of writing contests.
As you might imagine, much of what I love about this review is your story about the writing competition and working with high school students. At its best, there is nothing so satisfying as getting students to write and surprise themselves with their writing. I have some very fond memories myself. The book sounds interesting as well.