As Mitchell S. Jackson likes to say, lit life is life
On Monday evening, my husband and I got all dressed up and went to the Gerding Theater here in Portland for the Oregon Book Awards. At the beginning of January I’d been named one of five finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, and though the winner in each category was already selected, the director of Literary Arts kept those names a secret until the ceremony. It was, truly, a tremendous honor just to be nominated. My novel was up against Willy Vlautin’s The Free, Smith Henderson’s Fourth of July Creek, Lindsay Hill’s Sea of Hooks, and Amy Schutzer’s Spheres of Disturbance. It was a tough field.
I wore my lucky red shoes I’d splurged on for my book launch back in 2013 (the Oregon Book Awards cutoff date is weird—August—which is why I was eligible this year rather than last). I wore a cicada necklace I’d bought just for the occasion. I did not write an acceptance speech, because the thought of going home with an unread speech in my bag was too much. I did make a list of people I wanted to be sure to thank, in case I did win and my mind went blank on the podium but...honestly? I didn’t expect to be using it. I mean...I hoped I would be using it, but I didn’t expect it. Smith and Willy’s books, in particular, had both gotten far more attention than mine, and I thought one of them would probably win.
Okay. I thought Smith would win. And I would have been happy for him (sort of), and bummed for me (quite). He’s a friend, and a great guy. Never mind the fake rivalry we tried to stir up on Twitter. That was mostly because he was pissed that I got into his car one time without taking off my jacket after we’d walked in the rain. But I drive a Kia minivan with synthetic cloth seats, so what the fuck do I know about kid leather?
(It’s okay. I don’t think he subscribes to this letter, so it’s just between us.)
At the awards ceremony they had the finalists sit in the first few rows. Billy and I got there just as they were getting ready to begin and the only seats still open were in the first row directly in front of one of two podiums. And then the ceremony began, and Mitchell S. Jackson, the Master of Ceremonies, came out and stood at the podium in front of us, waggled his eyebrows at me, and launched into an excellent opening speech.
Mitchell and I have some history. The good kind. We first met in summer 2013, when he read at Powell’s on his book tour for The Residue Years. That October, we read together at Word in Greenpoint, when I was on tour for The Revolution of Every Day. We hit it off, and because our debut novels had come out around the same time, and because we had the Brooklyn <--> Portland connection, though he’d gone one way and I’d gone the other, swapping home towns, we each kept tabs on the other's career. And it looked to me like things couldn’t be going better for his book. “So happy for you!” I’d comment on his Facebook posts. “You’re killing it!” he’d comment on mine. But his book was selling so much more than mine, I thought. The reviews for The Revolution of Every Day were excellent, but the sales weren’t. Mitch, it seemed to me, was having much more success. And then, in an email to him one day, I admitted to being disappointed about my sales. I said, “Writers don’t talk real numbers with each other enough. Let’s be honest. I think we’d all feel better if we weren’t comparing ourselves to our perceptions of what’s going on with other people’s books.”
He agreed, and we told each other what our numbers were. He’d also been feeling, based on reviews and word-of-mouth buzz—the same things I was basing my assumptions of his sales on—that my book was outpacing his. And you know what? His initial orders were higher because he was with Bloomsbury and I was with mighty but tiny Tin House, and there are questions of scale, but basically we were doing the same. Each of us was sure the other was killing it, and each of us was disappointed by our own sales, and the fact is we were basically even.
(I’m happy to say things picked up for him considerably with the release of his paperback and the selection of The Residue Years as Portland’s Everybody Reads pick for 2015. It’s a GREAT book. Read it, if you haven't already.)
So Mitchell and I have that bond of having started out together as debut novelists, and having been honest with each other in a way that was helpful to us both. And then I was nominated for an Oregon Book Award the year that he was asked to be the Master of Ceremonies. Nice, right? I loved that he would be there for what was to be a highlight of my writing career regardless of results.
The way the OBAs work is that a presenter in each category reads the excerpt from the winning book and THEN announces the title and author. So the audience hears the excerpt and, unless they know the book, are in suspense for a minute while the winner sits there, knowing they’ve won but not able to show it until their name is called, and the other finalists sit there already knowing it won’t be their name. It’s a lovely way to do it from an audience member’s perspective, but it’s a bit much on the finalists, emotionally. The second podium on the other side of the stage from Mitchell’s was used by the presenters of each category, and then by the winners. Fiction was the last category, and Mitchell was to present that one himself. At the podium right in front of me. He opened the envelope and read “That one over there by the dog...” and paused. And I thought it could be my book, or maybe it wasn’t. The pause threw me. (And Smith’s book has dogs, too.) As he paused he glanced down toward the bottom of the page and grinned and read “run could have been Cat herself...”
It was my book he was reading from. My fucking book. I had wanted to win. I’d wanted it so badly. My debut novel, the book of my heart, had received great reviews and not-so-great sales and the nomination for the OBA was the best thing that had happened for it and I wanted this award for my book oh my god I wanted it so badly and Mitchell was reading from my book and I’d won! I’d really won! I started to cry. I sat there and looked at Mitchell and bawled, and he read the entire excerpt looking right into my eyes, and then he said, “The winner is The Revolution of Every Day, by my friend Cari Luna.”
I won. I fucking won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, and was given that award by a friend who’d been there with me at the beginning, and who’d traveled a similar road with his own book. It was such a gift to have Mitchell there in that moment, to feel our connection through our books, through these lives as authors that we’re building. I’m so grateful for that. The best things the book has brought into my life are all people.
And now...well... It still doesn’t feel entirely real. It’s been two days and I keep replaying that moment in the theater, Mitchell reading my words to me as if it were just the two of us there telling each other, “Look at us. We did it.”
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The Revolution of Every Day
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