A Pulitzer Prize Winning Presentation

A Pulitzer Prize Winning Presentation

By: Joanna Domson

Sentry Staff Reporter

A published author is a bit of a rarity when you think about guest speakers. A Pulitzer Prize winning one is even less common.

Robert Olen Butler, a Pulitzer Prize winning fiction writer, spoke to the Literary Magazine class and read one of his short stories to fourth period lunch on October 29th. Melanie McCabe, the Literary Magazine and English teacher, invited Butler to speak to her class after she read his Pulitzer Prize winning fiction novel, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, and then Tabloid Dreams, a collection of short stories.  Butler read a short story from Tabloid Dreams called “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” at lunch.  Tabloid Dreams is a collection of fictional short stories derived from wacky newspaper headlines.  However, the stories are rarely as wacky as their titles make them out to be.

“What he ended up writing, although there are elements of humor in it, they were very poignant, human, sometimes heartbreaking stories. And I was impressed that he was able to take such silly titles and turn them into such elegant pieces of fiction” said McCabe about the stories in Tabloid Dreams.

Editor of the Literary Magazine, Amanda Gaylord, also attended Butler’s reading.

“That’s where the true power of Tabloid Dreams lies: he takes an absurd situation (“Jealous Husband Returns in form of Parrot”) and makes the main character so emotionally relatable that you can’t help but feel a connection” said Gaylord about Butler’s writing.

Not only is Butler a talented writer, but he is also a professor of fiction in the Florida State University English Department.  He spoke to the Literary Magazine class about a wide variety of writing and reading related topics: from how to write emotionally to practically condemning the analysis of symbolism as you read.

McCabe recalls, “He talked to them about the nature of writing, and how they needed to approach writing less with their brain and more with their intuitive sense, their gut.  To stop analyzing what they write and to write from a subconscious place that he calls ‘the place where you dream.’”

Butler advocates writing right after waking up so that you are just coming out of that “place where you dream”, and are not quite conscious yet.  However, before you decide to write all of your essays the morning before they are due, keep in mind that Butler is a fiction writer and is proposing a method that makes for good fiction, not necessarily good essays.

“He seemed to really hate symbolism, which I thought was kind of funny. We’ve always been taught that symbolism is a powerful literary tool, but Butler was saying that there’s no such thing. In his opinion, an object is an object. It’s the emotions related to the object that connect it to another idea – he called it “thrumming,” like playing in harmony with an instrument. It was a really interesting viewpoint,” said Gaylord about Butler’s presentation.

Because Butler is a college professor his presentation was at a level for college students. McCabe was worried that some students might have difficulty following what he was trying to get across to them.

“I think that because the [Literary Magazine] students are all people who do write creatively, I think they were more open to what he had to say.  I think they were very interested in what he had to say,” said McCabe.

Gaylord had no problem relating to Butler.  She really enjoyed what he had to say and found his opinions very interesting.

“We don’t usually write with some grandiose deeper meaning in mind. We’re just writing a piece based on some event or emotion we can relate to. We’re not trying to write the next great American novel, we’re just trying to write something we can all enjoy and innately understand. Having Butler qualify what we’ve been doing was really empowering. It’s just nice to have a Pulitzer-prize winning author tell you that you’re doing the right thing,” said Gaylord.

Overall, Butler brought a new way of thinking about writing to Literary Magazine and the student body who attended his reading.  He emphasized the emotional, not analytical, value in writing, which is really what Literary Magazine is all about.

 

Featured image by Chrissy Wiedemann

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