Endless Knots

Ron Currie: Young Lions Fiction Awardee 2008!

NYPL lion from ForgottonDelights.com - thanks! Event photos to come...Photo of Barbara Currie by David Gerard Fromm.

On the steps of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street sit two massive marble lions. My mother loved her joke about them, told it frequently: They roar whenever a virgin walks by. Last night they did roar when Ron Currie won the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award for God is Dead.

Actor Ethan Hawke and a group of his friends (Rick Moody, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and Hannah McFarland) started the award in 2001 for writers under 35, making Ron the eighth winner. Hawke was MC in the Bartos Forum of “this wonderful building,” a banquet hall with a glass "saucer dome" ceiling and marble walls. We sat at round tables, ours all the way to the left in front of the stage, the one with the Ron Currie tent card. At tables next to ours, the other nominees: Ellen Litman (The Last Chicken in America); Peter Nathaniel Malae (Teach the Free Man); Dinah Mengetsu (The Beautiful Thing that Heaven Bears); and Emily Mitchell (The Last Summer of the World).

Hawke was exuberant, congratulating the nominees regardless of the outcome. Ron's mother, Barbara, had brought along a stunning picture of her husband , Ron Currie Sr., who passed away last December.

Four actors read excerpts from the works of each nominee, Ron’s “Indian Summer” was first, read by Brian O’Byrne, star of “Coast of Utopia.” Brian took a wide stance, right hand in his pocket, sometimes carving the air, weight shifting, knee bending, leaning into the tough parts of the story adding more punch to the raw prose, his mouth just an inch or two from the mic, dressed in black jeans and a charcoal sweater much as the characters in the story might have worn, he not that different in age from them. The story is awful and riveting, the same excerpt Ron read at the book party last summer (well, apparently, I never revealed in these pages that we hosted a book party for him here last July when the book came out so this link will have to do). "Indian Summer" will stand as the emblem of hopelessness, hilarious yet so raw that each time I hear it, I wish Ron had never written it because of what it must have taken out of him to do so. But, horrible as it is, it fits the book as a whole - and everyone lunges for it, readers and reviewers alike.

The other excerpts were wonderful - two emigré stories, one Russian, one Ethiopian, a jail story that had Ron’s not preceded it would have been even more powerful, and a portrait of Edward Steichen - all beautifully written, as one would expect from nominees for this award, humorous, and all well read by Hawke, Amanda Peet, and Michael Shannon - but when Brian finished, I felt sorry for the other nominees. Ron’s work is a different kind of original and that, I’m certain, is why he won.

The judges considered 142 books, chose five as finalists, said Paul LeClerc, NYPL president, before receiving “the envelope, please.” Not a second between his opening it and his “Ron Currie.” We erupted, we being his mom, Barbara, his niece Sierra (who got to have her picture taken with actor Aaron Eckhart), and three of my Zoetrope friends - Anne Elliott, Don Capone, and David Fromm. Congratulations is a small word for what this means to Ron and for his career. And lest I overlook one detail: Prize = $10,000 for Ron; $1000 for each of the other finalists.

See also: Don Capone's Hit List, Paper Cuts (NYTimes book blog), NYPL Young Lions site, GalleyCat

The conversation continues

'member when I went slideless to the Boston KM Forum? My topic was Moving Beyond Web 2.0 Resistance. Turns out that conversation continues next Friday, May 2 (Rebecca's, Reservoir Place, 7:30 AM):

Selling KM in a Hostile World: One line of commentary by Jessica Lipnack at the recent program on KM 2.0 concerned emotional and psychological barriers to getting colleagues to adopt new behaviors and technologies. She went on to make the case for creating a comfort zone and welcoming environment to help alleviate resistance. But there is much more to explore around the notion of a hostile world that has to be considered and planned around when we contemplate our KM initiatives. Join us to discuss how to move from outright barriers to may-be to probably.

Registration Form for Friday Only

Registration Details (Cost, logistics, etc.)

 

Pub day

Writing's rewards are protracted - a draft, 800 more drafts, waiting, acceptance, corrections, pdfs (used to be page proofs that took weeks to arrive), publication, waiting, hard copy in hand.

Two waiting last night:

The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams, all 764 pages of it. Big cheers to editors Jill Nemiro, Michael Beyerlein, Lori Bradley, Susan Beyerlein - and to my fifty authors who never met. Not even a mega conference call. Virtualteamspedia. And you can download tools, frameworks and even a spreadsheet with a taxonomy for all the significant studies on virtual team leadership. Our bit is last, The Virtual, Networked Organization.

"Feeling Numb," my essay on MS in Ars Medica, the medicine, arts, and humanities journal from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Will post once scanned. Have read several stunning pieces so far - "Two Minutes with Zack: A Found Poem" by Zachary Faceman and Ben McGren, and Myra Sklarew's "Lie Perfectly Still."

Stand-up for your meeting

Had the privilege of sitting in, er, standing up at a client's daily meeting. Three times a week, weather permitting, everyone in the organization gathers on the porch at 8:30 AM for a "stand-up." They go around in a circle, anyone with something to say saying it. Brief little reports, lots of chiding, and one frustrated person who couldn't get on the network arguing with the IT folks (I'm sure this never happens in your organization). On the days when they don't do the stand-ups, they do a conference call at the same time. Keeps the group in synch. Nice way to start the day. Try it (providing you work with people face-to-face).

What blogging brings to business

Four fabulous bloggers plus me as moderator are coming together at Enterprise 2.0 to talk about the fine points of blogging and what it can bring to business. With a combined blogging history of 400 years (ooops, I mean 19, fingers got away from me), we'll be talking about "What blogging brings to business:" Blogging as knowledge management, Blogging as a conversation, Blogging for "fame and fortune", Blogging as a platform for experimentation, and Blogging to reduce internal spam.

Bloggers extraordinaire =  Bill Ives, Patti Anklam, Doug Cornelius, and Cesar Brea. Conference takes places here in Boston; this panel is on Tues, June 10 at 2:15.

Jeff and I will do two other sessions as well - details to be revealed soon here.

Running away

I happened to be at Logan Airport today where there were an inordinately large number of very thin people in sweats and running shoes, many of whom were limping. Why? The Boston Marathon, run yesterday under sunny skies, a race we've watched nearly every year for as long as I can remember. The wheelchair competitors always make me cry, none more so than Team Hoyt, the father-son team, with the father, Dick, now 65, pushing his son, Rick, now 45 and with cerebral palsy for the 25th time this year. 26.2 miles, Heartbreak Hill, and people screaming support all along the route. Inspiring.

Oh, Pottstown

It isn't often that I hear reference to my hometown and its surrounding areas, never mind all day long. But that's what's going on right now - and it will be over, completely, by Wednesday. Turns out Southeastern Pennsylvania is one key area for the Democratic primary tomorrow - thus the candidates and busy bees swarming around them are dropping in and out of Pottstown and Reading and Phoenixville.

Today on Robin Young's Here and Now, "two farmers from Pottstown" were holding forth on the economy. Actually, there are no farmers in Pottstown, haven't been since before I was born. It's hard to find them even outside of Pottstown without going more than a bit of a distance. But it sounds like there should be, doesn't it? What there were in the Pottstown of my little girlhood and are no more: factories. Bethlehem Steel, Firestone, mondo plants that employed everyone. Made me very sad to drive down High Street a couple of months ago and see all the boarded up stores (though that link in the previous sentence provides a bit of a more upbeat view of the town's economic health).

And lastly on this ephemeral topic: Have you heard mention of Montgomery County, Chester County, and Bucks County as being pivotal in the primary? I lived in all three: Pottstown's in Montgomery County; when I was 13, we moved across the Schuylkill (take a guess on how to pronounce it) to Chester County; and when I was 15, I went away to school in Bucks County. I guess this means I'm deciding the election.

Cloudy with a chance of matzoh balls

Anyone else a fan of the wonderful children's book, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs? It has nothing to do with this post but it does provide a nice title for it and allows me to refer you back to my recipe for matzoh balls, which, naturally, graced our soup last night. Had the distinct pleasure of celebrating the first night of Passover at our daughter's apartment, which happens to be around the corner from where my mother was born in Brooklyn. For those whose parents have passed on, you know how powerful and comforting such connections are.

And while we're on the subject, praise to the web. Someone (who could that be?) failed to bring the basic equipment for the Passover seder, namely the haggadahs, the order of service that tells you when to dip the parsley and how soon you can make the haroseth and horseradish "sandwiches," our family's fave. Thus I had to do a crash search online to print out something suitable for the assembled masses. Guess what? Slate has a two-minute, two-page "Passover service for the impatient" (hilarious) and many other sites provide simplified (and modern) haggadahs. We made do and something about the simplicity and makeshift nature of our "supplies" was in keeping with this very moving and universal story of perseverance and freedom.

"The College That Would Not Go Gently"

Today's New York Times Education section carries yet another article about the Antioch College saga, which I've posted about aplenty. The story is not over and each writer who tries to tell it struggles for another angle that makes it make sense. Squaring the circle, that.

The lead picture with today's Times article says as much as anything in the piece itself: It's raining, pouring apparently, and one lone person is struggling into a desolate student union. In my five years at the college, there was never a moment when a picture like that could have been taken: the Union, as we called it, was teeming with activity day and night. Indeed, it was usually hard to find a table in the cafeteria. A college built for 2000 now has barely 200.

Graduation is next week and it might be Antioch College's last - and it might not be. The Antioch University Board of Trustees and the Antioch College Continuation Corporation (ACCC) are still talking, even after reports that talks have broken off. And there's yet another organization called "Non-stop Antioch" that vows to soldier on with a million dollars in funds collected by still another group of alums.

If the ACCC is successful in gaining control over the college (two deals have been proposed, one whereby this non-profit founded by a group of wealthy alums takes over the college assets in exchange for $10 million, another whereby ten of these alums join the University Board and ten of the current trustees resign), their challenges will be immense. Not insurmountable but immense. They too will have to make tough decisions about reconstruction, tenure, recruitment, endowment...all the things that plague the institution now. And, ironically, among their numbers are some of the very same people who served on the Board of Trustees while the college declined and the endowment did not grow.

It's not over and I do admire everyone who's hung in there constructively on all sides.

"The" handbook for virtual teams

It's out. And it's got lots of useful information, says she, co-author of "The Virtual Networked Organization," the final chapter in this highly collaborative volume. You can order it here and read on for the press release.