VCU First Novelist: For award winner, life’s a story worth telling

With more than a hundred submissions to the VCU First Novelist’s Award panel this year, it was not an easy feat to get through all the entries and sort out the good from the bad and the ugly. However, on Friday evening, English students, faculty and literature connoisseurs gathered in the Richmond Salons to honor author Karen Fisher with the fifth annual 2006 VCU First Novelist’s Award.

Despite the ever-increasing amount of submissions the panel receives each year, for the four main panelists of the 2006 Awards committee, once the final pages had been turned, Fisher’s “A Sudden Country” was the clear winner. “The choice was unanimous,” moderator Catherine Ingrassia, professor of English, said of the decision process later on in the evening.

The night opened up with a welcome commencement made by the Department of English chair Terry Oggel, as well as opening remarks by acting dean of College of Humanities and Sciences Robert D. Holsworth and an introduction by associate professor and novelist Susana Cokal. Director of VCU e2 Bookstore Steve Gonzalez then presented Fisher with the Allan Rosenbaum designed award, which depicts a small turquoise armchair sitting atop an open book. For Fisher, whose novel also won the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Award for Best Fiction of 2006 and the 2006 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award, receiving the VCU First Novelist’s Award was a great honor. “I’ve been to a lot of bookstores, groups and forums but never to a school where people are learning to write,” Fisher said. “So, it’s really exciting to be here.”

After the presentation of the award, Fisher read an excerpt of “A Sudden Country” and then opened up the panel discussion. During the discussion, Fisher addressed questions about parallels between the book and the Sept. 11 terrorism that took place while she was finishing the final chapters of her book.

“It was a very similar event,” Fisher said of her story, which is set in the mid-19thcentury and follows the life of Lucy Mitchell as she immigrates with her family to Oregon and meets a compelling but sorrowful man, James MacLaren.

“In terms of lives it was small, in terms of politics it was large,” Fisher said in regards to her portrayal of American immigration among a Western backdrop of European settlers and Native Americans during a culturally evolving time. “I realized that it came from an equal ignorance that basically there were two groups of people involved that had no idea who the other really was and really didn’t understand each other’s stories.”

“It altered the course of American political history in the West.”

During the panel discussion, Fisher also provided profound insight into what being a novelist is really about. Dispelling the false notion that novelists are just mere storytellers, Fisher shared her thoughts about the bridges that novelists lay with their stories between people of different cultures and lives.

“Our job as storytellers, as artists, is to make the world comprehensible in a different way,” Fisher said. “In a different way than historians use analysis, in a different way from journalists, perhaps, who can give us the chaos of life but sometimes not the true feeling that comes from a perception of an experience. A lived experience. And that’s what, I think, novelists set out to do. They set out to create an alternative life for you so that you can feel it and by feeling it, you can understand it.”

For Fisher, who lives on an island in the Puget Sound as a teacher, wrangler, farmer and carpenter, at the end of the day, life itself is a story. “Our lives, our worlds are all composed of good stories,” Fisher shared. “It’s just a matter of figuring out what those stories are.”