{"id":369352,"date":"2019-03-22T12:44:18","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T16:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=369352"},"modified":"2019-04-01T13:47:50","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T17:47:50","slug":"author-marian-crotty-receives-2018-janet-heidinger-kafka-prize-369352","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/author-marian-crotty-receives-2018-janet-heidinger-kafka-prize-369352\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Marian Crotty receives 2018 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marian Crotty<\/a>\u00a0has been publishing short fiction\u2014and winning several awards in the process\u2014for more than a decade. An assistant professor of writing <\/a>at Loyola University Maryland and an assistant editor at the literary magazine The Common<\/a><\/em>, Crotty has now released her first book.<\/p>\n

Full of heartache and hope, the collection of short stories touches on themes of class, sexuality, and gender, while highlighting the universal need for human connection.<\/p>\n

Crotty is the winner of the Ä¢¹½´«Ã½\u2019s 2018 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize<\/a> for her work What Counts as Love\u00a0<\/em><\/a>(University of Iowa Press, 2017).<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an amazing bookshelf of authors who\u2019ve won, like Ann Patchett, Jessamyn West, Toni Morrison, and Mia Alvar,\u201d says Crotty. \u201cI was very surprised and very happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize<\/h3>\n

The award ceremony and author reading\u00a0will take place on Thursday, March 28, at 6 p.m.<\/a> in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library. The event will be followed by an hors d\u2019oeuvres reception and book signing, with copies of What Counts as Love\u00a0<\/em>available for purchase.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Awarded annually by the Ä¢¹½´«Ã½\u2019s Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women\u2019s Studies<\/a>, and the Department of English<\/a>, the prize recognizes American women who are launching promising writing careers. It was created in 1976 to honor its namesake, a young editor who was killed in a car accident just as her career was blossoming.<\/p>\n

What Counts as Love<\/em>\u2014also the winner of the 2017 John Simmons Short Fiction Award and a semi-finalist for the 2018 PEN America Literary Awards\u2014carries nine unique tales centered on mostly young women. In the title story, a young woman begins a job on a construction site after leaving an abusive marriage. Two 11-year-old girls spy on a neighbor\u2019s sex life in \u201cCrazy for You,\u201d as they both explore their own sexuality. In \u201cA New Life,\u201d a mother\u2019s grief after her infant\u2019s death leads her to reconsider her marriage and understand her husband in a new light.<\/p>\n

Crotty\u2019s book was selected by the prize committee, made up of Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ faculty members Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas<\/a>, an assistant professor of art, and\u00a0Katherine Mannheimer<\/a>, an associate professor of English, as well as English teacher Evelina \u201cEvvy\u201d Fanning<\/a>\u00a0from Pittsford Sutherland High School. Mannheimer says Crotty places women\u2019s narratives in the foreground in a complicated and interesting way.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou get the sense that these characters are living in a world that is less visible, either because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds or they\u2019re not living in major cities,\u201d says Mannheimer. \u201cThey\u2019re dealing with different sets of hardships that are keeping them back in some way, whether it\u2019s abuse or drug addiction or an eating disorder. It sheds a light on other perspectives you may not otherwise hear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crotty has published several short essays, such as \u201cLove at a Distance\u201d and \u201cIt\u2019s New Year\u2019s Eve, and This is Dubai.\u201d A recipient of a Fulbright research grant, she lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and is currently working on a novel.<\/p>\n

\"bookEight out of nine of the stories in this collection are focused on female characters. What inspired you to make this choice? <\/strong><\/h3>\n

I was really just writing about what was going on with people I knew. The only feminist choice I made was to revisit the pressure to write about men. I think men don\u2019t really have the pressure to write about women, but women are pressured to believe that male stories are more interesting or more important. I was trying to resist that.<\/p>\n

In this collection, you touch on many topics that concern gender, from sexual assault to eating disorders. Were you hoping to reach young women with these stories?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Of course. If people see themselves represented in the book and want to read it, that\u2019s great. But I hope men are curious about the inner lives of women. Women\u2019s lives are just as complicated as men\u2019s, but I think women are often taught from a young age to censor themselves and to think of how they\u2019re perceived by other people, and because of that there\u2019s often a lot going on in women\u2019s inner worlds that\u2019s often not acted upon, or said out loud. I wanted to try to show some of that in fiction, and I was trying to show that these people\u2019s lives and these people\u2019s stories were worth telling.<\/p>\n

The one male narrator of\u00a0 \u201cThe House Always Wins\u201d is very different from the other eight, in that he is outwardly polite while dealing with aggressive thoughts. How did you come to create this complex character?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Most of these stories start with a story or situation, and that one started with the news of these fires that destroyed several mansions. It was devastating in part because the houses were so big. I was trying to write about that area, and I was trying to imagine someone who would have felt out of place even before these weird things started happening. The character is someone surrounded by what he sees as greed and entitlement, but then also sees that same entitlement in himself and his sexuality, and he\u2019s disturbed by it. I see people\u2019s love of money and need to get money sometimes as the same type of entitlement and aggression that people have in their relationships. He was scared of what he was capable of.<\/p>\n

Many of the protagonists come from a low socioeconomic background. Why the focus on class?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I often think about class and money because it dictates, for many people, either what is possible or what seems possible\u2014or what they feel obligated to do, what they feel entitled to do. I also think class is complicated, and it doesn\u2019t coincide just with what you have. It also coincides with education, possibility, and knowledge you\u2019ve inherited from your family, so I think it\u2019s complicated. But each of these stories came out of situations, or people, or circumstances that were interesting to me.<\/p>\n

You have a long history of writing essays and short stories, several of which focus on young women and stressors in their relationships. What was your creative process in putting these many pieces together for this collection? <\/strong><\/h3>\n

The advice that I\u2019ve gotten from other people is to look for both the differences and commonalities. I think the commonality piece is actually a lot easier than making sure they\u2019re different enough. All the stories come from you and your subconscious, and the ideas and experiences and imagination that\u2019s available to you. So I think it\u2019s highly unusual that someone would write twelve stories and nine of them aren\u2019t clearly connected in some way. That part was easier for me. The harder part was making sure that the stories felt different and weren\u2019t covering the same ground.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Are you already working on something else? What\u2019s next?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I\u2019m working on one new story I want to write, and one story that I\u2019m mostly done with, and then some essays. Once I do that, I\u2019m going to go back to a novel that I\u2019m working on. It\u2019s been exciting to work on a longer project, so we\u2019ll see what happens.<\/p>\n