Tag Archives: Pulitzer Prize

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Wednesday Wordsmiths: Frederick Buechner

Today’s Wordsmith:

Frederick Buechner

 

He’s an ordained Presbyterian minister who rarely preaches, but who for six decades has maintained a congregation of loyal readers. While never winning the awards (a true example of oversight if ever one existed), he has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In his later years, he has published little, claiming to no longer have the same zeal for producing books, but in earlier times was quite prolific, crafting works of various form and genres, including novels, lexicons, literary criticism, sermons and autobiography. John Irving, one of his students from Phillips Exeter Academy, credits him as a mentor of profound impact. His most well-known works include Godric (a novel chronicling the life of the medieval, monastic hermit, Godric of Finchale, creatively narrated in Godric’s own “mediaeval” tone and language), A Long Day’s Dying (his critically acclaimed first novel), and his four memoirs, The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, Telling Secrets and The Eyes of the Heart.

Buechner’s themes are drawn from his own life and the similarities between his experiences and everyone else’s: themes of loneliness, rebellion, doubt, redemption, grace and contemplation. Despite the wide variation in his forms, these themes remain central but never wear thin or become repetitive. Anyone wishing to look into Buechner’s works would do well to start with his lexicons; these three works take overused-to-the-point-of-being-archaic religious terms (Wishful Thinking), well-known and obscure Bible characters (Peculiar Treasures), and common societal buzz words (Whistling in the Dark) and infuses them all with fresh, poetic theological significance. They were recently republished in a single volume called Beyond Words. And, for those interested in Buechner’s fiction and memoir, Godric and The Sacred Journey, respectively, will captivate in ways you never knew books could.

It is almost impossible to provide a short sample of Buechner’s talent, because it seems he is endlessly quotable. However, here are two wonder-filled lines:

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. - Now and Then

If you look at a window, you see dust, flyspecks, the crack where Junior’s frisbee hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond. Something like this is the difference between people who see the Bible as a Holy Bore, and those who see it as the Word of God, which speaks out of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of ourselves. - Wishful Thinking (“Bible”)

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Wordsmith Wednesdays: Annie Proulx

Today’s Wordsmith: Annie Proulx

She has been awarded countless honors and prizes for her strangely beautiful prose – lines that flow like oil over glass yet somehow still succeed in capturing some of the hardest situations and emotions for some of the most forceful and obdurate characters in modern literature. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her resplendent novel, The Shipping News. While I consider all of her works notable, the ones that stand out the most are Accordion Crimes, Close Range (her first book of short stories focusing on the raw, harsh life of Wyoming ranchers and featuring the wonderful-and-let-no-one-tell-you-different final story, “Brokeback Mountain”), and Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2.

If you are interested in reading prose that very few writers today can match in talent and gravity (of the authors I read, only Marilynne Robinson and Michael Chabon come to mind as possible equals), I suggest you begin with the Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Shipping News. Do yourself a favor, though; read the book. The movie is three stars at best, but Proulx’s delicately layered narrative will captivate you in ways few novels can. When you’ve finished that and if you think you’ve got a strong stomach when it comes to digesting depraved characters, Close Range is one of the greatest collections of short stories I have read in recent years (Proulx does with Wyoming what Flannery O’Connor did with the South). Here’s a sample from “A Lonely Coast”:

You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You’ll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull off the road to close your eyes or look up at sky punched with bullet holes. And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don’t give a damn. They are too far away, like everything else.
The year I lived in that junk trailer in the Crazy Woman Creek drainage I thought Josanna Skiles was like that, the house on fire in the night that you could only watch.