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No Turn-Around Deadlines in Prize Winning Lukas Awards

By Fran Dauth

 

Two days after many Americans learned Navy Seals had killed Osama bin Laden by reading the news on Twitter or Facebook, the ceremony May 3 to bestow the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards was the antidote to immediate media. It reflected the opposite for the publish-what-we-just-heard-now syndrome.

 

Consider the work done by the winners of the prizes for narrative non-fiction:

 

Eliza Griswold, author of The Tenth Parallel, Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, spent seven years researching the book chosen for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.

 

For Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, published by Random House, it was 15 years of work, including interviews with 1,200 people, before publication of her book led to the Mark Lynton History Prize.

 

And Alex Tizon, winner of The J. Anthony Lukas Prize for a Work in Progress, has been gathering material for his “sociological memoir” all his life. Tizon’s book, Big Little Man: The Asian Male at the Dawn of The Asian Century, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

 

The prizes, administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, are in memory of Tony Lukas, the celebrated reporter and author, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, whose narrative non-fiction was built on in-depth reporting and the use of individual experience to explain events of national consequence. He died in 1997.

 

Lukas’ book about school integration in Boston, Common Ground, took seven years to complete. It won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His last book, “Big Trouble,” was 10 years in the making.

 

The Lukas awards are supported financially by the family of Mark Lynton, a refugee from Nazi Germany, WWII officer, automobile industry executive and author, who was an avid reader of history. He also died in 1997.

 

The Lukas Book Award is presented each year to “a book-length work of narrative non-fiction on an American topic that exemplifies the literary grace, the commitment to serious research, and the social concern that characterized the distinguished work of the award’s namesake.”

 

Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lemann, who awarded the prize to Griswold, read the judges’ citation, which includes this comment:

           

“Griswold takes you with her on her journey around the globe, as she discovers just how entwined the conflicts over religion are with conflicts over land, water, oil and other natural resources. Although the reporting is all done abroad, the topic is of great importance to American political and social policy.”

 

Griswold was not present, but was, in Lemann’s words, in Pakistan “where she is tied down by events.” Her editor, Paul Elie, accepted the prize on her behalf.

 

“The book that we, or she, gave the subtitle, ‘Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam,’ has the title ‘The Tenth Parallel,’ for the line she followed in the book, but it could just as well had the title Common Ground, “ Elie said.

 

Lemann also presented certficates to two of the three finalists:

 

Jefferson Cowie for Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, published by Penguin Press.

 

 Paul Greenberg for Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, published by Penguin

 Press.

 

The third finalist, Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, published by Scribner, was not present. Mukherjee’s book won the Pulitzer Prize as well.

           

The Mark Lynton History Prize is given to “a work of history on any subject that best combines intellectual distinction with felicity of expression.” Robert H. Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, gave the award to Wilkerson.

 

Later during a panel discussion, Wilkerson talked about what the prize meant to her.

 

“I was obviously influenced by Common Ground. I have a trilogy of protagonists as he (Lukas) did. The book deals with many of the same issues as his book did.

           

“As a matter of fact, I teach at Boston University in the same classroom where he taught, so this (award) is very special to me . . . Students sense there is something spiritual about that room as if they know Tony Lukas had been there, “ she said.

 

The judges named one finalist, Patrick Wilcken, for Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in His Laboratory, published by Penguin Press.

           

The J. Anthony Lukas Prize for a Work in Progress was presented to Tizon by Taylor Branch, the author-historian best known for his trilogy on the civil rights era, America in the King Years.

           

Tizon, who, like Wilkerson, didn’t comment until the later panel discussion, said the Work in Progress award was “a great affirmation . . . I expected to have a small audience for this book and to receive this kind of award, such encouragement. Thank you, thank you.”

           

The judges named two work-progress finalists:

 

Joe Mozingo for The Fiddler on Pantico Run, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

           

Florence Williams for Breasts, to be published by W.W. Norton.

           

After the awards (and prize money) were handed out, Wilkerson and Tizon joined Branch in a discussion of their work.

 

In his opening remarks, Lemann had recalled that Lukas worried non-fiction writers didn’t enjoy as many forums as fiction writers to share their experience, that there wasn’t “enough structured conversation about our craft.”

           

“So we use this program as a pretext to do that,” Lemann said. “It reminds us all why we’re giving (these awards), that in addition to honoring outstanding achievements, it is to try to create a community of people who do this work, care about this kind of work and are always engaged in thinking how it can be done better.”

           

Branch began by noting “what we are really here to talk about is the craft of creating the kind of non-fiction that Tony Lukas did.“ 

           

Turning to Isabel Wilkerson, Branch said her book was both broad and intimate, but had she ever thought of doing one or the other? “Or were you resolved to do a blend, from the beginning, that is a broad history of the migration, together with intimate portraits of chosen representatives?”

           

Wilkerson answered her intent had always been to weave the personal narratives and the broad history.

           

“I needed to have three people coming from different experiences, three different states in the South, following three different tracks of migration during three different decades, and have the readers follow them through the course of that narrative as it unfolded.

           

“But those stories in of themselves would have been random experiences of ordinary people had there not been the context and the background and the history … therefore there had to be the blend of both.”

           

She said she also was influenced by the structure of Grapes of Wrath, which while it is fiction, also provided historical context for the narrative. She said she used “inter chapters” as Steinbeck had, and “found that to be a lovely way to keep the writing at a certain level, yet not interrupt the narrative.”

           

Branch then turned to Tizon. “Narrative non-fiction is difficult enough, you’re doing narrative non-fiction with a first-person character, in other words, putting yourself in the story. Was that a necessary choice? A hard choice?”

           

“As far as the decision to go first person, it was very difficult,“ Tizon said, adding that in writing the book he feels a little bit like his five-month-old golden retriever who likes to lie on his back with his legs spread apart, making him as vulnerable as possible.

           

“There is a fine line you have to walk when you are writing first person, you want to be personal without going too much into private areas. …

           

“If I had tried this topic without it being first person, it ran the risk of being another kind of sociological piece about race, and particularly about the Asian male experience.

           

“I felt like it needed a face and I guess my face was as good as any.”

           

Branch asked Wilkerson about a vignette in her book about a night-blooming cereus, which was one of the few times she mentioned her family’s migration north. Branch said he brought up the plant because his mother has one. “How did the night-blooming cereus deserve to get in there? It is a wonderful story.”

           

Wilkerson said that at some point while she was listening to the 1,200 people she interviewed in search of her three protagonists, she realized she had spent more time with other people’s parents and grandparents than she had with her own family.

             

She said when she’d tell people her mother was from Rome, they would give her a questioning look until she said, Rome, Georgia. Her father was from southern Virginia and each of her parents migrated to Washington, D.C, where they met.

           

“My toughest interview by far was my mother, she said. One of the reasons the Great Migration was an underappreciated part of American history was because the people who lived it did not want to talk about it, she said, adding that many of the things in the book about her family were previously unknown to her.

           

The story about the night-blooming cereus came up because Wilkerson’s mother noticed some Casablanca lilies on her daughter’s coffee table and it reminded her of the rarely-flowering plant her own mother grew.

           

“The story is that it is a gangly orphan of a plant. It blooms for a singular moment, a lily-white bloom in the middle of the night. Her mother, my grandmother, happened to be a wonderful gardener and she would watch this thing, which was horrible to look at, for 364 days” waiting for it to bloom. When the time neared, neighboring women on Gibbons Street in Rome, Georgia, would be invited to come at midnight to watch for that bloom while drinking sweet tea and home-made vanilla ice cream.

           

“My mother remembered this and it was one of the things she had to forego,” when she left, Wilkerson said.

           

“Most of us are descended from someone who had to make the difficult decision to leave not just the harshness of their lives but the lovely moments, “ when they left the place where they began for the promise of a better life somewhere else.

           

Branch asked Tizon how he decided to write his book about Asian men, not Asian women or even Asian men and women.

           

Tizon said that if one Googles Asian women many book titles will come up, but not so for Asian men. “I think it is a story I could tell…with personal insight. My story serves as sort of a skeletal outline for the story I am trying to tell. So there a memoir element to it, but the memoir is a portal into the larger issues I’m going to try to address …

           

“Growing up in the United States I saw no images, no statues, of anybody who looked like me,” Tizon said. He told about a trip he made to one tiny island in the Philippines where a local warrior, Lapu Lapu, killed Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan.

           

“For me to go to this island and tell the story of Lapu Lapu . . . and stand on the sand (there), I don’t know if I can explain why, it was an affirmation to a certain degree that men who looked like me did have the strength, could stand up, could fight, could win.”

           

After Branch opened the session to questions from the audience, Carlin Romano, one of the works-in-progress judges, asked whether authors had to consider the relationship of money to the kind of book they wanted to write. In other words, could they afford to give to take as much time as needed to have the best book possible?

           

Tizon said he had not taken money into account when he conceived the book, (because) it is a book he needs to write. “Certainly this prize ($30,000) will help me a lot. It will help me in the next year or two to live,” he said.