Sara Pritchard, a student in West Virginia Universitys new master of fine arts degree program in creative writing, has won the 2002 Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize for Fiction. Her collection of linked stories, Crackpots, is scheduled for publication in 2003 by Houghton Mifflin.
Pritchard joins WVU alumna Ann Pancake and WVU English Professor Kevin Oderman as winners of a Bakeless prize. Pancake won the fiction award in 2000 for Given Ground; Oderman received the Bakeless Nonfiction Award in 1999 for How Things Fit Together.
Awarded by the faculty of the Bread Loaf WritersConference at Middlebury College, Bakeless awards help fund the publication of writersfirst books of fiction, nonfiction or poetry. Usually one recipient in each category is selected each year.
A non-traditional graduate student, Pritchard has worked full-time as publications coordinator for the Canaan Valley Institute (CVI) for more than a year. She previously worked seven years at WVU s National Research Center for Coal and Energy (NRCCE). During her time there, she began taking creative writing courses at the urging of a friend.
She admits to reading and rereading The Purchase of Order by Gail Adams, WVU associate professor of English, and being”greatly inspired.”Adamsbook received the Flannery OConner Award for Short Fiction in 1988.
“I used to walk by her house every day on my way to work, and I always wondered what if would be like to be a writer like Gail and have a book,”Pritchard said.”Secretly, I thought of myself as a writer, but I couldnt think of anything to write about.”
Harriet Emerson, a colleague at NRCCE , encouraged Pritchard, at age 48, to take one of Adamsgraduate-level fiction writing workshops with her. In that class, she finished two stories she had been developing in her head for a few years.
“Gails class opened up a whole new world for me,”Pritchard said.”I had never written anything seriously or had any stories published. The entire workshop experience was thrilling.”
The following year, she took Kevin Odermans course in creative nonfiction. She missed the first class where he explained what nonfiction is or isnt. Her first piece for Oderman, called Crackpots, was about Pritchard as a little girl and her great aunt, who was senile. In the story, her aunt relives the time when she eloped with a doctor in the 1890s.
Since she missed the first class, Pritchard focused on the creative part of the assignment and not the nonfiction, adding fictitious details like her grandfather having a pet monkey.
“I just went wild and created this kind of other life that could have been mine if I was somebody else,”Pritchard said.”I began to realize that I was writing what should be called fiction, but Kevin said `Oh, so what, who cares what it is. Its greatso just keep writing,”
That material eventually evolved into the award-winning Crackpots. She has also had 10 other stories published in literary magazines.
In addition to the Bakeless Award, Pritchard also received a literary fellowship from the West Virginia Commission of the Arts.
Following completion of her MFA , she is pondering a possible return to teaching. In 1971 she came to WVU s English Department as a graduate student and taught freshman composition and rhetoric classes.