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LORRAINE ADAMS
Fourth Annual VCU First Novelist Award
Robert Holsworth
Good evening everyone. I’m Bob Holsworth and
I’m serving this year’s Dean of the College of Humanities
and Sciences, and I wanted to welcome everyone to this wonderful First
Novelist Award event where we have another fabulous winner this year,
and really want to say it’s going to be a great evening for all
of us. I want to say just a couple of things, first about our Department
of English and our MFA program, which I think are really doing a fabulous
job, not only here at VCU, but in relating to the entire Richmond community,
and beginning to really to have an impact in terms of how the community
views Virginia Commonwealth University—in terms of our writing
and literature work. And David Wojohn, Tom De Haven, I see Laura, Jeff
Lodge, Clint McCown, Susann Cokal, our new hires are just fabulous, and
it’s really been remarkable to be able to work with this group
of faculty here.
The other thing I’d like to say as we kind of go forward here is that
I think beyond the First Novelist Award and the Levis Award that we give out
on poetry, I’m hoping that over the next year or so we can even move
forward with some new hires in the MFA program, and beyond that we’re
looking to try to put in a Master Writers program, where we can bring people
here not just for an evening, but for a week or two. And we’re hoping
that we can be able to do that as soon as next year. So David, I hope I didn’t
steal any thunder there, but we’re really . . .
And it’s also a great pleasure for me to be able to welcome everybody to this award because about twenty, twenty-five years ago, the person who was the principal benefactor of this award, David Baldacci, was a student in my political science classes, and I remember David, who had a thirst to write from the time he was eighteen or nineteen; he’d work all night as a security guard and come into the class with his security guard uniform at 9 a.m., and then be one of the top students in a class of one hundred and fifty. So it’s a particular pleasure for me to be able to welcome folks to this award because, as I said, one of the principal benefactors of it was a student of mine twenty years ago here.
And then finally, tonight is a special pleasure to introduce someone who came to the novel through the ranks of the writing journalists in America, and who had been a Pulitzer Prize winner. Lorraine Adams, because in my own field of politics and political science, some of the great national reporters for the Washington Post right now came through Richmond prior to writing their big books on Bill Clinton and Vladimir Putin, John Harris and Peter Baker. So while I’ve met Lorraine for the first time this evening, I feel some affinity for her because of the relationships I’ve been able to establish over the year with some of her compatriots.
Right now what I’d like to do is turn the program over to one of our most recent hires in the MFA program, Clint McCown, who himself is a novelist, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and I think perfectly appropriate writer to introduce our winner this evening. Clint?
Clint McCown
The VCU First Novelist Award is now in it’s fourth year. It exists thanks to the generous support of writer and VCU grad David Baldacci, the College of Humanities and Sciences, the Department of English, the Department of Mass Communication, the School of World Studies, the Follett Higher Education Group, and the Artspace Gallery. It couldn’t exist without the judges—this year John Beckman, Michael Byers, and Jann Malone—and the many graduate students, faculty, and friends who invested countless hours in reading the entries—and there are plenty of entries. We’ve already received over ninety novels for next year’s competition. I especially want to single out two people for all their work: Andrew Blossom, who put in long hours as this year’s Baldacci Fellow, and most especially, Patty Smith, who has served as the point person, overseeing all the details that make this award a reality.
The Award itself this year is a sculpture created by Allan Rosenbaum, you will be seeing that shortly, and it will be presented by Steve Gonzales, Director of the VCU E2 Bookstore.
This year’s recipient of the First Novelist Award is not a newcomer to writing. Before turning to fiction, Lorraine Adams established herself as a journalist, a critic, and now a teacher at the New School in New York City. She has written for some of the country’s best publications, including the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Washington Post, where she worked as a reporter for eleven years. VCU is not alone in recognizing her literary talent. Harbor won last year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, and was Entertainment Weekly’s Fiction Book of the Year. It was named a Notable Book by the New York Times.
One reviewer of Harbor, writing in blogcritics.org, raised what for him was the most obvious question: How in the world, he wrote, could a blond-haired American woman educated at Princeton and Colombia somehow transmute herself into a desperately poor, semi-terror-stricken Algerian illegal immigrant, so much so that it is as if you yourself were experiencing what it is like to be Aziz Arkoun. The reviewer concluded that Lorraine Adams’s accomplishment was nothing short of a miracle.
But Neal Gordon, writing in the New York Times thought it simple to account for this miracle. It’s easy, he observed, to explain how Lorraine Adams knows so much about the illegal Algerian Community in America, about credit card fraud, about terrorism and FBI investigations. Harbor, her meticulously constructed first novel, is based on her reporting for the Washington Post on the arrest of Abdel Ghani Meskini and the FBI investigation of a millenium terrorist plot in which a car full of explosives was to have been driven across the Canadian border near Seattle and detonated at Los Angeles International Airport.
Neal Gordon is right in noting that Lorraine Adams knows how to track down leads and gather material, how to amass the insider’s facts. She is a journalist of the highest rank. She knows how to investigate a situation, a procedure, a culture. She knows how to follow a story. In 1992 she received the Pulitzer Prize for reporting that charged Texas police with extensive misconduct and abuses of power. That kind of journalism takes guts.
But not every great journalist makes a great novelist. How then did Lorraine Adams manage so successfully to leap from fact to fiction? In turning to the novel form, she brought along her reporter’s courage and tenacity, her reporter’s determination to dig beneath the surface and ferret out the most telling details. But to the reporter’s insights she adds the novelist’s drive to get to the heart of the human experience. Harbor is rich with information and detail, as one might expect, but it’s also rich with emotion and psychological depth. She combines the smaller truths of what goes on in the world with the larger truths of the human heart, of suffering and resilience, hardship and hope. No matter who you are when you start to read Lorraine Adams’s book, you will become caught up in Aziz Arkoun’s desperate struggle.
Her writing meets all the demands of the craft and of the art. As another reviewer noted, her sentences move with speed and visual economy, but also contain poetic beauties. This is certainly true. Her book is compelling. She never treads water—each page provides reason to read the next. Perhaps it’s true as the Times reviewer noted, that it’s easy to understand how Lorraine Adams could accomplish so much in her book. But that still doesn’t negate the fact that it’s still nothing short of a miracle.
It’s my pleasure to invite Lorraine Adams to the stage to receive this year’s VCU First Novelist Award.
Lorraine Adams
Thank you so very much. I’m very honored by what Clint had to say and I’m very honored that you chose Harbor, and I think that’s all I’m going to say right now. Obviously, I’m going to read from Harbor. After that introduction I almost don’t have to do an introduction, but I will say a few things.
I’m going to read the first chapter because it’s the most easy way to get into what is a novel full of funny names and strange places. And the name Aziz Arkoun is a name you’re already familiar with. Aziz is the character that opens this novel, and he’s the character that ends the story, and he is actually someone who is named Aziz. There is a real person named Aziz, and he doesn’t know anything about Harbor, he can’t really read English at all, he can’t really speak English very well, but what I am going to read to you in this first chapter is by and large what actually happened to the person who is Aziz.
And not only did it happen to Aziz, what I’m going to read to you, but there are many young men who did exactly what Aziz did, which is to leave Algeria during the 1990s and do so by stowing away on a natural gas tanker. Algeria is one of the biggest producers in the world of natural gas, and there’s a lot of natural gas tankers off the shore of Algeria in the Mediterranean, and those tankers are destined for various places, but one of those places is Boston. There were many young men who knew this and who made the journey, which took them generally fifty-two days—I mean, that was a number I heard a lot. And doing so was dangerous, and they were very desperate.
[Chapter One of Harbor, by Lorraine Adams, published 2004 by Alfred A. Knopf.]
Thank you. 
