An ironic award

My literary career has been checkered with awards and grants, as many marginal careers are, and most of these have come at opportune times when I needed validation or money or both. In particular, I recall the good timing of:

• The Best American Short Stories "Roll of Honor" awards I won in 1971, 1972 and 1974 at the beginning of my career. These were important national validations of my work. And then, strangely, I abandoned fiction for decades.
• I received 8 grants through the 80s, the first for fiction, 5 for playwriting and 2 for performing, all of which helped me survive as a working playwright and writer.
• Winning the 1997 Crossing Borders International New Play Competition gave me second life after the dark 90s, in which I'd crashed after the sunlit 80s. I needed this then.
• My book SEVEN PLAYS being a finalist for the 2001 Oregon Book Award was a nice curtain on my playwriting career, from which I considered myself retired.
• But of all these, the least expected at the time and the best, even if the most ironic, is being selected by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning indie newspaper Willamette Week as being someone who made a major contribution to the cultural life of Portland (as voted by Portlanders themselves). In the alphabetical list, I came just before my friend Paul deLay. What is ironic, of course, is that the Portland to which I contributed no longer exists. But I like this footnote in history, this documentation that I was there in what I consider the city's Golden Era. Strange what we end up remembering most.

I don't expect to get any more grants (I don't apply for them any more) or awards (what use have I for an addition to the resume now?), but it's nice to recall the good timing of the few I've received. They helped at the time. It's always nice to be recognized -- and it's always nice to be able to pay the rent. Yeats put everything in perspective when, upon hearing he'd won the Nobel for Literature, asked first off, "How much?" (Hmm, oh yes, my mystery is a finalist ... well, things like this are like gravy or dessert, pleasant additions to the real meal. You can live without them, and you also can enjoy them if they appear on the table.)

clipped from www.wweek.com They Rule We're sure we've left a few thousand names off this list, but the following people, during the last quarter-century, have all helped to make this a better and more entertaining place in which to live. We've haven't always agreed with them, but these folks have made Portland Portland. Names printed in bold were the top 25 vote-getters in our recent readers' poll. Come the next millennium, they will be enshrined on bricks in Pioneer Courthouse Square. CHARLES DEEMER: DRAMATIC LICENSE PAUL DELAY: THE REAL THING