Postscripts

At the Texas Institute of Letters' 63rd Annual Awards Banquet last Saturday night, Don Graham, off-the-cuff scholar, TIL president, UT professor, and emcee, said, "I like the sound of 'president'" in his opening remarks. He also saidthat he likes the "trappings of power" associated with his position. Anytime Don Graham makes remarks like these, he's being facetious and you should pay him no mind, though it's advisable to run and take cover nonetheless. Graham read from a litany of actual e-mails he has received in his tenure as TIL president (names withheld to protect the guilty). Some were sweet, or meant to at least sound sweet, and some were sour. Some were of this tenor: "Dear Don, about halfway through your review of my (insert specific literary form here), I wanted to strangle you." Few people, and fewer professors, are such masters of charming self-effacement as Don Graham. The decided consensus was that Don Graham was far more Billy Crystal than Whoopi Goldberg. No ingratiating costume changes for this TIL president!

If it strikes you as inappropriate to compare any proceeding of this august literary organization with those flimsy Oscars, then you probably would not have enjoyed last Saturday night. Graham shaved about an hour's length off previous TIL banquets, and, from all reports, that was a welcome move. I think the table I sat at made up for the lost hour. Marion Winik sat down and declared the table the Glamour Table, and that's when I thought, "On Monday at least one person from this table is going to call and apologize for something they say tonight and suggest that it not go in the paper" only when mystery writer Tom Zigal called me on Monday morning, he said he was fair game. He was undoubtedly referring to making innocent Pati Griffith think he was Carol Dawson. At one point during dinner, Griffith, the author of Supporting the Sky: A Novel, who grew up in Texas but lives in Washington, D.C., turned to Zigal and said, "Carol, I haven't met you yet. I'm Pati Griffith," which made sense for Griffith to say since Zigal had put on Carol Dawson's nametag. What a lady, Pati Griffith. I swear I'd bring up any point of conversation and she'd say, "Oh, I've written a play about that." (Case in point: I told her I grew up in Amarillo and sure enough, she's written a play about Pantex.) People like Tom Grimes and Annette Carlozzi, Zigal's wife, looked upon these shenanigans and ... well ... looked upon them some more. (Southwest Texas State news: Following Tim O'Brien as the SWT Mitte Chair in Creative Writing will be MacArthur "Genius" Award winner Leslie Marmon Silko.)

Congratulations to the winners of the $18,750 TIL bestowed Saturday night: C.W. Smith won the award for fiction for Understanding Women; Robert Flynn won an award for excellence sustained throughout a career; Susan Choi, author of The Foreign Student, won for best first work of fiction; Don Carleton won an award for the book making the most significant contribution to knowledge for A Breed So Rare: The Life of J.R. Parten, Liberal Texas Oil Man; poet B. J. Fairchild won the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award for The Art of the Lathe; best short story went to Jane Roberts Wood for"My Mother Had a Maid"; James Hoggard and Marian Schwartz were co-winners for best translations; Rick Bass wrote the best piece of magazine journalism; Patrick Beach and Bryan Wooley shared an award for best work of journalism; and best children's book went to The Big Sky by Pat Mora.