Prairie Schooner

This is the third and final entry of our three-part series in which Hali Sofala, our Book Prize Coordinator, speaks with some of our past Book Prize winners to get a sense of how Prairie Schooner's Book Prize has played a role in their careers, and what advice they might have for future Book Prize contestants. Today, we're featuring her interview with James Crews who won the Book Prize in Fiction in 2010.

1. You won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry in 2010 for your collection, The Book of What Stays, what were you doing when you heard the news that you had won? How did you feel?

This is the second entry of our three-part series in which Hali Sofala, our Book Prize Coordinator, speaks with some of our past Book Prize winners to get a sense of how Prairie Schooner's Book Prize has played a role in their careers, and what advice they might have for future Book Prize contestants. Today, we're featuring her interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval who won the Book Prize in Fiction in 2006.

1. You won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction in 2006 for your collection The Alice Stories, what were you doing when you heard the news that you had won? How did you feel?

Being an academic who reads comic books, it’s not surprising to me (though a tad tedious) when my colleagues want to talk about “post-modern superheroes.” These discussions tend to involve the usual suspects--Alan Moore’s Watchmen or Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. Whether there’s really anything “post-modern” about them is contentious, but it’s actually quite rare when one finds a true depiction of Nietzchean imperatives. My favorite out of those rare representations of the ubermensch and his attempt to convert humanity is Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme.

It is important, in considering the role of videogames in modern literature, to note the different types of games that we play as well as which player model we are adopting when we play them. The recent explosion of smaller puzzle games to a more vast audience, through the medium of such portable devices as tablets and phones, are clearly marketed to a Rational Player Model. The rise of Angry Birds and the resurgence of 2D platformers such as Braid and Limbo, appeal to our sense of practical strategy, rather than our moral pathos. Still, triple-A titles like the recent releases of Skyrim and Mass Effect 3 seem to balance the scales of those two corollaries, providing an expanding new medium which allows for participants to push themselves into intense moral situations that provide a safe format for experimentation. This is not always a good thing.