[Texas Institute of Letters Newsletter, July-August 2007] Page: 3 of 4
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Seale analyzes entries for 2006 Catarulla Short Story Award
Jan Seale, who chaired the 2006 committee for the
Kay Cattarulla Short Story Award, did an interesting
study of the stories submitted. Here's what she found:
There were 22 stories submitted, 15 from male au-
thors, seven from female. The longest story was 9600
words and the shortest 1200.
Seventeen of the protagonists were male, with a
majority being young men coming of age or running
away from what they found, while of the five female
protagonists, there were a party girl, a runaway wife,
two caregivers, and a tourist.
The people in the stories were fairly settled, with
only four drinking binges and a couple of drug trips.
Adultery was not a major theme, although there were
a number of other major husband/wife issues, like ill-
ness, social or cultural differences, divorce, and sui-
cide. Plenty of old parents, crotchety and eccentric,
required care.
Prominent in seven of the stories was a twosome
of male friends or siblings. These were traveling, par-
tying, working together, reminiscing about Korea or
Vietnam, or struggling with family relationships.
Animals roamed through the stories. In the winning
story, Mark Wisniewski's "Prisoners of War," a turtle
farm was center stage, and two other plots depended
on calves and cats. Raccoons, dogs, goats, fish, snowy
egrets, and herons prowled about in others.
A number of stories were set in Austin, while oth-
ers spun themselves out in New York, Houston, theMidwest, New Mexico, or Greece. Most of the scenes
occurred in cities or midsize towns, with only three
distinctly rural settings.
The majority of points of view were first person,
with one wonderful first personplural ingeniously act-
ing as chorus.
Themes predominating were loneliness, being mis-
understood, dysfunctional and separated families, and
caregiving. Mostly, "things" were just too overwhelm-
ing for people to feel passionate or act decisively. They
simply muddled through, with sometimes a glimmer of
hope at the end. Laugh-out-loud treats for the reader
were few.
Titles tended toward brevity, with nine stories headed
by one to four words.
Of the magazines publishing the stories, two of the
three winners were published in Glimmer Train. Claim-
ing three stories was North American Review, with
Shenandoah having two. The others derived from
McSweeney 's Quarterly, Southwest Review, Idaho
Review, Crate, Langdon Review, Barrelhouse,
Southern Review, Open Windows 2006, Callahoo,
New Yorker, Three Penny Review, Passages North,
Antioch Review, New England Review, and The At-
lantic.
Of the 22 authors, 12 are currently living in Texas.
The combined "Texas experience" among all the au-
thors was 304 years.News of members and others
Dates have been set for the annual Texas Book
Festival. Mark your calendars for November 3 and 4.
Website is www.texasbookfestival.org.
Our president, Fran Vick-well, to be formal,
Frances Brannen Vick-combined with Jane
Clements Monday for a new book, Petras Legacy:
The South Texas Ranching Empire of Petra Vela
and Mifflin Kenedy. Publisher is Texas A&M Uni-
versity Press. As the catalogue description says, be-
sides being a biography of Petra and the story of the
famous Kenedy ranch, the book relates the history ofSouth Texas through a woman's perspective.
The Texas State Historical Association has issued
a second edition of Laura Wilson's Walt Matthews
of Lambshead with a new afterword by Laura. The
original award-winning edition was published in 1989.
Matthews was then 90 years old, the ninth and last
child of pioneering parents who established their ranch
in 1858. Matthews had spent practically his entire life
on that ranch except for four years at Princeton. He
died in 1997.
Continued on Page FourTEXAS INSTITUTE OF L-ETTERS
July/August 2007 Newsletter
Page 3
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Texas Institute of Letters. [Texas Institute of Letters Newsletter, July-August 2007], periodical, 2007; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1841294/m1/3/?q=Lamar+University: accessed June 6, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.