August 5, 2006

Metrotimes (July 26-August 1): Summer Lit 2006 issue.

Every summer in the Detroit area, the local free weekly holds its anuual writing contest. This year's winners reflect a lot of the tensions (economic, ethnic...) in and around the Detroit area.

Larry M. Webb from Dearborn won the grand prize for fiction with "Some Tomatoes Please." The story follows a working class Joe (Gabriel actually) to the store. Gabriel's got a kid, a pregnant wife and is looking at being downsized. All of this plays through his thoughts as he witnesses a foiled shoplifting heist, making him wonder how far he'd go if he had to.

Tom Schusterbauer won the grand prize for poetry with "My Father's Song," a narrativish poem (all the poems were heavy on the narrative, but then again the judge--Peter Markus-- is primarily a short fiction writer) about the narrator's traveling salesman father:

Monday through Friday,
he was the salesman.
A 1954 two-door Ford,
robin's egg blue,
stuffed high and forlorn
with sample cases
and cardboard-leather satchels (ll. 1-7).

Matt Sadler's third place poem, "Bubble Wrap and Packing Foam," has a good use of rhetorical questions that act to bookend the piece:

And what did you learn about life? Do you wealk across the cold
--rail bridge [no line break]
toward home, kicking stones through the vertigininuos slats
lit by the subtle grace of inspiration? Did you pay your respects?
Your insurance bills? Say yes to yourself even once? (ll. 9-12)

Not being of or even around the Detroit scene, it's hard to tell how much the works presented are a bellwhether of the Detroit scene or an indicator of the judges' tastes, or both. At any rate, it's a window into what's going on at the local level around here.