Postcripts: Miscellaneous Notes · Winter 2011–12

Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Christine Sneed with the twenty-first annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.

This year’s judge was Ladette Randolph, Ploughshares’ editor-in-chief. In choosing the book, Randolph said: “Sneed’s Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry is a sophisticated collection. Linked by a common theme of male-female relationships—often sexual, always unbalanced—the stories are mature, beautiful, and devastating testaments to the ways we betray ourselves and each other. No word is out of place, no detail unnecessary. There isn’t a story here that isn’t a gem.”

About Christine Sneed Raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Libertyville, Illinois, Sneed describes herself as a “Midwesterner from birth.” Growing up as an only child, she was left alone a fair amount and ended up treasuring her independence—“but I had a lot of cousins, a lot of friends and neighbors,” she says, “so I wasn’t an only child outcast or anything like that.”

Her relationship with words began early: there were always books in the house, she says, and “a lot of respect in my household for literature.” Although she filled a few childhood journals with love poems and entries about unrequited crushes, she didn’t begin writing seriously until a time-rich year spent studying abroad in Strasbourg during college. “I realized that I could become a writer if I actually sat down and wrote frequently,” she says. “I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission—I could just do it.”

Sneed majored in French and International Business at Georgetown. When asked what she planned to do, she laughs: “I just thought I could get a job—some glamorous job working in a high-rise and wearing nice suits and speaking French, making money, and it didn’t happen.”

After graduation, she worked for a few years for a company selling highway safety products, and then went on to get an MFA in poetry at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Post-MFA, Sneed moved to Chicago to work at the Art Institute and began to focus on stories rather than poetry. She still writes the occasional poem, she says, and credits poetry with developing both her attention to language and her sense of writerly playfulness, a quality that she eventually learned could be captured in stories as well.

Over the next several years, Sneed endured streams of rejections and celebrated the occasional success. One of her breakthroughs, the inclusion of “Quality of Life” in Best American Short Stories 2008, happened only after the story had been rejected by twenty different journals, before finally being accepted by the New England Review.

After several years working at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sneed began teaching at DePaul, where she still works. On a whim, she bundled together some of her published stories with others that seemed to work well with them, and sent the collection to a contest. Allan Gurganus awarded it the Grace Paley Prize. “By turns funny and pitiless,” he wrote, “these tales amount to a vision.”

Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry has several elements that lend the collection coherence. All of the stories have an unmarried woman at their center, either single or divorced, and many of them focus on an imbalance in a relationship, often a romantic one—between partners who are rich and poor, young and old, famous and ordinary. With bursts of humor and sometimes great sadness, the stories explore whether the imbalance might be overcome—as in “Twelve + Twelve” or “By the Way”—or if it is more likely to become a poisonous element in the relationship, as in “Quality of Life” or “You’re So Different.”

Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry ends with “Walled City,” a...