Assistant Professor Catherine Brady was recently named co-winner of the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for her short fiction.
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Writing Prof Battles Her Vocation
Like any good writer, Catherine Brady, assistant professor in the MFA in writing program, doesn’t stint on her metaphors in describing the challenges of a writing career: It’s a battleground, a struggle of colossal proportions, one person against the odds.
“It’s extremely difficult to publish. Your art is often judged by commercial standards. You tell yourself, ‘Nobody knows I exist. I haven’t achieved what I wanted. I’ll never publish this next book,’” Brady said. “It’s so painful, and it never stops.”
And that’s from a writer flush with success. Brady, who has enjoyed 20 years worth of steady publishing, was recently named a co-winner of the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction.
The prestigious award includes a $1,000 cash prize and publication by University of Georgia Press of Brady’s collection, Curled in the Bed of Love. Given her experience with publishing, Brady said she was surprised at winning the award.
“I would imagine most writers are surprised when they meet with success since rejection is the rule of the day,” Brady said.
But that’s the downside of a vocation Brady says she has repeatedly tried to quit, and failed. Like an addiction, once she gets hooked on a piece of writing, she can’t stop.
“Once I even enrolled in graduate school to become a therapist,” she said. “Then I got an idea for a novel and quit.”
Curled in the Bed of Love is also the name of the collection’s title story which originally won the O’Connor prize. It also won a 2001 short fiction prize from film director Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All Story magazine. It is about a gay couple, one of whom is HIV positive, and how they sustain their love during the stress of possible death and afterwards, when the virus is alleviated through drugs.
“I wanted to write about the plague, how when the big battle is over people lose interest. But AIDS is still hell to live with,” Brady said. “The main part I wanted to write about was where the partner finds out the gift of their love is not going to be taken away and how to sustain a relationship beyond the first infatuation.”
Brady writes mostly short fiction although she is currently looking to publish a novel. Her first collection of short stories, The End of the Class War, about working-class Irish women, was published in 1999 and was a finalist for the Western States Book Award in Fiction.
“Class War is totally different from Curled but one of the things I’ve found is that you can’t get past the issues that concern you,” Brady said. “I don’t think you can write if you don’t look outside yourself.”
Writing and thinking about social issues is complemented by her work at USF, Brady said, where this year she is teaching a composition class to undergraduates in addition to her graduate courses. “I believe in the university’s mission of social justice. I feel strongly that literature is made for the purpose of questioning our place in the world.”
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