A 1st for me ... times 3
Saturday, May 20, 2006 at 10:01PM A leap of faith is all it took for me to come home Saturday with not one, not two but three 1st place awards in the 2006 Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest, sponsored by the Illinois Woman's Press Association (IWPA).
I can't say that I was surprised when the awards were officially handed out at the IWPA's Awards Luncheon at the Chicago Athletic Association in Chicago. But that's only because the 1st place winners had been tipped off by an email that was sent earlier in the week.
Cecilia Green hands out Randy's awards at the IWPA Awards Banquet
The email came on Tuesday evening and let's just say that when you get these kinds of emails, if you're at all like me, your heart starts racing and your palms get all sweaty. You don't even want to read it because you tend to think that good things just don't happen to you. But you open it and then you see the names of the 1st place winners but they're in alphabetical order so you have to read almost all the way to the end to find out that you'd taken THREE 1sts.
This is way more than I ever expected when I took that leap and entered the contest a couple months back. Really I entered not expecting anything at all. But there was my name listed as the 1st place winner in three separate categories: web content for personal or hobby sites for my essay "Pickles and Hiccups"; website development/creation for lostintheivy.com; and fiction, novel for Lost in the Ivy. I also took 2nd place in the web content for personal or hobby sites for "A Cubs fan finds hope in Sox's success", an essay that I now realize seems rather foolish.
I should note that the competition is not over for the three 1st place entries. They've all gone on to the National Federation of Press Women's Communications Contest for judging at the national level. How cool is that? My work being judged in a national competition.
Randy's Awards
Winning isn't everything, but it sure makes you feel good. So good that your wife can convince you to pose for silly photos like the one to the left.
And my publisher liked the news, too. For the second time this year, my book is Up in Lights on their home page.
Randy Richardson
"Will you be attending the awards ceremony in drag, Mr. Dart?" a writer's group friend teased.
The reference was to a character in my book, Jimmie Dart, who is a drag queen.
This was a little friendly razzing for being a member of the Illinois Woman's Press Association when I am obviously not a woman.
I would note that the IWPA is not the the first woman's organization that I joined. That would be Sisters in Crime, a world-wide organization for women writing mysteries. I never hid the fact that I was a man but I didn't come right out and tell anyone that that is what I am. The reality is that there are a lot of men just like me who are Sisters. I wouldn't have joined the group if there weren't. Sure the group is primarily for women, but they don't exclude you or discriminate against you in any way because you're not one of them. So I'm proud to be a Sister.
My entry into the world of the Sisters I think made it a little easier for me to join the IWPA, a group that first came to my attention when I took part in a book fair that they hosted back in November at the Chicago Cultural Center. Now I didn't immediately join because, well, I felt just a little bit uncomfortable about the fact that I was, you know, a man.
Back at the time of the book fair I broached the question whether the group was strictly for the opposite sex. I was told in no uncertain terms that they are open to both kinds. But I didn't join.
Not until a few months later when I got the invite to take part in their Communications Contest. Even then I still wasn't sure. The debate in my head went back and forth but I kept looking at the contest entry form until I finally decided that I really had nothing to lose, other than the cost of membership and the entry fee.
So I took that leap of faith. And it paid off in a big way. Still, I must confess that there was a part of me that felt just a little bit uncomfortable about accepting awards from a woman's organization when I am not a woman but the exact opposite of a woman. The easy thing to do would have been to just take the awards but not go to the awards banquet and show my face as a man. Randy is a kind of adrogynous name and those in attendance that hadn't met me before would probably just assume that I was a woman. But that would be the chickenhearted way to do it and, quite frankly, the unmanly way to do it.
I went to the awards banquet secretly hoping that there would be other men there, and there were. But most of them weren't there to pick up awards. Besides me, there was only one other man that came to pick up an award and he was there with his wife. The two of them had coauthored a book, I believe. There was one other man who won an award (honorable mention) in the non-fiction book category but he didn't make an appearance. That's too bad, because I'd seen him before at the book fair and he was quite entertaining. I wondered if he, like me, felt a little bit awkward about the award. Or if he just wasn't able to make it for some reason or other.
By the time the awards were over, I was glad that I'd come. Everyone that I met there was friendly and supportive and didn't at all make me feel out of place. Except for another award-winning author, Gen LaGreca, whose first question to me was something like, "Men aren't supposed to win these, are they?"
She was teasing. I think.
Randy Richardson
Just today I received the judge's comments on my book. The judge was Amanda Freymann, who began her publishing career in 1978 at Houghton-Mifflin Company, followed by Little Brown and Co., the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Stewart, Tabori & Chang. At the Art Institute of Chicago where she was Associate Director of Publications-Production, she produced many exhibition catalogues and a number of popular books, including revised editions of The Essential Guide and Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms, and oversaw the first four children's books to be produced by the Art Institute. This is what she wrote in her comments about Lost in the Ivy:
"A good plot, well written and edited. Great characters. A real Chicago hook!"
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