After glowing reviews and wide acclaim, Austin’s John Pipkin won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize for his debut, Woodsburner, which was published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in April. The awards were announced November 9 at the Center for Fiction’s Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner in New York City.
Pipkin backed into writing Woodsburner. While researching another novel, he ran across a “Harper’s Index” reference to an incident in which Henry David Thoreau accidentally set fire to some 300 acres of woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts, in 1844, a little more than a year before moving to Walden Pond. Intrigued by this little-known event despite having taught Thoreau, Pipkin turned his attention to writing Woodsburner.
You’d have thought that Thoreau would be the star of Woodsburner, but it is the aptly named Oddmund Huss who anchors the book. A Norwegian immigrant who keeps to himself while lusting after the wife of the farmer who employs him, Oddmund steps out of himself when he joins the fight against the fire. Then there’s the opium-addicted Reverend Caleb Dowdy, who interprets the fire as his opportunity to finally offend God. Comic relief comes in the form of Elliot Calvert, who gave up his dreams of becoming a playwright to bring in the almighty dollar through his book shop. Yet even in 1844, books weren’t enough to keep him in business; it’s black-market porn that supports Elliot and his growing family.
The heart of the book is the fire itself, which Pipkin whips into a frenzied character of its own. He caps it all off with a masterful, pitch-perfect early-Victorian style and voice that perfectly suits this obscure escapade that perhaps shamed Thoreau into his retreat to Walden Pond and changed American literature forever.
But writing the novel was only half the battle. Pipkin landed representation with agent Marly Rusoff, who took the manuscript to publisher Janet Silver at Houghton Mifflin. When Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin merged in late 2007, John’s deal seemed to be off. A few months later, Silver landed at Nan A. Talese/Doubleday and John suddenly had a deal. (For more on John’s circuitous route to publishing, see this timeline of the making of Woodsburner from the Austin American-Statesman.)
Pipkin wasn’t the only author with Texas ties to get a nod from the Center for Fiction; Philipp Meyer, a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, was nominated for his own acclaimed first novel, American Rust. The other finalists included The Cradle, by Patrick Somerville; Tinkers, by Paul Harding; and The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li.
The prize includes a $10,000 cash. Past winners of this prestigious award include Hannah Tinti (2008) for The Good Thief, Junot Diaz (2007) for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Marisha Pessl (2006) for Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, John Pipkin attended Washington & Lee University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and received his Ph.D. in British Literature from Rice University in 1997. He has taught writing and literature at Saint Louis University, Boston University, and Southwestern University. He was the executive director of the Writers’ League of Texas from 2005 to 2008, and left to complete Woodsburner.
John lives in Austin with his wife, Eileen Cleere, who is a professor at Southwestern, and his very clever and entertaining son, Max. He’s now working on his next novel for Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
A most satisfactory ending to a fabulous story, don’t you think?
For more on John Pipkin and Woodsburner, check out this video interview with John and the Amazon author Q&A. Better yet, go buy a copy and read it ASAP!
