{"id":3310,"date":"2014-11-13T21:07:12","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T02:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/2014\/11\/13\/tevis-wins-pushcart-prize\/"},"modified":"2024-07-24T09:37:30","modified_gmt":"2024-07-24T13:37:30","slug":"tevis-wins-pushcart-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/tevis-wins-pushcart-prize\/","title":{"rendered":"Tevis wins Pushcart Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Furman<\/a>

Furman English professor and writer, Joni Tevis<\/p><\/div>\n

For nearly 40 years the finest writers the country has to offer have been featured in David Henderson\u2019s The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses<\/i><\/a>. It would appear, then, that Furman English professor Joni Tevis is officially one of our finest writers.<\/p>\n

Dr.\u00a0Tevis was recently named a Pushcart Prize winner for her essay \u201cWhat the Body Knows,\u201d which will be published with other award winners in the 2015 edition of the series. Short stories, poetry, and essays are represented in the annual collection, and being selected for inclusion is a coveted career achievement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was so happy about it. I had hoped for one for a number of years,\u201d Tevis said. \u201cI\u2019ve been nominated a couple of times before and was just happy to be nominated. It\u2019s such an honor to be in the anthology with writers like Louise Gl\u00fcck<\/a>, Philip Levine<\/a> \u2013 people whose work you\u2019ve read and admired for years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the Body Knows\u201d recounts Tevis\u2019s experience on a rafting trip she took with her husband David in the summer of 2009 on the Canning River more than a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. For two weeks, they and their guide braved frigid temperatures and potentially life threatening currents in the stunning, empty vastness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge<\/a> on their way to the Arctic Ocean, which Tevis shares with readers in the form of vivid imagery sprinkled with a thought-provoking dose of philosophical musing.<\/p>\n

The mosquitoes, for example, are a constant menace, yet Tevis realizes at some point that \u201cwithout the mosquito, the jaegers and longspurs and buntings would starve, and the wolf and the bear. They\u2019re the wide base of the food pyramid here, billions of pounds of protein on the wing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just such an amazing time to be up there. I had never been to Alaska, and I\u2019d always wanted to go,\u201d she said. \u201cThe sun never set . . . and you would think that would be very unsettling and strange, but it immediately made sense to me and I really enjoyed that time. Writing about it was a way for me to relive it and also to share it with other folks who hadn\u2019t been there because it\u2019s a hard area to reach. Even in Alaska, it\u2019s a hard area to reach.\u201d<\/p>\n

The essay originally appeared in the November\/December 2013 edition of Orion Magazine<\/i><\/a>. Tevis has been published multiple times by Orion<\/a>, which also nominated the piece for a Pushcart.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt brings a lot of well-deserved recognition to Joni Tevis for her work as a non-fiction writer, but it also it brings a lot of attention to the writing program at Furman and Furman overall,\u201d Furman English department chair David Bost said. \u201cThis is a national prize, very highly regarded.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the Body Knows\u201d will also be one of the anchor pieces of Tevis\u2019s second book, called The World Is on Fire <\/i>and scheduled for release in April 2015 by Milkweed Editions<\/a>, which also published 2012\u2019s The Wet Collection: A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory<\/i><\/a>. Both are a collection of essays, which are Tevis\u2019s specialty.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love all the genres, but I think the essay is the queen of the genres because it takes what it needs from other genres and uses it for its own end,\u201d she says. \u201cYou have the character-building and the scene-building of good fiction, you have the careful attention to language that you would have from poetry, and you could have associative leaps too. I really feel that the essay has a ring of truth to it, or it should . . . The actual French root of the verb essay is just to try. It\u2019s such an inviting form. Everyone should write essays.\u201d<\/p>\n

Being such a successful purveyor of her craft gives Tevis instant credibility in the classroom, Bost says.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the students I talk to who are prospective English majors are really very interested in writing, being creative writers, being poets, being non-fiction writers the way Joni is,\u201d he said. \u201cThey may want to go into journalism or even some aspect of marketing where writing will be one of the basic skills that they use. I think it does matter to students that they\u2019re working under the guidance of not only published authors but authors whose work has been recognized by their peers as being exemplary.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Pushcart, which bills itself as \u201cthe most honored literary project in America,\u201d has forged through a massive upheaval in the publishing world by carving out a niche with what are called \u201csmall presses\u201d\u2014publishers with annual sales below $50 million\u2014and surviving thanks to an endowment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really is one of the last great holdouts of the literacy collectives of the late \u201860s,\u201d Tevis said. \u201cJust one fella (Henderson) basically carries it on and puts out this anthology every year that\u2019s 800 pages long. It\u2019s amazing to me what he\u2019s been able to do. It\u2019s a labor of love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read \u201cWhat the Body Knows\u201d here<\/a>, and listen to her discuss the piece here<\/a>. For more on Tevis, click here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For nearly 40 years the finest writers the country has to offer have been featured in David Henderson\u2019s The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. It would appear, then, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":14049,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-english"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3310"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33240,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3310\/revisions\/33240"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}