One week ago, something amazing happened.

Monday afternoon the program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts announced its scholarship awards. Members of my class, the Magic Ifs, received several honors and awards and I was so, so pleased for all of them, because I knew how hard they had worked.

The last award of the day was the Norma Fox Mazer, which is awarded for the first twenty pages, plus synopsis, of a young adult novel.

Martine Leavitt presented the award on behalf of the committee of three. She said wonderfully complimentary things about the manuscript, which included something like "in the spirit of Norma Fox Mazer," and some specific details that I no longer remember because when Martine said, "The Norma Fox Mazer award goes to Katherine Quimby," all coherent thought vanished from what was not really a mind at that moment.

What I do remember:

• Feeling stunned in the best possible way. For all the good things that have happened in my life, I did not know it was possible to be this overwhelmed and overjoyed. It was a Sally Field moment.
• The warmth and kindness in Martine's smile, like she knew how I felt, when I didn't quite know myself.
• The applause, the cheers, the sheer sound that filled College Chapel. WCYA people--your support will buoy me for the rest of my writing days.
• Needing to hug Tom Birdseye as a way of thanking him for being the advisor who made that award possible (more on that in a minute)
• Martine's hands guiding me so that someone could take a photo--I did not know where to look.
• My Magic(al) Ifs surrounding me with love when I finally got back to my seat and collapsed.

This award means so so much to me, more than the awards committee can possibly know.

While I can't say that I knew Norma Fox Mazer, I did meet her, in 2006, when she and Carolyn Coman were the YA and Middle Grade author-faculty at the SCBWI New England Novel Writers' Retreat.


Norma Fox Mazer gave an inspiring presentation on structure, one that will come as no surprise to those of us now at VCFA, but which was a new concept to me at the time. I found my notes today, and they are as helpful--if more familiar--now as they were then. Here's one metaphor: "Structure is the bottle that holds the wine of the story together."

From my notes, from being in Norma Fox Mazer's presence, and from knowing the high esteem in which she is held by former students like Sarah Aronson and Martine Leavitt, I have a sense of her high standards and what she valued in writing. I am truly humbled at the thought that what I was working on last semester in some way measures up to those standards.

I had so many doubts about that project--about the story, about decisions I made about how to tell it, about my ability to tell it in the way it seemed to need to be told. The beauty of being in the MFA program was that I could share those doubts with my advisor, and Tom Birdseye, to his great credit, asked the right questions and, more importantly, encouraged me to keep going as long as I felt compelled to move forward with the story.

So I kept going, except for a week or so in October, when I went back and revised the first twenty pages and wrote the synopsis so that I could enter them for the scholarship award. And then, when I went back to drafting, it took me a long time to get back into the story. In my next packet letter, I wrote Tom that it might have been a mistake to go back. Let's just say, I no longer feel that way.

Receiving this award will make a difference to my work from here on out. It's not that all my doubts have completely vanished. I think, for me at least, a certain level of doubt, of self-doubt, of questioning, is helpful. It puts consideration of the story's needs first when I am writing. But the award does tell me that any doubts I had about the value of taking creative risks have diminished. From here out I will take those risks, knowing that if they work, it will be worth it--and if they don't, "all" I have to do is try something else.

I will also continue to listen to that inner voice when it says, "try this." And if it feels right, I will continue to keep going until I reach the end, or until it no longer feels right, whichever comes first. And if it stops feeling right, after two semesters of MFA work, I have more tools to figure out where it might have gone wrong and how I might be able to redirect.

I know I have much work to do to revise the rest of the manuscript that was recognized. It is work that I was going to do anyway, because this story has not let me go--I can feel it as an almost physical presence in the left half of my body. But receiving the Norma Fox Mazer award gives me that much more faith that I am capable of doing the work that is necessary.

Finally, I have to say, we do not achieve like this all by ourselves. Indeed, this work would not have existed at all if I had not had Tom Birdseye as my advisor. Going into second semester, I was considering at least four projects and I decided I would let the advisor I was matched with determine the project I would work on. Other possible projects were a fantasy I took to workshop and a completely different contemporary YA novel.

I may have done the work, but the revisions I made were done keeping in mind Tom's specific suggestions and questions about certain aspects of the work. Tom's interest in the project made me brave enough to dare to submit.

And HH's  continued faith in my abilities and his support for my work, which extends to saying "Okay," when I announce immediately after the "I'm home" kiss that I need to go back up to my office for another half hour to finish something. If we achieve, it is because others have faith in us, sometimes when we doubt ourselves, faith that encourages us to put forth our best efforts.

One week after receiving the Norma Fox Mazer award, I am still amazed, but I am more focused--focused on continuing to take creative risks, to explore and expand my skills, to do my best work, to write in a way that honors an amazing author who left us too soon.