Richard
Hermes ’98C scored an academic and literary hat trick
this spring when he received a Luce Scholarship for an internship
in Asia, won the 2004 Gesell Award for fiction at the University
of Minnesota, and took home a grant from the Minnesota State
Arts Board to assist him in publishing his first collection
of short fiction.
Hermes
(left), who earned a master of fine arts degree in creative
writing from Minnesota in May, is one of fifteen scholars nationwide
to receive a Luce Scholarship. He will live and work in Bangkok,
Thailand, where he will work for the Bangkok Post, from
September 2004 through July 2005. The program is funded by the
Luce Foundation and administered in Asia in cooperation with
the Asia Foundation.
“When
you’re selected [for the Luce Program], you don’t
know where in Asia you’ll end up,” Hermes said. “This
kind of experience is invaluable for someone like me because
a writer needs to learn how to make his way around a new place–not
just a literal place . . . but also the kind of unfamiliar imaginative
territory that a fiction writer might deal with.”
After
graduating from Emory with a bachelor of science degree in biology
and English, Hermes co-founded the Atlanta arts magazine bluemilk
with Emory alumni Chris Hansen ’99C and Ben Tran
’98C (Emory
Magazine, Spring 1999) before enrolling in the creative
writing program at the University of Minnesota in September
2001.
While
a student at Minnesota, Hermes attended the Keough Institute
for Irish Studies in Dublin, served as an editorial fellow for
Utne Magazine, and was hired by Garrison Keillor to write scripts
for The Writer’s Almanac, a daily radio spot aired on National
Public Radio.
Hermes’
first published short story, “Dockwalloper,” received
the $10,000 Tamarack
Award from Minnesota Monthly.
Judge
Gish Jen, an author who has published in the New Yorker,
the Atlantic, the New Republic, the Los Angeles
Times, and the New York Times, said of Hermes’
work: “This delicate and surprising story is not a story
at all, if we think about a story as something with conflict,
rising action, and resolution. It is, rather, a slow-motion
account of a dock foreman’s fall from a walkway. As the
moments stretch on—unnaturally, unnervingly—his fall
takes on a wonderfully appalling grandeur uncommon in contemporary
fiction. I have always been fascinated by the artistry that
renders Cezanne’s apples, for example, so palpably dense;
the chronicler of this ordinary man’s ordinary tumble works
a similar magic. How risky to slow the action the way he does,
and how brilliant: with every moment this man’s life gathers
weight, growing in humble importance until we are overcome with
a desire to stop his fall. We want to reverse gravity, to protest
fate. The fact that this fall is simply an accident only makes
things worse; we militate against a world where humans can be
subject to the arbitrary. For how can it be? We are outraged;
we hope for salvation; we are held by suspense. I will not give
away the beautiful ending, except to say that I do think the
reader will want to lift a glass and say, as I did, Bravo.”
