Instructor wins Bellwether Prize for socially responsible literature

Story and photo by Liza Porter

When Naomi Benaron writes, the scenes she’s trying to capture flow across her mind’s eye.

“I see it cinematically,” she says, sitting at the kitchen table of her home in northeast Tucson.

Benaron is a former Pima Community College student and now teaches writing at both PCC and at UCLA Extension. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Antioch College in Los Angeles.

“It’s what John Gardner calls the fictive dream,” Benaron says. “That phrase has always stuck with me.” The late Gardner wrote “On Becoming a Novelist,” one of the classic books about fiction writing.

Benaron’s manuscript “Running the Rift” won the 2010 Bellwether Prize for Fiction and will be published by Algonquin Books in the fall of 2011.

It is the 10^th anniversary of the Bellwether, which was established and funded by Barbara Kingsolver and is the largest prize in the country for a first novel.

Most of “Running the Rift” takes place during the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s when at least 800,000 people were murdered. It tells the story of Jean Patrick, a young Tutsi boy whose dream is to race in the Olympics.

Naomi Benaron relaxes in her backyard with her dog, Scout.

Benaron’s own experience in running and swimming competitions inform the book. She has participated in marathons and triathalons, even the Iron Man. She also traveled to Rwanda several times to do research for the book.

The Bellwether Prize is awarded to a work of “socially responsible literature,” which is defined on the Bellwether website as literature that, “for the purposes of this award, may describe categorical human transgressions in a way that compels readers to examine their own prejudices.”

The socially responsible novel cannot just describe those transgressions, however. Social responsibility is defined as “a moral obligation of individuals to engage with their communities in ways that promote a more respectful coexistence.”

“Running the Rift” does just that.

At the beginning of the novel, a famous marathon runner visits Jean Patrick’s school and observes him running a race. The man tells Patrick he has a great gift.

“Look at that lean! A natural!” Telesphore shouted. He shook Jean Patrick’s hand. “I watched you,” he said.

“You know how to run through pain.”

… “It’s hunger. Someday you’ll need to run as much as you need to breathe.” Jean Patrick felt this was the highest compliment the runner could have paid him.

This hunger is present in Jean Patrick throughout the book as the horror of genocide takes over his family and country, forcing him to flee for his life.

Benaron submitted her manuscript to the Bellwether because she is a political writer and that is the only thing she is interested in writing. The $25,000 prize is welcome, of course, but her purpose in writing is to reach people about issues in the world.

“I want to change people,” she says. “I want to put something in their hearts that makes them think.

“There’s people in Africa, and they’re not just little kids on the TV with big huge bellies and worms crawling on them. You know? They’re human beings. They’re characters, you watch them go through the day. They become real. I want people to see people they normally wouldn’t see as real, as real.”

An author can get in trouble writing with an agenda, Benaron says.

“You edit out the agenda. Clearly I have an agenda when I write it. Because I am a political writer, and I wish there were more of them in this world.”

Benaron is not sitting around waiting for “Running the Rift” to be published and her book tour to begin. She is writing another novel.

Her new novel-in-progress (“Fragile Beauty”) takes place in Terezin, a Czech concentration camp during World War II. The Nazis built a false front on an 18^th century fortress built by Emperor Franz Josef, and presented it to the world as a model Jewish settlement.

One of the main characters is a dancer.

“The arts is what gave the people the courage to survive in that place,” Benaron says. It was what they had to get through from day to day.”

Josef Mengele, known as the Nazi Angel of Death, sees the woman dance. That saves her life, while everyone else she knows dies.

The dancing was “what she did to know who she was,” Benaron says. In the same way, Benaron cannot separate her writing from herself.

“If I didn’t write, it would be like cutting off an arm.” She touches her elbow. “Not down here, there.” She touches the top of her arm at the shoulder.