Drue Heinz winner examines strange behavior

Mother-daughter relationships, bisexuality, the intersection of drugs and parenting, road trips,… Mother-daughter relationships, bisexuality, the intersection of drugs and parenting, road trips, America — these are just a few of the things that fascinate Shannon Cain, this year’s winner of the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

“The questions we’re most interested in, we can’t help them from coming out in our work if we’re being true to ourselves,” said Cain, whose short story collection, “The Necessity of Certain Behaviors,” will be published this fall by the University of Pittsburgh Press, the prize’s sponsor.

“I’m really interested in situations in which people behave in an extreme way, whether in order to survive or just to experience their own joy or or to relieve their pain,” she said.

Cain’s fiction centers on such behavior. For example, she summarized her collection’s title story as follows: “I have a character who goes on an ecotourism trip and finds a village in the mountains of a foreign country where people practice a culturally mandated form of bisexual non-monogamy. She likes it, and she stays.”

Another story dramatizes the results of an incident in which a mayor’s wife is caught pleasuring herself in the steam room of a YMCA. As Cain put it, this character is “tired of public life and of her marriage in a way she can’t really articulate, so she acts out.”

Alice Mattison, the judge who selected Cain’s collection from a pool of nine final entries, praised her writing’s unpredictability, likening it to Grace Paley’s.

“There’s something of the same … willingness to go where the material leads you, whether that’s where someone might conventionally think you would go or not,” Mattison said.

Cain is interested not just in the psychology of illicit behavior, but in its social dimension: “There’s an intersection of social awareness and social commentary around the illicit — around people who either break the rules or don’t understand or acknowledge them in the first place.”

Indeed, Cain welcomes political readings of her work. In graduate school, she studied political fiction, and she has a history as an activist.

“Feminism attracted my attention from a young age. I always found ways to agitate for equality and social change around women’s issues. When I was living in New York, before writing seriously, I directed a women’s health nonprofit organization in East Harlem. I was involved with activist groups that did traditional street activism and street theatre.”

Mattison said Cain’s feminist sensibilities were another selling point for her.

“You see a lot of stories about women overcome by unrequited love and all kinds of other bad things,” Mattison said. “I loved reading about strong women — I thought that was just great.”

Though she now coaches aspiring writers and edits manuscripts, Cain’s interest in the relationship between art and politics has never wavered: “I think art has a huge role to play in helping us change the world. The artist reflects back our experience and helps us see ourselves in a different way. She opens minds and expands perception.”

At the same time, Cain strives “to avoid making a lesson” of her work, or, conversely, “to make the lessons so integral that they become invisible.”

“My goal is to create a story that can spark people’s imaginations around broader social issues without moralizing,” she continued. “Whether a piece of work sets out to have a social message or not, it succeeds if it opens our hearts, and in that way all art is political. If literature is doing its job, it’s challenging the status quo on some level — even on the tiniest level of detail,” she said.

Another key issue that Cain addresses is the development of small cities like Tucson, Ariz., where she is currently the artist-in-residence of Ward 1. Reiterating her love of road trips, Cain voiced distress over the increasing homogeneity of the American landscape.

“I think, more and more in this country, regions are becoming flattened and dulled with the commodification of America. Everywhere you go, the cities are starting to look the same. I’m very interested in what that looks like when you have three people driving across the country.”

Cain finds Tucson’s rich identity so compelling that she has spent the last five years writing a novel set there. But this doesn’t mean questions of a broader national character disinterest her.

“I like to live in the space between ‘regional’ and ‘American.’ I definitely identify as a Southwestern writer, but I identify just as strongly as an American writer. I hope to provide a snapshot of the issues that the whole country is facing around development.”

Though her work hasn’t traveled the straightest path to the praise she now enjoys, the Drue Heinz prize has demonstrated that her preoccupations have found an audience in spite of increasingly long odds.

“Every year we receive more and more submissions and we hear from more and more authors wanting know whether the [Drue Heinz] winner has been selected,” Maria Sticco, publicist at the University of Pittsburgh Press, said. Sticco added that she believes an Internet-inspired, do-it-yourself mentality has led to a rise in fiction submissions across the board.

As someone all too familiar with rejection herself, Cain said the prize couldn’t be more vindicating.

“I’m flabbergasted with happiness. I’ve experienced a huge amount of rejection for these stories —  more than 200 rejection letters over the years. So to have this collection be recognized by the Heinz prize is hugely rewarding considering the perseverance and humility it’s taken to get these stories out into the world.”