Barbara Hamby Wins A Guggenheim Fellowship

After winning her Guggenheim Fellowship award in April 2010, the next step for Barbara Hamby has arrived: she must now do the work on two projects that she hopes to have ready for publication in the next year.

But before concentrating on her writing, Hamby needed the month of May to organize a second-floor room in her home as a comfortable place for her thoughts. It was filled with papers and books—"I was like one of those people on the TV show 'Hoarders'"—but Hamby says, "I now have a clean space to put all of my papers as I write."

With the fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Hamby will spend the next year creating a group of new poems and assembling a selection of existing ones from her first four books for a compilation entitled On the Street of Divine Love. She relied on a very formal writing — syllables and using end rhymes, for example—for her last batch of poems, but this time she says she will be in "high free verse mode. I am calling on the great god Walt Whitman in my time of need."

She will also continue working on her first novel for publication, which is about half-finished. Saimin, Sister is about a missionary family in rural Oahu, and spans about an eight-year period in the 1960s. (Saimin is a noodle soup popular in Hawaii; the mishmash way it is made serves as a metaphor in the novel, Hamby says). Hamby says that writing poetry and fiction are complementary. "I can only work on my poetry for so long. It's like eating cake all the time—sometimes I need the protein of fiction."

While Hamby gets a break from teaching during her fellowship—"I love teaching but it is nice to have some time away"—she will not be completely removed from the classroom. In the fall, she will sit in on Robert Butler's Fiction Workshop class, "to get the creative juices flowing," she says. The last time she was a student and not an instructor in a classroom was when she sat in on Butler's first class at FSU in 2000. Being in his fall workshop, Hamby says, will give structure to the shorter chapters in Saimin, Sister, ones focused on the characters. "I don't want them to be too poetic. I want them to have the impulse of fiction."

Hamby will no doubt produce engaging and imaginative work, as she has done in the past. Yet she still is disconcerted by prizes like the Guggenheim fellowship. She describes her writing process as "getting in touch with the deepest place within myself." Finding out that the outer world applauds her writing is still a shock: "It's like having a flash go off in your face after being in solitary confinement."