CU alum, aspiring writer, wins Michener award

Karim Dimechkie, a 2008 graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been awarded a three-year James A. Michener Fellowship in Creative Writing from the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers.

The program is considered one of the five most highly selective programs in the country and is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 graduate programs in creative writing.

Dimechkie’s fiction was chosen from more than 900 submissions in fiction, playwriting, poetry and screenwriting, and he becomes one of the 11 newly admitted fellows. Each new fellow receives free tuition, a $25,000 annual stipend for three years with no teaching responsibility, and a $6,000 professional development fund for travel and research.

The Michener Center’s MFA program was started in 1993 after Pulitzer-prize winning novelist James Michener endowed the University of Texas with $18 million to support a writing program.

During the three-year program, students are required to work in two of the four disciplines offered—fiction, poetry, playwriting and screenwriting. The Michener Center for Writers is housed in the historic J. Frank Dobie house on the university’s campus.

Recently, Dimechkie answered Clint Talbott’s questions about his work and the honor:

1. How did you become interested in creative writing?

I haven't always liked reading. My love of books set in quite late. I began really imagining what I was reading, getting lost in other people's fictions so to speak, when I was about 19! Before that I always thought of sitting down with a book, in place of “actually living life,” as a form of punishment. So some combination of timing and friends’ recommending the right books (at that time it was Jonathan Safran Foer and David Sedaris) exposed me to how fiction can really make your mind take off!

Also there were a handful of times, before I became a serious reader, that I wrote personal essays or short fiction (in middle school all the way up to my first year at college), where I was rewarded with good grades. At the time, I felt like I'd gotten away with something. It seemed like a miracle to have done something that was fun and also considered good work. Of course later, when I started writing regularly, I realized that good writing really is hard work.

Anyway, during my hunt for an undergraduate major, I realized writing was about the only hard work that I can get lost in without seeing the time pass. I never was a particularly engrossed student, but when I was given the freedom to write stories, I was able to get carried away in a way I never could with psych papers or math class. That work still felt like a duty to me. I reasoned that the most logical major to choose was the one that interested me most; even if a creative-writing degree hasn't proved to be particularly practical, I haven't regretted my choice yet.

2. Which writers do you particularly admire?

The list is long, but a few authors that have been important to me over the years have been John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Flannery O'connor and William Faulkner. As for more contemporary authors I often re-visit Tobias Wolff's work, that of Jim Harrison, and a beautiful collection of short stories called "Sweet Talk," by Stephanie Vaughn. I've lost count as to how many times I've read that collection. More recently, I've been deeply affected by Jennifer Eagan, William Trevor, and Nam Le.

3. What do you want to pursue while on the fellowship?

To publish a collection of stories for sure, and hopefully, if I’m efficient and courageous enough, a first novel.

This fellowship also has a “secondary area” of study, in which I will be asked to write screenplays too. This is new for me, but I'm excited to see where it goes.

4. How would you characterize yourself as a writer?

Great but virtually impossible question for me. I think my eternal answer will be I'm still very much defining myself as a writer. Part of the fun is exploring new facets of the craft, and so hopefully never really doing the same thing more than once. That said, there are some themes that re-appear in the stories I've written so far: middle-class Americans, family dynamics and coping with the absurd.

5. What do you hope to be writing in 20 years?

Difficult to project myself into the future. But I do sometimes dream of doing more research-based fiction. I admire writers who take on humanitarian issues, for example, or set their stories in conflict zones, or impoverished areas––social writing, I guess.

6. Is there anything about your time at CU that you found inspiring?

I had a couple of truly inspiring professors whose passion for writing and helping young writers was incredibly helpful for me. The names that come to mind are Carol Keeley, Julie Carr and Steven Hayes-Pollard. All wonderful teachers and writers, whose love for fiction was contagious.

There’s nothing more valuable for a writer than time, and these teachers who gave me so much of theirs—reading my work attentively, and being genuinely invested in improving my writing—are people I’ll be forever indebted to. Encouragement is so important for a young writer, and these teachers were really there for their students. Their generosity is something that still wows me today, and I hope to someday emulate them.