Last winter, Utah State University writing student John Gilmore rented a snowmobile and searched out his old Boy Scout camp high in the Uinta Mountains. The journey carried him not only into his own past, but also helped him refine a geological metaphor for the disease afflicting a family friend.
For a class assignment, Gilmore blended journalism and memoir to write about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, the neurodegenerative disorder famous for killing baseball legend Lou Gehrig. His 8,000-word essay, "Final Cascade," this week won a major literary prize, garnering the senior a $10,000 award and a summer fellowship named in honor of the late Norman Mailer who pushed the limits of creative nonfiction more than any other 20th century writer.
"It's exactly what I want to do. I loved writing this essay. Immersion journalism is what I want to," Gilmore said Friday. He started school majoring in journalism but switched to creative writing, and is currently teaching basic writing to freshman. He graduates this fall and expects to end up in a graduate program.
"John always had a rangy intellect and a poetic gift at subtle connections and good language," wrote his professor Christopher Cokinos, an award-winning nature writer and editor, in an e-mail. "But he learned to harness diligence to talent, becoming an ambitious researcher and good editor of his own work. That's the key for him and any writer: to craft, to craft, to craft. John's done that. And I'm thrilled for him."
Mailer's estate set up the writing award to support promising talent through fellowships at the Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Mass. Emily Swanagin, of Birmingham, Ala., won the high school award for her essay "Luna" about her parents' divorce.
Mailer would have enjoyed that the prize's first winner carried the name Gilmore. His most famous book, The Executioner's Song , is a literary treatment of Gary Gilmore, the Utah killer whose 1977 execution marked the return of capital punishment to the United States. John Gilmore, who was raised in Centerville, swears there is no family connection, but he confessed his dad got calls from national media while he was studying at Brigham Young University in the late 1970s.
Gilmore's unpublished essay artfully entwines multiple story lines that bring "a sharp eye to a young man's struggle with friendship, evil, religion, geology, growing up, and death," contest judge Barbara Lounsberry wrote.
The narratives "braid" Gilmore's camp experiences and his relationship with his youth leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gilmore said. As Gilmore ends his involvement with the church, his relationship with the youth leader falls apart while ALS is robbing the man of the use of his body.
The essay likens the geological forces eroding the ancient Uinta Mountains with the erosion of the myelin sheaths from an ALS patients' neurons. The essay's title comes from descriptions of the disease Gilmore found in medical books.
The following is a 250-word excerpt from John Gilmore's "Final Cascade":
"After forty minutes of using a snowshoe like a shovel to dig around the snowmobile, my
palm blistered through my glove and burst. I tried reversing again, but sunk deeper still. I rolled
off the seat onto my back. The snow made a wonderful bed.
The scene above smeared and dripped across my glasses. Flakes fell heavy, straight at
me; tall pines in my periphery formed odd lines, curving, surreal, as if captured by a fisheye lens.
Minutes later, I realized I'd been drawing air through my mouth, silently, like when lying in bed
afraid to move, for fear of what? A slow progression of wind sifted the needles at the tops of the
pines, the sound like water moving toward and past me, without going through me. The air sat
stagnant, weighted, at ground level.
There've been places in which I've felt both invisible and watched. The two sensations
blend to one uniform feeling that is haunting to contemplate. In my teenage years, that feeling
became more pronounced with each trip into the wilderness. Back when I believed in such
things, I interpreted it as the absence of God and a vulnerability to evil. For me, God was not to
be found in the mountains.
Sometimes I've returned to such places with intent to spin around and stare it down-that
evil, watching presence. Catch it out in the open, grinning. But that was not why I had come this
February day. "
