Gifted vision of a Chicago snowstorm
Algren Award winner Barry Pearce inspired by South Side upbringing
Barry Pearce, 50 , winner of the 2019 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction, hates putting on a suit or tie. He said as much while pulling on the lapel of his black sports coat, seated in a booth at Kitty O’Shea’s. “I hate putting on a tie or a suit, but I have this wake on the South,” — he cut himself off, tapped his knuckles on the table and smiled. “I’m fulfilling some Irish stereotype right now. I met you at a pub and I’m going to a wake. Two things the Irish do well.”
Pearce’s parents, Michael and June, emigrated to the United States in 1960. The family first moved to the South Shore neighborhood, then into a two-bedroom home in Clearing, the Southwest side Chicago neighborhood cradled between Midway and the industrial suburbs. At night, the incessant sounds of planes landing and industrial trains chugging melted and made what neighbors called the “Midway lullaby,” not a nuisance but a comfort. Growing up, Pearce said, downtown felt like “another city entirely.” Distance stole its life and “like Emerald City” left only its profile.
Michael and June had seven children. In a 1976 Tribune profile of their family and path to citizenship, Michael and June shared how each new arrival further postponed their efforts to gain citizenship. Barry is fourth in the pack, the middle child. In the Clearing house, he shared a room with three older brothers. By the time he was 15, these brothers began sneaking him out of the house and into Kitty O’Shea’s.
Pearce — who lives in Lincoln Square and works as a freelance ghostwriter, journalist and occasional adjunct professor — makes it out to the pub just half dozen times a year. And with nearly three decades of written work under his belt, he thought the setting at Kitty O’Shea’s could add a bit of color to this profile.
For over 15 years, Pearce has submitted stories for consideration to the Nelson Algren Award, the Tribune’s original short fiction contest. In the meantime, his fiction was published in other literary magazines such as Oklahoma State University’s The Cimarron Review and Other Voices. Granted, he did not submit every year, but this was, he said, at least his 10th attempt. This year his short story, “Chez Whatever,” a metafiction that leads with the line a “black girl walks through Lincoln Park in a snowstorm,” took the top spot.
“I think it’s a pretty good story,” he said. “But some of it’s luck.”
This year, 3,000 short stories were submitted for consideration to the Algren Award. After four rounds of judging, authors Jennifer Acker, Mona Simpson and Jane Smiley helped narrow the group to just five finalists and Pearce, the winner. Tribune literary editor at large Elizabeth Taylor said “Chez Whatever” felt both “familiar and deeply imagined” and did very well what short fiction should do: open a world to readers.
Set during the 1990 Valentine’s Day Blizzard in Chicago, “Chez Whatever” tells the story of a young black woman trekking across the snowed-in city to meet up with her scorned girlfriend for a shrimp scampi dinner. Some of the plot revolves around parking; finding it, defending it, fighting for it. At one point a driver mistakes the unnamed narrator for a valet, handing her the keys to his luxury vehicle, a situation similar to one Pearce once found himself in during another early ’90s snowstorm trip to a girlfriend’s north side apartment in a heatless car. “That happened,” he said. “That part happened.”
Pearce remembers tossing the keys back to the man, exchanging a couple choice words and later fantasizing about driving off in his fancy car. For the past 30 years, Pearce has kept this memory in his back pocket, always aware it could be a fun one to share. But every time he sat to write it from the viewpoint of a character similar to himself, the story never landed.
Then he heard the voice of a new narrator, a young black woman. How it came to him is hard to tell, he said. But the new perspective worked and served to represent a segment of the city unlike Pearce himself.
“Chez Whatever” is a part of an unpublished collection of linked stories called “The Plan of Chicago.” In this larger work, Pearce set out to capture Chicago in stories. Many of the voices in the collection, like the “Chez Whatever” narrator and her lover, do not look or sound like Pearce.
“I’m well aware that I am out on a limb a little bit with a lot of these stories,” Pearce said. “But I’m trying to represent Chicago in all its diversity, color and glory.”
“If you are going to try to capture a city in stories, a city like Chicago,” Pearce’s longtime mentor Robert Boswell said, pausing to correct himself. “There isn’t any other city like Chicago; if you are trying to capture Chicago in stories, you really have to stretch to include everyone.”
During his sophomore year studying journalism at Northwestern, Pearce enrolled in Boswell’s “Reading and Writing Fiction” class. Later when Pearce was looking for graduate schools to attend, he searched the internet to see where Boswell was teaching — New Mexico State University.
Pearce moved out to New Mexico twice, once when he earned his master of arts in 1997 and then again to earn his master of fine arts in 2015. Boswell is still his closest mentor. “As happens sometimes with former students, (Pearce) has become a close friend,” Boswell said. “I send my work to him now.”
Despite the seven years he spent in New Mexico, Pearce stills feels ill-equipped to write on any space other than Chicago. “I love stories that are firmly rooted in a place,” he said. “It takes a lot to be authentic about the place.”
A serial renter, Pearce is toying around with the idea of buying a home out in his old neighborhood. Ever since moving back to Chicago after his second stint in New Mexico, he mostly makes the drive down to Clearing for birthdays, trips to Palermo’s for pizza with his sister when she’s in town, and weddings or wakes.
By the time he walked out of Kitty O’Shea’s with Rus, a buddy he was driving to the wake, his black sports coat was off. He disappeared across the corner into what was once just a far-away and flattened fold of the Emerald City.