BoomerGirl Diary

Jack just wants to dip his feet in the ocean.

The 35-year-old sculptor stood by as his wife drove to a new job in a new city. In the meantime, he’s painting houses in Iowa to make a buck, won’t show his artwork and doesn’t have the nerve to join his family in California.

Jack is paralyzed by fear.

He figures a road trip to Florida, a quick wade in the salty waves — “because he’s tired of hyperventilating at the sight of water with no end and sky with no edge” — might lift him out of his funk.

In the end, the best he can do is sculpt a swimming sandman on the beach who slowly dissolves as the tide rolls in. But that’s enough for the protagonist of Lawrence writer Mary G. Wharff’s “The Waves of St. Augustine,” the short story that won her this year’s Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in fiction.

“I think I would call it a journey story,” Wharff says. “But it’s more about his journey from feeling completely powerless in his life to trying to regain some power by facing one of his fears.

“What I was really hoping was happening at the end was he did the best that he could do. He got a little power back.”

The highways that link Iowa to Florida are familiar to Wharff, who has lived in the Midwest and Georgia and driven the routes in between. Indeed, Jack’s truck stop visits and motel breakfasts bear the too-familiar detail of one who’s traveled this way before. One of Wharff’s road trips led her to St. Augustine, Fla., which is part of the reason she set her story there.

“But I also liked that St. Augustine as a saint spoke a lot about the idea of forgiveness,” she says. “So in a way, to me, the story is about self-forgiveness and being able to just keep going, but keep going with more power than you were just kind of struggling along with.”

In some ways, Wharff can relate to Jack’s empowerment journey. She’s been divorced and remembers wondering what she would do next — how she could move forward in her life on days when she wasn’t feeling particularly strong. So it piqued her interest when someone once told her he was going to put his feet in the ocean to face his fear, sparking the idea for her story.

“I wish I had thought of that,” Wharff says. “I should have gone repelling down a mountain, or something that really freaks me out.”

Wharff’s certainly not living in fear these days. At 46, she has remarried, left a career in promotional writing and completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at Kansas University. Now she devotes at least four hours a day to penning new stories, serves as fiction editor for Coal City Review and associate editor of I-70 Review, and makes frequent efforts to get her work published.

Raymond Carver, William Trevor and George Saunders top Wharff’s list of short story writers she most admires. She also has a great deal of respect for Lawrence authors, as well as the namesake of the Langston Hughes Award.

“It’s neat to win an award with his name attached to it,” Wharff says. “He’s a really rhythmic and fabulous poet. When I write, I try to write with an ear toward rhythm.”

Lawrence writer Denise Low, one of the judges on the award panel, says Wharff’s story succeeds at the challenging task of getting readers to invest in its characters.

“The voice was so wonderful; the style and care with language was so wonderful,” Low says. “And then the dilemma of the main character was compelling and interesting."