Love this story. There is a very beautiful and thematically apt ‘where IS everybody’-scene in the beginning of Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers. There is a slightly similar scene in Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident, which I am now reading. And just when I was thinking about how I loved those scenes in those novels, and wondered if something like it would ever happen in real life, you came up with this.
Thanks for pointing those out. I hadn't heard of them. Even at the time, the incident felt made up. Why would everyone disappear? Not even someone tidying up the tables.
It must have felt both dreamlike and apocalyptic. I think I would have thought: “Here I am finally winning a prize and now it is either not real or the world is ending, just my luck.”
That must've been strange to come back to the empty space. I can imagine it.
My odd experience of winning, my only experience of ever winning or passing anything (I have no qualifications from school, certificates or anything ever, except for my book getting published and being in bookshops), was not so much at the time of winning it, but shortly after. I'd won a DYCP grant from Arts Council England to write a novel, the full amount. One of two people out of many entries.
A few months after, I went to an event about how to apply for grants, as I was interested in going for another grant. I was pointed out as having won the last ACE DYCP round and everyone looked round at me sitting at the back. At the end of the talk, I was surrounded by middle-aged, middle-class women, with bemused looks on their faces, wondering how on Earth this uneducated, working-class fella (my accent is blatantly working-class London, old-school), who'd only learnt to use punctuation in his 40s, had won the grant on his first application and then got his book published.
They asked me a lot of questions about how I'd applied and I explained I had help, as I'm dyslexic and had never filled in a form before. One asked me what my writing was about and I said it was written from the point of view of a psychotic, hallucinatory, altered perception. Another asked me if it was form personal experience, a slightly concerned look, which was then mirrored by all of them as I said yes and another asked what was wrong with me! I told them I'm schizophrenic and they all visibly recoiled in horror. Looked for the nearest exit!
It wasn't the first time this happened, but it was the first time it'd happened in such a situation, surrounded by confused people that seemed to be looking down at me and frightened of me at the same time as being in awe of my achievement.
I was amused. But also paranoid. And very isolated. I was the alien among 'normal' people and they made me feel it more that day than I usually did (I know it wasn't intentional, they probably weren't even aware they'd done it). It was a strange experience and one I never had at any other time.
It’s an interesting story to share. Not really what I was expecting to hear. Sounds surreal like a Dali painting - where you are waiting for the scene to clear - so you can make sense of it. Am glad to hear you still celebrated at your hotel. Sometimes tiny occurrences of miscommunication - can lead to moments like this and sometimes solitude is the only reward a writer obtains.
Love this story. There is a very beautiful and thematically apt ‘where IS everybody’-scene in the beginning of Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers. There is a slightly similar scene in Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident, which I am now reading. And just when I was thinking about how I loved those scenes in those novels, and wondered if something like it would ever happen in real life, you came up with this.
Thanks for pointing those out. I hadn't heard of them. Even at the time, the incident felt made up. Why would everyone disappear? Not even someone tidying up the tables.
It must have felt both dreamlike and apocalyptic. I think I would have thought: “Here I am finally winning a prize and now it is either not real or the world is ending, just my luck.”
That must've been strange to come back to the empty space. I can imagine it.
My odd experience of winning, my only experience of ever winning or passing anything (I have no qualifications from school, certificates or anything ever, except for my book getting published and being in bookshops), was not so much at the time of winning it, but shortly after. I'd won a DYCP grant from Arts Council England to write a novel, the full amount. One of two people out of many entries.
A few months after, I went to an event about how to apply for grants, as I was interested in going for another grant. I was pointed out as having won the last ACE DYCP round and everyone looked round at me sitting at the back. At the end of the talk, I was surrounded by middle-aged, middle-class women, with bemused looks on their faces, wondering how on Earth this uneducated, working-class fella (my accent is blatantly working-class London, old-school), who'd only learnt to use punctuation in his 40s, had won the grant on his first application and then got his book published.
They asked me a lot of questions about how I'd applied and I explained I had help, as I'm dyslexic and had never filled in a form before. One asked me what my writing was about and I said it was written from the point of view of a psychotic, hallucinatory, altered perception. Another asked me if it was form personal experience, a slightly concerned look, which was then mirrored by all of them as I said yes and another asked what was wrong with me! I told them I'm schizophrenic and they all visibly recoiled in horror. Looked for the nearest exit!
It wasn't the first time this happened, but it was the first time it'd happened in such a situation, surrounded by confused people that seemed to be looking down at me and frightened of me at the same time as being in awe of my achievement.
I was amused. But also paranoid. And very isolated. I was the alien among 'normal' people and they made me feel it more that day than I usually did (I know it wasn't intentional, they probably weren't even aware they'd done it). It was a strange experience and one I never had at any other time.
Thanks for letting me know this. It is always a strange situation, when you've done something and are asked how you did it, as if of course you knew.
It’s an interesting story to share. Not really what I was expecting to hear. Sounds surreal like a Dali painting - where you are waiting for the scene to clear - so you can make sense of it. Am glad to hear you still celebrated at your hotel. Sometimes tiny occurrences of miscommunication - can lead to moments like this and sometimes solitude is the only reward a writer obtains.