And now for the long-awaited announcement of the winner of the 2025 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel.
After much careful deliberation and consideration of the many fine manuscripts submitted, JEF has made its selection, and the winner is....
Erik Belgum for his book Ether Sunday.
In her encomium, judge Amy Kurman, author of Shorts (Black Scat Books, 2023), states the following:
While this is in short format, it is wholly interesting and thought provoking. It reads as to the timing of a metronome, you can almost hear the timer ticking in the background. The concept is of push and pull, of incongruence paired together. Each short-stated, conflicting idea prompts the reader to conjure images that test both the creative and intellectual sides of the brain. Quickly though, because you must keep time and move on to the next thought. Ether Sunday evokes current states of affairs in the world and then mixes them with spiked traditional ideals. This was a real treat, a special find within the grass of an Ether basket (case).
Erik Belgum has published two books of fiction, Collected Stort Shories (JEF Books, 2012) and Star Fiction (Detour Press, 1996). He has produced numerous works of audio fiction for CD and radio stations around the world, including 40 episodes of the “Evidence-Based Fiction Network (EBFN) Radio” for Wavefarm (WGXC). A speech pathologist by day, he charts the extremities of speech and language found in autism, aphasia, brain injury, dementia, schizophrenia, and even dehydration.
We are very excited to be publishing Erik Belgum again after over a dozen years. Raymond Federman was a mutual friend of ours, so I was doubly happy to see that Amy selected his manuscript blind. All the reading is done blind, which, of course, can make reading difficult. What I mean, of course, is that we do not know who has written what when the judging is done. How marvelous that an old friend's manuscript rose to the top!