Ingrid Reti Literary Award
Writers in San Luis Obispo County have an opportunity to win award money thanks to the family of former resident and creative writing teacher, Ingrid Reti.
The Ingrid Reti Literary Award (IRLA) is a program of ARTS Obispo and was established in 2008 in memory of Reti in an effort to continue her 25 year legacy of working with and mentoring local writers in SLO County.
From 2008 until 2018 a $1,000 award will be given each year, through ARTS Obispo, to a SLO County writer who addresses a sense of place, natural and/or cultural. The place does not necessarily need to be the Central Coast of California. Each year a new genre of writing will win the IRLA.
2011
Los Osos Author & Teacher Wins 2011 Ingrid Reti Literary Award
Los Osos writer and teacher C.S. Perryess won the 2011 Ingrid Reti Literary Award for his 1500-word short story, “Martin Harrison Takes a Paddle.”
The award, established by the family and friends of writer and teacher Ingrid Reti in partnership with ARTS Obispo/San Luis Obispo County Arts Council, carries with it a $1,000 cash prize and the opportunity for a public reading to be announced at a later date.
“I teach teens, write for teens, narrate audio books, and ponder the wonder of words in a foggy little town on California's central coast,” Perryess writes on his blog, csperryess.blogspot.com. “ ‘Martin Harrison Takes a Paddle’ is my attempt to bring alive not only a place, but a teen who needs a little extra life to make it through his circumstances.”
A versatile writer, Perryess has contributed children and young adult fiction for Highlights, With and READ, as well as adult fiction for Pangolin Papers, Way Station, Eureka Literary Magazine and Short Story. His professional articles also have appeared in Green Teacher, The Writing Notebook, California English and Educational Leadership.
The Ingrid Reti Literary Award, a program of ARTS Obispo/San Luis Obispo County Arts Council, is given to a San Luis Obispo County writer whose work addresses a sense of place, natural and/or cultural. This is the fourth year for the annual award, which was established after Reti’s death in 2007 in an effort to continue her work mentoring San Luis Obispo County writers.
“Each of the submissions this year captured a strong sense of place,” according to retired Cal Poly English Instructor Mary Kay Harrington, who headed up this year’s judging panel that included Cuesta College English Department Chair Dennis Baeyen, Cal Poly English Instructor Todd James Pierce and New Times Managing Editor Ashley Schwellenbach.
2011 Ingrid Reti Literary Award Judge Ashley Schwellenbach, Award winner C.S. Perryess, ARTS Obispo Executive Director Charlotte Alexander
2010
Writer Lisa Coffman of Los Osos is the winner of the 2010 Ingrid Reti Literary Award. She received $1000 for her selected piece of non-fiction.
Lisa Coffman grew up in East Tennessee; “both the landscape (smokey blue hills in every direction) and speech (rhythmic, vivid, sprawled like Kudzu) have colored my writing” Coffman says. Coffman studied poetry at the University of Tennessee and New York University and also at the University of Bonn in Germany. She’s worked as a daily newspaper in New Jersey, and as a freelance writer in New York and Philadelphia. Coffman published a book of poetry, Likely, from Kent State University Press. Her poetry has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Coffman is currently a lecturer in the English department at Cal Poly.
Coffman first heard about the 1933 Jerome Boyatt lynching--the story at the heart of her essay "No Business, Tennessee" which won her the Reti Grant--about 15 years ago when she was doing volunteer work for the oral history archives of Big South Fork National Park on the Cumberland Plateau. Coffman was haunted by that story, and, six years later, in 2001, went back to the Plateau and did research and extensive interviews with a surviving Boyatt family member, Bonnie Chambers. Chambers died in 2002. Because of the sensitive nature of the story, Coffman explains; “I struggled with how to write it up and present it. I had--for the time being, if not for good--shut the file drawer on the whole project. The Ingrid Reti contest provided me with an opportunity to go through the material again and begin writing.” The grant will enable Coffman to continue work on the No Business story. “I am deeply grateful.”
2009
Poet Helen Knight of San Luis Obispo was the winner of the 2009 Ingrid Reti Literary Award. She received $1000 for her selected poems that, according to the award reviewers, “create vivid and self-revealing characters with fresh language. Her visions and versions of female archetypes compel the reader to want more."
Helen Knight was born and raised in San Luis Obispo County. She spent her childhood in Atascadero. When she was twelve, she and her family moved to a ranch near Creston. According to the poet, that landscape has deeply influenced her writing and her sense of home.
Knight moved to San Luis Obispo to attend Cal Poly and recently completed an M.A. in English. Writing poetry cropped up naturally during this time of discovery and occasionally she indulges in “the fantasy” of a life sustained entirely through creative work, while at the same time considering Ph.D. programs. Knight heads off to Purdue University to begin her Ph.D. program in the fall of 2010.
The Ingrid Reti Literary Grant review panel selected two Honorable Mention awards for the poetry of Paul Lobo Portugés and Rosemary Wilvert. Portugés is a prolific poet and author who currently teaches writing at Cuesta College. Books include "The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg", "Saving Grace", "Hands Across the Earth", "The Flower Vendor", "Paper Song", "Aztec Birth", "The Body Electric Journal", "The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson", and "Mao" (forthcoming). Wilvert is an ex-English teacher and the editor of "HopeDance" and "Edible San Luis Obispo". She is a former San Luis Obispo Poet Laureate and in 2008, she joined six other poets in writing and publishing "Poems for Endangered Places", to promote protection of our county's treasures.
2008
The winner of the 2008 Ingrid Reti Literary Award was Carol Alma McPhee of San Luis Obispo. She received $1000 for her submission titled "Local History". Chosen by a panel of respected literary reviewers from the local community, reviewers were asked to base their recommendations on the quality of the applicant’s work as demonstrated by samples submitted and on the use of innovative methods of creative expression in their submissions.
A San Luis Obispo resident most of her life, Carol Alma McPhee has mothered three daughters, taught English and has been heavily involved in local women’s politics. She published one novel, "Staying Under" (Papier Mache Press, 1998) and has coauthored two nonfiction books concerned with women’s political history, "Feminist Quotations" (T.Y. Crowell, 1979) and "The Non-Violent Militant" (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). McPhee has a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in English from California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo.
Carol describes herself as “not quite a native” of San Luis Obispo, having moved here at the “advanced” age of 18 months. The daughter of Cal Poly faculty, she attended local schools and went on to graduate from UC Berkelely. She taught at Atascadero High School for a year, and then spent some time raising her family. Upon receiving a Master’s Degree in English from Cal Poly, she taught at Cuesta College and became involved in the feminist movement during the 1970’s.
Ingrid Reti Biography
Ingrid Reti was born Ingeburg Bein in Nuremberg, Germany on September 16, 1927. In 1939 Ingrid and her older sister Elizabeth (Elspeth) escaped the Holocaust on the Kindertransport program that brought Jewish refugee children to England. Their parents were able to come to the United States through the sponsorship of a relative, and the family was reunited in Boston in 1940. As a result of the trauma of her childhood experiences in Germany, Ingrid did not identify herself as Jewish and was not public about where she was born.
Ingrid went to high school in Boston and then married Gabriel Andrew (Andy) Reti in 1954. They lived in Venezuela for much of the 1950s, where Andy worked as a civil engineer. In 1960 they returned to the United States and moved to Los Angeles, where they had two children, Irene, born in 1961 and Steven, born in 1963. Ingrid went to college as a re-entry woman beginning in 1964, and earned her B.A. in American Studies and her MA in English from California State University, Los Angeles. She also became a realtor and specialized in commercial real estate. Ingrid and Andy were divorced in 1975, but remained friends for the rest of Ingrid’s life. Ingrid found a loving partner and eventually a husband in Jerry Hull, who is a San Luis Obispo County resident.
In 1981 Reti moved to San Luis Obispo, California, where she practiced real estate briefly, but then began to teach courses in creative writing and literature and write seriously for the first time in her life. For the next 25 years Reti taught literature and creative writing for Cal Poly Extended Education, Cuesta College’s Community and Emeritus Programs and the Pismo Beach Recreation Department. In addition, she offered memoir and other creative writing classes in her home in San Luis Obispo, as well as at the Bookloft in Cayucos, Coalesce Bookstore in Morro Bay, and Linnaea’s Café in San Luis Obispo. She lectured on John Steinbeck and the history of Big Sur, and conducted literary bus tours of the Big Sur coast and of Steinbeck country. In the 1980s she hosted two “Books and Authors” television programs for local TV stations and was a guest on several SLO radio programs. She mentored and edited the work of many San Luis Obispo authors including Paula Houston.
Reti was the author of "Steinbeck Country Revisited" (Central Coast Press 2000), "Ephemera" (Tabula Rasa Press 1986), "Echoes of Silence" (HerBooks 1989) and "More Than A Grandmother", published posthumously in 2007. She published profiles of local people, a library news column, book reviews, and poetry in many magazines including the San Luis Obispo Journal, Plus Magazine, the San Luis Obispo Gazette, New Times, SLO Magazine, Steinbeck Quarterly, New Directions for Women, Broomstick, Iowa Woman, and The Californians. In addition, her work was published in anthologies such as "Women Aging and Ageism" (Haworth Press, 1990) and "Filtered Images: Women Remembering Their Grandmothers" (Vintage 45 Press, 1992).
Reti wove her teaching, book reviews, profiles and poetry together into her literary life. For instance, she reviewed many books by local authors such as Bob Gish, Louis Owens, and Gerald Haslam. She would then teach courses that focused on these writers and they would speak in her classes. The Ingrid Reti archive, put together by her daughter Irene Reti after her death, and deposited in Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Special Collections department, demonstrates these interconnections.
Ingrid Reti was diagnosed with lung cancer metastasized to the pelvis in October 2004. She fought a brave battle with cancer and for most of the two years retained a high quality of life during which she continued to teach and write. She died January 20, 2007 at Sierra Vista Hospital in San Luis Obispo.
