Welcome to the RPLA Showcase
Each year at the Royal Palm Literary Award Banquet, authors experience the joy of earning accolades for all the hard work that is often done in the privacy of the home with little to no recognition. Our goal is to showcase the best of the best at the 2015 Royal Palm Literary Awards and provide First Place winners with a well-deserved spotlight. Not only are we recognizing extraordinary talent, but we’re giving readers an opportunity to sample excerpts from the winning stories.
2015 Published Travel
Postcards From Poland by Joseph Kuhn Carey
Joseph Kuhn Carey won First Place in the Published Travel category. In Postcards From Poland, a multi-generational family journey to Poland in 2011 is captured in 41 fascinating, colorful “travel poems” that celebrate the sights and sounds of mysterious, magical Krakow and Zakopane.
Click the link to read a sample:
Excerpt from Postcards from Poland
Q & A with Joseph Kuhn Carey
Q: Where do you get your story ideas?
A: The ideas for my poems come from any visual image or memorable event that crosses my path during the day. Usually it’s something colorful, different and unusual that spurs a combination of senses and makes me want to get something down quickly on paper. For some reason, the ideas seem to hit the most around two or three in the afternoon when I’m driving around, standing in line at a post office or bank, or taking a short walk and just letting my thoughts wander for a moment. The well-worn manila folders I carry around for business are full of scribbled poems on the outsides that I’ve dash off in a few minutes in a barely legible script. Later on, I chip away at the poems as I type them up, changing a word or two here or there, like a sculptor with a careful chisel, unless a poem just feels right the way it came out the first time around.
Q: Anything in particular about your award-winning RPLA entry that you’d like to share?
A: I had so much fun traveling for several weeks with my family in Poland a few years ago that the poems in my book, “Postcards From Poland,” just seemed to magically appear on their own during the trip and after my return, one by one. I hope that I’ve been able to share the adventures, wonders, and thrills of Krakow, Zakopane and other beautiful Polish cities and sights with others through this unique and enjoyable travel poem book!
Q: Who do you credit with inspiring your writing?
A: I had a terrific creative writing teacher in college named Steve Katz who really inspired me with his chance-taking experimental writing and humorous approach and another great writing teacher in graduate school named Janet Burroway, who was also wonderfully supportive. Some other big influences include Ken Nordine, Mark Twain, Marcel Duchamp, Jack Kerouac, Dashiell Hammett, P.G. Wodehouse, Oscar Wilde, Kurt Vonnegut, Frank Capra, John Cage, Robert B. Parker, Steve Goodman, John Prine and Red Smith.
Q: Any tips for new writers?
A: Enjoy writing for writing’s sake and read everything and anything you can lay your hands on! Go to art exhibits, baseball games (for the slow pace & the hot dogs), fly a kite, take a lesson in something you don’t know much about, go to movies and get the big bucket of popcorn, spend a day at the beach and watch the waves curling and smoothing the shore, see the circus and laugh at the clowns, ponder sculptures indoors and out, travel to (or imagine yourself in) far-away lands, look up at the gorgeous red glow on end-of-day clouds and most of all, dream fantastically big dreams, because anything you dream is possible in this beautifully crazy tumbling turning world. And don’t forget to send your writing out wherever you can so that it can be read and enjoyed by others!
