Latest State Writing Award Keeps The Ink Flowing

By Shannon Hicks

Joan Bergquist still remembers the first time something of hers was published. It was in the 1978 edition of Conatus, the literary magazine of Western Connecticut State University. Her short story called “The Interview” takes up four pages of the small magazine and just a few minutes of time to read, but it’s a scream. Its humor is both a jab at feminism and at the media.

“I was thrilled,” Joan said recently. “I didn’t think anything would ever live up to that.”

Her satire writing has since then been compared favorably to the work of Erma Bombeck, she has led two writing workshops for Woman’s Club of Newtown, and she has flourished in a number of additional artistic branches. But it took a recent nod from an annual woman’s club contest in the short story writing category to remind her of how good it feels to be called a writer.

Winners of the annual statewide contest were announced in May during a convention and awards ceremony in Hartford. The writing had all been judged by professional writers.

“We found out on a Saturday morning,” Joan recalled recently. “My husband was standing at the door with this big, silly grin on his face. He just kept looking at me, and then finally said ‘Did you get all your messages?’ and then he told me I had won the contest.”

Joan placed first in the statewide short story competition. Marcia Cavanaugh, the current president of The Woman’s Club of Newtown, had left the message on the Bergquists’ answering machine.

“The funny thing was, I had been thinking about the competition, fleetingly, just a few days earlier,” Joan admitted. “This one really got to me. I still don’t believe it yet.”

Mrs Bergquist, a longtime Newtown resident, repeated her win in the Photography Feature category of the Woman’s Club arts and crafts show this year, and also won an award for her writing. For this year’s contest, she had entered a poem and a short story. She has won in the past for her poetry, but it was the short story award this year that put the shiny new feather in Joan’s hat.

“I don’t want to be known as a poet,” Joan said. “There’s nothing wrong with poets, and it’s a lovely medium, don’t get me wrong. But I’m more than a poet.

“I am a writer,” she said.Last year the Newtown writer won first place in both the poetry and one-act play divisions of the state competition.

Joan Bergquist says the new award “should either energize me or paralyze me.

“It’s going to give me inspiration, or stop me in my tracks.” She thought for a moment. “Oh, I’m ready to go. When I’m getting ready to write I’m hyper. It’s all gotta come out. I feel that coming.”

Joan’s talent, she says, comes from a few familial sources. Her father “wrote all these little things,” she recalled. “I can just see him as a newspaper editor, with his fedora hat…”

Her aunt offered musical inspiration, which was picked up by Joan’s son John.

“He began playing the violin when he was much younger,” Joan said. “He was very good, too, but he got flack from the other kids when they got into junior high, so he gave it up.”

Joan’s daughter, Pam, also picked up some of the family’s artistic talent, becoming a player of both the flute and oboe while growing up. Now a chemist, Pam still does macramé.

“Oh, she’s very, very bright. She gets it from me,” Joan quipped.

Joan has taken photography as an elective course at WestConn, and it was an instant match. In March she won first place in the Woman’s Club Photography Feature category for the second year running. She also enjoys sculpture, pottery, painting, gardening, and gourmet cooking.

She has written and published poems, short stories, a one-act play, and essays. “I love that form,” she said, referring to essays. “They’re beautiful.”

She also had a column, called “Dinner Is on a New Wave,” about her first microwave oven, published in The New York Times. One part autobiography and of course one part humor, the piece is vintage Bergquist.

“I’ve always known in my gut what I wanted to do,” she said. “I want to write, so I just keep dabbling. It’s like The Tortoise and the Hare: I just do a little, and a little, and a little at a time.”

She is working steadily on a collection of short stories that she hopes will eventually be published as a book. She doesn’t like to call the book a memoir because, she says, “they make you sound like you’re ancient,” but admits the market currently seems hot for life stories. The book’s tentative title is Anatomy of a Writer.

“Editors and readers right now, that’s what they’re looking for. I want to finish this before tastes change,” she said. “But whatever happens, it’s me and my art. That’s all I want to worry about now. I want to eventually reach my full potential, of course, and I think I’ve only just tapped it.”