Author Jedidiah Berry, who lives in Easthampton, recently won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction for his novel “The Naming Song.”
“I was so pleased to see my book included among a list of so many extraordinary writers’ works who I admire,” Berry said, “and winning it was just an astonishing thing. I felt incredibly grateful.”
The book is set after an apocalyptic event that made names disappear. The main character is an unnamed courier for the Names Committee, and she’s tasked with delivering words so that others can use them – “echo” to a gorge, “stowaway” after she’s caught hiding in a boxcar, “whiskey” to identify a spirit sent as a bribe.
The Massachusetts Book Awards, run by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, a nonprofit, celebrate books published in the previous year by writers and illustrators who live in Massachusetts.
“The Mass Book Awards have been celebrating the talents of Bay State authors, illustrators, and creators for a quarter century now. This year’s winners inspire and challenge us, they unpack difficult historical truths, and shape our understanding of the wild, wonderful, and sometimes confusing world that surrounds us,” said Courtney Andree, executive director of the Massachusetts Center for the Book, in a press release.
The two honor titles in Berry’s category were “The Road from Belhaven” by Margot Livesey, about a young woman in Scotland who can see into the future; and “River East, River West” by Aube Rey Lescure, an intergenerational story set in modern China.
“The Naming Song” was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Sci-Fi/Fantasy).
Berry wasn’t the only author from the Pioneer Valley who won a Massachusetts Book Award this year: Northampton author Jarrett J. Krosoczka, best known for his graphic memoir “Hey, Kiddo” and the “Lunch Lady” series, won the organization’s first ever graphic novel prize for his book “Sunshine: How One Camp Taught Me About Life, Death, and Hope,” a memoir of his time working at a summer camp for children with pediatric cancer. In a statement, Krosoczka credited his childhood in Worcester, where he read comics at a local comic book store and took classes at the Worcester Art Museum, for helping his creative career.
“Utilizing panels, word balloons, and page-turns, I can communicate a heady story in such a way that prose alone would be unable to adequately convey. As a lifelong citizen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I am so very proud that my state continues to lead the revolution — the graphic novel is a book format worthy of praise and celebration,” Krosoczka said.
Berry moved to the Pioneer Valley about 20 years ago. Though he currently lives in Easthampton, he’s also lived in Amherst, Hadley, and Conway, and he, like Krosoczka, credited an area of Massachusetts for helping inspire the book.
“There is this kind of a haunted quality to the landscape that I find really compelling,” he said, “and whether I am walking in the woods or moving among our towns or the old factory spaces here in Easthampton, all those have had huge influence on the book – and, in fact, careful readers will probably notice, even though it takes place in a fantastical world, that there are certain locations in the novel that are very much here in the Pioneer Valley.”
Berry also credited the “vibrant and engaged community of fellow writers and artists and musicians” he’s found in the area.
“I count myself so lucky to have found these folks who inspire me,” he said. “We trade our work and our beliefs in this conversation that is so enriching and so powerful.”
The book took Berry over a decade to write; his last full-length novel, a detective novel called “The Manual of Detection,” came out in 2009.
“I came to love these characters and the strange journey that they’re on in the book,” he said. “Living with that for so long and knowing that it’s finally out of the world is kind of a strange experience. It’s like finally introducing people to these old friends.”
His next projects include a series of novellas (“What would happen if Jane Austen were writing ‘Conan the Barbarian’?”) and an adventure setting for tabletop roleplaying games.
“Hopefully, the next things you see from me won’t be 10 years from now,” he chuckled.
Ultimately, Berry hopes that what people take away from “The Naming Song” is that no matter what happens in the world, “it still comes down to individuals working to make change and to find the ways to resist those who make their power seem inevitable.”
“It’s about using language, using art, using all of our creative and human resources – and I mean that in the deeply human sort of way – to fight for understanding,” he said, “and also, hopefully, along the way, to still believe in the possibility of adventure and the magical.”
“The Naming Song,” published by MacMillan, is available online and at book retailers for $28.99. To see a complete list of Massachusetts Book Award honorees in each category, visit massbook.org/mass-book-awards.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.