Mudlavia Pages Win Scholarship Contest!

In June, I was at McDonald's with my two girls. We’d spent twenty minutes scrounging up enough change to buy them each an ice cream cone, so I could use McDonald's free Wi-Fi without feeling guilty. At the end of a long day, the last thing I wanted to do was drive somewhere to use my email, and I was praying their internet would work well enough to send off my soccer documents and get on my way. I opened my e-mail and caught the subject line, “Congratulations Carrie” out of the corner of my eye. The sender… Midwest Writers. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even click to open the e-mail.

I’d entered the scholarship contest back in May, submitting a letter and the first five pages of my Mudlavia novel. This wasn’t the usual friendly e-mail that said to try again next year, but to let me know they had chosen me as one of the scholarship recipients. In my day to day life, my car won’t always start, I don’t have internet access, I scrounge for nickels to buy my kids ice cream, and I surely can’t afford to attend a writing conference. Their e-mail changed my life, filling my summer with a little extra hope, excitement, and gratefulness.

It’s an honor to be chosen as a recipient, but an even bigger honor that it had to do with my Mudlavia novel. It’s a tribute to my grandparents, and it represents the people who have worked hard to preserve Mudlavia’s history. So many of them have welcomed me into their homes to share their knowledge and their Mudlavia collections with me. It represents a rich part of Indiana’s history that would be extinct without their stories, memories, and assortment of newspaper clippings, postcards, and artifacts. It represents the hard working and friendly people of Warren County, a place with Mayberry-like charm that’s never been lost over time. Some people have grossly misrepresented it on the internet, leaving people with a glum story about a crumbled building filled with ghosts. The Mudlavia Hotel deserves to be represented with its fascinating history, Titanic-like extravagance, and healing mud.

I was still in “pinch me” mode until I walked up to the registration table and they handed me my nametag. The nametag was my pass to the Midwest Writers Workshop in Muncie. Lots of writers blog about the importance of attending writing conferences, and they’re right. The conference was full of all kinds of writers with all kinds of stories, who were eager to share, learn, and network. Agents, editors, and best-selling authors attended the conference to teach us how to perfect our craft, market ourselves, and even handle taxes. If you have a chance to go to a conference, do it! There’s so much you can learn from talking to experts in person that you can’t learn from a book or a blog. If you can’t afford to go, see if they have some sort of scholarship contest and go for it… you might just get a surprising e-mail in your inbox!