The Repository

17th Annual Bram Stoker Awards Ceremony Acceptance Speech for “Alternative Forms”

By Michael Arnzen (for The Goreletter)

June 5th, 2004, Park Central Hotel, New York City

Wow. Thank you all so much. This is my second Stoker – I won the other one back in 1994 for my first novel, Grave Markings – and I want to say thanks, HWA, for a very precious set of bookends.

Ever since I won that award a decade ago, I've kept a comic clipped out of the newspaper and taped by my desk to keep me humble. In it, a man in a suit sits on his sofa polishing a trophy and sipping a glass of wine. On the other side of the living room, a woman in a bathrobe and curlers holds a mop and says, “That's nice, dear, but it's still your turn to clean up the cat puke.” The caption beneath reads: “When the real significance of an award hits home.”

The glory doesn't last forever, but it sure does feel good right now. And I have a lot of people to thank for it. Above all, I want to thank my wife, Renate, who has always been there for me to talk to, run ideas past, and simply be with. Believe it or not, we're celebrating our eleventh wedding anniversary tonight. And I want everyone here to know that she is every writer's dream spouse…so supportive that she's actually cleaned up the cat puke for me many, many times just so I'd have a little extra time to write. Mein Frau, I love you very much.

I also want to thank my readers – particularly those who subscribe to my electronic newsletter, The Goreletter, which you are honoring with this award tonight. I'm proud to join the ranks of Jobs in Hell and Dark Echo – the only other newsletters to have won Stokers (and I think Hellnotes belongs in this lineage some day, too). I've tried to approach The Goreletter as a creative workspace rather than a rote announcement list, and I think it's safe to assume that this trophy means I'm doing something right. God knows what that is, but I do know it's something different.

Because for all it's confusion, that's all that the category “Alternate Forms” really means: something different. Although we have awarded many deserving works in it over the past five years, the category – whether we call it “Alternate Forms” of “Other Media” – is something of a catch-all, a place for folks to recognize “none of the above.” Search engines, DVDs, reading series, websites, coffee table books, magazines, gaming modules, multimedia CDs, newsletters, soundtracks, music videos, and newsletters – all compete for the same prize.

I worry that this too readily becomes the dumping ground of the miscellaneous. And though the criteria for judging, say, a Macromedia Flash e-poem against, say, an internet search engine are hardly in the same universe, there is, beyond the writing itself, one criterion that consistently does emerge and dominate. Otherness. An “alternate form” is a structured text that is not fiction, not poetry, not non-fiction. It is something different. Something Other. Something “alternate”…which in my mind translates into offering an “alternative.” We live in an era of alternate media and I hope that this category will remain attentive to it. After all, horror is itself an alternative form on the literary marketplace. It is a genre that is inherently something Other, something different, something unexpected. And it is for that reason that I am truthfully most honored to receive this award. Thank you very much.