Scott Blackwood was one of ten recipients of this year’s recently announced Whiting Writers’ Awards, largely for his 2009 novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, which won the AWP Prize for the Novel, judged by Robert Eversz. The Whiting Selection Committee cited We Agreed… for  “its marvelous compression, and the elegiac, ominous yearning, the fugue of loss and love and death that pervades the book.”

Originally from Texas, Blackwood now lives in Chicago where he directs the MFA Creative Writing Program and teaches English at Roosevelt University. AWP recently caught up with Blackwood for a quick interview.

On winning a Whiting Award, he said, “It was really strange. I felt disembodied for a bit. The committee’s completely anonymous, so it’s very far out of the writer’s control—you feel like it just kind of falls from the sky. You feel like something aligned somewhere and you don’t really know the cause and effect relationship. It honors you for your existing body of work and your promise. That, to me, was pretty gratifying.”

“Awards reinforce the idea that writing is really an interdependent art,” said Blackwood. “The idea that it’s a lone-wolf thing is just a complete fallacy. There’s a huge web of relationships necessary. Just when you think you’re alone in your hovel, you’re really not.”

So what does a writer do these days with a $50,000 award?

“Well, I wish I could say you just take a year off and write, but for a novelist in his mid-40’s, you have too many obligations to afford doing that. I’ve got one kid in college and one kid who’s six years old.” He added that it’s quite a different thing to win a prize like this at age twenty-seven; so, as of yet, no extravagant writing vacations are planned, and no Porsche convertibles have been leased.

Blackwood offered some advice to writers who have yet to break out with their first book: he recommends a slowed-down, patient writing process that may not be very appealing to young, carefree writers without as many responsibilities: “My process is very, very slow. You have to make the thing you’re writing into the best thing. Time has been a really beneficial thing.” He added that if writers don’t rush, but allow instead for obstacles in life, like work or family obligations, those things will all contribute to the overall work of writing.

“It’s helpful when you’re momentarily lost. You can always try to rethink, ‘OK, what am I trying to do?’ Time helps. Novels are much more about saturation and distilling and concentrating. It’s like the slow food movement. There’s something to attention to process that maybe gets lost in churning things out.”

The counterpoint, he said, is just writing rapidly to “get it out.” But, he argues, you have to be willing to sit there and stare and think. “And some people go absolutely insane doing that, but I think a lot can be gained from it.” Once you realize that you can write an effective sentence, an effective scene, and good characters,” he said, “you should slow down and try to listen to your stories; see what they’re thinking.

When asked what he’s working on now, Blackwood said, “I’m not working on a trilogy about zombies and vampires.”  He is, however, working on a novel set mostly in Austin, Texas, based on an unsolved crime from the early ‘90s that he said is a “legendary murder; a very sensitive one I’m keeping low-key right now.” The new novel, tentatively titled See How Small, includes characters from Blackwood’s novel and his 2001 short story collection, In the Shadow of our House.  He mentioned that the story it’s based on is rooted in several of his fears and that “I have to write about those things that scare me, underneath the surface.”

Roosevelt University, where Blackwood teaches, will be hosting the keynote event for AWP’s 2012 Conference in Chicago. “I’m introducing Margaret Atwood,” said Blackwood. “No pressure.“