When Keaton Charles Butler entered the fourth annual chapbook contest at Salt Lake Community College, he didn’t think that he would win.
“I did have a fairly established level of confidence about my work,” says Butler, “but there’s always that level of apprehension, wondering if anyone else is going to be able to understand your work the way that you understand and value it.”
Butler has been fascinated with language since he was a small child and is currently an English major, who works as a writing assistant at the SLCC Community Writing Center.
“I taught myself how to read when I was almost five,” says Butler. “I had these story books that had been read to me over and over so I had memorized them, and I would go through and just sort of look at them word by word, and I’ve been writing ever since I figured it out.”
His winning work, “My Life as a Human,” is a short fiction piece about a boy growing up feeling isolated.
“In the story, he is the only human that he’s ever seen, and everyone else around are these sort of weird inexplicable animals that are more or less sinister to him,” says Burton. “His mother is a giant spider that he’s afraid of, and his dad is a bear.”
The basic idea for Butler’s story started with the power of imagination, and centers around the theme of growing up and finding true love.
“It’s a story about the process of moving from childhood to adulthood and sometimes how destructive that can be, especially to the creative spirit,” says Butler. “It’s a story of a person navigating life with this sense of isolation and maybe feeling like he doesn’t know how to relate to anyone and then ultimately there’s another human that he meets. All these other characters that seem sinister and peripheral just sort of fade away, and there is this one other person of your same species, figuratively speaking.”
Karin Anderson, a Utah Valley University English professor who served as a judge for the contest, loved the story and hopes that Butler will continue writing.
“I admired the author’s ability to hold us still and yet moving within the character’s idiosyncratic perception as he sifts through a population of personified animals looking for his own kind,” says Anderson. “The language is deadpan, witty, often digressive yet always returning to the singular quest for love and affinity.”
Butler is focusing on finishing his associate degree. Afterwards, he wants to take a break from school for a while and then transfer to the U of U to complete a degree in education. He also has bigger plans for his story.
“’My Life as a Human’ has since been expanded, and I have plans on making it into a full length novel,” says Butler. “Not a huge one, I never really liked really long books. When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ because it’s just that short, sweet type of story. That’s sort of what I am planning for ‘My Life as a Human.’ It’s not an epic story; it’s something else.”
The SLCC Chapbook Competition provides an opportunity for SLCC students to be published.
Contest winners receive $100 and have their chapbook published by students who are taking the Publication Studies course. The winning manuscript will be printed in a run of 250 copies and will be made available for purchase at local bookstores. Finalists can have their manuscripts printed in smaller runs.
“The SLCC Chapbook Competition takes place every fall from September to November,” says Charlotte Howe, an English instructor at SLCC and the Chapbook Contest Coordinator. “All current SLCC students are eligible to enter the contest. The categories for submission are fiction, non-fiction and poetry—one category per year, and it rotates. This year the category was fiction, and next year, it will be non-fiction.”
On May 1 from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Student Event Center on the Taylorsville Redwood Campus, Butler will read from his published chapbook. Robin Glassey, Erika Lynne Smith and Alex Maughan, who are the finalists from the chapbook competition, will also be featured that night.
“The three finalists have also worked with the Publication Studies students to create chapbooks of their manuscripts,” says Howe in an email. “Refreshments will be served, and guests will have an opportunity to visit with the writers, pick up a chapbook or two and experience a public reading of the work.”
For more information, contact charlotte.howe@slcc.edu.
