The Evil Companions Literary Award was established in 1992 by Colorado State University’s Center for Literary Publishing, the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, and the Oxford Hotel. The award is named for a group of Denver writers who, in the Fifties and Sixties, met periodically to drink and talk about writing. Funds raised by the annual event at the Oxford Hotel benefit Colorado Review, a literary journal published by Colorado State University’s Center for Literary Publishing.

At the annual awards ceremony at the Oxford Hotel in Denver, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Robert Hoffert, offered the following remarks. After thanking Professor David Milofsky and other friends of Colorado Review and Colorado State University who year after year have made possible both this award and the Evil Companions Award Dinner, Hoffert said:

“Initially, I wanted to draw your attention to an analogy between the creative work of a writer and the responsibilities of a public university.

But unexpectedly, Kent Haruf stopped me in my tracks. His Mcpheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, experimented briefly with the use of analogy but they quickly recovered in time to set aside such distortive recklessness.

Both brothers worried that Victoria, their teenage house guest, had become kind of sorry and miserable. Then, with uncharacteristic daring, Harold attempted to understand her despondency through a comparison of her state of being with that of a two-year-old pregnant heifer.

Raymond, barely controlling himself, pointed out that Victoria is a girl, not a cow, and that you can’t put girls and cows together in a common explanation, or, as he put it in his own direct words, “I don’t appreciate you saying she’s a heifer.”

Eventually, Harold and Raymond appear to agree that the Victoria/heifer analogy may be something that is worthy of thought but not of speech; of private reflection but not of public expression.

So, it seemed that it was okay for me to ponder my analogy, but not to share it with you. With due respect to our honoree, I have listened carefully to the Mcpheron brothers, but on this one I’m going my own way.

There is an important similarity between creative expression and a responsible public university. Both, at their best, give us access to simple and unadorned structures of beauty and meaning upon which we can compose our personal and civic lives.

There is no time in which this similarity is inoperable or insignificant, but in the particular time we are sharing these days we must say it every bit as much as we think it.

We desperately need to protect and honor the voices and the institutions that most effectively anchor us in possibilities that make human life worth living and worth defending.

Thank you for being part of an evening that has brought us together and has invited us to discover similarities that are essential to futures of promise and hope.”