This 1916 song was inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and it’s far from the first piece to build off the famous novel. Here at USC, a competition called the Wonderland Awards encourages students to continue drawing inspiration from the author and his works.
Tyson Gaskill: We’re in the Horton rare book room and one of the winning entries is right here and it is a sculpture of Queen Victoria made out of playing cards.
That’s Tyson Gaskill, executive director of communications and events for USC libraries. We’re in a small reading room in Doheny Library with wooden bookshelves, tables for reading and many books related to Carroll. It’s where anyone can see items in the Cassady Collection, which contestants have to use. But despite the common starting point, students take their entries in very different directions.
Gaskill: You will have a video going up against a poem against an artwork against, this year, a croquet game. This year, I saw the entries when they came in, and I just started giggling. I was like, where do they come up with this? I mean, never in a million years, would I think to do what they do.
The Cassady Collection began in 2000 with a donation from George Cassady. I met with the creator of the Wonderland Awards and Cassady’s wife, Linda Cassady, in her L.A. apartment. She remembers how the dedication her late husband had for USC motivated him to create the collection.
Linda Cassady: He felt that he owed them everything, that he’s the person he is because of USC. He wanted to pay that back. No one has done the type of work that he did.
She turns on a lamp to flip through a thick stack of pages. It’s a catalog they worked on with details about each item for the collection, down to how the pages were cut.
Cassady: And so this is about 2,800 pages.
In the apartment, there are bookshelves of materials waiting to go through the full cataloging and donation process to join the collection at USC. There’s items ranging from Alice books in every color to illustrations and marionette dolls.
Cassady: Oh these are great, let me see if I can get them out. So we have a collection of postcards. OK what do we have here, we have a Japanese book … woodprints … calendar. These are plates that were used to produce Alice books.
After so much work building the collection, Cassady wanted to make sure students knew about it and used it.
Cassady: We were in the Horton Rare Book Room and I said, you know, the students are out there, the books are in here. How do you get them in here? You pay them.
And so, the Wonderland Awards began in 2005 and since then, the library has received around 20 to 40 submissions each year. Judges use a point rubric to narrow those down to two winners, with $3,000 awarded to first place and $1,500 for second place.
Cassady: And you think you’ve seen it all, but you haven’t. Every year there’s something that you go, “I have not seen this before.” But we still go through every one of them because people can die on the sword for the one that they love. And we’ve asked the students, should we have categories instead of making the haikus go against 120 page script, and they go no, they like going one on one. They want to be the winner.
At this year’s award reception students looked through the many entries, such as a colorful, illustrated tarot deck; a set of themed stamps and postcards; and VR art piece students could step through. The winners were a mini-golf course designed by themed entertainment students and an essay annotating one of Carrol’s poems from a legal perspective. The author of the first-place essay, Elijah Granet, said he began work on it back at the beginning of the school year.
Granet: I thought, here’s an area where I can find depths and layers and bring them out. Actually show that there’s these jokes and brilliant little humor in it.
Contestants come from many academic fields, and don’t even have to be from USC. For some, working on submissions is a welcome break from coursework.
Granet: So it helped that because I’m in law school, there was always something more boring I had to do and this became my carrot whenever I had the stick of, oh, gosh, I’ve got to read about civil procedure, but then I get to do pig law.
In addition to the two winners, each year a third student receives the Bellman Award, for an entry with creative risks or qualities the point system doesn’t recognize. Will Domke won it this year for a short film of performance art where actors dressed as chess pieces in the neighborhood around USC. Domke said mishaps like getting lost only added to the art.
Will Domke: In the book, like, I revisited passages from it and she gets lost a lot. That’s literally something that happens, so it’s not like, presentational, it’s sort of a lot of it is about accepting just what happens as what happens. I honestly feel like, really fulfilled by it.
Before research for the film, Domke was very familiar with Carroll’s writing, but not as much with his puzzles and mathematics. Granet also felt his research gave him a new perspective.
Granet: We have original work by Carroll that just keeps you going for hundreds of years, and will never be exhausted, and so I never would have gone to Special Collections in my life if it wasn’t for this, so I’m just really grateful it existed.
For those behind the award, seeing the interest and dedication students have is a highlight of the competition.
Gaskill: That’s what’s so gratifying for us here in the libraries is that we’re seeing students use this collection, doing it in creative academic ways and then, you know, winning. Winning some money for it, which is awesome.
With this year’s awards over, the libraries will soon start preparations for next year, open to whoever wants to fall down the Lewis Carroll rabbit hole.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Nina Moothedath.