PRISM international is proud to announce the winning pieces from our Creative NonFiction Contest along with Ivan Coyote’s judge’s essay.
Judge’s Essay
I wasn’t expecting to love each and every one of the shortlisted essays as much as I did. Each one brought its own mix of craft and truth to the page, and I found myself excited to return to my own work in progress after truly enjoying each of these pieces.
I read everything twice early one morning, and then went and got my bivalent vaccine booster. I returned home with a shopping bag full of chicken soup ingredients, and started to read through everything again. As the side effects settled into my throbbing head and tender arm, I fell asleep, and the winning essay wound itself into my fevered dreams.
Czech is a Difficult Language moved me in the moment and then gathered its words behind my eyelids for days, and caught in my chest in a hard lump of recognition. Running through the spine of this work is love for someone who is disappearing into dementia, fumbling through first and second languages for the right words. It is unmistakably written by a tender witness, and I am still thinking of this paragraph:
“As my grandmother’s vocabulary shrinks, she leans more heavily on certain words. The word possibility, fittingly, takes on many meanings. A possibility is an appointment (her doctor has a possibility next week), a road (turn on the first possibility to the right, she says, giving me directions), a restaurant (we will have lunch at the possibility under the bridge), a job (she and my grandfather were able to leave Czechoslovakia because my grandfather had a possibility in London). We walk along the beach one morning and the sand under our feet is dense from last night’s rain. Sea foam collects on the shoreline and blows onto the beach. Sandpipers flicker past us, moving to the water and then running back with each wave. We walk for some time and turn back at an arbitrary point. She tells me while we climb the wooden stairs back to her apartment building that she will be sad, until the last possibility of when she is here, that she never visited Russia, where her father was born.”
I will not ever forget this image, of a woman leaning heavily on a word, a word like possibility.
In What Are You Doing Here, the writer brings us into a company-built house in a small mining town on already poisoned dirt, and drops us into a chair at a grandmother’s kitchen table. Grandpa is not wearing any pants and reeks of whiskey and worse, and the writer shuffles through memory and photos and deals us a story that speaks to the generational ripples that do not stop when an addict’s heart ceases to beat. A powerful and poetic piece.
The Thing That’s Wrong With Me is another family story (a genre which I freely admit I am consistently drawn to and deeply moved by) about grandparents, disease, mental illness and all that we inherit in our veins. To say much more about this piece would be to give away the clue to the mystery, so I won’t do that, but there are bits of this story that I will keep like a treasure in a wooden box in my desk.
What a privilege it was to be asked to spend some time with each of these writers.
Please join us in congratulating these writers!
Grand Prize
“Czech is a Difficult Language” by Alexandra Trnka
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Runner-Up
“What Are You Doing Here” by Vicki McLeod
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Second Runner-Up
“The Thing That’s Wrong With Me” by Terese Brasen
“The Thing That’s Wrong With Me” is part of a nonfiction collection, which she is currently completing. Several of the stories have been published and shortlisted for prizes.
Terese has an MFA in creative writing and studied with the novelist Fred Leebron. She is drawn to creative nonfiction and memoir, because she spent many years as a magazine journalist and enjoys blending imagination with fact. In her upcoming CNF collection, many of the stories deal with her mother’s mental illness.
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Thank you to Ivan Coyote and all who submitted!
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Don’t forget The Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize is open until October 31st! Learn more on our Contests page, and submit via Submittable. Free submissions for Black and Indigenous writers and a limited number of free submissions for low-income folks.