Terrain.org is pleased to announce the winners and finalists of our 4th Annual Contests in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction. The winning and finalist entries will appear in our forthcoming issue, No. 34, with the theme of “Elemental”. The issue will launch at https://www.terrain.org on October 28th.
The winners and finalists are:
Poetry
Judged by John Daniel
Rob Carney, Winner
“Seven Pages from The Book of Sharks“
Of Rob Carney’s winning poem series, judge John Daniel writes:
Many poets refer to myth or incorporate myth, one way or another, as part of their work. The author of The Book of Sharks takes a different approach. He writes of elemental things in an elemental way—he aims to create myth, and from the evidence of this excerpt he is off to a fine start. His diction is plain and sure, his phrasings move with a storyteller’s narrative flair, and the long form and loose stanza structure that he has adopted serve to contain without binding the turns and arcings of his imaginative attention. It is standard to say after judging a contest that all the finalists were strong, and in this case it is actually true. I hated to choose against any of the four. I picked the Book of Sharks excerpt, finally, for its ambition as well as for its present achievement.
Poetry Finalists
- Janie Miller, for “November”, “Biscuit”, “Ligature”, and “Desert Autopsy”
- Mark McCaig, for “Order Odonata” and “Shad Run”
- Cal Freeman, for “How to enter the woods like water” and “How to enter empathy”
Fiction
Judged by Teague Bohlen
Eloise Schultz, Winner
“The Water Cycle”
Of Eloise Schultz’s winning story, judge Teague Bohlen writes:
In “The Water Cycle,” there’s a sense of holistic narrative that pervades, so we feel as though we as readers are allowed a glimpse through this narrow and purposeful window into Grace’s life. The story itself is much like that narrator’s grandmother’s tales, which offer new perspective with each retelling; this is a story that unfolds itself deliberately and emotionally, in a way that defies chronology but embraces meaning all the same. The language here is lush and evocative, pushing out from theme much like her mother and grandmother from the water, “marked with lines of scum and duckweed strata.” The imagery is likewise thick here, and effectively so; we feel the wading-through that this character must do in order to plumb the true depths of her familial inheritance, this language of learning and sorrow and perseverance that we all hope to gain from our past, and pass down. “The taxonomy of loss is written in an alluvial field,” this story reminds us, and so it is. So is this story, winding through this narrator’s life as it does from the point of origin, the passing of her father, reminding us of those moments to which much is owed. Lovely, bracing, lyric, and true.
Fiction Finalist
- JoeAnn Hart, for “Rare Offering”
Nonfiction
Judged by Kathryn Miles
Nancy Geyer, Winner
“(Dis)Appearances”
Of Nancy Geyer’s winning essay, judge Kathryn Miles writes:
A great essay surprises and challenges us in elemental ways. It asks us to confront our prejudices and preconceptions. It uses form in order to expand—and sometimes even subvert—the very form it employs. It compels us go deeper in order to find what we might have overlooked. It begs to be read again. “(Dis)Appearances” does all of that and more. Like Yeats’s famous gyres, this essay spins out, then back around itself, then out again, ever widening its discursive circle, ever asking us to do the same. Something as seemingly straightforward as a police report becomes a kind of talisman, a way into a world of degraded spaces and forgotten people and, ultimately, the complexity born of our own inability to see. At its heart, this essay inspires us all to consider the relationship we form with the people and land that surround us. As such, it is segmented and braided and also something more: a kind of literary fugue that reminds us we are all quite a lot greater than the sum of our parts. I’d say more, but that would only delay further what I really want to do, which is to go back and read this piece yet another time. I think you’ll find you want to do the same.
Nonfiction Finalists
- Emily Wortman-Wunder, for “The Great Underground”
- Jennifer Hirt, for “Students of the Route”
- Melissa Matthewson, for “Fall, or Falling”, appearing as Issue 34’s “To Know a Place” feature
Be sure to tune your browser to Terrain.org on October 21 to read (and listen to) the contest winners and finalists, and lots of other great contributions!
Sharks in ocean photo by Steven Maltby, courtesy Shutterstock.
