This year, we are fortunate to have the award-winning interdisciplinary writer J.D. Scrimgeour as our judge for the Michael Steinberg Nonfiction Prize. (Scrimgeour has also contributed an essay, “The Great Fire,” to this issue.)
Of the winning essay, Alexis Lathem’s “A Forgiveness of Whales,” Scrimgeour writes, “A fascinating love poem to fascinating creatures, studded with startling, precise metaphors to let us feel the natural world. The facts and anecdotes about whales resonate with humanity’s own precarious situation, yet never become simplistically symbolic. Each section, whether narrative, meditative, autobiographical, or lyrical, whether reflecting on literature or ecology, takes us deeper, making us feel increasing awe for these creatures ‘who would turn out to be the most like us,’ and yet ‘were the ones who were the least like us.’ In the process, the essay makes us feel increasing awe for humanity as well.”
Scrimgeour chose “Change of Name” by Mahru Elahi and “Zeke” by John Kaufman, as our two runners up; of “Change of Name” he writes, “With the aftermath of 9-11 as its jumping off point, this essay gracefully explores the complexity of a name and how it is perceived both by the world and the self that must carry it. As stories get revised, the author must reassess the identity found in a name.” “Zeke,” writes Scrimgeour, is “an empathetic narrative that portrays a schizophrenic young man. The author’s willingness to expose himself leads to moving discoveries and connections, and the directness of the writing is refreshing.”
In “House Made of Tracks,” John Macker, guided by memory and a sense of obligation to the past, brings alive a deeply personal history of the American southwest that leaves little or no room for sentimentality, shallow political attempts to divide people, or the obfuscation that they rely on.
This blurring of the past into lies in the present is also addressed and challenged by Sandra Jackson-Opoku in the wonderful “’We don’t go there’: The Plantation as a Site of Trauma, Memory, and Resistance,” which takes on, directly, the awful proclivity of contemporary America to sanitize, commodify, and sell our history, erasing the truth for profit and convenience’ sake.
In “Afterwards,” Rebecca Evans gathers moments when life and death hang in the balance, when nothing matters but breath itself.
Each of these fine essays contributes to an understanding of who, what and where we really are, in time and place, in the natural order of things, in the difficult, sometimes baffling present. Read these writers. They are telling the truth.
Richard Hoffman is the author of nine books, including the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury; the story collection Interference and other stories; the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists and other essays; and five books of poems: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, which won the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry; and People Once Real.
