Congratulations to Catherine Mauk whose essay, “A Rarely Sung Song” is the winner of this year’s Michael Steinberg Award for nonfiction. Our judge, the celebrated essayist, memoirist, and critic Sven Birkerts has this to say about “A Rarely Sung Song”: “Catherine Mauk has given us a wise and unsentimental portrait of a woman facing up to the inevitable changes that aging brings to both body and psyche. She has lived her insights and offers them to the reader in a prose that balances clear-eyed description with a sad wonderment edged with humor, defiance, and, at the end, a dash of sass.”
Congratulations also to our runners-up. Of Nadia Ghent’s “Squalor,” Birkerts writes that Ghent “offers a finely-observed portrait of a family trying to make do in a shambles of a living space in SoHo—back before it became “SoHo.” The hard-scrabble ethos is made rich by Ghent’s textured and tactile prose, and her rendering of family travails is complex and strongly felt. The passages about jazz giant Ornette Coleman practicing a few floors down is the perfect atmospheric touch.”
And Birkerts calls “Floodplain,” Stephanie Silenti’s essay, “a harrowing and compelling account of bodily pain and the uncertainties of medical intervention. A braided essay, it takes the changes observed in a nearby river as a counterpoint, gradually filling out a comparison. The weave—the sharpness of Sienti’s observations—creates a nuanced portrait of systems in perennial flux.”
Birkerts is the author of eleven books: An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th Century Literature; The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry; American Energies: Essays on Fiction; The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age; Readings; My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time; Reading Life; Then, Again: The Art of Time in the Memoir; The Other Walk; Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age; and The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing. In addition, he’s edited three profoundly influential books — Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Writers and the Muse, Writing Well (with Donald Hall), and The Evolving Canon. He is Emeritus Editor of Agni magazine, and an occasional contributor to Solstice.
Each of the essays chosen for this issue demonstrates how a complete absence of sentimentality permits real feeling and emotional complexity to emerge. Sometimes parts of the essays borrow from other rhetorics, other forms: the looping and digressive manner of a child’s thinking, a mock letter of recommendation, dream fragments…. using these conceits like potholders to handle their subjects’ intensity. I’ll add only that each of these essayists is aware that people change, that no one is any one thing, that we are shapeshifters whether we choose to be or not, whether we embrace that fact or not.
Happy reading! And congratulations not only to our winner and runners-up, but to all the essayists gathered here who remind us how rich and complex and varied and nuanced and challenging and gratifying our lives can be.
Richard Hoffman
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.
