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Selfie, EDG

Dear Readers and Writers —

We launched Longridge Review 9 years ago this March. It was the professionalization of the Essays on Childhood project that began in 2011. We would never have gotten off the ground without our launch issue writers, Margaret Ward McClain, Douglas Imbrogno, Jeremy Dae Paden, and artist Sarah C.B. Guthrie.

I keep trying to think of a magical or easy-ish way to say this is the end; maybe I can’t do it because I’m not sure it is the end. The truth is, it is the end of how we have operated for nearly a decade.

The current plan is keep the site up as an archive, to consider a print anthology, and to look at either continuing exclusively with the Barnhill Prize here or finding a new home for said literary prize.

Longridge Review built a community, a literary family. Defining an end to that community is not in my blood. We have something here that cannot die or be taken away. We have shared our life stories, our narratives of pain and joy that we brought into the world. We built understanding and grace and epiphany.

None of this was my doing alone. I am deeply grateful to editors Suzanne Farrell Smith, Mary Heather Noble, Beth Duttera Newman, and Molly Young Maass; and to readers Semein Washington, Thea Princewill, and Crystal Good; and to M. Randal Owain, Carter Sickels, Mike Smith, Sonja Livingston, and Neema Avashia for serving as Barnhill Prize judges.

And to our brilliant and vulnerable writers, our luminous artists, and our smart and compassionate readers: You made this community work. You wrote and you read and you created and shared this special genre with ferocious love. Thank you for that, and for helping me bring a lifelong dream into reality.

I will always be grateful for you.

And until we meet again, stay true to your story.

Very Truly Yours,

EDG

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. William Faulkner wrote that in his novel Requiem For A nun, and my mom liked to quote it a lot. I found an addendum of sorts to it online recently, a quote by a writer named Greg Iles from his book The Quiet Game. I want to read it to you because I think it speaks to grief in a powerful way. Iles wrote, “Faulkner said the past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in web spun long before we were born. Webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken. We pursue images perceived as new, but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events. But some of us feel it always.”

Anderson Cooper, All There Is, January 10, 2024

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Elk River Reflections ©John Wirts

The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America.

Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in annual collections. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Every volume contains an index of past selections, plus lists of outstanding presses with addresses.

The Pushcart Prize has been a labor of love and independent spirits since its founding. It is one of the last surviving literary co-ops from the 60’s and 70’s. Its legacy is assured by donations to its Fellowships endowment.

Longridge Review is proud to nominate 4 essays from 2023 for The Pushcart Prize: Best of The Small Presses XLIX.

Congratulations to each of these wonderful writers, and thank you to everyone who found a forever home for their essay with us in 2023!

Featured image by John Wirts.

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Kevin Hershey, photo credit Carla Zavala

It is our great pleasure to announce that Kevin Hershey is the 2023 winner of The Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. His essay, Three Fairies, was an early favorite in the submission process, and was named the best of the best by contest judge Neema Avashia. Avashia writes:

It was such a pleasure to judge this year’s Barnhill Prize submissions. The writers who submitted this year took on a wide range of topics: from intergenerational trauma to interactions with nature to complex family relationships to evolving understandings of queerness. I’m grateful to these writers for their courage in putting truth on the page, for the care and craft with which they did so.

I’m a parent to a relatively new daughter, and I marvel almost every day at the joy she takes in seeing herself in the mirror. She revels in her own appearance, her own existence, with a kind of unabashed glory that both fills me with joy, and gives me some existential angst. Because, what happens when she stops looking at herself that way? Who or what will make her stop seeing herself as a thing of beauty? And how will I stand beside her in the moments where she loses sight of herself because of the messages the world gives her?

The essay “Three Fairies” resonated for me deeply because of the way in which it interacted with my questions. The writer’s detailed descriptions of this group of young boys who loved to dress up as the fairies from Sleeping Beauty, who delighted in capes and hats and wands, and who were supported in doing so by their moms, reminded me of my daughter’s early delight. And their reckoning with their own identity in a world that is not always kind, reminded me of my own. But what stayed with me most by the end of the piece was the way in which the adult writer is able to see his mother, and his best friend’s mother, so clearly: to see that the care and welcome they extended to their children did not just stop there–it extended to the queer community around them. That what he’d thought of as a child as a manifestation of his mother’s love was that, but also so much more–it was a manifestation of her commitment to a broader community of queer folks.

The emotional arc in “Three Fairies” is rendered so skillfully that by the end of the piece, I was filled with a deep love for the characters within it–the boys, and their mothers. The same love that the author was intending to communicate through the writing. The narrative clarity, the precision of language, and the author’s own vulnerability on the page, all led me to choose it as the winner of this year’s Barnhill Prize.

Neema Avashia

Neema also named as notable Lost at Sea (Harley).

Congratulations to Kevin, and to each of our finalists. On behalf of our editorial team, we are humbled and grateful to have the opportunity to read your work; most of all, you contributed to the dream of honoring Anne Barnhill by offering poignant and powerful narratives from your childhood experience.

Please see our home page or Creative Nonfiction menu tab for links to all of our essays, and thank you!

Kevin Hershey is a writer, early childhood educator, and graduate student of clinical social work. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Crab Creek Review, and Open Global Rights. He lives in New York City.

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Neema Avashia – photo credit Laura Cennamo

The Barnhill Prize honors Anne Clinard Barnhill’s generous spirit of support for all who love to read and write; her lifelong empathy with those who mine their childhood experience to understand themselves now; the natural vulnerability in her compelling prose and poetry; and her boundless generosity in sharing her writing passions with the world.

We are thrilled to announce that Neema Avashia will award the 2023 Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Personal note from EDG: Neema and I share growing up in the Kanawha Valley, West Virginia. We didn’t know each other then, but I remember hearing her name. My family knew an Indian family in our area, and from elementary school through high school, my sister and I grew up with friendships that linked us to “another Appalachia.” When Neema sent us her essay, A Hindu Hillbilly Elegy, in 2019, it was an easy decision to make it a finalist; that it made it into her wonderful book is a huge privilege for us here at Longridge Review. Thank you, Neema!

Finalist for Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography

Finalist for the 2022 New England Book Award

Book Riot 2022 Best LGBTQ+ Memoir

New York Public Library Best Book of 2022

Honors for Another Appalachia

Things to do today:

Read the #BarnhillPrize-winning essays to date:
2019: Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer
2020: 4 Generations of Black Hair Matters
2021: How to Make Jeweled Rice (Shirin Polo)
2022: Story with Dog

Most of all, be inspired, get excited, and write on!

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Untitled ©Emily Sunderman

Creative Nonfiction, #26, Spring 2023

Gravel, Alan Caldwell
Colored Pencils, Melissa Greenwood
Pulling Away, Summer Hammond
Imaginary Friend, Linda Petrucelli
Five, Ryan Walker
Games of Chance, Melissent Zumwalt

Featured Artist

Various

Alan Caldwell discloses the domestic violence in his childhood home in a straightforward just-the-facts manner that’s chilling in its detachment. Gravel reveals an unsettling portrait of a child adapting his existence to survive a predictable cycle of misery.

Melissa Greenwood is relatable to any oldest child in this scene of teasing and tormenting her younger brother. It seems like her father is intent on teaching her a lesson about bullying, and he does. Just not the lesson he thinks it is.

Summer Hammond‘s brief ode to loss will stay with you long after the last line. I wrote this to Summer, “Dear heavens. I’m struggling not to just weep doing the final read throughs on this issue. Every piece does a unique job of pulling me back into those feelings, those fears, the weirdness of knowing and not knowing what this experience portends for your adult life. Then you grow up and maybe find the words, which you have done so beautifully here.”

Linda Petrucelli remembers her reunion with a favorite doll while she and her sister share the unenviable task of cleaning out their childhood home after a parent dies. Her capacity to return to old emotions is astonishing (I had this same doll), as is her clarity about letting things go.

Ryan Walker puts us in the room with him and his seriously ill brother. If I told you he tried to make contact with Sesame Street’s Big Bird when no one else is around, you might think this is going to be funny. You would be wrong. The loneliness of this narrative haunts me.

Melissent Zumwalt crafts a delightful reflection on her father’s gambling addiction; what I love most about this piece is how it surprised me. She is clear-eyed about the problems embedded in the behavior, but she also brings a generous spin to betting on oneself and the concept of hope.

This issue features one new image, one of my favorite pieces by Emily Sunderman of Middlebury, Vermont. Emily is a personal friend, and I am deeply indebted to her for sharing her various arts forms with me over the last decade. In addition, we pause to remember pieces of visual art from the first 25 issues of Longridge Review.

Submissions for our 2023 #BarnhillPrize issue open June 11 and close August 12 . Thank you for reading and for sharing the online literary landscape with us.

EDG

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© Hans Hillewaert

It is a tremendous honor to be interviewed this month in one the most active and respected craft magazines for creative nonfiction working today, Hippocampus Magazine. The opportunity is especially cherished because it came via my classmate and friend Lara Lillibridge. #WVWCMFA

Visit the magazine link for an insider’s peek into how Longridge Review came to be, the #BarnhillPrize, the thing we will not do, and more.

Basically, I got into this focus because I started to think about how maybe in general we don’t talk about this enough. That childhood is pretty hardcore, and there is no getting out of that. So maybe let’s talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so we can understand ourselves and other people better; so we can value ourselves and each other more. So we can find language to talk about trauma, and humor, and wisdom, and love from the day we first open our eyes.

Elizabeth Gaucher

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We are tremendously grateful to so many of you for making 2022 a positive year of creative energy here at Longridge Review.

  • To everyone who sent us their best work, and in doing so kept our mission powerful.
  • To Diane Gottlieb and Beatrice Motamedi for making financial gifts to help keep the lights on around here.
  • To Sonja Livingston for serving as our judge for the #BarnhillPrize and also for donating her honorarium to keep us sustainable.
  • To Mike Smith, Anne Barnhill’s son, who has supported us in diverse ways for years.
  • To our sharp and dedicated team of readers/editors who always ask the right questions and bring their hearts and minds to the craft of creative nonfiction.
  • To my parents, both of whom died this month but who always gave me their full support and believed in this work.
  • To everyone who read and shared essays and showed our writers the love.

Returning to Mike Smith, he wrote in 2022 about reading our contest finalists’ essays:

I pledged to seek the same reverence for language and seriousness of purpose I watched my mother bring to such tasks, perhaps remembering her own long push to publication. To be taken seriously and read well was often the only encouragement she needed. 

Mike Smith, Finishing My Mother’s Last Book, storySouth Issue 54

To be taken seriously and read well.

We pledge to deliver this gift to you in 2023 and beyond.

Thanks again to all, and Happy New Year.

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Ghost Leaves © Colleen Anderson

Creative Nonfiction, #25, Winter 2022-23

My Short and Tragic Tap Dancing Career, John Backman  
Help, Please!, Melissa Greenwood  
Descended into the Carnage, James Morena  
Asthma, Rina Palumbo
My Bike, Mike Wilson  

Featured Artist 
Colleen Anderson

John Backman has a difficult memory of disappointing his mother; except he doesn’t remember it. He remembers the feeling of something he may have invented himself. What, if anything, actually is real about what he feels, and can he give his three-year-old self a way out after 60 years?

Melissa Greenwood‘s narrative is less than 400 words and still may leave a reader out of breath. She brings us into a chaotic home and tells us, “at a precocious 10, I’m the only adult in this house.” This is a difficult but important reminder of the heavy burdens children bear in domestic violence situations, and how profoundly aware they are of being trapped on all sides.

James Morena. I don’t even know how to begin to give you a heads up (pun intended) on this wild, weird, funny, and a little heartbreaking narrative of a little boy who opened the door to a big surprise. When you’re home with no one but your dog, and someone insists you open the door and you do and…..well, you just have to read it and find out.

Rina Palumbo crafts a frightening scene, sharing a bedroom with her asthmatic sister. Nights would start out well, and but morph quickly into distress. This piece really got to me. Rina brings us into that room, into that fear, and into the desperation of self-harm to escape emotions.

Mike Wilson writes about his bicycle, and so much more. Boy meets bike, boy bonds with bike, boy loses then is reunited with bike. But something has changed. This is a beautiful narrative about love, loss, and growing up.

Finally, I am delighted to share the nature art photography of Colleen Anderson. Colleen is a writer, songwriter, and graphic designer in my hometown of Charleston, West Virginia. I always enjoy her textured imagery and I hope you will, too.

We will be back on February 1, 2023, to open submissions for our Spring issue. Thank you for reading and for sharing the online literary landscape with us.

EDG

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We will be closing subs at midnight tonight so we can get the Winter issue out early. We will be back in the Spring. TY to everyone who wrote for us in 2022, it was a wonderful year! #WritingCommunity #amediting #litmag #CNF #Essays

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It’s sad, but it happens all the time. A terrific read by Anthony J. Mohr.

The Brevity Blog

By Anthony J. Mohr

When a literary journal disappears, a little hole appears in my heart. It’s happened too often. Now, when Duotrope’s Sunday morning Weekly Wire reaches my inbox, I race to the section marked “publisher listings with major status changes”and hope they don’t say a place that once published me “has permanently closed to submissions,” “is on indefinite hiatus to submissions,” or “is believed to be defunct.” The first two phrases are usually euphemisms for the third: defunct, as in dead.

Maybe I’m unlucky, but as of this writing, too many of my homes either no longer exist or languish in prolonged hospice. Some just disappear, like Circle Magazine. The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts died in 2011 and is still dead.

Others tender a tinge of hope. In October 2016, Word Riot claimed they were “temporarily closed for a six-month hiatus.” They have yet to wake up…

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