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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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© 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 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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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 2022 for the The Pushcart Prize: Best of The Small Presses XLVIII.

Congratulations to each of these wonderful writers, and thank you to everyone who found a forever home for their essay with us in 2022!

p.s. Our submission period is now open until the first of the year.

Featured image by Elise Ostraff.

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Longridge Review is proud to nominate 2 essays and 3 works of art from July 1, 2001, to June 30, 2022, for The Best of the Net.

2022 Best of The Net nominees

Congratulations to each of these brilliant folks, and thank you to everyone who found a forever home for their essays and art with us so far in 2022!

The Best of the Net is an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional publishing. This space has been created to bring greater respect to the continually expanding world of exceptional digital publishing. 

The Best of the Net Anthology began in 2006, a project created by Sundress Publications (with special thanks to founding editor Erin Elizabeth Smith), to gather communities of online literary magazines, journals, and individuals that do the work of creating our digital literary landscape. We believe this effort is integral in decentering the literary canon as well as promoting and amplifying voices that are imperative to good literature, responsible culture, and the understanding of today’s social climate. We cherish these writers and publishers and hold digital publishing in high regards as a medium that creates access to a greater array of voices than the traditional publishing climate has allowed.

http://bestofthenetanthology.com/about/

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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.

©Sonja Livingston

We are thrilled to announce that Sonja Livingston will award the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Personal note from EDG: I studied with Sonja at #WVWCMFA when she was a visiting professor. She is warm, brilliant, and humble. I am so pleased she said yes! She also created a delightful and insightful series of interviews on her YouTube channel, The Memoir Cafe. Go there and subscribe.

Sonja is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, and teaches in the Postgraduate Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA). She has taught at the University of Memphis and in The Writing Workshops Abroad for the University of New Orleans in Edinburgh, San Miguel de Allende and Cork.

Things to do today:

  • Learn more about Sonja on her website: https://www.sonjalivingston.com
  • Read her gorgeous CNF: The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion; Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses; Ghostbread; Ladies Night at The Dreamland; and her wonderful CNF guide, Fifty-Two Snapshots: A Memoir Starter Kit. (All available through links on her website and wherever books are sold.)
  • Read about the #BarnhillPrize on our website and familiarize yourself with our mission.
  • Follow our blog to stay current on contest information as we move toward June 1.
  • Follow us on Twitter, our favorite hangout on the socials: @LongridgeReview
  • Follow Sonja on Twitter: @SonjaLivingston
  • Start penciling out your own essay for our contest. Submissions open June 1 and close July 31, 2022.
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)

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

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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.

Photo by Andrew Wegmann

We are thrilled to announce that Mike Smith will award the 2021 Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Mike is Anne’s son, and we are over the moon that he will be our judge this year.

Mike Smith lives with his family of seven deep in the Mississippi Delta. He’s previously published nonfiction, poetry, and fiction in translation with independent and academic presses. Most recently, his published work is Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories (Columbia University Press) and the memoir, There Was Evening and There Was Morning: Essays on Illness, Love, and Loss (WTAW Press), which documents the strange set of coincidences between his first wife’s illness and death and his stepdaughter’s similar illness and recovery three years later. Three years ago, his mother, Anne Clinard Barnhill, named him her literary executor, leaving behind two unfinished manuscripts for him to complete.

Things to do today:

Read the 2019 #BarnhillPrize-winning essay here:  
Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer
and the 2020 winner here:
4 Generations of Black Hair Matters
Mike Smith and his children

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Miriam Glassman, The Bibliosquatter
Therése Halscheid, Incident
Kent Jacobson, What She Didn’t Say
Janine Kovac, Breaking Character
Sharon Waters, Straight Hair Be Damned
Hannah Williams, Ring and Rabbit

Featured Artist

Chloe W.

My World © Chloe W.

This issue has a bully thread running through it; the essays range from humorous to painful, and remind the reader that childhood is often a rollercoaster of dodged threats, unwanted pursuits, emotional crises, and coming to terms with how to best situate what other people put us through so we can move on with our whole lives.

Childhood can be funny, heartbreaking, and dangerous; and some parts of it are unforgettable.

In The Bibliosquatter, Glassman confesses her childhood secret life at the library; and by secret we mean secret. You can’t help but be impressed and awed by the lengths she goes to while escaping her personal bully. What were 1970s parents doing again?

Halscheid’s flash piece recalls the meanness of boys who waited for her daily, harassing her and mocking her appearance as she tried to best cover her starving body during her father’s illness. The narrator’s loneliness becomes something we can’t un-feel.

Jacobson’s haunting memories of a girl he loved and her unexplained disappearance from his life linger like salty air or soft flowers; the entire narrative feels like something evoked from a mysterious scent, something that triggers a sense of loss but exchanges what it takes for something beautiful.

In Breaking Character, Kovac’s childhood ballet takes a Lord of The Flies turn that, while bringing a laugh, also owns up to how we feel deep desires and rages even when very young — emotions and wants on a level that feel familiar from an adult perspective. (Her recounting of a teacher’s memories of winters in Germany is not to be missed. You’ll appreciate The Nutcracker on a new level.)

Waters tries to make peace with her mother’s obsessions with what other people think of her and her family. Many readers will recognize the experience of trying to please a parent who cannot be satisfied, and spending years seeking the best way to accept that parent and to love oneself.

Finally, Williams explores a relationship that spans childhood to adulthood, and that reveals some uncomfortable truths about competition, judgement, and control in unexpected places. Readers no doubt will recognize some version of this evolution in their own lives. The reappearance of the rabbit (What is the rabbit, in fact?) towards the end of the essay is a brilliant touch.

Come read and enjoy!

The writers have worked hard to bring you their experience, wisdom, and places for empathy and understanding. Our team of readers and editors are privileged to assist.

P.S. Submissions open soon for our next issue: February 1, 2021-April 2, 2021.

Thank you for your support.

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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 6 essays from 2020 for the The Pushcart Prize: Best of The Small Presses XLVI.

Congratulations to each of these wonderful writers, and thank you to everyone who found a forever home for his/her/their essay with us in 2020!

p.s. Our submission period is now open until the first of the year.

Featured image by upfromsumdirt.