By |

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

By |

Shana Ross

It is our great pleasure to announce that Shana Ross is the 2022 winner of The Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her essay, Story with Dog, was an early favorite in the submission process, and was named the best of the best by contest judge Sonja Livingston. Livingston writes:

Judging this year’s Barnhill Prize was a real honor but not an easy one. The essays broached important but tough topics and I fell a little in love with each piece. 

I chose Story with Dog because it would not let me be. As the title suggests, the essay recounts a story with a dog, but, like the best writing, its deceptively simple subject functions like a trap door and, by the essay’s end, we find ourselves free falling into the fertile terrain below the surface of the words. 

Vivid and poignant, Story with Dog is about cruelty and survival, yet the writing tackles these weighty topics with restraint. In such a brief essay, every word matters. Nothing is wasted. Though the subject matter is not easy, the writer’s voice is inviting, magnetic and does not flinch. As the essay progresses from dog to father to child and we might rather look away, the telling is so masterful, we’re compelled to stay with it and are rewarded for doing so. By the end, we understand what the story means but its meaning is felt and not prescribed. As a result, this “small” story stands for itself while powerfully suggesting a much larger world—making it not so very “small” after all. 

Flannery O’ Connor said, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way—you tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” This year’s winning essay does just that and would do Flannery proud.

Sonja Livingston

Sonja also named as notable Game of Life (Fontaine) and Field Day, 1990 (Choate).

Congratulations to Shana, 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!

Shana Ross has done time in both a co-ed percussion fraternity and the PTA. She arrived this March in Edmonton, Alberta, after 25 years in New England. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, Phantom Kangaroo, Gone Lawn, Cutbank Literary Journal, Laurel Review and more. She was awarded first place in the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition, received a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly. Her first chapbook, Heavy Little Things (Finishing Line Press) is now available. She holds both a BA and MBA from Yale and rarely tweets. Twitter: @shanakatzross

Wendy Fontaine‘s work has twice appeared in Longridge Review (and now three times), as well as in Hippocampus Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, River Teeth, Sweet Lit, and many other literary magazines. Her writing was nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net anthologies, and in 2020 she won the Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize. A native New Englander, Fontaine now reside in southern California. Twitter: wendymfontaine

Emily Choate is the Fiction Editor of Peauxdunque Review. Her fiction appears in Mississippi Review, storySouth, Shenandoah, The Florida Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. She writes regularly for Chapter 16, and other nonfiction appears in Atticus Review, Late Night Library, and Nashville Scene, among others. Emily holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers Conference. She lives near Nashville, where she’s working on a novel. Twitter: @EmChoate_Writer

M Tamara Cutler is a narrative screenwriter with a visual arts background. Works of creative nonfiction are published/forthcoming in Hunger Mountain Review, Under the Gum Tree, and Brevity Blog. She has a diploma in Advanced Creative Writing: Nonfiction from Cambridge University and an MFA in Film from New York University. She splits her time between Southern California and southern Spain. Twitter: @thatplaceUlove

Rachel Laverdiere writes, pots, and teaches in her little house on the Canadian prairies. She is CNF editor at Atticus Review and the creator of Hone & Polish Your Writing. Find Rachel’s prose in Grain, The New Quarterly, Atlas and Alice, The Citron Review and other fine journals. Twitter: @r_laverdiere

Zachary Ostraff received his MFA in creative writing from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University (2016). His essay, Precedent, was a semi-finalist for the 2020 Hippocampus Magazine’s Remember in November contest. He has also had work in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and High Desert Journal. He is currently a Ph.D. student at Texas Tech University. Twitter: @ostraffz

By |

Today marks ONE MORE WEEK of open submissions for the #BarnhillPrize. Read this unrolled tweet from last week for details on prize winners from 2019, 2020, and 2021, then send us your best!

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Subs R open for 2 more weeks for the #BarnhillPrize. Who has won since 2019? See comments for more on @mjmahoneywriter @real_marsha @writergirl and pls share w/ your networks. TY! 🧵🤩

https://longridgereview.submittable.com/submit

Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer @mjmahoney judged by @ranowain

Mary J. Mahoney

What initially drew me 2 ‘Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer’ was the confident narrative voice. I felt at once that I was in the hands of a complicated storyteller …that understands how necessary it is 2 consider the complexity of the human condition w/o relying on E-Z answers.

The voice is curious yet anguished with a great amount of humor and all of this together deepens the insights the writer gains about place and family, especially in the nuanced ways in which the parents and sisters are balanced with regards to the new suburban home.

In the end, however, what drew me to this essay out of all the very self-assured and talented writers I was lucky enough to read for The Barnhill Prize was the impressionistic style of “Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer.”

Where the situation of the essay—a Catholic family moves from Brooklyn to a Long Island suburb called Deer Park—is simple enough, the subterranean story of longing and economic advancement, the story of tradition and generational shifts, is written with compelling subtlety.

4 Generations of Black Hair Matters @real_marsha judged by @CarterSickels

Marsha Lynn Smith

4 Generations of Black Hair Matters explores the changing hairstyles of four generations of Black women, and beautifully exemplifies what the personal essay can do. It’s both intimate and insightful.

By writing about her own life with nuance, intimacy, and specificity, Smith illuminates truths about American culture and history, and about race, gender, and class.

From the first scene, as the narrator considers “detangling” her granddaughter’s “springy hair coils,” I knew I was in confident, skilled hands.

Whether mining her mem0ries of her mother wrking over her hair w/ a hot comb or getting her first natural @ a barber shop in Chicago, or keenly examining why genrations of Black women embraced or rejectd particular hairstyles, the narrator of this essay is smart, supple, & funny.

I was absolutely drawn in by the narrator’s voice, and by the precise, nimble prose. 4 Generations of Black Hair Matters is a personal, perceptive essay that explores Black women’s hairstyles as powerful expressions of identity, beauty, and culture.

How to Make Jeweled Rice (Shirin Polo) @writergirl judged by Mike Smith

Beatrice Y. Motamedi

“How to Make Jeweled Rice (Shirin Polo),” like a lot of great lyric essays, recognizes alteration—of time and place, of voice, of perspective and language—as a dynamic generator of rhythm.

The steps of the recipe for Shirin Polo, handed down to the writer from her mother, anchors poignant childhood scenes of growing up in the 1960s as the child of Iranian immigrants in Milwaukee to an extended scene of visiting “Tehrangeles” as an adult.

The essay moves between the steps of the recipe to memories of childhood in which the writer comes to terms with the decision to assimilate into American culture.

From the problematizing of the popularization of rice in the United States—through a brief history of Uncle Ben’s, which successfully “stirred the pot” in the second half of the 20th Century—

—to an episode of people-watching on Rodeo Drive, there is a wry, winking humor at work throughout this essay, which grounds us through the movement between times and places as much as it charms.

Who will win the #BarnhillPrize in 2022? Maybe you will! Maybe someone you know w/whom you share this tweet thread. #WritingCommunity ❤️

Originally tweeted by Longridge Review (@LongridgeReview) on July 18, 2022.

By |

Growing the Longridge Review family of writers, editors, readers, and artists is a perpetual joy, and it is truly with joy that we welcome Crystal Good as a 2022 reader for The Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. CG and I have been friends for 20 years. We helped build Create WV together, walked runways together (I’m telling you, even I can’t believe that happened…..), earned our MFAs together, and still check in with one another from time to time to say, “Check me on this, did that crazy thing actually occur?” The answer is invariably yes, it did.

It’s a privilege to have her onboard to help read for the #BarnhillPrize this year. Check her out, and consider submitting your work through July 31. We use Submittable, CLICK HERE.

— EDG

Crystal Good is the publisher of BLACK BY GOD | The West Virginian, an emerging news and storytelling organization centering Black voices from the Mountain State; the name is a riff on the colloquial phrase West ‘by God’ Virginia that claims a unique place in central Appalachia. Tweet at her here: @cgoodwoman

Crystal Good

***

If you’re new here: In 2010, a little idea for sharing essays on childhood got a big boost when Anne Clinard Barnhill submitted “Winter Solstice” to an unknown fellow West Virginian. I wanted to pursue the idea there is a lot to say about how our early experiences shape the world. Anne later sent “Melungeons and Mystery,” as well as “Staying.” It is because of Anne’s belief in Essays on a West Virginia Childhood that the project became something so much bigger, an online literary journal that publishes writers from coast to coast in the USA, and beyond.

By |

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!

By |

Cocktail Party © Judith Podell

Congratulations to our finalists for the Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction!

Anita Cabrera (San Francisco, California)
Catherine Con (Greer, South Carolina)
Carroll Grossman (Louisville, Kentucky)
Douglas Imbrogno (Huntington, West Virginia)
Lina Lau (Toronto, Ontario)
Beatrice Motamedi (Oakland,California)
Paulina Pinsky (Brooklyn, New York)
Frances Thomas (Brooklyn, New York)

We are exceptionally proud to present these writers and their outstanding essays. Out of over 60 submissions, our editors chose these eight to forward to contest judge Mike Smith. Mike has made his choice, and we will announce the winner on Monday, October 4; on that date we will also post links to each essay, along with bios of these talented writers.

Thank you for your support of this contest. Our goal is to keep the spirit of Anne Barnhill alive in the writing world she loved so much, as well as to offer recognition and reward opportunities for writers who “present the finest essays on the mysteries of childhood experience, the wonder of adult reflection, and how the two connect over a lifespan.”

By |

Our current submission period is open from June 1, 2021 to July 31, 2021. Submit your nonfiction to be considered for the #BarnhillPrize. 

SUBMIT YOUR WORK HERE

Previous winners of The Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction 

Mary J. Mahoney, Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer 2019
Marsha Lynn Smith, 4 Generations of Black Hair Matters 2020

Read all our published essays via our Creative Nonfiction menu tab.

#BarnhillPrize judge 2021 Mike Smith
Creative Nonfiction

By |

Growing the Longridge Review family of writers, editors, readers, and artists is a perpetual joy, and it is truly with joy that we welcome Thea and Semein as 2021 readers (they will be joining, not replacing, our current band of five editors) for The Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Check them out, and consider submitting your work beginning June 1.

— EDG

Thea Princewill is a writer for magazines, newspapers, television, advertising agencies, and corporations. In fact, when she isn’t writing, she is usually reading. Or copy-editing. Or proofreading. Thea lives in South Florida and is currently working to improve her French language skills.

Thea Princewill

***

Semein Washington is a poet whose published work can be found in Light, Eye to the Telescope, Sijo: An International Journal of Poetry and Song, Sonder Midwest, and is forthcoming in Hawai’i Review. Semein’s work is ecstatic poetry discussing topics of nature, science, religion, music, comic books, and human experience. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches as an adjunct professor of English at John Tyler Community College.

Semein Washington

***

If you’re new here: In 2010, a little idea for sharing essays on childhood got a big boost when Anne Clinard Barnhill submitted “Winter Solstice” to an unknown fellow West Virginian. I wanted to pursue the idea there is a lot to say about how our early experiences shape the world. Anne later sent “Melungeons and Mystery,” as well as “Staying.” It is because of Anne’s belief in Essays on a West Virginia Childhood that the project became something so much bigger, an online literary journal that publishes writers from coast to coast in the USA, and beyond.

By |

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

By |

It is our great pleasure to announce that Marsha Lynn Smith is the 2020 winner of The Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her essay, 4 Generations of Black Hair Matters, was an early favorite in the submission process, and was named the best of the best by contest judge Carter Sickels. Sickels writes:

“I was impressed by all of the wonderful essays I read for The Barnhill Prize, and I want thank the writers for sharing their work. 

4 Generations of Black Hair Matters explores the changing hairstyles of four generations of Black women, and beautifully exemplifies what the personal essay can do. It’s both intimate and insightful. By writing about her own life with nuance, intimacy, and specificity, Smith illuminates truths about American culture and history, and about race, gender, and class. 

From the first scene, as the narrator considers “detangling” her granddaughter’s “springy hair coils,” I knew I was in confident, skilled hands. Whether mining her memories of her mother working over her hair with a hot comb or getting her first natural at a barber shop in Chicago, or keenly examining why generations of Black women embraced or rejected particular hairstyles, the narrator of this essay is smart, supple, and funny. I was absolutely drawn in by the narrator’s voice, and by the precise, nimble prose. 4 Generations of Black Hair Matters is a personal, perceptive essay that explores Black women’s hairstyles as powerful expressions of identity, beauty, and culture.”

Congratulations to Marsha, 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.

Thank you!

Marsha Lynn Smith is completing a memoir highlighting a rocky romance with a jazz musician, juggling single motherhood and her surprise career as a Hollywood publicist. Her work has or will be published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, River Teeth, and Rigorous. Also, her essays will appear in the print journals of Genre: Urban Arts’ Femme Literati Mixtape No. 2, and Madville Publishing’s 2021 essay anthology, Being Home. She likes to read historical fiction novels, and admits to binge-watching international TV dramas.  Follow her on Twitter: @real_marsha

Desi Allevato lives in central Virginia with her husband, where they are raising one child, two cats, and a hundred tree saplings in a suburban backyard. She has a brain tumor, ADHD, and an unfinished dissertation about Russian history, and assumed her life was pretty ordinary until a friend told her should write about it. She is a contributing writer to Grow Christians. Follow her on Twitter, @desirosie.

Elana Margot is a writer of poetry, autofiction, and creative nonfiction based in the Bay Area. Her writing has been published in The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, and Undercurrents: A Journal of Critical Environmental Studies. Her work centers the practice of writing into grief, embodiment, childhood subjectivity, queerness, and animality. Follow her on Twitter: @ElanaMargot

Vanessa Remmers  is a former journalist who is now working to tell her own stories. You can find more of her work on Twitter @RemmersVanessa or at vanessaremmers.journoportfolio.com

Cheryl Skory Suma launched her writing career with a YA fantasy novel, Habitan, which made the longlist of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. She won Blank Spaces 2020 (March) Flash Fiction Contest, was longlisted for both Pulp Literature’s 2020 Bumblebee Flash Fiction Contest & Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize, received an Honorable Mention for Spider Road Press 2020 Flash Fiction Contest, was a finalist for Exposition Review’s Flash 405 (April 2020), and her second novel, gods Playground, was a ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Competition semifinalist. Her poetry has appeared in La Piccioletta Barca and Public Poetry’s Enough Anthology. In 2019 she was also a semifinalist for Ruminate Magazine’s VanderMey Nonfiction Prize and shortlisted for Hippocampus Magazine’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, Blank Spaces Flash Fiction contest and the Erbacce Prize for poetry. Cheryl has a Masters of Health Science in Speech-Language Pathology and a B.Sc. in Honors Psychology. Her website is cherylskorysuma.com. Follow her on Twitter: @cherylskorysuma