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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.”

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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

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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.

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Untitled © Sharon Lyn Stackpole

Creative Nonfiction, #19, Spring 2021

d. e. fulford, 1992-1996
Diane Gottlieb, Deadman's Float
Linda Jordan, Boyhood in 3 Parts
Marie Manilla, Sasquatch
Anna Oberg, Thundersnow
Virginia Watts, Sleds

Featured Artist

Sharon Lyn Stackpole

Submissions open soon for our next issue: #BarnhillPrize, June 1-July 31.

Here are links to jump right to what’s in our latest issue! Rather than writing summaries of each piece, we are trying something new with #19. Using Facebook and Twitter, we will post pull lines from each essay throughout the coming week, paired with links to the writing.

There’s an impressive blend of craft styles in this issue: flash, braid, lyric, bespoke structure. It’s gratifying to attract and publish such quality work. Dive right in, or follow us on the socials and let your mind dine with leisure as we serve up the good stuff all week.

Thank you for your support.

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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.

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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

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

Desi Allevato (Charlottesville, Virginia)
Elana Margot (Santa Cruz, California)
Vanessa Remmers (Columbus, Ohio)
Marsha Lynn Smith (Los Angeles, California)
Cheryl Skory Suma (Greater Toronto Area, Ontario)

We are exceptionally proud to present these writers and their outstanding essays. Out of over 70 submissions, our editors chose these five to forward to contest judge Carter Sickels. Carter has made his choice, and we will announce the winner on Friday, October 16; 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 |

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.

We at Longridge Review are pleased to announce our 2019 nominees:

Congratulations to each of these wonderful writers, and thank you to everyone who found a forever home for his or her essay with us in 2019!

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

Featured image by Deb Farrell

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It is our great pleasure to announce that Mary J. Mahoney is the first winner of The Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her essay, Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer, captured our editors’ eyes early in the submission process, and was named the best of the best by contest judge Randal O’Wain. O’Wain writes:

“What initially drew me to ‘Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer’ was the confident narrative voice. I felt at once that I was in the hands of a complicated storyteller, a storyteller that understands how necessary it is to consider the complexity of the human condition without relying on easy 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.”

Named as notable by O’Wain are The Imaginary Writer by Elizabeth Lantz, and The Fence by Dorian Fox.

Congratulations to these writers, 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!

Mary J. Mahoney earned an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. She is an associate professor of English in New York. Her work has been published in many literary venues, including The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and more. She is the recipient of numerous writing awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities. 

Elizabeth Lantz holds an MFA degree in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University and currently teaches creative writing at Columbus State Community College. Her work has been published in Kenyon Review, American Literary Review, South Dakota Review, and others.

Dorian Fox is a writer and freelance editor in Boston, where he teaches courses at GrubStreet, a non-profit creative writing center. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Gay Magazine, Atticus Review,  december, Under the Gum Tree, Gastronomica, and elsewhere.

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Tomorrow we announce the winner! Here are all 10 essays in case you have an office pool or Fantasy Writers League going . . . congratulations again to these outstanding essayists.

Neema Avashia (Boston), A Hindu Hillbilly Elegy
Rochelle Harris Cox (Northwest GA), North Georgia Gothic
Dorian Fox (Boston), The Fence
Jenna Korsmo (Tuscon), Sister-Cats
Jessica Langlois (Atlanta), Ways to Die in Alabama
Elizabeth Lantz (Columbus), The Imaginary Writer
Mary J. Mahoney (New York), Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer
Elizabeth Muller (New Jersey), The Revival of the Fittest
Laura Stanfill (Portland OR), Birdsong in the Key of Brain Injury
Lisa López Smith (Central Mexico), Turning 37

I give thanks for baptism in symbol.
The deep blue covering every need—
watery armor against despair—
praise the groundswell of heartbeat.

Word incarnate, Word divine,
holy place of print,
create in me,
break me.

from “Keep the Feast” by Anne Clinard Barnhill, a poem in Coal, Baby