Freshwater Student Writing Contest

80 – Jessica Handly 83 – Zebulon Huset 84 – James Croal Jackson 85 – Andrew Jarvis 86 – Genevieve Jaser 87 – Brandon L. Kroll 88 – John Lambremont 89 – Tom Lagasse 92 – Sarah Leslie 93 – Christopher Linforth 94 – DS Maolalai 96 – Joan McNerney 98 – Rosemary Dunn Moeller 101 – John Muro 104 – Zach Murphy 105 – Elise O’Reilly 107 – Ruth Pagano 109 – S.E. Page 112 – Wood Reede 113 – Russell Rowland 115 – Natalie Schriefer 116 – Edythe Haendel Schwartz 117 – John Sheirer 120 – Harvey Silverman 123 – Richard Smith 124 – Susan Winters Smith 125 – Matthew J. Spireng 128 – Steve Straight 130 – Eugene Stevenson 131 – Kelly Talbot 134 – John Tustin 135 – Charles R. Vermilyea Jr. 139 – Shelby Wilson 141 – Diane Woodcock 142 – Chila Woychik 144 – James K. Zimmerman 148 – Contributors

Freshwater Student Writing Contest

Our 29th annual contest was open to full- and part-time undergraduate students enrolled during 2020 or 2021 at Connecticut’s community colleges and/or public universities. This year’s contest focused on memoir essays. As we do each year, Freshwater hired a judge who is not affiliated with any Connecticut colleges or universities to ensure fairness. Special thanks to the Asnuntuck Community College Foundation for providing prize funding through the Nadia Kober Writing Scholarship.

Our judge this year was Melanie Brooks, author of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press, 2017).

Here is the judge’s commentary on the winning essays:

First Place: “Fourth Grade” by Susan Winters Smith

A beautifully-realized and heartbreaking narrative. The writer takes us on a vivid and wrenching journey through a memorable period of her childhood when trauma and struggle framed her life at home, and the unforgiving judgment of her peers and a jaded and careless teacher defined her life at school. The immediacy of present-tense action and child’s voice puts the reader in her fourth-grader shoes as she tries to navigate the uncertainty of this time and cope with so many circumstances beyond her control. We feel her longing to be understood and taken care of through her clear-eyed observations of the world around her and the carefully selected details she brings to the page. A poignant piece of writing that urges us to see the stories that reside just below the surface, if only we’d take the time to look.

Second Place: “Misplaced” by Sarah Martin

From the opening line of dialogue, the reader is grounded in time and place with the narrator as her ongoing struggle with a post-concussion brain injury comes to a crisis point on one particular night. The writer’s command of language coupled with her use of imagery and metaphor allow us to feel both her physical and mental anguish in the moments that unfold.

Third Place: “To the Woman Who Hugged Me” by Amanda Fahy

This piece zooms in on a touchstone moment in the writer’s life when the kindness of a stranger—brought closer through a second-person point of view—made a lasting impact. The reader is placed fully in scene through a lovely

balance of sensory details, dialogue, action, reaction, and inner thoughts and feelings.

First Honorable Mention: “Closeted Skeletons Still Collect Dust” by Victoria Orifice

This writer skillfully takes a meta approach to speak directly to the reader about a previous writing process and its consequences. In the current writing, the author peels back layers of the past and unpacks difficult moments that show the ways in which they’ve changed and grown.

Second Honorable Mention: “Genesis” by Luiz Emanuel de

Castro Moura

A painful portrait of the writer trying to fit into a mold fashioned by a culture and religion that allowed no room for authenticity. The author’s use of brief snippets of dialogue to define the environment that stifled them is masterful.

Third Honorable Mention: “2019” by Emily Schwartz

The writer weaves threads of moments encountered in this era of gun violence that have created a lasting sense of fear and insecurity. The repetition of questions about the right to actually own these moments that the writer asks throughout lead the reader to question the ways we, too, feel the repercussions of circumstances that we may not have been directly a part of, but that hit close to home.