Top Ten Writing Home Selections
Out of more than 100 submissions, the following entries were repeatedly favorites on at least three out of five judges’ top ten lists. All of the judges had a couple of wild cards—creating hard, but necessary, decisions. Wild card authors’ names are included at the end of this list.
1. Doodlebug Summer
By Margaret Rumsford
A young girl learns the meaning of home when she’s uprooted from New Zealand to England in the midst of World War II. A memoir of chaos and finding security in a makeshift bomb shelter. Click Here to View the Essay
2. The Million-Dollar View
By Valerie Seiling-Jacobs
A lawyer intent on selling her deceased parent’s mid-century, misfit house in Staten Island bumps up against an unctuous, greedy realtor. The writer draws you in with spare prose and declarations of intended unemotional conduct, slowly turning until it ends with a deft emotional twist. Click Here to View the Essay
3. The Music of Noise
N. Benchly O’Neall
An author reaches for a high concept with writerly conceits that attempt to tie art and science together. The purposeful verbiage underscores the romantic nature of a six-year-old boy’s desire to assert his thinker’s persona in this lofty meditative memoir. Click Here to View the Essay
4. My Radioactive Home
By Julie Curtis
A mother’s hilarious malapropisms ultimately define the author’s 21st Century family structure, redefining her own rigid literal meanings of the nuclear family, while nurturing adaptation in this light-hearted, verve-filled memoir. Click Here to View the Essay
5. Eminent Domain
By Nancy Shulins
A ten-year-old girl watches a stubborn farmer die in a fire he sets to his own home, rather than allowing the state to bulldoze his land and uproot him. This startling memory is reignited as the author, a journalist, takes the reader traveling on a decades-long quest for both losing, and finding, one’s roots. Click Here to View the Essay
6. Home
By Nancy Flannagan
When a young wife realizes that her husband’s family tells the same anecdotes at every gathering, she rails—judging her own family’s spontaneous interchanges to be honest, if unpredictable. After many of her blood relative’s spontaneous, opinionated blowups wind up as cold-shoulder estrangements, the author comes to understand the value of crafting a repetitive “family” story in order to preserve respect, affection and love. Click Here to View the Essay
7. Home
By Catherine Tandy
A young girl is disheartened by the outward appearances of her family’s unkempt home—between the rodents and the eccentricities, it’s noisy and weird. When her mother, equally responsible for the home’s chaos, divorces her father, the author acclimates, learning that a family is not always about a dignified residence, but about the unique and loving people who inhabit it. Click Here to View the Essay
8. When Janice Bailey Walked
By Tessa Smith McGovern
Upon her release from prison for the self-defense killing of her only family member, a violent husband, Janice Bailey feels lost and mistrustful. She attempts to get herself arrested again in order to have a safe home in jail. Click Here to View the Essay
9. Au Revoir, Corbu
By Elizabeth Clement
A young woman with her mind set on living in New York City forever, marries a purist architect who builds her his dream house in Weston, CT. Through the triumphs and tragedies of a marriage, physically contained within the architect’s esthetic, the author struggles, eventually understanding her own sense of comfort and place. Click Here to View the Essay
10. The Nomad
By Paul Einarsen.
A nine-year-old boy growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest values the less than dramatic interchanges that make an old-fashioned hamlet a home. When his father brings a nomad, who happily lives in his car to dinner, the boy’s perception of home starts to shift. The regional writing voice of this memoir clearly illustrates how an author’s geography informs a story. Click Here to View the Essay
Judges’ Wild Card Favorites
Authors whose entries appeared on more than one judge’s list of notable submissions, and additional author favorites:
Steve Lance, Michelle Coppola Ames, JoAnn Kienzle, Stephanie Bass, Joanne Perlman, M. Teresa Duse, Margaret Brooks, Sophie Barnes, Ann Chernow, Leslie Chess Feller, Howard T. Stutz, Diana Bowes, Max Adam Wender, Caryn McAllister, David Baxley, Bradley Moroni