Winston-Salem Writers' Writing Contest—We Have Our Winners!

“How has writing enriched, transformed, or saved your life?” was the topic.

Essays were screened by WSW president Jennifer L. Stevenson and director Dan O'Sullivan, then fowarded to our judges: Mr. Calvin F. Patterson, (vice chairman of the board of trustees and chairman of the Community Relations Committee of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County and host of "Empowering You,” WSNC FM 90.5; Ms. Elizabeth J. Skinner, public services manager of Forsyth County Public Library and chairman of On The Same Page/ Big Read Committee; and Ms. Jacinta V. White, award-winning poet and founder and artistic director of the WORD project.

And the winners are:

FIRST PLACE
Marta Felber
Writing Fills an Empty House

I don't want to live without him!" I scream at the empty house as I drive up. In the next breath, I whisper, "But I don't want to die."

The memorial service was beautiful, but it did not bring Joe back. For the first time, I will be alone in the home my husband and I built on a mountain top, Must I open the door? A patch of sunlight creates a pool of warmth on the floor, and I fling myself down upon it. For the first time since Joe died I let myself sob with no controL Tears flow and are not wiped away; they drip on the carpet.

"1 don't want to live without him!" I scream to the empty house. And in thenext breath, I whisper, "But I don't want to die."

Where are my notebooks? Istruggle to my feet, wiping tears on my sleeves. I find the notebooks from my five-week vigil in Joe's hospital room. Grabbing a pen and the notebook marked "Pain," I pour out my feelings, and find that I can't write fast enough. Gradually my breath returns to normal, and I stop crying.

I dare to look around. How can r possibly go into our bedroom? Sleep alone in our bed? Not see Joe everywhere I look? Then I remember the second notebook, the one with «After" scrawled on the cover. In the lonely hospital room I had begun making notes about how to face the many problems that had gone around and around in my head as I sat by Joe's side.

Several years (and six notebooks) later, what I had written would become my first book. The exercises and journal writing pages had been field tested. "Grief Expressed When a Mate Dies" is published! Why have J gone through all of this? I've shared my writing with others, and now they may choose to write from their own grief, by my side.

***
The setting is a Barnes and Noble, early on a Saturday morning. Chairs are in a circle, to welcome participants to my "Write Your Grief" workshop. I notice a woman hovering in the background.

Hesitant and shy, she approaches. "1 can't stay for the workshop," she murmurs, "but I have to talk with you. My husband died three weeks ago. I freaked out totally. Isaw no reason to live and had aplan to end my life."

She paused. "Then I took one last walk up Dixon Street and saw your book in the bookstore window, bought it, and took it home. I read it all the way through, into the night, without stopping, and then read it again. I came to thank you for writing it. What you wrote saved my life."

I held her in my arms as both of us cried. "That makes two of us," I said.

SECOND PLACE
Louis Aiello
An Odyssey Through Time

What has been simple for everyone else has always for me been a chore and a struggle. For I have Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high functioning Autism. As a youngster, I failed to express myself and grasp the fundamentals of both comprehension and interpretation. Then I found writing, afterwards my life was never the same. I embarked on one of the greatest odysseys that life had to give, discovering through maturity, myself, success and the potential I carried. Writing has indeed saved my life.

In the beginning, I wanted people to understand me and how I perceived the world. Asperger’s made this task difficult, if not impossible. I feared the future. The thought of growing up and being unable to productively communicate, comprehend, and interpret the world and the people in it was a nightmare. At the time I was in middle school, and English was my worst subject. I was determined to change this. Thus began my odyssey to find my place in the world.

I set small, simple goals. I needed to write a story. I taught myself, grammar, spelling, and punctuation skills by spending countless hours at my computer. Once I did this, I made a new goal to tell a good story, or a story which reflected the way I perceived the world from the way I comprehended and interpreted it. Only after accomplishing this, could I interpret and define my life.

I used to be discomforted when people criticized my work, but maturity transformed my way of thinking. I learned to take the advice of others and become the biggest critic of my own work. I looked at it as if it wasn’t even my own, but rather another individual’s which needed a fresh perspective.

I created my plots by disconnecting my mind from this reality and transporting it into another. Only its physical grounds were my doing, when it came to the psychological and the sociological, the plot had a mind of its own. My works were no longer just passages; they were entities. What had been at first a hobby was now an integral part of my very own soul.

Through my writing, I have found an emotional definition of myself, our world and Humanity. I truly believe I’ve discovered who I am. I have developed an unbiased psychological and sociological perspective to our world through analytical observations. I believe I have the capability to help those in need. If I can do all of this, then I can be a leader who can help others find their way to an inner peace and a peace beyond.

THIRD PLACE
Donalee Goodrum White

What does a woman do who has suffered seven years of battering by her first husband, has voluntarily jumped out of an airplane 10,000 feet above the earth, has white-water rafted Class Five rapids, has lived in a commune in Berkeley in the 1970s, has single-handedly taken two adolescent daughters on a 9,000 mile camping trip around the United States, has attended the largest outdoor rock concert in history with 650,000 people, has held her father’s hand as she witlessly watched him die of a heart attack, and has woken up an hour before her alarm goes off at three o’clock in the morning? She writes!

My cup runs over. My hard drive’s full. My seawall’s breached. I write to bring order to the chaos in my mind. I write to express the emotion, joy, and trauma of my life. My poems express my deepest emotions. My essays relieve the guilt in my gut. My short stories encapsulate my adventures. My novel rights the broad-sided ship of this upside-down world where my protagonists save the lives of millions of people; they might even save mine.
I read somewhere that one should not be afraid of dying; one should be afraid of not really living. I, the daughter, the wife, the mother, the grandmother, the thrill-seeker, the adventurer, have really lived and will continue to live voraciously until I die. I write to keep track of it all, make sense of it all, and digest it all. Most importantly, I write to give something back to those who loved me or hurt me for both have enriched me and have given me much to write about.

Like the cleansing of my morning coffee, my writing unblocks, unleashes, flushes out the details in my brain compacted from a life lived on the edge. I rise in the pre-dawn darkness leaving my night terrors behind. I approach my computer as a monk approaches the sacristy, with reverence and expectation. Like the songs of the finches at my feeder, my writing welcomes the light of each new day with relief and celebration. My writing fulfills me.

Honorable Mention
Susan Hill
Cape Town, South Africa

Events we encounter along life’s journey shape and mold us, guiding us into our destinies. Writing emerged as a compass that provided perspective and direction for me to respond, rather than react to life’s dramas.

The children who left Mrs. Chase’s fourth grade class early wrought a devastating shadow of shame upon me until I learned performance and character are not formulaic requirements that qualify us for everything in life! Having not been selected to attend the weekly Hebrew lesson paved the way for an introductory course on writing poetry! Poetry emerged as the first cardinal point of creative expression in my life. Excited to share and collect accolades from my parents; I burst running out the front door as they arrived home from work.

Economic reality dined mercilessly on Mom and Dad in those days. They wearily tread inside barely able to pick up their heads, let alone notice my poems. My newly discovered passion was relegated to the way back seat by a “too little” pay check that pilfered my joy. The relentless demands of financially supporting a family of seven sucked the life out of two amazingly gifted and talented people. They never meant to abdicate their roles as chief inspiration. Life simply demanded it and I turned to my own dark, self protecting and secret cave. There I imagined and wrote about life as it should have been.

Alcoholism isolated our family and demanded an abandon of self from most of us. My father’s untimely death shattered what remained of our family. Aimless shells of existence floating in a black hole of sorrow and confusion, we had become hopelessly void of lights or road maps to guide us home.

Daily journaling demanded by my High School English teacher helped organize my thoughts and emotions. Desperate for my own escape I had barely noticed the plight of others around the world. My circumstances seemed so small in comparison. Writing sparked a journey enabling me to learn and write about others’ personal tragedies and victories. Surprisingly, their stories forcefully advanced me onward to fresh destinations of perspective and compassion.

Like the tide, our lives ebb and flow. Writing introduces a net full of potential in every wave that crashes upon the shores of life. I find courage to face that perpetual cycle of life that beckons my participation and contribution. My personal struggle and shame morphed into overcoming victories; clipping the wings of previous labels from which I thought I might never have secured release otherwise. That freedom propitiated me into a life of faith where I could courageously make choices in life, rather than allow circumstances to paralyze me! When something broke or fell away, writing urged me to learn from it, thrusting me forward rather than bogging me down in the mire. Writing pulled up my socks, compelled me to shake off the residuals of the past and opened wide the door for faith, hope and love that marvelously revealed my life transformed!

Honorable Mention
Carl Lombardi

I’ve often asked myself, “Alouicious, how has writing enriched, transformed, or saved your life?”, which is odd because my name is Carl.

“Alouicious”, I continue, pausing for some unknown effect -- “please tell me”. [pause for a different, yet equally poignant, effect] I shall tell. [in the distance a dog pees, then silence] [another pause] Often.

I first noticed writing’s effect in middle school when I found I was able, like Ororo from the X-men, to control weather.

Please don’t mistake the literal for metaphor: I don’t mean that I could create a world by writing a story and, say, devise a rainstorm when a character was feeling particularly forlorn; no, I mean that I could, after scratching out a poem or short story on notebook paper, a napkin, or a sticky Hubba Bubba™ wrapper (O-K, a very short story), stroll outside on a still February morning and summon a tornado to demolish my Social Studies teacher’s, Ms. Schneener’s, house for giving me detention (when it was obviously Deedra Bubbkin belching the alphabet in class, not I). (Deedra I spared, of course, because she was funny.)

My brash first climatic interlude, however, visited upon me negative consequences (to accompany the positive profound, vindictive satisfaction) not the least of which was yet another day of detention. I discovered that with great power comes great need for secrecy. From then on I would be more discrete than a calculus function.

Soon thereafter I noticed I was gaining power over the behavior of lower animals such as slugs, abalone, and hippopotami. It wasn’t so much a Dr. Doolittle-ish, mutually respectful communication, but rather the impressing of their feeble minds to my inexorable will. I won’t go into detail, I’ll just say Bill Gates wasn’t quite himself when he developed Windows 95.
After that, writing gave me control of a small island in the South Pacific wherefrom I conquered what could be called a cozy little empire. Zombic Empire. Ever heard of it? Of course not: discretion. It is the better part of despotism.

Funny thing is that my writing wasn’t ever particularly good, it simply imparted relative omnipotence. I could write something like

O Bacchus, blessed be thy foamy dregs:
Who once seemed Troll now hast hot legs.

and three hours later win the lottery. Some are born to greatness; others have it spilled upon their laps like tepid minestrone.

That’s my story: clandestine fame and surreptitious glory. I would say that you could acquire similar power, success, and ultimate satisfaction in your life by the simple act of writing, but I doubt it. The correlation of writing to apotheosis is probably sheer luck. Nothing you could ever write would have much to do with -- oh, wait a minute. Writing got me a date to the prom with Deedra Bubbkin. I passed her a note in class.