Joy of the Pen 2024

The Verdi L. Tripp Fiction Award: Nathaniel Krenkel for White Dress Wet
Fiction Honorable Mention: Julia McLeod for The Right Path?
Margaret F. Tripp Poetry Award: Grace Star for Wedding Vow
Poetry Honorable Mention: Poetry Honorable Mention: JC Goodwin for I Was Wrong
Richard F. Snow Nonfiction Award: Bill Guddeck for Creature in the Woods
Nonfiction Honorable Mention: John Reinhart for I Light Children on Fire
The Crowbait Short Play Award: Joe O’Donnell for Pier Shakes
The Crowbait Short Play Honorable Mention: Jeff Stewart for The Moose Pond Book Group

Verdi L. Tripp Fiction Award

White Dress Wet by Nathaniel Krenkel

Next to the ferry terminal on the other side of the yard was a sprawling antiques shop, and often I would drop in and scan the used record bins when there was time to kill before the boat. They had a decent selection of jazz and soul, and ample amounts of used rock, mostly 1970s era, nothing great, but occasionally I’d find a gem, an upgrade, or a patch of something that synchronized with a current interest. Past visits have resulted in my leaving with stacks by Hot Tuna, The Frog Dogs, Janis Ian, and Rory Gallagher. No Beatles or Aretha, but plenty of 10cc and Moby Grape; it was that kind of place.

I was still browsing when the door opened and, though I didn’t see her come in, I knew something had changed. The old man in denim behind the counter stood a little taller, and eventually I had to look up from the albums to see what was causing his continued and unsettled adjustments.

I believe it was her dress, more than anything else, that made the energy in the room to shift. A rich cream-color, billowing while remaining elegant, with a glimpse of lace at the neck and a slight yellow fraying at the cuffs to suggest periods of prolonged storage. I didn’t see her face—she had already moved past me into the shop—but I saw her hair. Milk-coffee and silken, in calm, easy waves, a braided red band sitting atop like a crown.

I returned to digging through the records, ignoring the woman in the dress, this time flipping through the bins a little slower, opening myself to the potential of letting a record find me, a process that requires reading credits, looking past the cover, digging under the surface. I then stumbled upon something that truly spoke to my interests. The record was misfiled, an LP that should have been in the soul section, but was in rock instead: Rose Royce’s In Full Bloom. The album was produced by psychedelic soul guru Norman Whitfield. I felt a small rush, excited to have found something that would certainly contain multitudes of interesting hooks and tripped-out production techniques. Wizard shit. Protest and pop, acid strut and bellbottomed shimmy. I took the record to the counter and was soon on my way up the block to find my wife and kids.

Only, I’d left my phone in the car, between the seats for podcast listening on our drive up Rt.1, and retrieving it now would mean disturbing the dogs, the yappy little shits, so I skipped the car, leaving it and the dogs in line for the boat, and carried on, assuming I’d bump into my family somewhere on Main Street.

A few blocks up, I entered a bookstore. My wife and kids weren’t there, the shop was empty apart from the one employee, but I chose to stay and browse. I discussed with the red-cheeked, white-haired salesclerk a few of her recent favorites, and a few of mine. Eventually someone else came in and the clerk moved on.

I was about to leave when, on the table in the window where a dozen books were displayed face-up, an image caught my eye. An illustration for a novel, set in the past, depicting a drawing room or lounge, with a lean, well-dressed man sitting cross-legged in a chair wearing a Tam O’Shanter cap and reading a broadsheet. Behind him, at the window beside a forest green curtain, stood a woman in a long white dress with red berries in her hair. I touched the book cover gently with my fingertips. Though she was in the background and her face a gauzy afterthought, I couldn’t help but note that she looked like Jessica.

The door of the shop opened, triggering a bell and breaking my trance. A man walked in, and I quickly left.

Up the block, past stores open and empty, and others closed and looking like they might stay that way until spring, I paused to consider whether I should go inside The Grasshopper Shop, a favorite haunt of the kids, or settle for a look through the window. I wanted to find my family and was feeling uneasy about the time that had passed since we’d last been together, though in truth it had hardly been an hour.

I was startled by the sound of a truck. A low, coughing grumble.

Chug-chuga-chug.

                                    Chug-chuga-chug.

                                                                        Chug-chuga-chug.

Tinted windows. Those grills that are hellishly tall, as if designed to mow down crowds while barely causing the driver’s mug of caffeine to slosh out of the jumbo cup affixed to the dash. The whole apparatus screamed sexual dysfunction, a hostile inability to promote the common good, Ecocidal glee. Dead cormorants, calving glaciers, houses packed tight with potash and mud. I squinted at the driver’s window as the truck idled before me.

Chug-chuga-chug.

The sound was like a basement smoke detector played at the wrong speed and heard on the wrong drugs, pushing out into the sidewalk, dogs with their tails tucked, babies suddenly screaming. It occurred to me that if I hadn’t left my phone in the car, I could be listening to something else, the new Kendrick or something pillowy-soft like Satie’s piano works. I wondered if the truck driver was looking at me. What was he seeing? A man with a totebag, wearing expensive wool gloves? Was he seeing a target? A joke to share later with his friends?

The vehicle moved on, but the thought remained: the signs were still up, nearly a month after the election. Not all of them, but some. We were past the gloating phase, so what was the point? Why leave all those signs in the yard, on the side of the road, in windows and nailed to trees? Perhaps they serve as a signal, like an arm band, or a cross on a hillside.

Further up the block, by the barber’s, I finally saw my wife and kids, and I quickened my step. Three talls, clearly related, walking with their backs to me. I shouted, but they didn’t hear. Then my son turned around and they stopped and waited.

They’d bought dog food, and sandwiches for the ferry.

I was happy to see them, relieved. They were safe. Only, it seemed, they were upset with me. Where had I been, they wanted to know? They’d been calling me. I explained that I didn’t have my phone, but my excuse sounded silly when it left my mouth. The dogs? Fuck those dogs, I could hear my wife thinking.

I became frustrated. Whatever, I said. I excused myself, stating I was going to go find some good wine before the boat.

I stepped into the wine shop half-a-block off Main. The two women behind the counter stopped their conversation to say hello. I greeted them and moved to a holiday display. I chose two bottles of red and one white. The white was pricier, but from a winery in Oregon that I’d visited years ago with my parents, before my mother’s Alzheimer’s blossomed to the point where such visits no longer made sense to her, or any of us.

A delivery man came in through the back with a hand cart stacked with cases of wine.

All set for the holiday Jerry? asked one of the women behind the counter.

Hardly. My daughter just went veg.

Watch that Jer, you’ll have an eating disorder on your hands next thing you know. Don’t let her waste away.

Jerry slid the handcart out from under the boxes and placed his open palm on the tower to make sure it was secure. He said, My father-in-law just discovered edibles, but he still thinks LePage was the best governor we’ve ever had. You can imagine how that works out.

Christ, said the second woman. How do you manage?

I don’t. He patted the stack of wine and added, Though this helps.

They all laughed, wished each other a happy Thanksgiving, and laughed some more.

Back on the street, my bag was heavy on my shoulder. I walked to the corner of Main and was looking up and down the street for my family when, behind me, down the hill from which I’d just come, the large black truck let out a roar as it peeled out of a parking lot across from the wine store. Time slowed and I watched with horror as the truck jumped the opposite curb, striking the woman in the cream-colored dress. I had not noticed her until the moment before impact, but she was standing in front of the wine store, and as the truck hit her, she turned to a milky vapor, cloth and foam. I ran back down the block, but by then, both the truck and the woman were gone. I felt sick, gagged, and dropped to my knees. I pressed my forehead into the asphalt. From my praying position, I looked up and down the street for another witness. The woman in the dress had vanished, but there, only a few inches from my fingertips, was a branch of winterberry. I touched it like it might contain an electrical shock. I thought again of Jessica, how she used to smile, so sly and knowing, at all the boys at the bar. Silly boys, little men with their simple ideas about good and bad, talking about records like they were the cure for cancer, talking about politics like we weren’t privileged and toxic ourselves.

I coughed and spat, stood up and brushed myself down. My tote, with the Rose Royce LP and three bottles of wine, was next to me on the sidewalk. I wiped sweat from my forehead and tucked the branch of winterberry into my pocket. I wanted to find my wife and tell her what had happened, but even imaging the conversation felt off, even impossible, its singular result, my stammering and her incredulity.

I picked up my bag and walked back to the terminal. My family was there, at the car. I was feeling a little better, and did my best to mask my dissipating distress. I’d concluded that what I had seen was nothing more than an extreme gust of imagination, a hallucinatory punch that had caught me off guard. Nothing more. A moment from the past, triggered by a passerby in an antique store, the cover of a book, these anxious times.

We drove onto the ferry. Ever since a tumultuous crossing in the dark several years ago, I’d been unable to stay in the car during the seventy-five minute trip across the bay, so I went inside and found a seat in the starboard cabin. Out the window, the cannery slid past, followed by the Coast Guard station. Then we were around the buoys, out of the harbor, and the engines cranked up. The air smelled of diesel and the boat started to rock as it cleared Owl’s Head.

I fetched the Rose Royce LP from my bag and removed the protective plastic sleeve. The album was only two sides, but came in a gatefold. I opened it to find the nine members of the band all grinning up at me. The layout consisted of a group shot, framed by nine individual headshots. The men wore black polyester flairs and open-chested tops with silver sleeves and  scalene collars, large green decorative buttons, part sci-fi, part cocaine-disco heaven. Rose Norwalt, the lead singer and only female in the group, sported tight braids and a sleeveless, red glitter, push-up top. Half the men had marvelous afros. One wore glasses. Everyone was smiling, Vaseline teeth, the future wide open.

I hadn’t noticed the man behind me.

He now leaned over my shoulder, his breath of ham and cigarettes.

Fuck is that? he said.

Just a record, I said, unable to get a good look at his face, as he had me pinned between the metal wall of the ferry and his own girth.

He jabbed a finger at the photo of Rose.

I’d let her blow me, but nothing else, he said. My ears went hot. The man straightened and continued his walk up the aisle toward the door. But he didn’t exit the cabin. Instead, he dropped into the seat and opened his phone. A second later, I heard the invasive sound of a video coming from the speaker. I imagined two men in a cage, swatting each other with coils of barbed wire before a blood-eyed audience sitting ass-to-ass like mussels in the oiled tin.

I looked behind me. The only other passenger on this side of the boat was a teenager, also on her phone, but wearing headphones and oblivious to her surroundings. I got up and walked away from the man, past the teenager, toward the rear exit. I stepped over the doorway and my environment switched from fumy and threatening to windswept and blue majestic. And there she was, not more than ten feet ahead, occupying the other side of the stern. Off to my immediate right was the large black truck, parked and unoccupied, the last vehicle down the ramp. Its vanity plate read: NOCHOYCE.

Her dress was longer now and more white than cream-colored, and the wind stretched it to lengths of impractical measure. It whipped about noisily. I reached into my jacket and retrieved the redberry branch I’d found on the street. As I trepidatiously held it toward her, she turned away and spread her arms to the sea.

Then she sang in a sublime, yet eerie tone:

I’m wishing on a star, I’m wishing on a dream…

Her voice carried out over the water, like rock weed on the rising tide. The sounds of the boat were muted and I felt both underwater and skyward. Then she toppled forward into the churn. Her dress bloomed once, then twisted and vanished into the depth.

I almost dove in after her. I saw myself do it, felt the cold, understood the choice of removing myself from the board, but my feet were stone blocks, and she was gone.

Instead, I ran into the opposite cabin on the boat’s portside. An older woman sat alone, knitting, a bag of provisions taking up most of her bench. I recognized her from the village. She walked her dog past our house most days. Her expression remained neutral and she returned to her knitting, singing under her breath: ball of confusion, that’s what the world is today, hey-hey. I ran through the otherwise empty cabin and out to the deck, weaving my way to the car, where I tapped the glass of my wife’s window. She motioned for me to go around, and I squeezed past our front bumper and opened my door, slamming it into the adjacent car packed in tight. The driver awoke and shot me daggers. I wanted to shout at him to fuck off, that I’d just seen a woman jump off the boat, but already the line between real and hallucinatory was starting to make me second guess my eyes. Like with the truck outside the wine shop, what I was seeing was not something to share, or at least, there was innate risk in my taking any sort of action, be it summoning an ambulance to the wine shop, or reporting that someone was overboard.

I sat down in the driver’s seat, palms sweating, mouth dry.

What on earth? my wife said. Did something happen?

Do you remember Jessica?

Jessica…from your radio station days?

Yes, Poughkeepsie.

I never met her, obviously, but didn’t she…? My wife looked back over her shoulder at our daughter who was reading a book, tuned out. Our son, asleep.

Yes. She did, I said.

So terrible, said my wife.

I gripped the wheel and looked straight ahead. We were now in the middle of the bay, passing a patch of gnarly rocks on the left known as The Drunkard. The boat hit a large swell and for a moment, gravity lurched.

What about her? my wife asked.
            I was…she wasn’t meant for this world, was she?

I don’t know what that means. You always said you liked her though. That her radio show was really good. I wish I’d known her, at least got the chance to meet her.

Yeah. She hated genre. Hated category, boxes, types…

Just like you, my wife said, giving me a poke.

Okay, I said. Sorry. I…I’ve been thinking about her. I don’t think she’d like it now.

Like what?
            The world. All this fuckery.

What are you talking about? She glanced again at our daughter.

I closed my eyes and saw the woman rolling forward off the back of the boat. Was it her? There was a time when we’d all meet up at the bar, three or four times a week; me, Jessica, other friends, but almost always, me and Jessica. Once we took a road trip to Cleveland. It was January, and in the middle of the interstate speeding at 80 miles per hour the van hit some ice and did a series of 360s. Jessica and I were in the back sharing a blanket for warmth. She grabbed me as we skated toward our deaths, I thought, it’s okay, if this is how it’s to be…I am okay with it.

A trite thought, but we were all under her spell. She was a presence that lifted the rest of us to better ways. She had a map in her head of every swimming hole in the Catskills, and she loved The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Mavis Staples, and Tammi and Marvin duets.

If this world were mine…

I lost touch with her after we moved north. I’d heard she’d started a clothing line and was selling some of her designs from a store across the river in New Paltz; a year later, more news, she’d had a baby, and was planning to open a shop in the City, somewhere in the East Village. Then one night a number lit up on my phone that I’d not seen in years. Jessica’s sister, Kat. Jessica had hung herself in a barn in Red Hook. There was no answer to the question, Kat didn’t know why, and I chose not to reach out to any of the old friends. I just hung up the phone and went on with my life. Jessica never had health insurance, never owned a decent car, never learned French, never flew first class, never saw her child turn ten. And I couldn’t think about any of that, I had to turn away. Such things could not enter my home, where my own children slept.

The ferry pulled into the terminal and I rolled down the window, waving to the man in orange guiding us off. I craved the air, the line of warm faces waiting for the passengers arriving for the holiday. We drove past the fountain commemorating the island lives lost during The Great War, and then up the hill to the house with its peeling paint.

The kids unloaded the car, my wife put out the flag, and I started a fire in the living room wood stove. That night I drank too much wine and was left alone downstairs with my book and the room feeling full of cotton and phlegm. In my haste to put the day behind me, from the antique shop to the ferry ride, I’d forgotten about the Rose Royce LP. Now, I stumbled into the music room and fished the album from the sleeve, put it on the turntable, returned to the living room and joined the dogs by the fire.

I’m wishing on a star…

I felt smothered, itchy in eye, cold jowled. I pushed through the living room furniture and pulled open the front door, falling into the screen, then onto the porch. I managed to get to the stairs and sat crooked, leaning against the rail.

A flapping sound….

                                    …the flag had been left out

                                                                                                …past dark.

When we bought the house, it was empty apart from an American flag on a wood pole. We thought it appropriate to continue to put the flag out whenever we were there, as a sort of notice for the neighbors that we were on-island, as well as a way to respect the previous owners, the heritage of the island-dwellers in general, and, at least for myself, as a way to take back a symbol that I felt still carried some notion of progressive idealism, even if it had been, for the most part, hijacked by assholes. I never let the flag touch the ground when I rolled it up and brought it in at night. And I brought it in every night.

In my stupor, I let out a barking laugh as I thought about this, and how the flag can now be found on vape pens, condoms, potato chip bags, yoga pants, phone cases, diapers, chainsaws, scratchcards, energy drinks, essential oils, power tools, and of course, handguns.

Down the street around the corner lot—a space used by the boatyard for off-season storage and presently filled with white-plastic-wrapped Whalers and small sailboats—headlights and the roar of an engine broke my fog, and I instinctively pressed myself further against the porch rail, anticipating the moment when the headlights would crest the hill and illuminate a portion of our yard. I wasn’t even surprised this time to see her. Jessica, in the road, dancing like she was the reincarnation of Martha Graham, Appalachian Spring, on an island in Maine in November. I smiled at her grace and waited for impact, for the air to fill with shreds of fancy paper, hot marshmallow, and Saddlewood smoke. Only this time, as the truck approached, its engine now given full reign to wake the neighborhood like a godfart, Jessica turned her full attention to the approaching vehicle. Arms and legs, her body a starfish. She was the center of the world, and in the beam of light she hovered electric. Then the truck lurched and skidded off the road into the neighbor’s fence across the street. It crashed through the fence, swerved hard-left, and tumbled back into the boatyard, toppling over a rowboat and coming to rest, upside-down, against a small fishing vessel. Headlights pointed at an angle, skimming the tops of trees on the far side of the street. A flicker and a flame. The bottom of the truck was burning. Jessica continued to dance, switching from modern to something more clubbish. I started to bob my head, thumped my heal heavy on the porch. The dogs yapped like compressed sixteenth notes on the hi-hat. The flames heightened and spread. Jessica’s dance grew more furious as a techno beat rose up from the thoroughfare on the other side of the village. Seals slapped their tails at 160 beats per minute. Oysters clapped and strobed. The tide pulsed. The whole village was raving as the flames blossomed and more boats ignited, white plastic melting back to reveal wood consoles and fiberglass hulls. A scream, an explosion, a crescendo, and my wife on the porch behind me, pulling me inside, calling to the neighbor across the street that she didn’t know if someone was still in the truck, that she hadn’t seen what had happened. The moon spun like a whirligig, then everything coned. The fire was now a silent film and all I could hear, coming from inside, was Rose Royce singing about wishing on a star as the track wound down. I looked over my shoulder and saw Jessica one last time, sitting on the swing we’d hung in the big tree years ago when the children were still our little-ones. She had twisted the rope taunt, and as I caught her eye, she let go and began to spin, faster and faster, until she was nothing but a spiral of brown, white and gold, spraying red sparks, the last star before the curtain of the forever dark.

Nathaniel Krenkel lives in Portland, Maine. He is the host of Rhizome Radio at WMPG, and runs the record labels Team Love and Oystertones. Krenkel is the former manager of the artist Conor Oberst/Bright Eyes, was the music supervisor on Electrick Children, and prior to that worked for Sony Music. He’s a graduate of Bowdoin College and grew up in small-town Utah. Published work can be found at nathanielkrenkel.com.

 Top

Fiction Honorable Mention

The Right Path? by Julia McLeod

I am debating whether I should add a dragon or a polar bear to my most recent comic as the bus pulls up, lights blinking. It’s the kind of chilly fall morning I love – a little foggy with sun filtering through the treetops.

“Definitely polar bear,” I decide as I cross the road and ascend the stairs. The bus driver barely glances at me as I sit in seat three as usual. Luckily my bus is pretty empty so I can sit alone. I just started middle school a few weeks ago and my bus ride provides much needed alone time.

I flip open my sketchbook and grab a pencil from my backpack. In today’s drawing, the heroine is battling an evil king who is forcing all of his subjects to work in lithium mines to support his endless quest for space domination. I know she can communicate with animals, but I’m still figuring out what role the polar bear will play in her adventure.

I tap my eraser against my cheek as I debate names for my heroine. Not too fierce but not too passive. Harper? I write it down to see how it looks.

I’m so engrossed in my drawing that I startle when someone sits next to me. Instinctively, I close my sketch book and scoot closer to the window. Then my gaze rises. I can’t remember ever seeing this girl before, which surprises me since she seems to be my age. But then again, she’s pretty unremarkable. Her wavy brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her clothing looks like she picked it out with the sole purpose of blending in with the brown bus seat.

“Nice drawing,” she says, pointing her chin to my battered sketch book.

“Thanks,” I say hesitantly. I’ve never liked people looking over my shoulder.

“My name’s Brooke. What’s yours?”

“Maddie.”

Getting the hint that I don’t want to chat, she turns forward, pulls on her headphones, and taps play on her phone.

I open my sketchbook and continue to draw. I’m just fooling around with Harper. Bow and arrow? Sword? Spear? Long hair or short?

I get the sense of being watched, but whenever I look up, Brooke is staring straight ahead, tapping her fingers slightly in tune to her music. When the bus pulls up to the school, she gives a quick nod and disappears into the crowd without a word.

“Maddie!”

I see Candice rushing toward me and I feel some of the tension leaving my face and neck. I wave to my best friend as I tuck my sketchbook under my arm.

“Have you ever imagined your perfect entrance song?” Candice asks. “I was going through my playlist on the bus and I think I found my song! Can’t you just imagine me walking into school with ‘Girl on Fire’ blaring from the speakers?”

I raise my eyebrows and laugh, imagining her long, straight, blonde hair blowing back as she makes her grand entrance. “Sounds like you had a productive bus ride.”

Candice waves one of her many pencils with fuzzy monster toppers like she’s cueing the music to start. Middle school doesn’t seem to have changed Candice; I would never call her childish to her face, but it is kind of what I love about her.

We enter the front doors to the school to find the bulletin board by the main office newly decorated.

“Oooh, clubs,” Candice says as she quickens her pace. One side of the bulletin board is titled “Clubs for Girls!” with pinks and purples, while blue and black letters advertise “Clubs for Boys!” The girls’ clubs include cooking, cheer-leading, and something called, “make every day a spa day.” The boys’ clubs include wrestling, debate team, and archery.

“Have you ever thought about what it would be like to join one of the boys’ clubs?” I ask. At school we’ve always been separated from the boys except for lunch, motor break, and school dances. My brother’s middle school schedule was full of math, science, and PE classes. My class schedule includes math for the homemaker, make-up, and cooking.

Candice gapes at me. “Why would you say that?” she asks. “The girls’ clubs are perfect!” Candice’s dad works in the government – he’s kind of a big deal – so Candice is pretty bought in to following all the rules.

I’m about to say more, but then I realize that we’re not alone at the bulletin board. Brooke appears to be studying the details of the spa club, but I get the sense that she’s watching me out of the corner of her eye. I feel a combination of curiosity and unease.

“We should get to homeroom,” Candice says. “Coming?”

“I’m starving,” I groan, as I slide into the seat next to Candice and unwrap the sandwich I just picked up from the lunch line.

“Mm hmm,” Candice says in response, obviously distracted by staring across the lunchroom. She glances over and actually seems a little surprised to see me sitting next to her. She quickly recovers. “Did you know Mrs. Grant is gone? We have a new social studies teacher today.”

“All of a sudden?” I ask in surprise. “She was here on Friday and was even telling us about a project we were going to work on. Are you sure the new teacher isn’t just a sub?”

“He told us she left to take care of her family. And the classroom is different – he took down all her decorations and boxed up her books.”

I glance around us to make sure no one is listening. “I heard her arguing with Mr. Morgan on Friday when I passed her classroom. Something about an article she wanted to have students read. He said it was ‘not appropriate for young girls.’ Do you think that’s related?”

“Probably good riddance,” Candice replies. “My dad says we were lucky to get Mr. Morgan as our new Principal. He says that he is a real leader.” Candice says this in the deep, earnest voice of her dad, which always makes me laugh.

I shrug, not feeling amused, as I follow Candice’s gaze to Kaylie Thomas. She went to our elementary school but now that we’re in middle school, she doesn’t acknowledge that we exist. She’s surrounded by her new friends. They are all leaning close to each other over the table, laughing and whispering, probably about their newest crushes.

I can’t read the expression on Candice’s face, which is unusual. We’ve been friends since second grade and she’s usually an open book.

“What’s up with you today?” I ask.

“Oh nothing,” Candice says, finally looking me in the eyes. “I’m just tired.” She gathers up her things. “Sorry, I have to go early to get an assignment from Mrs. Morin. See you later!”

I watch her go, sandwich halfway to my mouth. I can’t believe she left me alone in the cafeteria of all places. Sitting alone in a middle school lunchroom might be the worst fate I can imagine. Even though my stomach is growling, I wrap up my sandwich and throw the rest of it in the trash before heading for the door. I’ll make up an excuse to tell the teacher on duty.

Candice was right – the social studies room looks way different. Mrs. Grant’s room had been decorated with silly inspirational posters. They were kind of ridiculous, but better than the blank walls of Mr. Walker’s room. Maybe he just hasn’t gotten around to decorating.

He gives the same explanation Candice gave. Mrs. Grant has to take care of her family and he’ll be with us for the rest of the year.

And then he jumps into teaching. We’ve learned before about the “Year of Storms” and resulting societal collapse and rebuild. But that doesn’t stop him from telling us again.

When our great-grandparents were kids, there was a year of massive storms. Climate change combined with an asteroid and some sort of change on the surface of the sun created massive hurricanes and tornadoes all over the world. Nearly half of the country was wiped out and more people were displaced. In the upheaval that followed, there were dark years of violence and hunger before the “Right Path” party gained control.

They promised peace and prosperity, and everyone was ready for it. Their plan to bring our country back from the dark years was to place people into the roles that most fit their innate abilities and to encourage nuclear families to rebuild the population. They placed men in positions of power and jobs needing strength, while women were assigned to take care of the men and their children. According to the history books, the people welcomed these changes and the country began to thrive and grow. We started rebuilding from the storms, housing the vast numbers of homeless and returning from the brink of mass starvation.

Schools changed too, in order to better prepare future generations for their “right paths.” Boys and girls were separated and leaders in the movement developed courses of study for each group. Once we finish high school, boys can apply for college or a job and girls can apply for “appropriate” jobs for our gender. Or we can get married right away and support our husbands.

Before this summer, I never questioned our roles. My mom is great at taking care of our family of six. My dad drives a truck. We’re comfortable enough, though our house is tiny compared to Candice’s. But lately I’ve been wondering if this is how it has to be. Our history lessons start with the storms, but I’m curious about what life was like before them.

I know enough not to question my teachers, so I keep my thoughts to myself. Mr. Walker assigns us an essay due next week about how a loyal wife can help her husband achieve greatness.

As we walk out of the classroom I whisper to Candice, “It doesn’t seem fair that we can’t go to college or do any of the male jobs.”

Candice gives me a look of surprise. “But we get to do the jobs we’re good at,” she says. “What we’re suited for.”

***

I’ve gotten used to Brooke sitting next to me on the bus. She rarely talks to me, and I’m content to continue sketching. Today I’m starting a comic strip about a girl who is banished to the wild for secretly practicing archery.

But this morning Brooke holds up her raincoat and says, “do you mind?”

I shrug, not sure what she’s asking me and wondering why she even has a raincoat on such a bright, sunny day.

She reaches across me to shove the coat between the seat in front of us and the wall of the bus.

“My coat is always in my way,” she explains, which still doesn’t make sense. But I shrug and return to my drawing.

Brooke pulls out her own sketchpad and gets to work. She nudges my elbow and points to the page. On it she has written, “You need to be more careful.”

“What are you talking about?” I blurt.

She puts her finger to her lips and quickly scribbles, “They are listening.”

I’m about to tell her that she’s nuts, but then I stop. What if she’s right? I know the people in power don’t like critics. In school we’ll get in trouble for questioning the curriculum or for behavior that’s “unfit for our gender.”

She’s scribbling again. An arrow points to the side of the bus covered by her jacket. “There’s a camera hidden in the side of the bus. You need to be careful about what you’re drawing.”

I write three question marks on my page.

“Can we talk after school?” she writes.

I nod, curiosity getting the best of me, and write, “Meet at Bay Park?”

She nods then closes her sketchpad. When the bus pulls up to school, she grabs her jacket and disappears into the crowd.

All day I’m distracted. I space out during my classes and, when I show up in the lunchroom, Candice is sitting with Kaylie and her friends. She waves me over and makes room for me, but I can’t quite find a way into their conversation. When I finally get home, Mom is in the kitchen making dinner.

I grab an apple and take a big bite. “Mom, can I go meet Candice at Bay Park?”

“Sure, honey, just be back for dinner.”

Bay Park is a little neighborhood playground that I’ve been going to my whole life. Just a few swings, an ancient playground structure, and a few picnic tables. It is near the dividing line for our town’s elementary schools, so I never went to school with kids on the other side, like Brooke, until we came together in middle school.

When I get there, Brooke is already sitting on one of the swings, headphones on. When I walk up to her, she doesn’t say anything but indicates that I should follow her. We wind our way among neighborhood roads until we get to the end of a quiet, dead-end road. We stand in front of a house that looks just like all the houses in the neighborhood, except for the eerie stillness.

The lawn is unmown and the mailbox is overflowing, but it doesn’t look like it’s been empty for long. Tomatoes rot on the ground in a once productive garden.

Brooke takes off her headphones and I’m surprised to see tears in her eyes.

“What are we doing here?”

She pauses. “What are we doing?” She says, and I get the feeling that she’s asking herself more than me.

She looks me straight in the eyes. “I want to tell you something, but I don’t know if I can trust you. Can you keep a secret?”

I think for a minute. “I think so,” I say. “I don’t know if I can trust you either.”

She ponders my words for a minute before asking another question, “Do you ever feel like you don’t want the future all the adults in the world have decided is right for you?”

“Yeah,” I say, letting all my breath out, “Lately, all the time.”

“But you feel like no one else cares? Like no one else questions the future we’re all being trained for?”

I nod, thinking of Candice. “Totally.”

“Then you’re going to want to hear this.” She pauses. “But I can’t tell you unless you promise not to tell anyone, especially not anyone at school or your parents.”

I nod.

“My best friend, Tyler, lived in this house.” Brooke starts. “We met on the first day of kindergarten and were friends instantly. We ate lunch together every day and played after school. But last year, in fifth grade, he started asking questions. He started writing stories about boys who took care of kids and girls who joined the army. He asked questions that the teachers didn’t want to hear. And he got in trouble, a lot.”

Brooke pauses, looking up at a second-floor bedroom window, curtains drawn.

“And then one day he and his family were gone. I asked my parents where they went. My dad said his family moved to be closer to his grandparents, but then he looked at my mom in the meaningful way adults do sometimes. I had never heard Tyler talk about his grandparents. It was weird. Then one day there was a woman waiting for me outside my house after school. She slipped me a letter and was gone.”

Brooke pulls a worn envelope out of her pocket and hands it to me. I open it and read.

“Brooke,

Please be careful and don’t show this note to anyone. In fact, you should probably put it away now and read it later in a private place. You need to know that the ‘right path’ movement is watching you. They’ll do anything to make sure we all conform to their rules. There are cameras and microphones everywhere and big data centers where they analyze the surveillance. They brought me and my parents to a reeducation facility and separated us. They are ‘training’ me and the other boys here to be real men. (You don’t want to know what that entails). They’re watching us all the time, but I found an adult here who is trying to fight back and agreed to deliver this letter. You need to be careful. Trust me, you don’t want to get taken away. It’s awful here. Be careful about what you write and what you draw. Some of the kids here never spoke up but started drawing people bending gender norms. Watch for the cameras and avoid them. Lay low. I miss you.

Tyler”

I realize I’ve been holding my breath. Obviously, I knew that the school was teaching girls and boys differently, but kidnapping people who don’t conform? That seems a little extreme.

“I’ve seen your drawings,” Brooke says. “You need to be more careful.”

“I don’t know,” I say, “This all seems a little far-fetched. Maybe this is just a story being spread by the terrorists who threaten our success as a country.”

But then I realize that I’m parroting what I’ve always been told, just like Candice.

Brooke looks at me nervously, chewing her bottom lip. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.” She trails off. I can tell she’s tense, ready to run.

“Do our parents know?” I finally ask.

***

The next few days go by in a fog. I sleepwalk through my days and lay in bed at night thinking. It’s always seemed normal that girls and boys go to different classes and have different jobs. We’ve been told our whole lives that we are fundamentally different from each other. But what if it doesn’t have to be that way?

I’ve only seen Brooke in passing and she doesn’t acknowledge me. I can tell she’s keeping her distance. Candice keeps asking me what’s the matter, even as I see her drifting away from our friendship and toward Kaylie’s group. I’ve stopped drawing.

It’s a cold Tuesday when Brooke sits next to me on the bus again. Winter is on its way, and she’s wearing a gray hat and mittens. She takes off her coat and reaches across me to shove it between the seat in front of us and the side of the bus.

She takes out her sketchpad and writes, “Did you tell anyone about what we talked about?”

I shake my head.

“I need your help.”

I shrug my shoulders and point my chin at her sketchbook, not wanting to make any commitments. She starts to write.

“They took away my uncle after he smuggled information out of the AI data center where they analyze the video from all the cameras. My aunt doesn’t know where they took him, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever see him again.”

I take out my sketchbook, pause for a minute, and then start to write. “I’m sorry. That sounds awful. But what am I supposed to do? I’m just a kid. Aren’t the adults supposed to take care of things?”

“They’re brainwashed, or in denial, or scared. I’m not sure which. But some are trying to change things. They need people to help move messages. No one suspects kids. I’m going to do it. You should too.”

“Sounds like a good way to get caught and sent away. What good would that do anyone?”

“What am I supposed to do? Nothing? I don’t want to spend my life in fear, taking care of my husband and kids knowing that someday my kids could be taken from me just for asking questions.” She pauses. “I don’t want to keep losing people.”

A tear falls on her sketchpad, smearing the ink.

I don’t really know what to write in response. Maybe she’s right. Maybe things could be different. Or maybe she’s going to get herself taken away and reeducated, whatever that means.

“Don’t you want things to be different?”

When I don’t respond, she slams her sketchbook closed and pulls her headphones over her ears, pulling her jacket over her lap and glaring at the seat in front of us. The tension between us is electric until the bus finally pulls up to the school and she melts into the crowd.

***

As the days go by, I start noticing things. I notice the way the women teachers defer to the men, getting them coffee and always agreeing with them. I notice that I don’t see some of my classmates from elementary school anymore. When I walk by their houses, they look empty like Tyler’s. I even knock on their doors, but no one comes to let me in. I notice the cameras. They’re small and easy to miss, but once I know what to look for, I see them everywhere.

I’m sketching again with a vengeance, but only outdoors where I’m pretty sure there aren’t cameras. On the page, heroes and heroines battle evil and gender roles are all mixed up. I show my drawings to no one.

And then on another cold, gray day, when I bump into Brooke getting off the bus, I sneak a scrap of paper into her hand. On it I’ve written, “I’m in.” She glances at the paper while pretending to tie her shoe and sneaks me the tiniest hint of a smile. A wave of relief passes over me while at the same time I feel an electric hum of excitement. I’m in. The words hover in my brain as I walk to class. Though talking polar bears are a long shot, I might be able to be a heroine in my own story.

Julia McLeod lives on a small farm in Bowdoin with her husband, two kids, dog, and 40 chickens. She currently works in a middle school library. She loves fiction written for and about tweens and teens and is in the midst of writing a middle grade novel in verse. Though writing has often been a part of her work life, this is only the second short story she has shared with others. 

 Top

Margaret F. Tripp Poetry Award

Wedding Vow by Grace Star

I pledge
to hold you in my seasoned heart,
melt in your divinity -
drink from your wisdom’s jewels, 
folly’s laughter,
sea-eyes of acceptance.

I want all the moments 
of our daily travels-
down the hallway, across the ocean,
standing upright,
leaning together.

You are gentle, 
I am rash.
You reflect, 
I burst forth.
We are like spring and summer, 
print and plaid,
surprise and steady

In future years I will still see 
the you I met three years ago,
and treasured moments,
like a stairway lined with pictures
we have barely begun to gather.

Your love - the softest, warmest blanket ever I have worn,
your presence - flames in the hearth of a once chilly home,
I bask in these comforts, 
in your whole embrace 
of us.

By loving you, 
my dearest, 
I cradle the heavens.

Grace Star: Words are pearls that you can string together into delicious feelings and images. I savor picking up the first lovely gem and finding its companions. I’ve spent my whole life writing, journaling for growth, press releases, webpages for my products, and now, the delicious leisure to craft poems. It’s an honor to be part of this celebration.

 Top

Poetry Honorable Mention

I Was Wrong by JC Goodwin

I thought you would judge me…
… I stayed away.
I thought you would
no longer love me.
I thought you would
 refuse my pain…
… I pushed away.

I could all but hear
the tone of disappointment
in your voice. 

I knew your opinion
and
the words you would say.
The hurt you were sure to give.

I didn’t want your judgement 
or
your disappointing looks.

I didn’t want to feel the guilt,
and unforgiveness,
that was sure to be dealt. 

But,

I was wrong…

It was me who held the judgement,
the guilt and shame.
Assuming I knew, 
the words you would say.
Determining I knew 
how you would respond.

JC Goodwin is a poet, author, and artist who has been creating art, whether it be in words or in colors, for most of her life. Her debut free verse poetry collection, THE PAINTED MIRROR, was released in October 2025 by Dark Pine Publishing. She lives in central Maine with her husband, and children, on a small generational family farm.

 Top

Richard F. Snow Nonfiction Award

Creature in the Woods by Bill Guddeck

Bobcat!

That was my first thought.

I knew there were bobcats in these woods. Said as much on the sign at the trailhead. Yet, this paw print, the one pressed deeply into frozen snowy ground, seemed much too big. Maybe it was a really big bobcat…

Mountain Lion?

I remember reading about this guy in Colorado. That one where a mountain lion pounced onto his back while he was trail running and he had to fight it off with his bare hands. I definitely did not need that scenario replaying in my head. My eyes darted around the small ridge. It was still and quiet. Save for the sound of droplets melting off the tree branches. I have absolutely no idea how I would react if a mountain lion jumped on my back right now. The hairs on the back of my neck gave a shiver.

This paw print was just at the edge of a rocky outcropping. Right at the spot that I usually crouch down to ease myself back onto the trail below. I imagined a mountain lion standing there, right where I had almost just put my hand, scouting out the landscape below. Waiting for a fox or rabbit, or an unwitting trail runner, to dart by. High enough for a good vantage point and at perhaps the perfect height from which to pounce!

I run this route a lot. In fact, I was here yesterday: in the snowy, rainy, wintery mix. I definitely did not see this animal track yesterday.

The weather was nicer today. Everything had frozen overnight. Tree branches glistened with a coat of ice and the blanketed ground was firm and crunchy. It was still cold, but warming up and the sun was out! It would all be a dish of mashed potatoes by midday, of course.

I dropped down from the ridge onto the trail, careful, to avoid disturbing the

monster-of-the-wood’s paw print. Wasted no time lingering about and continued running along the trail. My ears attentive to every rustle both real and imagined.

I go left to skirt the heath, then veer right and follow the path down to the river. Run with the river for a few miles, pop up the hill, round the other side of the heath, and arrive back at my little ‘creature’ ridge. Pass the old quarry and down into the neighborhood. A quick shortcut

through another wooded area leads me back to the start. That’s the route. Which meant I was going to pass back into the lion’s den…

But wait… Mountain Lion?!?! I live on the Maine coast. Come on, Bill. I don’t think mountain lions are even in these parts. Maybe at one time, like a hundred years ago and perhaps further up north in Canada there might be some. Well… I suppose one could have wandered downeast. I mean it’s possible, right?! There have been reports of mountain lion sightings just a bit south from here. Unsubstantiated, if I remember correctly, but… As it happened, just the week prior, I was talking to this somewhat over seasoned gent in the sauna at the gym and he was a believer. He was certain that mountain lions were still on the prowl in Maine. You may ask yourself how we possibly got onto the topic of the Eastern Cougar, and well, not a clue. However, for some reason the conversation seemed really alive in my mind as I navigated the snowy terrain.

Bear? We do have bears in Maine. And it is getting closer to spring. I read that some bears do notreallyhibernate, so…could be a bear… Hard to tell, with the melt freeze cycle of the last couple days. That would explain the size of the print, at least.

No, it’s not a bear print. I’ve seen those on trails before. But… I’ll make some noises just in case. In case, my crunching footsteps bouncing off the naked trees like a frosted, forested pinball machine weren’t enough noise. “La LA lalala La”

Anyway, I turned right at the river and continued jogging along the banks.

If I was a bear, or mountain lion for that matter, I would probably head to the river, grab a fish for lunch, or get a cold drink with my bobcat buddies. Considering that, itisquite possible, I could run into an apex predator at any moment. Ateveryturn of the trail. That’s simply fantastic! Just makes the whole run more exciting, right?! Right!?

The sun casta lotof shadows into the woods making for almost constant corner-of-the-eye jump scares. Plus, the rush of the river was making it quite difficult to hear. I was running blind out there!

Snap!!

Like a branch of thunder cracking through the forest. A sudden Whoosh! A brown blur pounced across the trail! Oh Shit! My heart was beating at my chest like a taiko drummer. I screeched to a stop, breathing heavy. I jerked my head to the side. Eyes scanning the shadow-painted trees. There it was! Moving swiftly…

…a deer?!! HaHAHAha… hmmmmmm… Of course it was deer. I was clearly amping myself up. Deep breath. I started running again. More crashing to my right. Not fooled that

time. Apparently, there was a whole family of deer prancing away from me. I had clearly startled them. The verdict is still out on who startled who more.

Good thing it wasn’t a mountain lion, though.

I did tell someone where I was going, right? Just in case I didn’t show back up at work. Someone would come looking for me, surely. At some point, anyway. I hope they don’t take too long while I’m bleeding out from a cougar attack.

Stop! You’re being silly. You run this all the time, you’re fine! I told myself.

And yet, my mind kept drifting back to that print in the snow. An animal made that print, was a decent sized, living, breathing animal. Larger than a dog, for sure. But what was it?Was there a mountain lion wandering around out there?

A few miles later, my pace slowed as I turned back into the “den.” I stopped. Listened. Let my eyes trace over every rock and shrub on that ridge. My ears, pricked and alert, eyes were straining into the dark corners. I felt my muscles tense, at the ready. My mouth, puffing clouds of steam into wintry air. I could smell the metallic hardness of stones and the muddy scent of softening snow mixing with the dirt. Hints of pine sap. Sweat sliding down my cheeks. My senses were alive. My animal instincts at the ready. I was keenly aware of my forest surroundings. Bring it on, mountain lion!

Nothing.

Not even a squirrel moved.

I scrambled up the ridge. There it was, the print.

I sat down next to it. Letting my feet hang over the side. It was a good sized print.

Almost the same size, I thought, as I hovered my gloved hand over the print. Its distinct paw toes splayed just a bit, probably from the pressure of its bodyweight. Rounded edges. My fingers slid easily into the paw, pinky and ring finger here, middle and pointer there and then my thumb. My palm follows the curve of the animal’s foot. A perfect fit. Huh. I looked down from the ridge, hand in hand with the wild animal.

A big grin spread across my face. Realization washed over me and I laughed. I always put my hand here to lower myself down. Yesterday, I had pressed into the wet snow at this very spot. Overnight, it had smoothed, distorted slightly, and froze.

HAHAHA! This was my print!

I was the creature in the woods.

Top

Nonfiction Honorable Mention

I Light Children on Fire by John Reinhart

“I tell people I’m a children’s entertainer, specializing in fourth grade,” she said.

We were hiking in New Mexico, just outside Santa Fe, where I was interviewing for a first grade teaching position. About the finish my master’s degree, I’d wanted to become a teacher since I was in high school. I’d never considered that teaching might be considered children’s entertainment. Still, something about her quirky view rang true to me.

I never wanted to become a professor. On the one hand, I did not have the drive to take on more schooling which seemed more and more detached from practical life. While I do enjoy researching and writing, after a while, I also begin to miss dirt under my fingernails. And I have never wanted to profess anything.

Which is not to say that I want to entertain. It is to say that I don’t relish the idea of standing at a lectern proclaiming my opinions, however well researched and written or being coerced into writing books of the same. (Which is not to say that I don’t have opinions.)

I’ve told my students as much. I’ve told them I try to teach — in that traditional sense of imparting knowledge — as little as possible.

Of course, if we’re reading a book written during Stalinist Russia, then I generally know more about that context than my students do. I can help direct them, give them background for details they pick up. I can contribute to their knowledge or help point them in the direction of more information so they can begin to form their own ideas about the subject.

What I don’t do is stuff facts into them.

I can coax, cajole, converse. I can ask questions that raise more questions or light connections for students. I can invite them into discussion. By encouraging the students to engage in the learning process, by teasing out their understanding, by connecting them to their thoughts, their thought process, and ultimately developing the possibility for new thoughts to emerge, we all benefit. They often surprise me with observations that open new avenues for my own thought. I’m no more a teacher than a conduit, a supportive conductor orchestrating a human symphony — while simultaneously playing triangle too.

My high school math teacher, who remains one of my role models and one of the reasons I decided to go into teaching, once asked the class about the key ingredient to learning. It’s not intelligence, or fear, or desire, or persistence, though they might all play roles on different levels. The fundamental, most important ingredient for learning, for truly learning something, for understanding something so that it becomes yours, that ingredient is love.

Love.

If you are stressed out, hate school, wonder where your next meal is going to be, whether you or your parents might arrested, anxious about how a teacher might call you out, or have been made to feel inadequate, you’re not going to have an easy time learning anything.

If you love what you are learning, love what you are doing, you will soak it up. And still have room for more. That’s why people become experts at their hobbies. Fanatics. There are precious few professional baseball statisticians, but a multitude of diehard baseball fans who can quote obscure statistics. And that’s not because they’re going to be tested on that knowledge at the end of the season.

So, what I can impart, what I can help foster, what I can cultivate through care, encouragement, and support, is love. If students love what they are doing, love their subjects, love their topics, love the doing, they will learn. What they learn is hardly up to me, though I help set broad parameters, parameters like U.S. History or Romanticism. The result is shown to me every time I ask a class to reflect their favorite parts of a course: invariably, they love their independent projects, the projects they chose, they researched, where they became fascinated then shared that interest with their classmates. All I did was create a vessel, helped them when they got stuck, and encouraged a certain form for presenting their newfound knowledge.

May that be an example each of us carries into our everyday interactions.

And I know this firsthand, from the many projects I have taken up on subjects I knew nothing about, but fell in love with by choice, by practice, by depth of understanding. Like the time my History Through Art teacher opened a book and the colors leapt out of the pages. I knew I wanted to research that painter, though I had never heard his name. My father brought home massive books from the library and between school and baseball practice, I absorbed every detail about Wassily Kandinsky, presenting his life and art to my classmates for 45 minutes at the end of the course.

I’m not sure if you can teach love, but I know you can model it and create space for it and foster appreciation for our world, which is to say, I know you can lay the groundwork for love.

In my 10th grade year, a recently retired teacher was cajoled out of retirement to teach a few courses at our school, courses of his own devising. We spent three weeks focused on ballads (“every song, every poem is about two things: love and death” was his opening line for the course), reading from Francis James Child’s collection of British ballads. This teacher lived around the corner and invited us to his house for class a few times, playing records of specific songs related to our work while we gawked at the decorative instruments and extensive bookshelves, basking in his zest for life.

“The more you know, the more you know,” he said, which I’ve quoted to students, reveling in its simple profundity. I’m not sure it lands as deeply with my students as it did for me, but perhaps I didn’t really fully absorb it when I first heard it either. It’s a statement that continues to challenge me to explore broadly, and not just within my field of interest. I’m as likely to pick up a book on mathematical paradoxes as poetry, and though I lean toward the poetry, I read as widely as possible. Knowing the classical western canon helps me understand references in modern culture that escape my students just as they escaped me. Understanding other cultures, languages, and world history provides the groundwork for appreciating the perspectives I encounter in what I read.

But my teacher didn’t tell me that, he brought me in, enticing me with thousand-year-old songs that influenced folk music of the 1950s-60s that was connected to the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, student uprisings, countercultural dreams, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave. These threads led me to my own path, my own desire to map a new direction, to foster new forms, to rise from the ashes of the old.

Which is why this William Butler Yeats quote has always stood out to me: “Education is not to fill a bucket, but to light a fire.”

We are not towers built of fact laid upon fact, but torchbearers illuminating the space around us. Lighthouses. Beacons in the darkness.

I look back over the last 40 years to see that the world has changed dramatically. Children now carry computers in their back pockets more powerful than anything I could have imagined when my family first got a desktop computer during my high school years. My children don’t know what it is to wait for boxscores in the newspaper to see who won last night’s baseball game. They don’t know what it means to wait until next week for the continuation of their favorite show. As much as we have tried to shove the children out the door and feed them books, screens are ubiquitous, instant gratification the common parlance.

I remember being told that if I learned about computers I would be set up for future jobs. What that meant 30 years ago is laughable now. What that meant five years ago — laughable. So why do we continue to think that if we fill students with certain skills and facts that those same skills will be relevant by the time they finish college?

I remember a ninth grade student asking if he could paint a revolutionary graphic on the classroom wall for his History of Revolutions art project. I told him I’d need to see a draft first and maybe we could work out a plan — a clever ruse I’ve utilized to weed out students who are not willing to follow through. I didn’t hear about it again. On the last day of class, one of the framed posters in the classroom was slightly askew. Sure enough. There was a hastily painted fist, paint dripping down the wall. I left it covered so he could enjoy the big reveal. Afterward I wagged my finger at him. Of course, I smiled inwardly at his own experiential learning, his own act of rebellion.

He’s now an environmental lawyer.

It’s not the skills we build, it’s the capacities we encourage. If you love the work, love the process, see the challenge in front of you, then life’s a merry puzzle.

I was already looking for a vehicle to replace my 13-miles-to-the-gallon truck, so after Hurricane Katrina when gas hit almost $5 a gallon, I narrowed my search to cars with alternative fuels. Vegetable oil, to be specific.

I’d heard of GreaseCar, a company manufacturing secondary tanks and conversion systems for diesel vehicles. They had a classifieds section and I located a nearby seller offering a 1983 Volkswagen Quantum Turbo Diesel converted to run veggie oil. Hot dog!

It was a stick shift. And I’d never learned to drive stick.

Still, I went to check it out. The owner was an 8th grade teacher with appropriate patience to instruct a willing young driver around the suburbs of Boston. I drove the car home, stalling only once.

After the rust gods called that car to the heavenly heap, I found myself an unaltered diesel, this time a 1981 Mercedes 240D, a veritable tank. I bought myself a GreaseCar kit and some time. Over the course of a weekend, with my new kitten variously sleeping in the car, on the car, or in the middle of the street, I converted the car to run on vegetable oil.

Did I mention that I had no mechanical skills or knowledge? Just a willingness to give it a go, a trust that I could work it out, a crazed determination to turn my only car into a burnt-falafel-smelling sustainablemobile.

It worked. A couple months later I drove it across country and back, refueling on vegetable oil halfway. I went on to repair several parts of the car myself largely because Mercedes parts and repairs were beyond my budget. YouTube videos, the car manual, and patience: I still can’t stake any claim to automotive knowledge or skills, but my children believe that I can fix anything because there’s nothing I’m not willing to try.

This is what it means to me to teach toward capacities. It’s the old, Give someone fishsticks and some reruns and they’ll eat for a meal; teach someone to bread their own fish and play guitar and they’ll be set for life. How can I teach someone to be willing to give anything a try?

In my classroom, I aim to honor initiative and creativity. I don’t give quizzes, I ask for students to demonstrate their thinking process. I want them to wonder, to sit in awe, to ask unexpected questions. The skills we practice are in service of developing new avenues of thinking. Did you know there’s a Singaporean form of poetry where each line is composed of four words and each word of two syllables? How about the Italian form with repeated lines originally sung by peasants? The more we know, the more we know — and the more connections we meld in the grand marble track we call our mind, the more we can generate pathways to places we didn’t yet know existed.

The more we know is possible, the more possibilities we build into existence.

Deep down, we are all curious, at least we start curious, asking questions about everything. As we grow older, that burning curiosity mellows. Formerly astounding occurrences become everyday. It’s hard to be amazed at every blooming flower, every sunset, every chipmunk with stuffed cheeks racing around the yard.

I firmly believe that such curiosity can be rekindled. In fact, I make it my job to light children on fire.

I am an arsonist.

As D.H. Lawrence wrote in his poem “Phoenix”

“…The phoenix renews her youth

only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down

to hot and flocculent ash…”

Burning away the old allows something new to emerge. That’s called learning!

I read a story once about a researcher who found squirrels leaping up to his bird feeder. To test their vertical jump limits, he gradually increased the height of the feeder until the squirrels could not reach it. A couple weeks later, a neighbor remarked on how the squirrels had never been able to reach his feeder until recently when they inexplicably turned it into their new buffet.

Sometimes we don’t realize we’re teaching.

As much as I am a cheerleader, I’m also always moving that feeder. I believe in my students so much that I know they can reach a little higher. I’m there to help them reach for their potential, reach beyond what they believe is their limit. And there’s something about learning to jump a little higher that doesn’t just apply to bird feeders. Students grow and apply their skills across disciplines, discovering context adds layers of meaning. The student who meticulously observed an American Lady caterpillar for science class can apply the same observational skills to articulate the movement and the character of the same critter for a poem in English.

This is another reason to honor students’ work in athletics, in extracurriculars, in hobbies, in their own fascinations. Sometimes we don’t recognize how skills cross from one arena to another. I can hardly consider myself responsible for my student who won the state Poetry Out Loud competition and went on to compete in the national finals in Washington, D.C. All I did was help pave the way, support them, encourage them, and show up to cheer them on each step of the way.

I don’t teach, I don’t stuff my students with facts, I don’t profess. Though I like to say I light students on fire, my goal is actually to encourage them to make their own matches, to spark their own flame, to light the way for themselves, for others, and to make the world around them a little brighter, a little warmer.

I agree wholeheartedly with Socrates, who said, “I am like the midwife, in that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom. The common reproach is true, that, though I question others, I can myself bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me…The many admirable truths which [others] bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within…”

What truths I have within me are mine not because they are subjective, but because I have come to understand them with my own heart, with the strength and conviction of love. As a teacher, what I work to accomplish is the space and confidence for each of my students to find what is true in their hearts, to find love. It is with the certainty of that love that they will make their paths through the world.

I believe that love opens doorways for new unexplored capacities. This is why and how I teach.

A time traveling arsonist, John Reinhart writes in ashes by candlelight.
Winner of the Horror Writers Association Dark Poetry Scholarship and editor of the Science Fiction and
Fantasy Poetry Association’s quarterly journal Star*Line, this is Reinhart’s 10 collection of poetry, work
ranging from heartfelt to heartwrenching to robots in space with no hearts.

Top

The Crowbait Short Play Award

Pier Shakes by Joe O’Donnell

You can read it here (pdf to preserve original format):

Joe came with his wife Jennifer to Maine from Ann Arbor, Michigan over 30 years ago because, well, Maine! And someone offered him a job at IDEXX Laboratories where he managed government approvals for new products for 25-ish years. That required a form of creative writing. Retired now, he has been writing short plays since 2019 and taking them to the Crowbait Club, where several have been voted the favorite play in the monthly “deathmatch.” His plays have been selected for production by the Maine Playwrights Festival and the Monmouth Community Players, and for staged reading at the Chocolate Church. Most recently, the Topsham Public Library “Joy of the Pen” online journal selected his submission as winning play of their annual writing competition. His goals in play writing are to create some humor, often touched with a few thoughts of value, and to let the actors have a good time.

Top

The Crowbait Short Play Honorable Mention

The Moose Pond Book Club by Jeff Stewart

You can read it here (pdf to preserve original format):

Jeff Stewart is a Navy veteran who earned his MA in Creative Writing from East Carolina
University. He went on to teach English to deployed sailors and marines in the Navy’s NCPACE
program. Jeff resides in Southport, Maine with his wife where he writes, fishes, and dreams of a
larger boat.

Top