Reading Passage Prize vol 1

Part 2

Note: I will not comment on all of the visual art or poetry. A lot of it is out of my wheelhouse.

As always, spoiler alert.

“Georgia Buddha” by V.N. Ebert – 1st Place Fiction

This is a good story. It is about the complex relationship between a father and a son: a father who has started a second family after the passing of his first wife, and a son who is looking for meaning and attention as he enters adulthood without a mother or his father’s guidance. Such stories are often told from the perspective of the slighted son, but “Georgia Buddha” is told from the father’s perspective. Buddy is a self-assured, self-made man who knows what he wants and goes after it. He’s a former star football player who made a living off his brawn until he had the experience and relationships to make him a successful business owner. Buddy’s son is distant, having gone to boarding schools since his mother’s death. He is nothing like his father and embraces the hippy counterculture while in college, changing his name to Siddhartha. Buddy is a steady character. He goes about his business, tends to his young family, but in his private time he investigates his estranged son’s lifestyle. He takes interest in eastern philosophy and the new music he thinks his son enjoys. The story culminates in Buddy driving out to the squalid hippy commune where his son is living to convince him to go back to college after dropping out. The characters are convincing, and the dialogue is engaging. Good flow and pacing. I didn’t care for some of the author’s stylistic choices, but the voice was distinctive and not overly distracting.

In his essay at the beginning of the book, Zero HP Lovecraft states that he read the son as mixed race; the young man’s mother—Buddy’s first wife—as having been black. I also found a phrase or two to support that reading, but enough was left out of the story to make me skeptical. To be fair, I don’t know much about the South in 1950, but I imagine that the marriage of a white state-champ football player to a black girl would have made for some large social challenges for Buddy, to say nothing of the legal implications. Ultimately, I don’t think the story needs that angle to be effective.

“Honor Your Ancestors: A Primer on Genealogy” by Hazard Harrington

Harrington does yeoman work providing a succinct if not particularly ground-breaking statement on the importance of learning more about your ancestors: learning more about where you come from can help ground you and give more meaning to your life. It’s an important message, and I’m glad it was included in the collection.

“He Who Fights” by Eor Odinson

This story takes us back in time to rural America in 1947. However, this time, we’re dealing with flying saucers and little green men. The opening line is a great hook: “It was a hot night in the summer of ’47 when hell dropped out of the sky.” It is a solid sci-fi action story with a war-veteran protagonist who puts to use his experience dealing with invaders. Worth a read.

“Cheap Therapy” by Charlie Deist – 2nd Place Non-fiction

“My name is Chuck and I am a recovering pothead.” Getting right to the point, this is how Deist begins the intertwining stories of his own addiction to weed and California’s ground-breaking recreational cannabis legalization. I didn’t love it. I found that the narrative meandered into areas just beyond the scope, to the detriment of the main story. The most interesting part of the story was the author’s personal experience getting addicted to and clean from cannabis, so I thought that many of the diversions into the science of addiction and quotes from notable figures were distracting. I think that Deist has a good feel for the formula of an issue-driven memoir, but it falls flat in a shorter format. It may work better as a book. I would read that.

“Buried in Due Season” by A.J. Wilk

As a narrative, I found this story disappointing. However, and it’s a pretty big however, I found the atmosphere created by Wilk to be fascinating and entirely enveloping. The story follows a young boy who lives on the periphery. His home is an antiquated farmhouse on the edge of town, near elderly relatives from another era, and he is in the sweet spot of childhood where independence mingles with a sense of wonder that is not self-aware. The boy investigates his world of liminal spaces: a creaky ancient house, the boneyard in the woods, the abandoned house at the edge of the nearby development. In this world, the author matter-of-factly presents supernatural occurrences and grounds them with vivid descriptions of everyday life. Wilk beautifully portrays the way a child can experience the world, with all its awe, mystery, and menace. The piece is marred by a handful of simple errors, but hopefully an editor can help avoid those in future works. I’m going to try to find more stories by A.J. Wilk and see what else he has to offer. I think I’ll enjoy what I find.

Note: the accompanying artwork by John Fitzgerald was a great addition to the story.

“London Fields, October” by Michael Button

I always enjoy poems that can find the essence of relatable experiences. This poem takes on early-morning swimming. My favorite stanza:

The slip into water crosses borders
of testicle, waistline, nipple, goggles.
We furrow lanes with fly, crawl cyan metres.