Edited by
Michael Steinberg and David Cooper
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2nd Annual Editors' Prize Winners Fourth Genre announces the results of the Second Annual Editors' Prize for Best Essay/Memoir (2005). Look for the winner and runner-up entries in our Spring 2006 (8.1) issue. This year's judge, Robert L. Root Jr., selected the following essays:First Prize ($750 Award)- "The Fishing Story" by Beth Richards This is a very powerful essay. The grandma and other characters are exceptionally well-drawn, the dialogue handled perfectly and distinctly, the stories moving and effective without being overly sentimental or maudlin. The narrative gets everything across without overt reflection, but there's still a lot of serious inner work taking place in the piece. It is wise, emotional, sensitive. The details are concrete, vivid, rich, and never superfluous; they stick in the mind so solidly that the author can draw on them confidently in the conclusion without fear of readers missing the resonance. I admire the pace and precision of the story; as compressed and compact as it is, its details are rich in implication and reveal or suggest a fuller story we have no difficulty intuiting between the lines. - Robert L. Root Jr. Runner-Up ($250 Award)- "The Scribe in the Woods" by Elizabeth Dodd This is a terrific piece of nature writing, a segmented essay that juxtaposes all sorts of mythic and remote and regional locations and makes the reader think about trees and time and the historic and cultural and commercial and lyrical presence of trees. It's a very strong piece and connects back to ancient poetry in the beginning and the end, with all sorts of stops at tree sites in between. Powerful writing, great melding of science, narrative, literature, description as well as near flawless control of segmenting. The richness is in the interconnectedness of experiences - the link between the poetic expressions of the connection of trees to the universe, from the Norse to the Celtic, from William Bartram to John Muir, and the physical observation of trees in their natural locations which render the observer poetic and attached. The segmentation works extremely well, each section adding more to the segment before it, so that the effect is recursive as well as cumulative. - Robert L. Root Jr. Finalists
Honorable Mention
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