Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction – serie

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You destroys our complacency about who among us can commit unspeakable atrocities, who is subjected to them, and who can stop them. From age four to eighteen, Sue William Silverman was repeatedly sexually abused by her father, an influential government official and successful banker. Through her eyes, we see an outwardly normal family built on a foundation of horrifying secrets that long went unreported, undetected, and unconfessed.

Mention the record album Jesus Sound Explosion to a typical child of the 1970s and that person is likely to picture one of those collections that used to be shown on TV (Call now! Not available in stores!). When Mark Curtis Anderson spied a copy in a junk store a few years ago, he knew just what he'd found, and the memories of growing up in a Baptist minister's family came flooding forth.The title of Anderson's memoir is a nod to the live concert album from Explo '72, a kind of evangelical Woodstock emceed by Billy Graham. Explo's crowds of 100,000-plus signaled that enterprising evangelicals were discovering how to use rock and roll in the marketplace of conversion. Anderson was eleven that year, too young to be at Explo but old enough to wish he was. Other preachers' kids may have gazed out at the wider world and craved its movies, clothes, or toys, but he wanted its music. And not just the Jesus-rocker fare of Explo's Armageddon Experience or Children of Truth, but the real stuff, too.Jesus Sound Explosion recalls Anderson's quest for worldliness-through-rock as he came of age under the gaze, he often sensed, of his father's entire congregation. All of the backsliding and revival, idealism and disillusionment one would expect is here, told with delightfully understated humor and set against the sounds of The Guess Who, Yes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Bruce Springsteen. Here is a knowing look back on a time when Jesus Christ Superstar climbed the pop charts, The Cross and the Switchblade hit the big screen, and anxious parents played their kids' records backwards in search of hidden messages from Satan.

She tipped her head sideways, her lips offering themselves to his. He remembered the fire those lips contained, the promise her kiss held. . . . In 1962 David Carkeet's drowsy hometown of Sonora, California, snapped awake at the news that it had inspired a smutty potboiler titled Campus Sexpot. Before leaving town on short notice, the novel's author had been an English teacher at the local high school, where Carkeet was a hormone-saturated sophomore. Leaving was a good idea, it turned out, for most of the characters in Campus Sexpot had been modeled after Sonora's citizens.Carkeet uproariously recaptures his stunned, youthful reaction to the novel's sleazy take on his hometown. The innocent nowhere burg where he despaired of ever getting any "action" became, in the pages of Campus Sexpot, a sink of iniquity echoing with "animal cries of delight." Blood pounded, dams of passion broke, and marriages and careers—not to mention the basics of good writing—went straight to hell.As Carkeet relates his own romantic fumblings to the novel's clumsy twists and turns, he also evokes the urgently hushed atmosphere in which the book circulated among friends and neighbors. Eventually, Carkeet stumbles into adulthood, where he discovers a truer definition of manhood than the one in the pages of the pulp fiction of his youth. A wry look at middle-class sexual mores and a witty appreciation of the art of the hack novel, Carkeet's memoir is, above all, a poignant and hilarious coming-of-age story sure to revive our own bittersweet teenage memories.

“When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through.” Ghostbread makes real for us the shifting homes and unending hunger that shape the life of a girl growing up in poverty during the 1970s.One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western New York that remain relatively hidden from the rest of America. From an old farming town to an Indian reservation to a dead-end urban neighborhood, Livingston and her siblings follow their nonconformist mother from one ramshackle house to another on the perpetual search for something better.Along the way, the young Sonja observes the harsh realities her family encounters, as well as small moments of transcendent beauty that somehow keep them going. While struggling to make sense of her world, Livingston perceives the stresses and patterns that keep children—girls in particular—trapped in the cycle of poverty.Larger cultural experiences such as her love for Wonder Woman and Nancy Drew and her experiences with the Girl Scouts and Roman Catholicism inform this lyrical memoir. Livingston firmly eschews sentimentality, offering instead a meditation on what it means to hunger and showing that poverty can strengthen the spirit just as surely as it can grind it down.

“When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through.” Ghostbread makes real for us the shifting homes and unending hunger that shape the life of a girl growing up in poverty during the 1970s.One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western New York that remain relatively hidden from the rest of America. From an old farming town to an Indian reservation to a dead-end urban neighborhood, Livingston and her siblings follow their nonconformist mother from one ramshackle house to another on the perpetual search for something better.Along the way, the young Sonja observes the harsh realities her family encounters, as well as small moments of transcendent beauty that somehow keep them going. While struggling to make sense of her world, Livingston perceives the stresses and patterns that keep children—girls in particular—trapped in the cycle of poverty.Larger cultural experiences such as her love for Wonder Woman and Nancy Drew and her experiences with the Girl Scouts and Roman Catholicism inform this lyrical memoir. Livingston firmly eschews sentimentality, offering instead a meditation on what it means to hunger and showing that poverty can strengthen the spirit just as surely as it can grind it down.

New to living and gardening in Philadelphia, Sharon White begins a journey through the landscape of the city, past and present, in Vanished Gardens. In prose now as precise and considered as the paths in a parterre, now as flowing and lyrical as an Olmsted vista, White explores Philadelphia's gardens as a part of the city's ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners and naturalists working in the area around her home.In one section of the book, White tours the gardens of colonial botanist John Bartram; his wife, Ann; and their son, writer and naturalist William. Other chapters focus on Deborah Logan, who kept a record of her life on a large farm in the late eighteenth century, and Mary Gibson Henry, twentieth-century botanist, plant collector, and namesake of the lily Hymenocallis henryae. Throughout White weaves passages from diaries, letters, and memoirs from significant Philadephia gardeners into her own striking prose, transforming each place she examines into a palimpsest of the underlying earth and the human landscapes layered over it.White gives a surprising portrait of the resilience and richness of the natural world in Philadelphia and of the ways that gardening can connect nature to urban space. She shows that although gardens may vanish forever, the meaning and solace inherent in the act of gardening are always waiting to be discovered anew.

Moses Unchained is the moving true story of a modern outlaw’s struggle with faith, betrayal, and the accidental nature of life. Zack Rosen was a simple man, but one with many contrasts. An urban Jew from New Jersey who moved south and converted to fundamentalist Christianity, he was not a philosopher or theologian but a man’s man, a tattooed truck driver who built a classic Harley-Davidson from spare parts. Zack met and married Shelley, another converted Jew, but their happiness was brief. Secrets from Shelley’s past came back to haunt them, and her sudden death from pneumon/ia revealed that she had AIDS and she had given the virus to Zack.Suddenly faced with the loss of his family, his job, his income, and eventually, his own life, Zack became an itinerant evangelist. He introduced himself to author Marilyn F. Moriarty in 1993 with the words, “I got an honorable testimony.” She listened to this story and became his friend and caregiver. At his request, she has told his story here.

How do we come to know a place, and in seeking to know it do we make it foreign from ourselves? Do we tackle it from other perspectives—the excavator, the traveler, the observant witness? Can we know a place without the blur of our identity, or does the attempt to extricate ourselves from the external lead only deeper? Brian Lennon seeks such knowledge in this rare and revolutionary work that blends poetry with narrative, ethnography with autobiography, and philosophy with literature. City: An Essay begins and ends with meditations on place, the first an unusual and intriguing excavation of the underground depths and history of New York City and the conclusion a travelogue of Italy that reads like snapshots. But place comes to reside somewhere within the landscape of the imagination.Though classified as creative nonfiction, City is an open genre piece that reads with the rhythm and beauty of poetry. Despite its sometimes philosophical core, occasionally pausing to ponder Kierkegaardian dilemmas, it maintains linguistic grace and self-reflexivity. City is a unique and unmatched experimental work by an emerging and sophisticated writer who is paving exciting new aesthetic and theoretical roads.

Darkroom: A Family Exposure is Jill Christman's gripping, funny, and wise account of her first thirty years. Although her story runs the gamut of dramatic life events, including childhood sexual abuse, accidental death, and psychological trauma, Christman's poignant memoir is much more than a litany of horrors; instead, it is an open-eyed, wide-hearted, and good-humored look at a life worth surviving.Through a shifting narrative of text and photographs, Christman explores the intersection of image and memory and considers the ways photographs force us to rework our original memories. Darkroom is a page-turning and disturbing journey that begins with an older brother's near fatal burning and progresses through a counterculture childhood in which her free-spirited mother moves the family to an isolated mountaintop. The story advances into an adolescence of eating disorders and barely remembered sex, slams into a young adulthood of love, literature, drugs, death, and therapists, and ends soon after a beloved uncle bleeds to death in a federal prison while serving a ten-year sentence for growing marijuana.Never sentimental, Jill Christman is brutally honest and surprisingly funny. She deftly blends narrative, quoted materials, her uncle's letters, and her father's photography to create a family saga that is both heartbreaking and exhilarating.

Constantly surprising, these personal essays explore the attractions and dangers of intimacy and the violence that often arises in close relationships. Deulen’s artful storytelling and dialogue also draw the reader into complicated questions about class, race, and gender.In “Aperture,” she considers how she has contributed to her autistic brother’s isolation from family and from the world. “Theft” investigates her mother’s romantic stories about conquistadors in the context of the Mexican heritage of her biracial family. Throughout the collection Deulen experiments formally, alternating traditional narrative with “still life” essays and collages that characterize a particular time, place, and sensibility.Deulen is remarkable in her ability to present her own confusion and culpability, and she also writes with compassion for others, such as her own suicidal and unpredictable father or a boy in her class who sets the teacher’s hair on fire. In part because she herself so poorly fits the identities she might be assigned—white in appearance, she is in fact half Latina; raised in a poor neighborhood, she has acquired an education associated with the middle class—Deulen sees “otherness” as a useless category and the enemy of intimacy, which she embraces despite its risks.The Riots seeks to create what Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion,” and Deulen investigates her own act of creation even as she uses the craft of writing to put parentheses around the chaos of continuous living.

In The Small Heart of Things, Julian Hoffman intimately examines the myriad ways in which connections to the natural world can be deepened through an equality of perception, whether it’s a caterpillar carrying its house of leaves, transhumant shepherds ranging high mountain pastures, a quail taking cover on an empty steppe, or a Turkmen family emigrating from Afghanistan to Istanbul. The narrative spans the common—and often contested—ground that supports human and natural communities alike, seeking the unsung stories that sustain us.Guided by the belief of Rainer Maria Rilke that “everything beckons us to perceive it,” Hoffman explores the area around the Prespa Lakes, the first transboundary park in the Balkans, shared by Greece, Albania, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. From there he travels widely to regions rarely written about, exploring the idea that home is wherever we happen to be if we accord that place our close and patient attention.The Small Heart of Things is a book about looking and listening. It incorporates travel and natural history writing that interweaves human stories with those of wild creatures. Distinguished by Hoffman’s belief that through awareness, curiosity, and openness we have the potential to forge abiding relationships with a range of places, it illuminates how these many connections can teach us to be at home in the world.

Increase is Lia Purpura’s chronicle of her pregnancy, the birth of her son, Joseph, and the first year of his life. She recounts her journey with the heightened awareness of a mother-to-be and through the eyes of a poet, from the moment she confirms her pregnancy as “A blue X slowly crosses itself, first one arm, then the other in the small white window of the test,” through “the X of his crossed feet in sleep” as her child’s world begins. Purpura’s sensibility transcends the facts of personal experience to enfold the dramatically changing shape of a larger, complex world.These closely knit essays portray the rhythms of a new mother’s life as it is challenged and transformed in nearly every aspect, from the emotions of wildness, loss, need, and desire to the outward progress—and interruption—of her work and activities. Increase offers us motherhood at an extraordinary pitch, recording, absorbing, and revisiting experiences from a multitude of angles. Purpura presents her story of discovery with unequaled eloquence, grace, and power.

The Broken Country uses a violent incident that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012 as a springboard for examining the long-term cultural and psychological effects of the Vietnam War. To make sense of the shocking and baffling incident—in which a young homeless man born in Vietnam stabbed a number of white men purportedly in retribution for the war—Paisley Rekdal draws on a remarkable range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and also by American-born veterans over the past decades. She interweaves a narrative about the crime with information collected in interviews, historical examination of the arrival of Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s, a critique of portrayals of Vietnam in American popular culture, and discussions of the psychological consequences of trauma. This work allows us to better understand transgenerational and cultural trauma and advances our still complicated struggle to comprehend the war.

Study in Perfect is an exploration of perfection. In “Moving Horizontal” a Victorian house loses its charm over time, especially when compared to a modernist contemporary filled with light. Family life is dense with pleasure, as in the perfect vacation described in “Marking Time in Door County,” and in “Neriage, or What Is the Secret of a Long Marriage,” where an ancient Japanese ceramic technique has much in common with shaping a close relationship. There is such a thing as a perfect cup of tea, depending on who is preparing and drinking it (“Perfect Tea”). And schmaltzy show tunes flowing from a black-lacquered piano in a Chinese restaurant can be genuinely moving (“Sentimental à la Carte”).Naturally, Gorham must embrace imperfection. The poisonous mushrooms in “Darling Amanita” lead to a consideration of our darker impulses, like obsessive love, even murder. And there is pain: “The Shape of Fear” relates the story of a child stricken with a deadly staph infection, as it considers the function and form of fear. And alcoholism, the family disease no one wants to talk about, is poised against The Cat in the Hat, a story everyone has read and enjoyed.Study in Perfect winds its way around and through the many permutations of this most hermetic and exalted concept and proceeds with the full consciousness that perfection’s exact definition is subjective, reliant on who is speaking, and easily unmoored by time, geography, and the vagaries of taste.

At forty, Sarah Einstein is forced to face her own shortcomings. In the wake of an attempted sexual assault, she must come to terms with the facts that she is not tough enough for her job managing a local drop-in center for adults with mental illness and that her new marriage is already faltering. Just as she reaches her breaking point, she meets Mot, a homeless veteran who lives a life dictated by frightening delusion. She is drawn to the brilliant ways he has found to lead his own difficult life; traveling to Romania to get his teeth fixed because the United States doesn’t offer dental care to the indigent, teaching himself to use computers in public libraries, and even taking university classes while living out of doors.Mot: A Memoir is the story of their unlikely friendship and explores what we can, and cannot, do for a person we love. In unsparing prose and with a sharp eye for detail, Einstein brings the reader into the world of Mot’s delusions and illuminates a life that would otherwise be hidden from us.

Uprooting ourselves and putting down roots elsewhere has become second nature. Americans are among the most mobile people on the planet, moving house an average of nine times in adulthood. Mobile Home explores one family’s extreme and often international version of this common experience. Inspired by Megan Harlan’s globe-wandering childhood—during which she lived in seventeen homes across four continents, ranging in location from the Alaskan tundra to a Colombian jungle, a posh flat in London to a doublewide trailer near the Arabian Gulf—Mobile Home maps the emotional structures and metaphysical geographies of home. In ten interconnected essays, Harlan examines cultural histories that include Bedouin nomadic traditions and modern life in wheeled mobile homes, the psychology of motels and suburban tract housing, and the lived meanings within the built landscapes of Manhattan, Stonehenge, and the Winchester Mystery House. More personally, she traces the family histories that drove her parents to seek so many new horizons—and how those places shaped her upbringing. Her mother viewed houses as a kind of large-scale plastic art ever in need of renovating, while her father was a natural adventurer and loved nothing more than to travel, choosing a life of flight that also helped to mask his addiction to alcohol. These familial experiences color Harlan’s current journey as a mother attempting to shape a flourishing, rooted world for her son. Her memoir in essays skillfully explores the flexible, continually inventive natures of place, family, and home.

Other Girls to Burn is a collection of essays that explores the relationship between women and violence within such contexts as the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, early Christian virgin martyrs (discussed in relation with modern true crime stories), mixed martial arts, and rape culture. Formally inventive and lyric leaning, these essays shift between cultural criticism and personal essay and cohere around a central motif of female mystics. With them, Caroline Crew asks, What does it mean for women to be complicit in the violence of the patriarchy? How do women navigate risk as well as revel in thrill? What does it mean to both fear and perpetuate violence? The essays explore disparate cultural touch points, such as contemporary feminism, race, hagiography, the Salem witch trials, dementia, fairy tales, Eurydice, indie music, gender performance, Anne Boleyn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, family dysfunction, and vaginismus, to name a few. Together, this collection is in conversation with contemporary nonfiction writers such as Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, and Anne Boyer.

Writer Pam Houston once summed it up: “Nice mother-daughter stories are a dime a dozen; pain-in-the-ass mother-daughter stories are the ones that grab us.” As Long as I Know You is a compelling read for any adult grappling with a living elder who might also be a pain in the ass, particularly, any reader who wants a tender take on the lethal combination of dementia and defiance.As Long as I Know You narrates Anne-Marie Oomen’s journey to finally knowing her mother as well as the heartbreaking loss of her mother’s immense capacities. It explores how humor and compassion grow belatedly between a mother and daughter who don’t much like each other. It’s a personal map to find a mother who may have been there all along, then losing her again in the time of Covid. As the millions of women like Oomen’s mother reach their elder years and become the “oldest of the old,” their millions of daughters (and sometimes sons) must come on board, involved in care they may welcome the way they’d welcome hitting a pothole the size of a semi. How a family makes decisions about that pothole, how care continues or does not, how possessions are addressed—really, no one wants the crockpot—and how the relationship shifts and evolves (or not), that story is universal.

In the winter of 1984, Sharon Nicorvo was violently raped while delivering pizza to Fort Monmouth Army Base in New Jersey. At the same time, her seven-year-old son Jay was being subjected to repeated and secret sexual abuse by his babysitter. Best Copy Available delves into these devastating events and their long aftermath. Thirty years later, Nicorvo receives a photocopy of the criminal investigation report documenting that brutal night. This report offers a primer to better understand certain assumptions about class and race; sex and violence; crime and punishment; low and high culture; sanity, madness, and masculinity; and the facsimile nature of the truth. As various American men—some real, some imagined, all prone to violence—move in and then out of their hardscrabble lives, mother and son spend decades avoiding and ultimately confronting what happened to them in that formative year. From the Jersey Shore to the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Midwest, Best Copy Available tells a harrowing and sometimes hilarious American story: how the love of a single mother helped end an awful cycle of abuse and abandonment. Most ambitiously, Best Copy Available lends voice to an alternative version of American boyhood, manhood, and fatherhood. One where the sons of deadbeat dads can grow up to be stay-at-home dads, and where our boys and men may realize that the most courageous show of strength is not the determined use of force. It’s knowing when and how to ask for help.

unMothered, unTongued is a collection of lyric essays written from the liminal space of the in-between. These essays thread themselves around questions of language, landscape, and identity, weaving together intersectionalities and intertextualities. Author Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, a biracial LGBTQIA+ Nisei who was born and raised in Laramie, Wyoming, to a non-native-English-speaking Issei mother, considers not only the tensions in the rifts between intersectional identities (biracial Nisei, LGBTQIA+) but also the tensions between marginalized identities and the landscapes and cultures of the American West; the tensions between nonnative, second, erased, and/or forgotten languages; and the tensions between those who abuse and those who survive. These rifts, intersections, and fractures, while frequently a source of violence and immense grief, are also a source of illumination and clarity. The essays in this collection are written almost entirely in hybrid/lyric forms—oftentimes braided, oftentimes patchworked, oftentimes segmented—reflecting some of the fractured complexities and intersections of Horikoshi Roripaugh’s own hybrid identities.

In Themes for English B a teacher ponders the nature of meaningful learning, both in and beyond the classroom. J. D. Scrimgeour contrasts his Ivy League education to the experiences of his students at a small public college in a faded, gritty New England city. What little Scrimgeour knows of the burdens his students bring to class—family crises, dead-end jobs, overdue bills—leaves him humbled. Fighting disenchantment with the ideals of higher education, Scrimgeour writes, "How much I owe these students, how much I have learned. They know the score; they know they are losing by a lot before the game even begins, and they shrug, as if to say, 'What am I supposed to do, cry?'"Scrimgeour's obligations to his students and his hopes for them glance off each other and sometimes collide with the realities of the classroom: the unread assignments and the empty desks. Is there too great a student-teacher divide? Can Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, or any other writer Scrimgeour teaches have something to say to a single mother with a full course load, two jobs, a sick kid, and a broken car? Yes, it turns out, and it is magic when it happens.The pupil inside the teacher emerges when Scrimgeour finds unexpected occasions for his own ongoing education. Pickup basketball games at a local park become exercises in improvisation, in finding new strengths to compensate for age and injury. His collaboration on a word-and-movement performance piece with a colleague, a dancer mourning the death of a beloved niece, leads him into unfamiliar creative terrain.A routine catch on a baseball field long ago, a challenged student in a grade school writing workshop, a yellowed statue of education pioneer Horace Mann: each memory, each encounter, forces revisions to a life's lesson plan. Scrimgeour's achingly honest, intimate essays offer clear-eyed yet compassionate accounts of the trials of learning.