Monica Waterston
Dallas, Texas
I’d known since the age of four that I was somehow different from the other girls I knew, but it wasn’t until the age of seventeen that I finally realized I was a lesbian. Living in a state as conservative as Texas, I knew that my life would become a living hell if [...]
Kenneth
Ann Arbor, Michigan
November 23, 2006 (Thanksgiving Day)
Three days before Thanksgiving, 2004, my daughter, Becky, left her home in Ann Arbor unexpectedly and drove alone to Austin, Texas. She was 4 days away from her eighteenth birthday, a senior in high school and she was extremely unhappy. Becky had become very distraught due to many tragic [...]
Lesley Yates
Austin, Texas
“Who is this?”
“Vienna Teng.”
“I’ve never heard of her.”
“Well, you should listen to her. She’s got the most amazing voice I’ve ever heard.”
And so we sat, I at my computer and my sister at hers, as I streamed what she was listening to into my WinAmp application. And I’ll admit it; I wasn’t really [...]
Lisa Federer
Dallas, Texas
When you’re five thousand miles away from home, away from all your friends and family, in a country where you can barely speak the language, you look for something to hold on to. During the semester I spent living in France in 2004, that something was the music of Vienna Teng. When I [...]
We’ll be posting a handful of the many amazing entries from the contest here, over the next few days. Thanks so much to everyone who wrote one; it’s been a pretty intense journey reading these.
Seems appropriate to begin with the winner of the drawing…
C. Weill
Lafayette, Louisiana
To Whom It May Concern,
My Daughter was born via emergency [...]
Listen, people…it is impossible to pick just a handful of essays for this contest/drawing thing. I keep reading one, moving the email to the “Finalist” mailbox, then realizing I’ve been moving all of them to “Finalist” for the past forty minutes. Hmm.
Apples and oranges, that’s the thing…apples, oranges, mangoes, avocados, flowers and firecrackers. You can’t [...]