Letter on the Hips Contest
This past semester was unusually quiet for me, reflective. For the first time since I started college, I enrolled in an average number of credits instead of adding an extra class, suddenly leaving extra space in each week. The 2018 midterm elections I had so fervently thrown myself into campaigning for were over; there were no more days chock-full of voter registration, canvassing, strategy meetings. Instead, an unfamiliar but comfortable expanse, a place to sit.
It was also the first semester I wasn’t taking a single English or creative writing class (and yes, it was even weirder than you’d expect). I told myself I would use my newfound free time to write, and often, I did—spending my rare snow days inside drafting a short story, revising poems in the evenings between my assigned readings, even taking an online workshop through Winter Tangerine that pushed me into two of the most productive weeks of writing I’ve ever had in college. But, even more often, I simply thought. I’ve always believed that 80% of writing occurs off the page; and while that 20% of craft, syntax, and shaping is important, the meanings behind those structural choices and the process that brings us to them is what ultimately makes a poem click. Waiting, processing, revising, continuing to live: that’s where the poem resides.
I have a tendency of mixing words together (the result of jumbled thinking patterns, residues of health issues, and meditational side effects), and one of the sets I consistently confuse is “reflective” and “reflexive.” What comes from memory and a deep thoughtfulness about memory, and what emerges instinctually as response? Where is the line—when memories prompt a fearfulness about the same situations repeating, or unconscious reactions remind us of rooted memories? In my earlier life, I wrote about events as they occurred, often on the exact same day. My reflexive interpretations became the reflective, and everything meshed into one, confused whole, where everything reinforced the story I was already telling.
To be fair, sometimes when you’re fifteen, you don’t have time to wait. The story is urgent and feels all-consuming. But that current state isn’t where the writing will always exist. This semester was a come-down: not just from the busyness of the fall, but also from its romantic chaos, mental health crises, surrounding drama. I had a vantage point to look back, inspect and turn over the lives of my previous selves with increased distance. So much of that reflection turned to the themes we prioritized for our Hips Contest, and reading through our submissions, I found myself stunned over and over again, lifted from my own experience then placed squarely back into it, pushed and pulled and moved. So many of the entries were well-crafted, with attention to sound, language, and style, but more than that, they clicked. They had full lives behind them, and you could feel them buzzing, pulsating.
There’s a quote I love, one that I return to over and over, from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. I put it in my senior yearbook; I hung it on my dorm room wall. In it, she says, “one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.” Here I am, almost three years after finding this quote, using it again in a new way. Here I am, four years beyond the confused immediacy of fifteen, still writing about the relationships and emotions I had then, but through an entirely new lens. This is the true art of writing: seeing the world around you, then seeing it again. Pressing into it, then leaving it for some time to ponder. Then returning, always returning.
In our original Hips announcement, we asked for a full examination of hips: “what they say, who’s making them say it, who they’re saying it for… the gritty truth, the deeper analysis of society and self and personhood.” This can come through how they act and what those actions mean within any given moment, the pressing urgency of writing, thought, and life we wanted to see when we first opened for entries, but even more, it comes through reflection, how hips can create a lens on life, an overarching story, a meaning much beyond any given moment. Especially with the themes of sexuality, gender, and trauma we prioritized, reflection is often how we come to understand these moments and their lasting effects. And the five winners of our contest—all of whom absolutely amazed me with their thoughtfulness and skill—did exactly that, looking backward and across time, between moments individual and societal.
In her honorable mention essay “Coding Bodies and Hip Size,” Danielle Amir-Lobel explores how instances of dress-coding compile together to create a problematic pattern, one that “makes [girls] ashamed of their bodies, self-conscious over the sway of their hips, and treated as a threat that must be thoroughly covered so that it does not distract boys from their learning.” As a method of social control, dress-coding is disproportionately applied to those with curvier or non-white bodies, making it an even more pressing issue to tackle. By starting with an individual anecdote than moving outward to aggregate trends, Amir-Lobel shows us the connections between our hips, the social fabrics that connect all our frustrations. She takes her own experiences and builds from them, outward and beyond.
Magdalena Kamphausen’s “moments and miles” operates oppositely: assuming a shared cultural reality of misogyny, fatphobia, and sexual harassment for girls as young as elementary school, one that resonates as familiar across geographical and national lines, then tracking one speaker’s growth through and despite this reality. Finally faced with a partner who meets her with “a grin of delight,” one she “fears… sees her completely,” she remembers each stage that brought her here. Ultimately, she chooses to reclaim her body and agency, her “clammy hands sure and steady,” even as she stays “both a moment and many miles away from” her partner. There’s no easy answer, no magical forgetting or overcoming. But there is hope, rooted in and with her, which seems realer, better.
In Maya Wright’s “Carnis,” the speaker begins with a resistance to reflection: “i never go back to that vacant parking lot.” But, as she presents her refusal, she also brings us into the story with her, reliving it as if it also belongs to us. All the details remain intact: “the pale orange streetlights / and the overhanging trees / and the moon,” all deserving blame as inactive witnesses. Somewhere else, this moment keeps repeating, for a self that the speaker begs, “Make that girl a separate entity.” As she realizes, though she never went back, she also never left, hovering between spaces in her continued understanding of them. The final lines present a new way to understand this separation: “we don’t live with our ghosts / we live through them.” This “through” has many layers: do we live vicariously through them, in the same lives? Do we live despite them, through the traumas inflicted? Do we live beyond and against them, fully moving somewhere else? Is it somehow a combination of all these, and more? Only continuing to live, with time, can truly answer.
Our second-place winner, Madison Lazenby, first described her poem “I’d Like to Think I Was in Gymnastics for a Reason” to us as “what a single person can do to affect the world—especially as it is ending.” Looking back on the destruction of everything we’ve known, how do we process what we could have done differently to prevent this? How does this phenomenon especially impact women, who are so often the ones asked to over-exert themselves to the point of “my hips rolling / out of place, my shoulders dislocating, // my eyes glazing over,” those tasked with keeping their families, their communities, the whole world together, without recognition of that labor or the sheer exhaustion it causes? As we expect women to work more and more, with emotional and literal labor, as the “glue” of the world, is what they do ever going to be enough to push back against other world forces that promote decay? Can women substantially or effectively protect their communities, or save “just one continent from the flood,” or is the attempt to do this tearing them apart as individuals, where they “split in half in one great earthquake”? Is it both? Is this a fair expectation? What does this phenomenon look like in individual, unique lives, in women’s own experiences? Lazenby leaves us with all these questions and more, spooling the story out from the page into our minds.
Finally, our amazing first-place winner, Miranda Sun, begins her poem “Bearing” reflecting on her very first moment: being “sliced out of her [mother’s] stomach / like a fruit growing inside a tree instead of out / or a tumor growing exactly where it wanted / to be.” This remembrance is second-hand, something she knows from when she “traced / my peach-soft fingers across the scar” at six. Only later, thinking back, does she realize “I did not truly know / what wound it must have been.” This wound then moves beyond her and her mother, to all of nature and humankind. We become each other and progress in reverse, “turn wild turn / feral turn fetal.” Together, all our hips transform into “white gates to walk through,” and so we do. We keep walking through.
I sincerely hope that these pieces amaze you even half as much as they did me; if so, I know you’ll be thinking about them for a long time, ruminating, revisiting, reflecting.
Courtney Felle
Editor-in-Chief
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
This past semester was unusually quiet for me, reflective. For the first time since I started college, I enrolled in an average number of credits instead of adding an extra class, suddenly leaving extra space in each week. The 2018 midterm elections I had so fervently thrown myself into campaigning for were over; there were no more days chock-full of voter registration, canvassing, strategy meetings. Instead, an unfamiliar but comfortable expanse, a place to sit.
It was also the first semester I wasn’t taking a single English or creative writing class (and yes, it was even weirder than you’d expect). I told myself I would use my newfound free time to write, and often, I did—spending my rare snow days inside drafting a short story, revising poems in the evenings between my assigned readings, even taking an online workshop through Winter Tangerine that pushed me into two of the most productive weeks of writing I’ve ever had in college. But, even more often, I simply thought. I’ve always believed that 80% of writing occurs off the page; and while that 20% of craft, syntax, and shaping is important, the meanings behind those structural choices and the process that brings us to them is what ultimately makes a poem click. Waiting, processing, revising, continuing to live: that’s where the poem resides.
I have a tendency of mixing words together (the result of jumbled thinking patterns, residues of health issues, and meditational side effects), and one of the sets I consistently confuse is “reflective” and “reflexive.” What comes from memory and a deep thoughtfulness about memory, and what emerges instinctually as response? Where is the line—when memories prompt a fearfulness about the same situations repeating, or unconscious reactions remind us of rooted memories? In my earlier life, I wrote about events as they occurred, often on the exact same day. My reflexive interpretations became the reflective, and everything meshed into one, confused whole, where everything reinforced the story I was already telling.
To be fair, sometimes when you’re fifteen, you don’t have time to wait. The story is urgent and feels all-consuming. But that current state isn’t where the writing will always exist. This semester was a come-down: not just from the busyness of the fall, but also from its romantic chaos, mental health crises, surrounding drama. I had a vantage point to look back, inspect and turn over the lives of my previous selves with increased distance. So much of that reflection turned to the themes we prioritized for our Hips Contest, and reading through our submissions, I found myself stunned over and over again, lifted from my own experience then placed squarely back into it, pushed and pulled and moved. So many of the entries were well-crafted, with attention to sound, language, and style, but more than that, they clicked. They had full lives behind them, and you could feel them buzzing, pulsating.
There’s a quote I love, one that I return to over and over, from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. I put it in my senior yearbook; I hung it on my dorm room wall. In it, she says, “one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.” Here I am, almost three years after finding this quote, using it again in a new way. Here I am, four years beyond the confused immediacy of fifteen, still writing about the relationships and emotions I had then, but through an entirely new lens. This is the true art of writing: seeing the world around you, then seeing it again. Pressing into it, then leaving it for some time to ponder. Then returning, always returning.
In our original Hips announcement, we asked for a full examination of hips: “what they say, who’s making them say it, who they’re saying it for… the gritty truth, the deeper analysis of society and self and personhood.” This can come through how they act and what those actions mean within any given moment, the pressing urgency of writing, thought, and life we wanted to see when we first opened for entries, but even more, it comes through reflection, how hips can create a lens on life, an overarching story, a meaning much beyond any given moment. Especially with the themes of sexuality, gender, and trauma we prioritized, reflection is often how we come to understand these moments and their lasting effects. And the five winners of our contest—all of whom absolutely amazed me with their thoughtfulness and skill—did exactly that, looking backward and across time, between moments individual and societal.
In her honorable mention essay “Coding Bodies and Hip Size,” Danielle Amir-Lobel explores how instances of dress-coding compile together to create a problematic pattern, one that “makes [girls] ashamed of their bodies, self-conscious over the sway of their hips, and treated as a threat that must be thoroughly covered so that it does not distract boys from their learning.” As a method of social control, dress-coding is disproportionately applied to those with curvier or non-white bodies, making it an even more pressing issue to tackle. By starting with an individual anecdote than moving outward to aggregate trends, Amir-Lobel shows us the connections between our hips, the social fabrics that connect all our frustrations. She takes her own experiences and builds from them, outward and beyond.
Magdalena Kamphausen’s “moments and miles” operates oppositely: assuming a shared cultural reality of misogyny, fatphobia, and sexual harassment for girls as young as elementary school, one that resonates as familiar across geographical and national lines, then tracking one speaker’s growth through and despite this reality. Finally faced with a partner who meets her with “a grin of delight,” one she “fears… sees her completely,” she remembers each stage that brought her here. Ultimately, she chooses to reclaim her body and agency, her “clammy hands sure and steady,” even as she stays “both a moment and many miles away from” her partner. There’s no easy answer, no magical forgetting or overcoming. But there is hope, rooted in and with her, which seems realer, better.
In Maya Wright’s “Carnis,” the speaker begins with a resistance to reflection: “i never go back to that vacant parking lot.” But, as she presents her refusal, she also brings us into the story with her, reliving it as if it also belongs to us. All the details remain intact: “the pale orange streetlights / and the overhanging trees / and the moon,” all deserving blame as inactive witnesses. Somewhere else, this moment keeps repeating, for a self that the speaker begs, “Make that girl a separate entity.” As she realizes, though she never went back, she also never left, hovering between spaces in her continued understanding of them. The final lines present a new way to understand this separation: “we don’t live with our ghosts / we live through them.” This “through” has many layers: do we live vicariously through them, in the same lives? Do we live despite them, through the traumas inflicted? Do we live beyond and against them, fully moving somewhere else? Is it somehow a combination of all these, and more? Only continuing to live, with time, can truly answer.
Our second-place winner, Madison Lazenby, first described her poem “I’d Like to Think I Was in Gymnastics for a Reason” to us as “what a single person can do to affect the world—especially as it is ending.” Looking back on the destruction of everything we’ve known, how do we process what we could have done differently to prevent this? How does this phenomenon especially impact women, who are so often the ones asked to over-exert themselves to the point of “my hips rolling / out of place, my shoulders dislocating, // my eyes glazing over,” those tasked with keeping their families, their communities, the whole world together, without recognition of that labor or the sheer exhaustion it causes? As we expect women to work more and more, with emotional and literal labor, as the “glue” of the world, is what they do ever going to be enough to push back against other world forces that promote decay? Can women substantially or effectively protect their communities, or save “just one continent from the flood,” or is the attempt to do this tearing them apart as individuals, where they “split in half in one great earthquake”? Is it both? Is this a fair expectation? What does this phenomenon look like in individual, unique lives, in women’s own experiences? Lazenby leaves us with all these questions and more, spooling the story out from the page into our minds.
Finally, our amazing first-place winner, Miranda Sun, begins her poem “Bearing” reflecting on her very first moment: being “sliced out of her [mother’s] stomach / like a fruit growing inside a tree instead of out / or a tumor growing exactly where it wanted / to be.” This remembrance is second-hand, something she knows from when she “traced / my peach-soft fingers across the scar” at six. Only later, thinking back, does she realize “I did not truly know / what wound it must have been.” This wound then moves beyond her and her mother, to all of nature and humankind. We become each other and progress in reverse, “turn wild turn / feral turn fetal.” Together, all our hips transform into “white gates to walk through,” and so we do. We keep walking through.
I sincerely hope that these pieces amaze you even half as much as they did me; if so, I know you’ll be thinking about them for a long time, ruminating, revisiting, reflecting.
Courtney Felle
Editor-in-Chief
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor