Letter on the Lungs Contest
In a 2017 college interview, an alumna asked me, “How do you see college changing you?” Her rationale was that a true education not only provides a person with career tools but also with a different, improved worldview. I told her that after the political turmoil of the past year, and after all the personal turmoil I had experienced surrounding mental and physical health, I wanted to become fearless—to learn to embrace all life’s challenges, and to consistently succeed despite setbacks.
When Marriah originally suggested the theme of “lungs” for our first contest, it was just before the New Year. Looking back into the chaos of 2017, we saw what we had experienced and how it had changed us. I imagined my series of stressful college interviews, and I looked around the college I am currently at—one I never envisioned myself attending at the beginning of the college process—and felt immensely grateful for the rejections that led me here. Looking forward into the vast abyss of 2018, we wondered where we would go and how we would grow. I imagined living a fearless life, shedding my old anxieties and old self. And, because this was Body Without Organs’s first contest, we reflected on how much the journal had already grown, and how much we could expand its efforts into new territories.
I expected the submissions for this contest to be beautiful, passionate, and intelligent insights about growth—which many, many were. What I did not expect was to feel as if I had grown as a person from reading the submissions and judging this contest. Nor did I expect my experience of these works to grow and expand each time I read them, each piece becoming a slightly altered, new piece when I return to it. But this happened—all of this happened.
“Ribbons,” the winning short story from Paige Stetson, accomplished this most of all. Each time I read its lyrical prose, I admire a new aspect of its emotionality. I feel more connected to it, then more compassionate to its claims that grief can never be wholly communicated to someone else nor connected to from an outside observer. It lives in contradictions that are both somehow true at once: in Maheen’s words, it is “satisfying but not sugar-coated, true to the nature of grief.”
Every sentence of “Ribbons” feels aimed at its ultimate purpose, and yet each sentence is also enjoyable in itself, a musical experience like the one inside it. It unfolds and opens itself in a thousand different ways. There is, as Marriah says, “passion inside of every single word.” Overall, it is “beautiful.” On a small scale, it is “intricate.” And, in relation to the prompt and what we foresaw, it is “unexpected.”
Of course, “Ribbons” is not fearless in the sense that its main character lives with permanent regret and grief. He does not “embrace all life’s challenges.” He does not “consistently succeed despite setbacks.” But, as I am beginning to realize, in no small part because of “Ribbons” and the other pieces showcased here, that to ask for this is too much. Recognizing the growth in human life also requires there not always being growth. It requires there being moments left without closure and tasks left unfinished.
My psychology class last semester, which focused on Adult Development, spent over a week simply defining what “development” means. Despite conceptions that “development” is nearly synonymous with “growth,” a fundamental part of development is its multidirectionality: the fact that some dimensions of life grow while others shrink, and back-and-forth fluctuation occurs instead of linear movement. Growth does not mean just growth. It also means loss, and grief, and sometimes pain. These feelings are tied together with ribbons: inseparable and still, despite everything, beautiful.
The second-place winner, “Biology” by Sama Hakmi, captured this confusion in her poem, too: the “diffusion of my concentrated world” from within me to the exterior world, and the exterior world’s diffusion into me, a mixing of internal and external. The physical environment around someone—like, say, the college they attend—blends into them, effortlessly and musically like the lines of “Biology,” and they become a new self they didn’t expect. And the simplistic beauty and honesty of the honorable mentions, “A Science Fair Experiment” by Kaitlin LaRosa and “untainted” by Jenna Wiley, also capture how, even when we cannot imagine growing, we do; we become something else and see our becoming in a new way.
In thinking about my college interview, if someone asked me how I envision college changing me now, I would answer differently. I would wholly embrace that I don’t know—and that I don’t want to know. If I can imagine perfectly who I will be and what values I will have, my worldview will not have truly grown to be that different or improved. I am shedding my old self, and I am growing. But this no longer inherently requires fearlessness, and I am open not only to change but to even my definition of change changing.
One thing that will not change, though, is the intricate power of these contest winners. They will, hopefully for you as for me, change philosophies. They will be read in a thousand different ways and create a thousand different moments of growth. Maybe in the future, why they matter to me will change, too. And how they matter to the world, as you all read them, will continue to change, too.
Courtney Felle
Editor-In-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor
In a 2017 college interview, an alumna asked me, “How do you see college changing you?” Her rationale was that a true education not only provides a person with career tools but also with a different, improved worldview. I told her that after the political turmoil of the past year, and after all the personal turmoil I had experienced surrounding mental and physical health, I wanted to become fearless—to learn to embrace all life’s challenges, and to consistently succeed despite setbacks.
When Marriah originally suggested the theme of “lungs” for our first contest, it was just before the New Year. Looking back into the chaos of 2017, we saw what we had experienced and how it had changed us. I imagined my series of stressful college interviews, and I looked around the college I am currently at—one I never envisioned myself attending at the beginning of the college process—and felt immensely grateful for the rejections that led me here. Looking forward into the vast abyss of 2018, we wondered where we would go and how we would grow. I imagined living a fearless life, shedding my old anxieties and old self. And, because this was Body Without Organs’s first contest, we reflected on how much the journal had already grown, and how much we could expand its efforts into new territories.
I expected the submissions for this contest to be beautiful, passionate, and intelligent insights about growth—which many, many were. What I did not expect was to feel as if I had grown as a person from reading the submissions and judging this contest. Nor did I expect my experience of these works to grow and expand each time I read them, each piece becoming a slightly altered, new piece when I return to it. But this happened—all of this happened.
“Ribbons,” the winning short story from Paige Stetson, accomplished this most of all. Each time I read its lyrical prose, I admire a new aspect of its emotionality. I feel more connected to it, then more compassionate to its claims that grief can never be wholly communicated to someone else nor connected to from an outside observer. It lives in contradictions that are both somehow true at once: in Maheen’s words, it is “satisfying but not sugar-coated, true to the nature of grief.”
Every sentence of “Ribbons” feels aimed at its ultimate purpose, and yet each sentence is also enjoyable in itself, a musical experience like the one inside it. It unfolds and opens itself in a thousand different ways. There is, as Marriah says, “passion inside of every single word.” Overall, it is “beautiful.” On a small scale, it is “intricate.” And, in relation to the prompt and what we foresaw, it is “unexpected.”
Of course, “Ribbons” is not fearless in the sense that its main character lives with permanent regret and grief. He does not “embrace all life’s challenges.” He does not “consistently succeed despite setbacks.” But, as I am beginning to realize, in no small part because of “Ribbons” and the other pieces showcased here, that to ask for this is too much. Recognizing the growth in human life also requires there not always being growth. It requires there being moments left without closure and tasks left unfinished.
My psychology class last semester, which focused on Adult Development, spent over a week simply defining what “development” means. Despite conceptions that “development” is nearly synonymous with “growth,” a fundamental part of development is its multidirectionality: the fact that some dimensions of life grow while others shrink, and back-and-forth fluctuation occurs instead of linear movement. Growth does not mean just growth. It also means loss, and grief, and sometimes pain. These feelings are tied together with ribbons: inseparable and still, despite everything, beautiful.
The second-place winner, “Biology” by Sama Hakmi, captured this confusion in her poem, too: the “diffusion of my concentrated world” from within me to the exterior world, and the exterior world’s diffusion into me, a mixing of internal and external. The physical environment around someone—like, say, the college they attend—blends into them, effortlessly and musically like the lines of “Biology,” and they become a new self they didn’t expect. And the simplistic beauty and honesty of the honorable mentions, “A Science Fair Experiment” by Kaitlin LaRosa and “untainted” by Jenna Wiley, also capture how, even when we cannot imagine growing, we do; we become something else and see our becoming in a new way.
In thinking about my college interview, if someone asked me how I envision college changing me now, I would answer differently. I would wholly embrace that I don’t know—and that I don’t want to know. If I can imagine perfectly who I will be and what values I will have, my worldview will not have truly grown to be that different or improved. I am shedding my old self, and I am growing. But this no longer inherently requires fearlessness, and I am open not only to change but to even my definition of change changing.
One thing that will not change, though, is the intricate power of these contest winners. They will, hopefully for you as for me, change philosophies. They will be read in a thousand different ways and create a thousand different moments of growth. Maybe in the future, why they matter to me will change, too. And how they matter to the world, as you all read them, will continue to change, too.
Courtney Felle
Editor-In-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor