Thanks to our Guest Judge:

Literary Agent Quressa Robinson

WOW was honored to have guest judge literary agent Quressa Robinson choose the spring season’s top winners. Thank you, Quressa, for sharing your time and efforts to make these contestants’ dreams come true!

Quressa’s bio:

Quressa Robinson joined the Nelson Literary Agency in 2017 after working at a previous agency and as an editor for five years. She is originally from San Francisco, but has been living in New York City for over a decade. As a New York based agent, she is eager to build her MG, YA, and Adult lists. When not curled on her couch reading, she plays video games, enjoys too much TV—mostly Sailor Moon and Harry Potter (Slytherin!), eats delicious things, drinks champagne, hangs out with her very clever husband, and adds another “dramatic” color to her lipstick collection. Quressa is also a member of the 2017-2019 WNDB Walter Grant Committee and holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction from Columbia University.

To find out what Marlo’s looking for, check out her Nelson Literary Page.

Connect with her on Twitter @qnrisawesome.

Visit Nelson Literary Agency: www.nelsonagency.com

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We want to thank each and every one of you for sharing your wonderful stories with our guest judges this season. We know it takes a lot to hit the send button! While we’d love to give every contestant a prize, just for your writing efforts, that wouldn’t be much of a competition. One of the hardest things we do after a contest ends is to confirm that someone didn’t place in the winners’ circle. But, believe it when we say that every one of you is a true winner.

Every writer has been a gracious participant through the whole process, from the beginning of one season to the next. We’ve written emails to authors, agents, and publicists who have donated books to our contest, and we’ve shared our delight regarding the true sportsmanship among our contestants. It doesn’t matter if it’s one writer who placed or another who tried but didn’t; all writers are courteous, professional, and wonderful extensions of WOW! Women On Writing’s team. Writers’ stories and e-mails fill us with enthusiasm.

Kudos to all writers who entered, whether you won or not, you’re still a winner for participating.

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To recap our current process, we have a roundtable of 8+ judges who blindly score equally formatted submissions based on: Subject, Content, Technical, and Overall Impression (Style). That’s the first step of the process. If a contestant scores well on the first round, she (or he) receives an e-mail notification that she passed the initial judging phase. The second round judging averages out scores and narrows down the top 20 entries. From this point, our guest judge helps to determine the First, Second, and Third Place Winners, followed by the Runners Up.

As with any contest, judging so many talented writers is not a simple process. With blind judging, all contestants start from the same point, no matter the skill level, experience, or writing credentials. It’s the writer’s story and voice that shines through, along with the originality, powerful and clear writing, and the writer’s heart.

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We’ve enjoyed reading your stories, each and every one of them. The WOW! Women On Writing judges take time to read them all. We recognize names of previous contestants, writers familiar with our style. We enjoy getting to know you through your writing and e-mailing. Remember that each one of you is a champion in our book. We hope that you continue to enter so we can watch you grow as writers and storytellers, because each season is a rebirth of opportunity.

Rochelle’s Bio:

Rochelle Williams lives in southern New Mexico. Her fiction, poetry and visual art have appeared in Lunarosity, Chokecherries, Desert Exposure, Lifeboat: A Journal of Memoir, Earthships: A New Mecca Poetry Collection, and Menacing Hedge. Her fiction has won a number of awards, including two Southwest Writers Workshop competitions and Recursos de Santa Fe’s Discovery Reading Series. She holds an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on a novel about the French early modernist painter, Pierre Bonnard.

Printable View

 

That Day

By Rochelle Williams

 

In the house at the top of the hill, Maggie stands with her hands in the dishwater, and she is suddenly hollowed out with sorrow. It comes upon her like this, without preamble, without rhyme or reason, and she has no defense against it. She is looking out the window, down the hill, toward the green disk of the pond, bits of it flashing like a broken mirror in the evening light. It’s a wet place, this. There’s always the smell of water in the air, a smell full of contradictions—musty and clean, zinging with fresh life and a rich undertone of decay. There is the pond, and the stream that feeds and drains it; there is the lake only a mile away; the land is pocked and dented and dissected everywhere with water.

An image of her son’s body in death flashes into her mind, and instead of pushing it away, as she always does, she lets it come, lets it unfold, lets the memory open completely. She knows there are things Anne doesn’t remember about that day. In those first minutes and hours, when everything shook loose from its moorings, when Maggie had come back up the hill to this house without her son, whose body was invisible in the weeds and darkness at the bottom of the pond, she had found Anne rooted to the same spot where she’d left her to run in uncontained panic down to the water; Anne shivering and bleeding and moaning inarticulately but alive. Alive. This is one thing she knows Anne doesn’t remember: Maggie had pulled the tablecloth off the table, spilling salt and pepper shakers, bills, pens, all the clutter that accumulates on a kitchen table, and had wrapped Anne tightly in it, enclosing her daughter with her body, holding her in that clutch until, perhaps hours later—time had become a huge, lumbering animal, staggering and falling as they were—she felt her go slack. And they stayed that way, in that one spot in the kitchen, as if they were frozen, until Tom came whistling through the door, unaware of the disaster that had befallen his family.

Of course that’s not really how it happened at all. It’s what Maggie’s memory has done with those events over the years since they occurred. There were the other children, out playing in the yard, or upstairs in the house. It was a weekday and Tom was at work, not out in the fields, not coming through the door, looking for lunch and a quick squeeze from Maggie. She must have called neighbors, the police; someone would have gone for Tom, knowing he could not be trusted to drive under the circumstances. But this is what Maggie remembers when she is standing at her kitchen sink ten years later: wrapping her daughter in her arms to keep them both from flying apart, in an empty white space outside of time, which had collapsed and fallen like an injured animal.

By early afternoon, someone had driven the tractor down to the pond. The Harris boys, stripped to their shorts, had already tried and failed to budge the stone that had knocked Jacob down and crushed his leg. Someone had gone to the barn for a cable and the boys had fastened it around the stone and signaled to whoever was driving the tractor. Someone—the police officer, one of the neighbors, a friend from work—had held Tom back from diving into the pond while the stone was pulled away. The Harris boys, one older, one younger than Jacob, had kept diving down, coming up for air, diving back down, streaming bright arcs of water as they surfaced, sleek and dark and determined, guiding the huge block of granite away from Jacob’s body. It was they who, when the stone had been dragged away, pulled Jacob to the surface, and Tom, unable to wait any longer, had waded in and lifted Jacob from them into his arms as if Jacob were a small child and not almost a man.

And some time in that endless afternoon, or in the disastrously long night that followed it, Maggie had released her daughter, had passed her into other enveloping arms, had gone into the living room where Jacob lay, his flesh an unearthly blue-white, on a blanket someone had snatched from the sofa, and she had washed her son’s body, beginning with his hands.

 

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What Rochelle Won:

• $400.00 Cash Prize
• $25 Amazon Gift Card
• Publication of winning story on WOW-WomenOnWriting.com website
• Interview on WOW!’s blog The Muffin

Amy’s Bio:

Amy Sampson-Cutler is a fiction writer who recently earned her master’s degree in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont. She has been published twice in the Pitkin Review, as well as the Wellness Universe, Elephant Journal, and was a Community News Writer for the Times-Herald-Record. She is the Executive Manager at Mount Peter Ski Area. She can be contacted through AmysHippieHut.com.

RUNNERS UP: