"We humans are performative creatures—the masks and costumes we put on are varied and many. But what happens when we take off the masks and costumes?"
Theodore Deppe
"More than half a century since I met you at a family gathering, you reappeared for a night in Connemara. So little I know of your life, but I’ll remember you for the story you told of the year you lived in London, near Little Venice."
Dina Greenberg
"When I try to pray, whose prayer is on my lips? Yours or mine, it makes no difference. Your brave voice silenced so I beckon Our people.i Your breath strangled and I clutch my aching heart."
Mark Liebenow
"I’m sitting in Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky. Again. Every time there’s a major trauma in my life, I return here. I first came twenty-three years ago on a silent retreat after my wife Evelyn died unexpectedly in her forties."
Suzanne Strempek Shea
"It was red. Red plastic. Shaped like a fat coin, wide as the bottom of a cup."
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From Compositions: A memoir in 42 Essays by the Kid on Her 8 Years in Catholic School, Handed in 60 Years Late
Hope
"Miracles are all around us. We just have to slow down long enough to be aware of their presence. The miraculous is an engine for hope."
Kristen Dorsey
"I dress carefully, ensuring my uniform is clean, pressed, and free of “Irish pennants.” My drill instructor reminded us every day in a very loud voice that woman Marines are “separate but equal,” and we have to work extra hard to get the “equal” part."
Richard Gilbert
"William, I’ll call him. His real first name was likewise one that people always slap a nickname on; but in the formal way of some country folk, he didn’t abbreviate. So, a gracious air of olden times arose with his mention."
Bridget A. Lyons
"My father is obsessed with the American chestnut tree. This might not seem odd if he were a biologist, an arborist, or a forester. Or if he, over the course of his eighty-two-years, had ever taken any kind of interest in landscaping."
Pushcart
Nominees
The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize that publishes poetry, fiction, essays nominated by small presses.
Todd Davis
"The hayfield is half cut and catches June light at the edges. A sweet dust floats down over the farmhouse as I park the truck along a line of century-old sugar maples. I hear a tractor which I can't see because it’s hidden by a hillock while it makes a loop in the lower meadow. "
KaToya Ellis Fleming
"Uncle Mike says that on summer nights in the country it would get dark enough to make you go blind. A deep, boundless black that would heighten your other senses so intensely, you could hear every cricket in Harlem, Georgia chirping in chorus."