The editors of Dappled Things are delighted to announce this year’s winners of the J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction. Named after one of the greatest writers of the 20th century Catholic literary renaissance–often called a writer’s writer–the contest aims to honor his legacy by awarding stories that, like the priests he wrote about in his fiction, have “one foot in this world and one in the next.” The contest awards prizes of $500 to the winner, $250 to its runner up, and publication for any additional honorable mentions at the discretion of the editors. The following are our selections for this year:

Winner:

It Was the Last Time It Snowed, Bridget O’Donnell-Muller

We found this standout story incredibly powerful in terms of content, structure, and execution. Its prose is marvelously well knit in every moment, and its compassion is remarkable, especially in light of the intense human tragedy at the story’s heart.

Bridget received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A. in Fiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is an Assistant Editor for Narrative magazine, and has been a Fellow and/or Artist in Residence at The Grunewald Guild, the Vermont Studio Center, the Noepe Center for Literary Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Runner-up:

The Cattle, G.M. Baker

This story grabbed us by the lapels with its gritty realism about the struggles of prehistoric humanity and kept us listening throughout, not only by its unrelenting drama, but thanks to its proto-Psalmist character, Snake–a paleolithic Qoheleth, who movingly voices human suffering and the human spirit without ever risking an excess of sentiment.

G.M. Baker is a writer living in Ottawa. His stories have been published in The Atlantic Advocate, Our Family, Fantasy Book, New England’s Coastal Journal, Storyteller, The Rockford Review, and Solander, the magazine of the Historical Novel Society.

Honorable mentions:

The Light, James Winter
Blind But Now I See, A. Kingston
The Drought, 1983, Christi Nogle
The Seconds After Living Wounds, Samuel Cole

The stories will be published in Dappled Things over the course of this year. Congratulations to all awardees and thanks to all who submitted their stories for consideration. Submissions for the 2019 prize will open in August.

As the literati are dragged kicking and screaming into the technological age they are subjected to the indignity of being published via short story dispenser. “For now, Valledor says the one dispenser in San Francisco has become so popular that people come in off the street just to print out a story…. Valledor encourages it. She says it helps the café find new customers, all through the power of literature.”

What do fairy tales have to do with the faith? “Peter Pan gives us Neverland, a place of eternal youth, where there is no death and nothing ever changes. C. S. Lewis gives us Narnia, where a King brings peace and redemption to a broken land. Tolkien gives us Middle Earth, where evil is fought by those who rise up to protect the good.”

Carla Baricz reflects on her Romanian family’s intergenerational love affair with books. “Among these classics, I also come across Editura Panghira’s prayer book, printed with the blessing of the Romanian Orthodox Church after the revolution and featuring Prayers for Deliverance from Spells, Charms, Curses, and Enemies…. Among all this wealth, one finds Hardy, Trollope, and Woolf, Eco, Jules Verne, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas, Zola, every Romanian author ever published, and so many others, hundreds of others. Here one finds the world.”

Dappled Things is once again accepting poetry submissions! Send us your verses bursting with awe and grandeur, or just make us laugh. Send us your sonnets, your haikus, your odes, your limericks, your free verse, but don’t forget to dip your imagination in the baptismal font first. As always, we are committed to publishing the very best Catholic literature of our times, and we look forward to reading more of your brilliant work.

“And the Lord said to Abram: Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father’s house, and come into the land which I shall show thee.”

Tonight’s Easter Vigil marks my fifteenth year as a Catholic, and approximately my seventeenth as a properly baptized Christian. On that night in 2003 I received the chrism of Confirmation and the consecrated Body of Christ for the first time in a church dedicated to St. Clement of Rome. After Mass, we celebrated in the rectory with a six-pack of local brew and I wondered greatly at what the future would have in store.

I have been thinking for some time about how to describe the change of Catholic conversion. The particulars of the change are different for every convert and catechumen, but it always involves a kind of quantum leap from a lower to a higher state. It is a movement from the outer darkness to the light of hospitality, from ignorance to knowledge, from the wasteland to the land flowing with milk and honey, from death to life.

But it does not always appear to be so. The unending stream of scandals of all sorts is enough to focus the mind on the so-called human element of the Church to the detriment of the divine. There is enough sin and stupidity among Catholics both cleric and lay to fill a library of unhappy memoirs. If there is one thing a cradle Catholic cannot bear it is a convert pointing out the emperor’s public nudity. A large part of the spiritual life is learning how to tolerate the imperfections of others while still retaining the capacity for righteous indignation when it is appropriate. It might be appropriate less often than we sometimes think.

With apologies to Mr. Plato: The kingdom of Heaven is likened unto a cave, where the inhabitants are prisoners chained to a rock and made watch an endless play of shadows on the wall which they mistake for reality; some are freed from their chains and make their way into the upper sunlit world, which they come to understand is The Real. The allegory of the cave is misappropriated by the “brights” and “wokes” of the world, and perhaps also by myself to describe entry into the Church, but to my mind it stands close to the parables of Christ in its vivacity and depth. For most Protestants, the bread and wine are a mere shadow-play of symbols; for the Catholic it is really and truly the Body and Blood. For the ancient pagans, goodness and truth were invisible abstractions; for us they are the incarnate God-Man. For the atheist, familial community is an existential choice of companions; for us it is the Mystical Body of Christ, bound together as a fellowship of adopted sons.

It is also likened unto a homeless man brought to live in a great mansion, or a child raised by beasts brought into human society, or a man born blind given his sight. The allegorical representations of la vita nuova are as endless as creation itself. (The medieval allegorists were fond of animal symbolism in their theology of the sacraments and spiritual life, but I will not torment our readers with those at the moment.)

Or consider the symbol of a dead man returned to life. The dead haunts the land of the living like a ghost, and indeed in the final analysis he is the shadow-play on the wall that believes it is real. This shade pretends to be alive and thinks it knows many things, but it is not until it is restored to its body with all its senses, and its powers of memory and will, that it understands how insubstantial it had been. The downside of being alive is that one can smell unpleasant things and feel pain, but that is a small price to pay for the benefits of bodily life. He has transformed from a shadow-play to the Real Thing that the shadow-play faintly mimicked. He may or may not be ultimately worthy of this transformation, but only time will tell.

The words of Holy Writ in the book long known as the Liber Ecclesiasticus are appropriate for this night when we repeat our baptismal promises: “Never come to him with a heart that hesitates…. Submissive be thy heart, and ready to bear all…. Firm let thy feet be set on the path the Lord has chosen for thee.” The path of the Catholic Faith is the path of life, and though the Church here on earth be fickle, freckled, its pied beauty still points irresistibly to the unspotted Beauty Celestial and Eternal.

“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.”

A happy Easter to all.

There were tiny flower gardens and vegetable patches in the yards. Often there were rows of corn, stunted but still recognizable, a few tomato plants, and always the vegetables were bordered by flowers, often grateful marigolds, all sizes and shades with tier pungent odor. I collected odors in my memory, the one beauty in those drab streets. The odors of geranium leaves, tomato plants, marigolds; the smell of lumber, of tar, of roasting coffee; the smell of good bread and rolls and coffee cake coming from the small German bakeries. Here was enough beauty to satisfy me.

This is how Dorothy Day describes her childhood in her autobiography The Long Loneliness. I’ve been a fan of Day as a human being and a thinker for a while now, but have only recently found time to read her closely in her own words. Right away, I’m impressed by how good a writer she is. Read that quote above again. It crackles with energy. It’s descriptive but not turgid, the language original but not pretentious, and the memory clearly nostalgic but not sentimental. Her talent as a writer is unfairly overshadowed by her personal reputation, which I suppose is a good problem to have, but still, I wish I’d read her work sooner.

One of the themes she builds throughout the book is that of existential loneliness. For instance, she records how she wept at night after moving out of the family house to attend college, and how she felt desolation at not holding her baby brother in her arms each night. Outside of this communion of familial love, she experienced the world as an ugly place and began to use profanity to express her rupture with the world. This last detail, which she is careful to elucidate, shows her sensitivity to the way in which her words and her inner spiritual state are intimately connected. If her life overshadows her art, perhaps we ought not be so hasty to separate the two in the good or the bad.

Later, as a young, eager social activist looking to make a mark on the world and overcome her existential angst, she manages to get arrested. While on a hunger strike in prison, she writes,

I had no sense of being a radical, making protest against a government, carrying on a nonviolent revolution. I could only feel darkness and desolation all around me. The bar of gold which the sun left on the ceiling every morning for a short hour taunted me; and late in the afternoon when the cells were dim and the lights in the corridor were not yet lit, a heartbreaking conviction of the ugliness, the futility of life came over me so that I could not weep but lie there in blank misery.

She speaks of never being free again, knowing the metaphysical prison of ugliness that sin causes. Most interestingly, the experience prompts her to question the very meaning of good and evil. She speaks of it like a wound, an experience that affected her far more deeply than any theoretical pondering about injustice. It was the direct, sensory

experience of evil. And then, the Bible she has asked for finally arrives at her cell. She reads the Psalms, written by a man who knows sorrow and yet expects joy. In the scriptures, she finds, the ugliness of suffering meets beauty. In the meeting, beauty proves to be the stronger of the two, such that it makes even suffering beautiful if it is accepted out of love.

The key to overcoming the long loneliness is not to escape it but to embrace it. To lose your life for love of the beauty all around, particularly the human souls with whom we make our pilgrimage. In this way, even ugliness is redeemed and transformed. In that encounter, which is the very nexus of human existence, is built a true community of persons. The ugliness of a Catholic Worker house with its random alcoholic tenants, its over-eager and under-educated poor, its maniacal would-be street-corner preachers, its smudged off-white curtains in the living room, its simmering pot of mashed potatoes covered in canned mushroom sauce meant to feed army, the willingness of those within to mingle with criminals and vagrants, to write for their simple newspaper simple articles to be sold at street corners for a penny apiece – This is beautiful. The long loneliness is only overcome by a beauty which is truly communal, whose beating heart is pierced for love. Anything else is whistling in the wind.

T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath were two poets who helped me fall in love with poetry when I was a teenager. I’m not alone in my early reverence for these two poets, who on the surface are quite dissimilar.

In addition to being a poet, Plath was an ambitious young woman, cheery in photographs, who went on to be an expert homemaker and mother before her famous suicide. By contrast, Eliot’s public persona was dour and fastidious, and he spent his time in London taking meals with famous writers like Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound. Whereas Plath railed against God along with her dead father in poems, Eliot underwent a religious conversion that inspired his later poems.

And yet these two poets have much in common. They both made the move from America to England, from vocational pursuits to lives of writing. Eliot worked his way from St. Louis to London, from bank clerk to preeminent poet and intellectual. Plath was a pretty, intellectually-gifted young woman who worked for fashion magazines and then became a Fulbright scholar and a serious poet.

Both spent time in mental institutions. Both found troubled British spouses who were likely unfaithful to them, and both obtained divorces. Both wrote verse passionate enough to move teenagers, a trait they share with Dylan and Springsteen.

I loved them both for their powerful words, for expressing painful emotions in kaleidoscopic free verse, for their attempts to exorcise the demons of mental illness with their pens.

Furthermore, they both introduced me to an incredibly beautiful poem (sung as a taunt by a sea spirit) from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

No spoilers for The Tempest, but this verse is sung to someone who believes his father has drowned. Plath alludes to the poem in “Full Fathom Five” as she struggles to come to terms with her father’s death. Eliot includes the line “[t]hose are pearls that were his eyes” twice in “The Waste Land.” This is a beautiful and frightful image—of impermanent eyes replaced in their sockets by strong, lovely pearls, and of bones with decaying flesh replaced by gorgeous coral.

One reason people write poetry (or attempt any endeavor) is in hopes of achieving a kind of immortality. At their best, poets take mundane details of life and turn them into permanent decorations. Another quality Eliot and Plath both share is that they’re both dead, and yet we remember them.

Poems, pearls, and coral do not last forever, but they can last longer than a human life. Shakespeare, Eliot, and Plath (and Dylan and Springsteen) perhaps hoped to achieve immortality through verse. We do not have these poets with us in the flesh, but we have words they wrote long ago. I’m grateful for the survival of the poems I’ve loved, and yet their existence benefits us and not the ones who wrote them.

Our hope is in more than memories. We hope in one who came not only to suffer with us as the poets do, but to end our suffering. As we remember the Resurrection this season, we hope for a sea-change—an exchange of mortality for immortality. We hope for a new world that will be stronger than pearl, more beautiful than coral, and stranger than poetry.

Looking for something to spark a love for Latin? Try these Baroque Anagrams on for size. “On the last page of a collection of his anagrams, the author rearranges his own name to ask serione haec laudas? (‘You actually like this stuff?’). He then puts that question to his anticipated critic and urges him to criticize the collection, not praise it, because critics and poets don’t like each other anyway. That’s the kind of irony the Baroque period has in common with Hellenistic Greek.”

Do philosophers make bad husbands? The awkward relationship of Regine Olsen and Søren Kierkegaard would seem to argue yes. “Kierkegaard wanted it both ways, to be Regine’s spiritual husband or comrade while Fritz handled day-to-day duties, which never, it turned out, included children. He wrote that he and Fritz would walk arm in arm with Regine in heaven. Fritz said No, I don’t think so.”

The Easter Bunny is coming soon, but beware his medieval kin.