The Looking Distance and Our 2023 Short List

A great ‘voice’ is merely a great voice. Maybe it modulates. Softens or moves up the register. Terrific. Now what? The problem with voice is that you work so hard to find it. Then you find it and there is no where else for it to be. No longer searching for voice, you end up parodying it. Voice becomes tied to personality and now your personality is writing the poem or fleshing out the story. The best writing is when that voice is still ripening, and still seeking its chords. Every book should be a debut, even if it is your tenth.

Most of us speak with our eyes. We say what we see. We want the reader to see what we see. But the reader is not watching. The reader is listening. She is listening the way dragons sleep, with one eye open to the words, and one eye closed to the outside world.

The writer’s looking distance is the reader’s hearing distance. What is happening in that space between the writer and the moment? Too often, even accomplished writers set up a stationary camera on some sort of weird tripod thing. The eye is fixed, with no attempt to move in relation to the oncoming subject. Sure, one remedy is the slide show or episodic writing. Instead of one camera you set up a different stationary camera every few graphs or so. But the looking distance is still an artifact and instead of scene you create a diorama.

Is the eye three feet away from the subject or a hundred feet, or angled up or down or out? It needs all these looking distances to be interacting, yet without omniscience.

One of my favorite debut collections to win a prize this year was Mary Lynn Reed’s Phantom Advances (Split Lip Press). The title refers to the shutter clicks a photographer uses to advance a roll of film without developing it. Reed’s eye is everywhere, but no where is she interpreting or judging. She’s too engaged in a changing moment—in bowling a strike, getting a high and tight at the barber’s, running away from the love (the voice) she’s seeking.

Our 2023 Short List is really only a Shorter List. The original Short List was toooooo Long because there is always so much we liked in what we didn’t choose. Congratulations to the authors for coming this far. Congratulations for your imaginative story telling, your poems fighting and singing for their need to exist, your essays that curl us into the shadows. The writing is tidy, and the voices are still discovering themselves, sure and not sure. Final decisions will be made before the holidays for the books in our 2024-2025 cohort. The list below is not ranked.

PROSE:

1. William Greene, The Devil You Don’t, novel

2. Jane Snyder, Brooches and Toys for Your Delight, stories

3. Emily May, Some Girls, essays

4. Nathaniel Eddy, Techniques for Breathing Underwater, stories

5. Johnny Payne, Fish Head, stories

6. Halina Duraj, Minor Surgeries, stories

7. Michelle Herman, Animal Behavior, essays

POETRY:

1. J. Thelin, Play

2. Esperanza Cintrón, On Men

3. Carolyn Oliver, Archangel Days

4. Tim Moder, How Taffy the Light Becomes

5. Fred Dale, A Boy’s Pirating Eye

6. Gigi Marks, Fragments in Ordinary Time

7. Laton Carter, The Woman with a Window Where Her Heart Should Be

8. Amy Spade, Uncertain Serenade

9. Matt Hohner, An Indifferent Sky

CHAPBOOK:

1. Bill Hollands, I want to be Clear, poetry

2. Shannon Waite, Notes Left on the Nightstand, prose

3. Ashley Elizabeth Evans, Red Line, poetry

4. Cindy King, Hallucigenalia, poetry