By Rebecca Schwab

This year’s Russ MacDonald writing contest for graduate students at WVU had three categories: Fiction, judged by William (Matt) Haas; non-fiction, judged by Professor Ellessa High; and poetry, judged by author Michael Blumenthal. For the Fiction prize, the winner was Kori Frazier, who graduated this May. Her winning story is titled “The Girl from Chippewa Lake,” which was written for her thesis under Professor Emily Mitchell, committee chair. Here is an excerpt from her story:

Penny started to tell him where to turn, but before she could get the words out, he already had. She seemed surprised by this, like the place was a private thing to her, that no one else had ever touched, and he had somehow cracked it open. They passed through a housing development where there were once patches of pine trees, and Lyle was momentarily lost. She told him to pull over in a ditch next to a metal fence, across from an empty sign that used to mark the park entrance, the logo of the Indian in the headdress stripped off, leaving the steel frame behind.

“They arrest people for trespassing here,” she said matter of factly, like she was giving a tour. Lyle cringed, imagined the phone call Maddy could receive that evening. Your husband got arrested breaking into a shuttered amusement park. But then he pictured the park the day they’d played, the blur of red painted steel and sandy roads, and couldn’t help himself. He followed her.

They walked the length of the road until it dead-ended into the fence. Penny scaled it with the agility of a gymnast, and while Lyle could feel his weight unbalancing against the links of the metal, he felt a certain exhilaration letting his body fall to the ground, like climbing trees as a child, the thrill of jumping. Straight ahead was the lime colored ticket booths, no cars waiting, no cashiers. They walked straight in.

The park was almost exactly as Lyle remembered it, but ghostly and empty. An enormous ballroom – one of northern Ohio’s finest – was still there, waiting in vain for girls in frothy dresses to arrive with their dates. A layer of moss had begun to spread like a rash across the singled roof. He could see the Big Dipper rollercoaster in the distance, remembered riding it with Maddy, her wild screams, how she was hoarse the next day and the two of them spent the afternoon in bed drinking lemon tea with honey. Without the roar of the car wheels, the screams of park patrons, the steel ghost of the ramps and curves made it look like a building under construction. “Come on,” Penny said.

They walked through the barren midway, past the grin of the Fun House clown’s chipping face, the staring carousel horses, the white pavilion entrance to the Dipper, the cars stalled on the track. It was the first time Lyle had seen it without a line stretching out from the entranceway. In the distance he could hear the lapping of the lake on the sand.

“There!” Penny said, and grabbed his hand. She’d been scanning the horizon of the park since they arrived, looking for something. She dragged him behind her as though she was a child herself, ravenous to go on some ride, devour the park. Finally, she came to a stop in front of a rotating coaster of rounded cars, the ride’s sign – “THE ‘BUG’” – dangling sidewise from a steel entranceway.

Lyle watched Penny run up to the boarding platform, dragging her hand over the red railing in a way that seemed dutiful, reverent, like she was trying to gaze out through a smudged window, stuck halfway here and halfway there, wherever there was to her. Then, she climbed into one of the cars and settled back, staring up at the sky with her legs stretched out across the seats, and she let go of a long sigh, a thick blanket of relief.

Lyle didn’t know what she was thinking about as she lay there. But he knew that whatever it was, it couldn’t have been much different from what was on his mind on the drive up. She probably would have been nine or ten when she first came here, the same age he was his first time, and Lyle knew, although he’d forgotten the place for so long, that there were many other things he’d left behind here. Maybe he was meant to come back with her – to find something in the dead park that was still intact. He figured it was the same for her. Lyle left her alone and walked across the park, past hamburger stands and boarded up game booths where people could throw plastic horseshoes and win goldfish and stuffed bears, the prizes long since given away.

He’d walked the length of the midway when he approached a clearing. The outdoor stage was up ahead, just the way he remembered it – here was the guitar, the lead singer, here were the drums. Here were the letters that spelled out CHIPPEWA in an arch across the top, already starting to fade. He climbed onstage, found the exact spot where he stood as bass player, and looked out across the lawn where the audience used to gather. He didn’t remember the show itself, not much. What remained clear to him was what happened after: cruising the grounds with Maddy, that moment on the Big Dipper, holding onto her as they rode The Bug – maybe in the same car where Penny was lying now – because Maddy was so small and scared she’d go flying out of the ride. That was before everything went bad, before she really did fly off, and Lyle kept holding on.

Already, the grass was curling up from the ground, the once manicured tree’s branches twisting. He tried to picture this place in five, ten years –left to nature’s devices, nascent trees creeping up around the steel skeletons, until it all became a giant forest, blotting out the sun, the buildings rusting, rotting, caving in. Maybe, Lyle thought, that’s just the way it is. You have to dig down deep to get at whatever is still there, let it rise up from the ruins of rot and dirt. But it never comes up the same, and instead of taking you back, it leaves you with two choices. Throw the thing out and go on, or hold onto it, watch it crumble and corrode, and keep going round and round.

Over the top of the old Ferris wheel, the sun was moving across the sky. It was almost four o’clock; Maddy would be home in an hour, wonder where he was, and maybe hope against hope that he’d gone out looking for a job. He’d never make it back before her now. Lyle didn’t know what he’d tell her, and decided not to think about it – a good story would come to him. Instead, he made his way back to The Bug and sat on a wet park bench, studying the quiet smile on Penny’s face. Maybe a memory was drifting across the lids of her eyes, a jumbled, free association of thoughts. What he did know was this: it was the kind of peace she needed, that for just a moment, she was in the right place. He hoped that he was, too.

Heather Frese, a fiction MFA who just completed her second year in the program, received an honorable mention for her story “An Open Letter Written to Patricia Balance (and Her Stupid Fat-Headed Son Ronnie?).” Emily Watson, who also completed the MFA program at WVU this May, won the non-fiction prize for her essay “Sweetie, Sweetie,” written for Professor Kevin Oderman’s English 618. This is an excerpt from her essay:

In Amy Cutler’s painted world, there are miles of braids. They harness chairs to heads, tie bundled burdens together, tow houses through snow, form rope swings and leashes, are wound onto giant blonde, brunette and auburn spools while the women sleep. Over and over, I see images of paired girls, younger than the grown-up women in most of Cutler’s paintings, with identical outfits, their four pigtails seamlessly braided into two ropes binding them together. The distance between these girls can grow with each year but they remain tied to one another—only in one sparse graphite drawing are the long plaits cut, twisting about the sisters’ feet like snakes on the invisible floor.

In Living Room Tangle, they wear dresses very like those that Lauren and I wore when we both wanted to be Betsy Ross on the Fourth of July. They are red, with a small print and long, tight sleeves and knee-length skirts. They wear white bib aprons, black Mary Janes. The twin on the left bends backward reaching up to grab her sister’s elbow. The twin on the right curls her head into her chest, grips a shared pigtail in hand. Each girl struggles to manipulate the other into a different position—they are tied too close for comfort. The museum catalogue calls it “an endless loop like a Möbius strip.” The girls can only twist their braids and their bodies so they face one another, or so they look the other way. Their braided binds are not long enough to let them stand side by side.

I prefer Two Girls and a Potbelly Stove. It’s painted on wood, cut in the shape of a house with a Mansard roof and chimney. The stove belches a loopy cloud of bluish smoke. Cutler says, “Usually when there are birds in my paintings, they represent thoughts,” and here there are three black birds flying or falling down the chimney, four more dead in the corner, and one crushed at the girls’ feet. There may be another; there is a dark shape clasped tight in the taller girl’s hands.

These sisters wear pleated yellow dresses with pointy white collars and crisp sashes, white stockings and brown lace-up shoes. Their dark braids draw their faces together and they seem to lean in for a kiss. The one without the clasped bird-thought holds her sister’s shoulders. For each girl, one sturdy shoe is rooted to the golden floor; the other is lifted, trying to step away, but resigned at last to dancing.

Sarah Einstein received an honorable mention for her essay “Fat,” also written for Professor Kevin Oderman’s 618 class. Lauren Reed won the poetry category with her group of poems titled “A Lot of Noticing,” written for Professor Mary Ann Samyn’s 618 poetry class. Lauren also graduated from the program this May. Here are a few of Reed’s winning poems:

The Museum

In the Ming Dynasty,
a woman is a series of bird nests, some careful
balance between sentiment and architecture.
Each bronze figurine takes flight (despite me):
bird with backward head, broken wing
bird, bird with rusted beak.

Later I took a photo when no one was looking –
four dead cardinals in a row, their tarsus’
tied together with tiny bits of string;
and all the wonder in the world can’t
make me okay with their being displayed.

Dispersion

Winter’s naked trees cut through the Blue Ridge
sudden sunset.

I miss the Rappahannock on my ankles,
Virginia rushing through my toes.

This I can’t ignore (like your kiss goodbye):
all the hills are lying in the distance,

like dozens of sleeping women.

Night Time

Try to stay calm; sometimes the whole thing is a draft.

Days end every now and then. Makeup runs down the sink:
I see watercolors where there’s merely colored water,

but what poem could this line be for?

Continents form in shadows of dampness on my sleeve;
I name them and their lochs for my people.

None of it may be very good, but

it’s out of me now
the way I first heard it.

Charity Gingerich, an MFA student who recently finished her second year in the program, received an honorable mention for poems written in both Professor Jim Harms’s and Professor Mary Ann Samyn’s 618 workshops. Congratulations to all of these recently-graduated alumni and current students, and thank you to the judges and professors who donated their time and expertise to these students’ work.