First Year Winner: Bring Me the Wind

WRIT 1003, Professional Writing: An Introduction. CD: Jon Sufrin.

Abstract

“Bring Me the Wind” falls into the category of “personal essay,” drawing on both autobiographical and critical material to explore an epiphany, a turning point in the writer’s life. This vivid and poignant piece of prose, both lyrical and haunting, confronts the difficult topic of child abuse with elegance and restraint: “In my eleventh year, I had become a child of dark places and even darker secrets.” Yet the writer refuses to “remain a silent victim of neglect and depravity,” doomed to repeat inherited patterns, and courageously elects to use her painful reality as a springboard for her own fashioning: “Crawling as I was through the dark did not mean I was destined to remain there. I could not fathom what my future would hold and yet I knew it would hold me.” This text, then, is not merely a “survivor’s narrative” but the testament of a “metamorphosis” that courageously “pierce[s] the horizon of possibility” by defying the power of a painful past and affirming its faith in the future.

The adjudicators have noted the marvelous use of alliteration to control the pace of the text: the heavier consonants slowing down and giving weight to the story, contrasting with the liberating forces of the natural elements – light, space, wind, and grass – in which the writer finds her strength. They have also been conscious of the intimacy she creates by using her voice in several ways: to comfort herself, as in “never mind, child, there was nothing to be done” or to encourage herself: “Survive. Survive until a new reality could take shape.” She also addresses the reader directly: “Do not mourn his passing. Learn from him.”

The road between where she began life and where she stands today is worth celebrating.