Third Year Winner: The Epigraph's Thread

WRIT 3730, Substantive Editing. CD: Dunja Baus.

Abstract

“The Epigraph’s Thread” is an ambitious, poetic, and experimental essay that simultaneously crafts its narrative in terms intimately personal and, through its guiding metaphor and approach, broadly universal. On the surface, the ambiguous narrative tells the tale of the author’s unexplained attachment to a sweater that eventually leaves nothing behind but a thread. The piece, however, reveals a meta-, multi-layered narrative imbued with symbolism and universal truths alongside an exploration of the sometimes inexplicable nature of human existence and attachment: whether the narrative’s details are literal, symbolic, or veering into the terrain of magic realism, its first-person narrator presents events through a subjectivity that foregrounds emotion and implicitly signals its driving focus. The essay beautifully constructs its tone and pace, offering a study in restraint, rhetorical flourishes, and true precision in design and intent. These combine to create a narrative world that reaches out to the reader in sharing a thematic/emotive meaning even when traditional narrative detail is here elliptical. If words at times may be a pretext to meaning, and that instead a bond can exist beyond language to join us together, “The Epigraph’s Thread” shows through language how, despite its limits, these meanings can unite us.