GPR 2021 Awards
by Mark C Watney
We were determined to go to print this year — After having to skip 2020. And no Plague, Insurrection, riots, or economic crashes were going to forestall us this time. But we had one problem which every literary journal loves to have: too many submissions. So the GPR 2021 editors had to work hard to whittle down over 200 pages of poetry, art, fiction, and reflections to under 100 pages. (And we had to write some very nice rejection letters). But even though the editors picked the finalists, they asked me, their advisor, to pick the best entries in two categories: Best Poet and Best Reflection (on the theme, Unprecedented). Here then are the results:
I. Best Artist (Cover Contest Winner): Tiffany Ellen Adams
I have the paper torn and off-center, because we are not whole in this life on earth, we are all slightly torn and shifted.
Tiffany designed one of the most striking covers in GPR history, and the editors were honored to place her “slightly torn” art on our front cover. In her reflection here, she also makes an interesting connection between her medium (charcoal) and this Unprecedented year: “I chose charcoal because it is a medium that is always changing and unpredictable. You can smear charcoal on the page, but it will not stay in the same place; you can even spray it with a mat fixative, but the chances of the piece still smearing is very high. It is like life: you have things set, but then something can come out of the nowhere and smear it.”
II. Best Poet: Johanna Beck
I will journey to the paths of zapping thought and try to glimpse you in the firing of a neuron
My fellow English profs and I were impressed with both the quality and quantity of Joanna’s poetry this year. Her work often evokes a yearning for something hard to describe, but she leaves striking images behind her as clues for us to follow, like a “footprint” on an asteroid, or a crater with a “tendril of your presence,” or “frozen dew on the willow tree, that tinkles in the breeze.” Give her work here a careful read — there’s gold images in them thar verses!
III. Best Reflection on “Unprecedented” Rev. Jonathan David Faulkner (SC ’13).
500 000 image-bearers gone…God where are you in the silence of that number?
This cry to God by an SC Theology graduate made my hair stand up. Jonathon’s cry recognizes that the over half-million dead this past year are not just bodies, not just Americans, but “image-bearers.” But how can “image-bearers” of God die? It is a rhetorical question of course. But still, “How?” he asks. “How does one reset after a year like this?” Read and meditate on this work.
IV. Honorable Mentions
There is gold in this little journal! Here are just a few more nuggets we don’t want you to miss:
In Alicia de Haan’s “It Happened in Our Time,” she tells us how Frodo and Gandalf have inspired her in their struggle against the darkness of Mordor: “Like Frodo and his friends, I have been shaken out of my small sphere and sent tumbling, scrabbling desperately for something to cling to. Frodo’s words, ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ could not capture our thoughts more perfectly.”
In “How Grace is Like the Wind,” Rebekah Parish describes God’s Grace in this time as the wind she saw in a film “whipping wildly through a field of grass — you can see the effect of the wind, but not the wind itself. Grace is the same way. There is a certain wildness about it that cannot be controlled.”
In “Savior,” Nathan Lusk (SC ’12) asks us a hard, hard question after the political and social divisions within Christianity this past year: “Has Good News ever come at the end of a gun? Did all the conquest and converts Really bring the Kingdom, Or just the power and glory?” Please hear the question.
And in Corrssia Perry’s “Why Black Lives Matter,” she warns us that “There is a fire in the African-American village.” She admits that her words here may offend many, but concludes by simply asking us to listen to these words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” (Math. 5.6).
And finally, who else but Joshua Mathews — a Sterling graduate teaching Shakespeare in China and Homer in far-western Kansas — could describe for us what the “Holy Ghost” feels like? He can’t of course. But as a struggling poet, he must try: “Surely this is what Holy Spirit feels like, For your touch hovers over my ghostly waters And fills all of my movements with trembling commitments And spirit-shook humble limbs.”
Thanks, Josh!
We tried to collect as many different voices as we could in this GPR 2021. And the voices we tried to collect are not the voices of those in power. They are not the voices of policy. They are the voices of those who “hunger and thirst” for righteousness, beauty, and truth.
