Meeting CWW’s 2015 contests winners at the May 14 CWW Awards Banquet and hearing them read from their winning work was an honor and inspirational for those who attended the event. CWW plans to introduce the winners to those who didn’t attend the banquet and post part or all of their winning works on this blog. We begin the introductions with Hannah Nies.
Hannah, whose piece “The Girl in the Moon” won the Essay Award for Young Writers, is a student at Waunakee High School in Waunakee. In selecting Hannah’s essay, the judge wrote:
“Many writers struggle to capture the essence of a city or state or geographical region in the hope of giving their readers the coveted ‘sense of place.’ Even if we’re not writing, most of us try to understand and connect with the places that form our lives. The need for a sense of place is so common that we seldom stop to ask if it’s a good idea.
“That’s the question that Hannah Nies presents to us in her essay ‘The Girl in the Moon.’ As a young girl, the circumstances of Hannah’s family life made it difficult for her to identify with a particular home. This rootlessness grew into a disturbing theme of her life until a fateful encounter with a prominent celestial body changed her perspective. Perhaps, as Hannah suggests, our need for a sense of place may distract us from life’s wider possibilities.”
Here is Hannah’s statement about the award, followed by her winning essay.
“I’m very honored to have been selected by the Council of Wisconsin Writers for this award. It’s very important to encourage young people to write, and share their experiences. Through the written word, we can reach across boundaries to exchange shared experiences, and if the future is to have writers, we need to give young writers as many opportunities as possible to improve themselves and share their writings. Thanks again to the Council of Wisconsin Writers for the opportunity!”
Girl in the Moon
I am five years old, and I sit on the couch, staring down at my sad-looking feet pointing towards the floor. My mom tells me it is 5:00, time to go over to my father’s house, and I start to cry. I am twelve years old, and at 5:00 I head out the door with a scowl on my face. I am sixteen years old, and I joke with my mom as I walk down the street. Sixteen years old, and I am already used to living out of my backpack. As John Muir wrote in his essay, Tree Ride, “Our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings–many of them not so much”(Muir). My little journeys didn’t consist of much, just the 75 steps it took to get from my mom’s house to my father’s.
I have never been the type of person to pick one place to completely imbue with myself, to know perfectly, with an encyclopedic understanding of every nook and cranny. Perhaps this is because I am used to uprooting myself every few days, never having time to make more than a shallow connection to any place. I like to think instead that I leave a little bit of myself everywhere I go, like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs so that they know exactly where they’ve been. I have an approximate knowledge of many places. It’s more fun than it sounds.
When I was younger, I wasn’t as accepting of this as I am today. I didn’t like not having a place that was wholly mine, but now I see it as a blessing of sorts. If there is nowhere that is completely my own, I can be equally at home everywhere I go. This is especially useful when travelling. Last spring, my family took a trip to New York City. Although my mom had bought several maps and guidebooks before we left, she had quite a difficult time finding her way around the city. My stepmom had similar troubles, and this lead to no end of stress for the first couple of days. Several times, we had to ask for directions from friendly pedestrians, or I sat and googled directions while they argued over the map. This continued until they decided to let me navigate. I had us places we needed to be in under twenty minutes, partly because I wasn’t afraid to ask people for directions, and partly because after only two days I was already more at home in New York than they would ever be.
As a child, I often felt displaced, even homeless. I thought that I was somehow less than a person because I didn’t have somewhere to call my home. But I didn’t let other people see this. If you asked anyone who knew me, they would have said that I was a cheerful kid who didn’t let anything get to her. My life looked pretty okay from the outside, and from the inside, it seemed perfectly normal. How could it not? I have no siblings and as a twelve year old girl with bad hair, bad teeth, and self-esteem issues, there was no way I was about to ask my friends if they sometimes felt like strangers in their own home.
A few weeks ago, when we were discussing these essays in class, I joked with my friend that I didn’t really have a sense of place. We fell into a series of quips about existential despair (so, you know, normal stuff for us teenagers) and eventually, as a completely random joke, I asked if she ever got the urge to go outside in the middle of the night and start screaming at the moon. She laughed it off, of course, and so did I, but something about the idea had an odd appeal.
As John Muir wrote, “Nature has always something rare to show us”(Muir). The night I went out to scream at the moon was cold and clear, and the stars shone like chips of ice in the sky. The moon was almost perfectly full. I bundled up in a thick woolen coat and scarf and made my way to the backyard of a friend. She and her family were at a wedding that night, so it was just me. Her house is in the middle of farmland, so there was very little light pollution.
I went out to her backyard and found a convenient place to stand, out of the wind and so that I could see the moon clearly. I turned my face up to the sky, threw my arms towards the stars, and screamed. It sounds absolutely insane, but I felt a sense of euphoria come over me as I stared at the sky. And right then and there, I decided that I didn’t need a specific place to call home. I make my own place in the world all by myself. I lowered my arms, looked up at the moon, and decided that I was enough.
Works Cited
Muir, John. “A Wind-storm in the Forests.” A Wind-storm in the Forests. Sierra Club, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2016.