Feeling Festive

Most of the time, my daily gratitude list is filled with reliable generalities: warm sunshine, cool breezes, my sweet family, good health. But today my reasons to feel grateful and happy and large and free are wonderfully specific ones. Here they are:

1.  My entry was selected as winner of the Nonfiction Prize in The Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest, which is sponsored by the Renegade Writers' Collective.

2.  The nonfiction entries were judged by Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams. I feel inspired and humbled and a bit holy when I read her work, and I certainly never expected that she would ever be reading mine.

3.  Green Mountains Review is going to publish my piece, "Home," online.

4.  Phoenix Books is going to give me an honorarium. I have never before received an honorarium for a piece of creative writing. I could probably get used to it, though.

5.  In September, I will have the privilege and the thrill of attending the book festival in Burlington, Vermont and reading my work at the Fletcher Free Library!

While I'm there,  I will have the chance to see and hear Leslie Jamison and a lot of other seriously good writers. Getting to hang out with Fiction Prize winner Mary Wasmuth and Poetry Prize winner Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach would be a real treat, too.

Gratitude. Happiness. The specific and wonderful list is done. Please excuse me while I go off into a corner, where I will pinch myself a few dozen times to make sure that today is not a dream. I am leaving you with a picture of me in front of the place I write about in "Home." That little girl had no idea she would grow up to become a renegade writer.

from the collection of Susan Gaissert