Oregon Humanities

Announcing the Winner and Runners-Up of the First O. Hm. Essay Contest

Thanks to all of you from across the state who shared your moments of insight or surprise in the first annual O. Hm. essay contest from Oregon Humanities.

The winning essay, “Laramie Scarecrows,” was written by Jedidiah Chavez, a visual artist and writer based in Portland. Chavez’s essay was selected by Oregon Humanities magazine editorial advisory board member Debra Gwartney, the author of Live Through This, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010.

In her judge’s comments, Gwartney writes, “The piece has a quiet potency that builds as the writer explores an ordinary moment that turns dark and even sinister. . . . The horror isn’t oversold, but is allowed to emerge organically from the details and syntax. I was very moved by this brief piece, well shaped and honestly told.”

Gwartney selected Tim Gillespie’s “Mark Twain in East L.A.” and Susan Pandian’s “Self-Fulfilling Expectations of violence” as runners-up.

Read all three essays below, and please watch for information about the 2011 O. Hm. Essay Contest in the fall issue of Oregon Humanities magazine and on our website later this year.

Laramie Scarecrows

by Jedidiah Chavez

In October 1998, I was an undergraduate studying art history at Colorado State University, in the small college town of Fort Collins, Colorado. To make ends meet, I waited tables at a pancake house. While clearing a table early one morning—October 9, to be exact—I scanned a discarded newspaper and read the headline “Student Viciously Beaten and Tied to Fence.” Matthew Shepard, a young gay man from Wyoming, had been brutally attacked in Laramie a few nights earlier.

I lived only a couple of blocks from the hospital in Fort Collins where Matthew was taken. For three days I drove by the twenty-four-hour vigils and watched the throngs of reporters who had descended upon our sleepy college town. I maneuvered through the news crews to get to my apartment, only to witness the same scene on television. Matthew’s story, and ultimately his life, slowly unfolded, sending a ripple of mourning across the country. He died from severe head trauma on October 12, 1998.

Matthew’s murder marked the end of my childhood. He was close to my age—twenty—when he was beaten, tied to a fence, and left for dead. When I think about his body lying crumpled and battered underneath the vast Wyoming sky, I realize that could have been me. We were so much alike. He and I came from upper-class families. We were both students. We both lived in rural areas, and we shared the idealistic belief that people are inherently good.

After Matthew died, the vigils stopped, the television news crews disappeared, and an unlikely sense of optimism pervaded the town. Federal hate crime legislation that included sexual orientation was passed (by President Obama, more than a decade later), town hall meetings were held, scholarship funds were created, and I heard my grandmother say the word “gay” for the first time. I know that these are good things, but I still feel like I’m living in the shadow of Matthew’s death and those of countless others. In 2008, Angie Zapata was viciously bludgeoned to death simply because of how others perceived her gender identity. She lived only twenty-five miles from the hospital where Matthew died. She lived twenty-five miles from a place I used to call home. I don’t live there anymore.

I doubt I will ever feel safe living in a small town again. I know that this is an irrational fear. I know that statistics say I am in more danger living in a city, but I moved to a city to hide behind the sprawling high-rises, the illusion of cultural refinement, and the façade of safety in numbers. I moved away from the wooden farm fences that are scattered across the Midwestern landscape I grew up in because they reminded me of crosses. I was tired of seeing them in my peripheral vision while driving along deserted highways late at night.

Mark Twain in East L.A.

by Tim Gillespie

Thirteen years old, I’m on my elbows reading in a circle of lamplight on a warm spring evening, the low thunder of the freeway down the hill seeping through the window screen, ceaseless traffic always streaming somewhere else.

But I am already somewhere else: transported to a sleepy medieval Austrian village at the far edge of what I can imagine by Mark Twain’s last fiction, The Mysterious Stranger.

My eighth grade teacher has suggested the book.

I am still transported by that text and that act.

My old school photo of Mr. Donald Seif’s eighth grade class of 1962-3 at Fremont Elementary in Alhambra, California, on the East L.A. border, shows thirty-six kids, a diverse urban mix. A tough teaching assignment. I know; I’m a teacher now myself. But in my memory, that room was always abuzz with learning.

Mr. Seif was enthusiastic, tough, interesting, approachable, and funny. He convinced me algebra was beautiful. His U.S. history curriculum connected the past to the lively argument of current events: the Cuban missile crisis, the fire hoses and police dogs of Birmingham, Alabama. He posed philosophical questions for us to write and talk about. In that classroom, our old flip-lid wooden school desks were bolted to the floor. But all year, I felt unmoored by Mr. Seif.

His greatest provocation was encouraging me to read Twain’s unfinished novella, a personal recommendation for his class bookworm. Mr. Seif knew I was an avid Twain reader who’d already gobbled down Tom Sawyer, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Huck Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee. Too callow to catch most of the deeper drifts, I thought these novels grand entertainments. But Mr. Seif’s copy of The Mysterious Stranger was something entirely different—disturbing, stimulating, a revelation. Transported from my L.A. window to that Austrian village, I identified with the lederhosened schoolboys of the story, lost in the excitement and disquietude of visits from the mysterious stranger who challenged their—and my—youthful certainties. Twain railed against religious platitudes, conformity, factory owners, warmongers, and moral self-righteousness employed to protect power and wealth. For this dutiful altar boy, these ideas were troubling and thrilling. I felt—for the first time, I think—truly disturbed by ideas. Twain’s tale gave me the unnerving and enlivening notion that I could question the world I’d received.

Decades later, I’m still a bit stunned by Mr. Seif’s act of recommending to me such a subversive and potentially controversial book—and grateful for his risk and confidence. Twain’s courage as a writer was matched by Mr. Seif’s courage as a teacher, admired figures willing to challenge and discomfort their admirers.

Years later, a teacher myself, I have been buoyed by this example. I learned that a teacher—that sort of mysterious stranger who enters young lives for a short period—can have confidence in his students’ capacity to tackle challenging texts, question truisms, think past the low thunder of convention and the window screens of their comfortable rooms. And travel somewhere else.

Self-Fulfilling Expectations of Violence

by Susan Pandian

On a late rainy night in Portobello, Scotland, I was turning back from a long walk on the beach when I saw a man coming down the steps that led up to the road. He turned, saw me, and started running toward me.

By the orange glow of the sodium street lights I could see that he was about twice my size, dressed like a biker in leather boots and jacket, with tattoos over his bald head and hands. The light glinted off the steel piercings in his ears, lips, and eyebrows.

The friends with whom I was staying had told me the area was rough, that it was foolish to go alone on a walk on the beach late at night. It was too far to run for the road, and I carried no weapons. As I watched him pound across the sands, I saw Death running toward me.

He stumbled to a halt in front of me. “Have you seen my mum?” he asked, his voice shaking.

After I managed to squeak out, “No, I haven’t seen your mum,” he turned and ran back the way he had come, the chains on his jacket jingling. That moment gave me a disturbing epiphany. I realized that if I had had a gun, I would have used it.

I had been raised in a nonviolent family of Quakers and Conscientious Objectors, and admired Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But in Portobello I realized how American I was; that no matter how much I might mouth the values of nonviolence, I had been raised to think of guns as a culturally appropriate option in extreme situations. The American Revolution. Shootout at the OK Corral. _Dirty Harry. _

I have been traveling to Britain for forty years—as a student, researcher, teacher, and visitor—and always admired the fact that until recently policemen never carried guns. The assumption that problems could be resolved nonviolently, that carrying guns provoked more violence than it prevented, seemed like a sane, rational policy. In Portobello my admiration multiplied. What kind of cultural courage does it take to declare peace on the world? To insist on an alternative to escalating levels of destruction?

In Portobello I experienced a deeper commitment to nonviolence. Perhaps sometimes fighting is necessary, but being raised with the expectation of battle will not create a more peaceful world. As the world becomes more crowded, with fewer resources and more strangers, we need to develop cultural solutions to the conflicts that await us. The strangers at the end of the sands will appear; and when they run toward us, we need to be prepared to meet them using strategies that maximize peace rather than war.

31 August 2010 | Permalink | Comments? (0 so far)