The Big Brick Review

Building on the narrative of our lives...one brick at a time.

 

ISSUE 5: 2025 ESSAY CONTEST WINNERS

1st Place ($500) What I Need, What I Don’t by Joy Underhill I'M DRIVING 300 miles upstate wearing a gauze bandage, bringing home a bag of my sister’s hair. Meadowbrook, Huntington, Cuomo Bridge. The exits fall behind me before I stop in Monticello, where the March snow is still piled high, the edges melting. At last, I feel the pull of home, a place of broad lakes and unplanted fields, three weeks behind New York City....read more

2nd Place ($300) White Cloverine Brand Salve by Jeanne Brinkman Grinnan MONEY WASN'T EASY to come by when I was a kid.  Collecting empty soda bottles for the 2-cent deposit on each was practically unheard of.  We rarely had soda and, if we did, my mother redeemed the bottles herself.  Even those few pennies were important to the family budget...read more

3rd Place ($100) The Fourth Way by Lee McAvoy WE'RE ON OUR way to Indian Echo Caverns, a Central Pennsylvania tourist attraction, twenty minutes from Harrisburg. I’m in the backseat of my oldest sister, Mary’s, 1978 Datsun B-210. Mary’s driving and my second oldest sister, Jill, sits next to her. Mary has been married and living in rural Pennsylvania for three years. Jill moved to a city apartment in Harrisburg a year ago. I’ve been living with Jill and her boyfriend, Dave, for one week...read more

Honorable Mention ($50) Salt Potatoes by Laurie Ward AS I PLACED my carry-on bag on the conveyor belt, I knew it would raise eyebrows. The X-ray screen lit up with its secrets: a cluster of small, round shapes and sixteen elongated tubes. A TSA agent held up my bag. “This yours?” I nodded....read more

Honorable Mention ($50) Orphan by Meredith Doyle WE DROVE NORTH, skirting Lake Ontario, having marked several potential wedding venues along the route that sat within our modest budget. Our first stop led us to a lonely town – little more than a dusty main street with a vacant café and a deserted secondhand clothing store...read more

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When Tiny Lights (a journal of personal narrative) was still being published, I looked forward each year to the annual contest issue, not just for the incredible nonfiction essays—but also for the small letter that editor Susan Bono would include as a foreword. She always shared something homey and insightful and cleverly written.

Flash forward to now; here; me. Another contest issue to roll out and (since it’s been quite a few years) I forgot about the small letter part! What do the readers of The Big Brick Review need to hear from me that they are not already getting in this year's essays from the talented pens of Joy Underhill, Jeanne Brinkman Grinnan, Lee McAvoy, Laurie Ward, and Meredith Doyle?

Here’s what I know today. As I write these words, it's 93 degrees outside (feels like 100…) and I'm watching (out my office window) the sun shimmer on the pool next door. My neighbors spend most humid days like this poolside—while I tend to hide in the air conditioning, often in front of a computer screen.

I used to look SO FORWARD to June as a kid. It was the month we finally got out of school and had the whole summer laid out before us like a sunny, ten-week gift. And, since I loved routine (they might call me a little OCD today), June-July-August for teenage me ALWAYS included:

• A new Stephen King book (always the hardcover version (I considered myself a collector), except for Cujo, which I left on the kitchen table one night and, in the morning over coffee, my father, having discovered both it and its hardcover price, yelled at me for wasting money and made me take it back)
• A tent camping excursion (even if it was just in the back yard, but often with an extension cord to power our six-inch screen portable TV so we could watch a fuzzy version of The Twilight Zone at 11 p.m.)
• A group of my buddies overnight (with swimming, Marco Polo, truth-or-dare, and, around midnight, an unsuccessful levitation attempt (“you’re as stiff as a board; you’re as light as a feather; on the count of three we will begin levitation.”)
• A frenetic week of snack and soda sales at my father's grocery story (just one mile north of Hill Cumorah where, for seven days each July, my little upstate New York canal town turned into a tourist mecca for attendees of the annual Mormon Pageant; we had shoppers from as far away as Belgium!)
• An Agatha Christie murder mystery at the Bristol Valley Playhouse (my brother was old enough to drive me and my sister each August; we’d get a bucket of chicken and eat it on the lush Naples hillside before the play started)

These were my basics back then for a successful summer. Now, in the tail end of my fifties, I’m wondering how that acquiesced into a functioning window A/C unit and an ergonomic computer keyboard?

But...I saw The Life of Chuck earlier this week. It has hung with me and has me thinking about what things are most important to being fully alive (if you haven’t seen, I highly recommend!). And, although I haven’t read a Stephen King book in years, I recently picked up his latest hardcover collection of shorts (You Like It Darker). The weight of it in my hands feels good. Really good. Good enough to find a pool somewhere, settle into a chaise lounge, and let summer wash over me.

Happy reading!

—Gregory Gerard Allison, June 2025

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