The Pinto Carver Essay Contest
Pinto Carver Essay Topic 2024
The Topic:
The first time I ever met Scott Fitzgerald a very strange thing happened. Many strange things happened with Scott but this one I was never able to forget. He had come into the Dingo bar in the rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters, had introduced himself and introduced a tall, pleasant man who was with him as Duane Chaplin, the famous pitcher (Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, Book-Of-The-Month Club, 1964, p. 149).
Many interesting things have happened to adult me, but in the opinion of teen-age me there is only one real event in our lives and it occurred on the sixteenth of April, 1993, when I fell thirty feet from my bedroom window (Zadie Smith, “The Fall Of My Teen-Age Self,” The New Yorker, November 20, 2023).
Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes one-self. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect. I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa (Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect,” in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, p. 142).
Alas, you will never have the opportunity to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald; you probably have not fallen thirty feet from your bedroom window, though membership in Phi Beta Kappa awaits you. You have, however, experienced a day or a moment that has defined or shaped who you are. In a narrative, capture, vividly and succinctly, that time. You may write in the first or third person. Your success, however, will depend on your ability to show, not tell, to remember that less is often more. In the famous first paragraph of A Farwell to Arms, Hemingway evokes a chill, a premonition of darker days to come, not by telling us that those days are coming but with a description of dust and falling leaves: “The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling….”
Eligibility: Current Liberal Arts Honors First Years (Class of 2027) and Sophomores (Class of 2026).
Specifications: 500 - 600 words, titled, double-spaced, and typed, with your name and EID in the upper-right hand corner. No cover page.
Awards:
1st Prize: $1500
2nd Prize: $500
3rd Prize: $250
Submission Deadline: Submit your essay as a pdf to this address by Friday, January 26, 2024 at midnight.
Please label the document clearly with your name. No text in the body of the email will come through. The judges reserve the right to withhold awards in the absence of prize worthy essays.
