Contest Judge Spotlight – J’Lyn Chapman – Nonfiction/Hybrid

” I am eager to read works that take risks and innovate narrative approaches within the capacious “creative nonfiction” genre.  “

As we near our contest deadline, we are thrilled to introduce you to last year’s winners — and this year’s judges! J’Lyn Chapman’s incredible collection of essays To Limn / Lying In won our Nonfiction/Hybrid Contest, as selected by Maya Sonenberg.

You can buy J’lyn’s book HERE

Taking its inspiration from the artist Uta Barth’s photographs of the sun as it enters her home and the poet Francis Ponge’s notebooks kept during the German occupation of France, this collection of lyric essays contemplates light as seen through the domestic space and its occupants, predominantly the author’s young children. Meditations on how through light the external world enters into and transforms the private spaces of self and home inextricably link to the author’s writing on life, or the giving of life. These vocabularies weave and tangle while the essays’ forms depict the staccato rhythms of thought and the estrangement of time one experiences when living with children. The essays can be read as standalone pieces, yet build on one another so that patterns emerge, like the obviation of how language serves to illuminate and veil meaning, the repetition of and ekphrastic approach to religious imagery, and the ineffable experience of depression. These essays continually return to the speaker’s admission that the life one gives another is ultimately unsustainable and that despite this catastrophe of living there is the resilience and bewilderment of being together. 

Read the most recent review of To Limn / Lying In in The Colorado Review.