Revell Contest 2011
	Katja Turcios-Wiswe ’11 (Collegeville, Pa.), My Linh Luu ’14 (Hanoi, Vietnam), and Mala Sharma ’12 (Pottstown, Pa.) were named first place winners of the second annual Alex H. Revell III '43 Writing Contest. The contest honoring the late Alex Revell, former Hill English instructor, included three categories: poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. The entries were read and critiqued by professional writers who selected the top three winners for each category. Georgetown University English Professor Jeanne McManus judged the essay/non-fiction category. Tufts University English Professor Susan Carlisle reviewed the short fiction submissions. Published poet and songwriter Naomi Shihab Nye ably judged the poetry category.   The first place submission of each category is listed below. Congratulations to our winners!

	Revell Contest Winner: Poetry
	Campus Visit By Mala Sharma '12   You have arrived at your destination: The distant satellite, senses my indecision- for early decision. I am rolling towards admissions, yet stopping in my mission. With one hand on the wheel, I shift into neutral; that dashboard accessory, that digital component of prophecy, winks a challenging eye, before reverting to inactivity. The occasion has arrived: to ponder the liberal arts- to clear my throat and announce my current inclination- for future concentration. This is the last stop of the day- the final stroll of one more main quadrangle, with tired feet and peeling shoulders. But is this my telos for scholastic cultivation?

	Revell Contest Winner: Short Story
	Dugan Leed Hated People By Katja Turcios-Wiswe '11 Dugan Leed was not good with people. But he knew that. He hadn’t really ever been. Dugan Leed was 26 years old and he had been thinking for a while. He had been thinking about a lot of things for a long long while. You see, Dugan might have been bad with people, and maybe that was the reason that he was alone, at 26, with what seemed to be no hope of ever not being alone, but he liked it that way. Or at least that’s what he told himself. Every morning in front of the mirror. “I, Dugan Leed, am alone. I live in this apartment alone. I wake up alone. I fall asleep alone. I spend my day with people that I am forced to spend the day with, though for all they are worth, I actually might as well be alone then too. I am alone but I am not lonely. Because I, Dugan Leed, hate people.” Not really though. That’s just what he told himself. Every morning. In front of the mirror. If he didn’t he would probably just stand there and cry and not be able to tie his tie and leave through the front door in one piece. To most, it seemed that somewhere along the way Dugan had ceased to be fully human. Not physically. No, definitely not physically. At a respectable, if not ideal, 5’11, Dugan was unmistakably a man. He had a clean-cut look and intriguing, if not immediately magnetic, features. However there was something about him that just screamed, “definitely not a boy, but kind of not a whole grown up either.” It wasn’t in the looks though. Definitely not the looks. It wasn’t something you could tell just by looking at him. You had to speak to him. And I guarantee that if you spoke to him you wouldn’t be speaking to him long. After “hello” it would take about 30 seconds and then you would stop for a second and your mind would scramble for what exactly was making you so uncomfortable about this conversation with this man who gave no outward indication or obvious cause for your discomfort. Another minute and you would realize that the feeling you had came because some primal part of you could tell that this man wanted absolutely nothing to do with you at all. Even though he wasn’t saying it outright or even implying it with anything he said or did, you could feel it. After that you’d do everything in your power to avoid talking to him again. There was something so frightening about engaging in conversation with someone who seemed to have failed to develop the sort of courtesy filter that everyone else had. If he didn’t like you, you knew it immediately, and so far Dugan hadn’t liked many people. The way he was seemed to tell you, before he knew more than your name, that you were human and that somewhere along the line you wouldn’t fail to disappoint him. Well, wasn’t that just lovely, so why should he even start to contemplate putting up with your crap? Dugan knew that he had this effect on people, but he told himself that he didn’t care. Because he hated everyone, right? Sometimes he could swear that he was the way he was just because he was scared of something he couldn’t verbalize without it disappearing in an unremarkable puff of smoke; even though naming it might put an end to its hold on him. Mr. Leed got out of bed one miserable Monday morning and knew before he set his feet on the wooden floor next to his bed that it was going to be one of those horrendous days that stay with you until the weekend. And it really was. Because on this Monday Dugan lost his identity. Had it stolen, rather. He got to work on time and didn’t cut himself shaving and didn’t spill his coffee, but when he got to his office, he had to stand in an elevator with Karen who avoided eye contact with him and said nothing. He had to sit in his office where he could see everyone walking past his floor, avoiding looking in his direction. It was just a really bad day. And it rained. It rained so much that he actually had to dig his umbrella out of the closet in his office for the trip home, an object he hadn’t used in some time because he would rather get a little wet than bother looking for it. But this time he bothered looking for it, a decision he would label as markedly stupid later on, because looking for the umbrella turned into one of those long chains of events that led to some set-in-stone future he never would have had, had he not looked for it. Searching for, and then finding the umbrella made him late to leave, which made him miss the last step in the entranceway of the building which made him fall which made him drop everything, which made him scramble to collect his things, and made him miss the 6:05 subway home, which made him so mad that he decided to walk home so that hopefully he would no longer feel like burning something down when he got home. Dugan was not good when he was angry and alone. So Dugan was angry and he walked, in the pouring rain, with his stupid umbrella. After walking something around five blocks, Dugan realized that his umbrella was quickly becoming obsolete as only something like a plastic bubble would keep all of the rain from him, and he decided to stop somewhere and wait it out. He was either still too angry to realize that he could have at this point just gotten on the subway, or he was just feeling particularly stubborn. Either way, he walked until he could see the Laundromat Café across the street, which is where he wanted to be. He should have just gotten on the subway, or a bus, or something. The road was clear when Dugan stepped off of the curb, but it wasn’t two seconds later when the Chinese food delivery man on the bike hit him full on. You wouldn’t think so, but the tiny man on the bike had enough momentum going to actually send Dugan catapulting and skidding through the air until he hit the pole of a bus shelter and passed out. Right before he lost his grip on his surroundings his mind couldn’t seem to make sense of anything, but Dugan swore, at least in the moments before fainting, that his briefcase flying through the air in a gentle stumbling arc over his head was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. To his credit the bike guy wasn’t really fine either, though. Upon impact he had sort of toppled off of his unfortunately brakeless single gear bike, and his head smacked into the pavement. Both men were out cold. When Dugan awoke an hour later he was still lying there by the bus shelter in a pool of his own watery blood, the bus guy was gone, and he was soaked to the bone. Bone, which he could in fact see through the small hole in his shirt where what he was sure one of his arm bones was sticking through. More than a little nauseated, he tried to reach his phone, and after a few tries managed to fish it out of his pocket with what he assumed would be his good arm from now on. Fifteen minutes later he was in an ambulance, and in an hour he was delirious on some painkiller ready for surgery or some other involved procedure, muttering about how he was glad that he could be the light bulb that was turned off in an empty room instead of being one that was on, giving its love out, wasting its energy with no one to see it or use it or love him, and that that was why he hated people because there was never anyone in the room. Only an idiot carries around their social security card in their wallet, along with all of the other important things in there to begin with. This was easier than she ever could have imagined, thought Lydia. Lydia was the woman who found Dugan’s bag nestled under the front tire of her car which was parallel parked twenty feet downwind from a bus shelter near a deli. The woman who thought nothing of taking this bag and making it hers. Lydia had been thinking for a long time, and Lydia needed money, and Lydia had dated her fair share of con artists in her time, and Lydia knew how to take what she thought she wanted and think about the consequences later on. And Lydia was angry today, so for the next couple nights, Lydia was Dugan Leed. Since this all happened before credit card companies had their safeguards in place, and Dugan had more important things to be thinking about than his stuff, Lydia did what she wanted. Lydia Folds had dreams. But people always got in her way. Or at least that’s what she thought. She told it to herself all the time. For a while now all Lydia had wanted was some connection, not necessarily to a person, but to something, anything really. Something she could keep in mind, something grounded in reality. But Lydia wasn’t finding it. Hadn’t found it yet, wasn’t really on her way towards finding it. Queen of inactivity, Lydia knew things didn’t happen unless you made them happen, and she was bad at making things happen. Maybe she was, but Dugan Folds wasn’t, at least not in her hands. For how reckless she’d always been, and how often her recklessness had landed her in trouble, it was something close to a miracle that she was never caught for her transgressions against one damaged angry man with a crooked arm and an awkward little limp. It might have been guilt, it might have been her weird little need for attachment, or it might have been that it was just a really nice bag, but Lydia kept it. She used Dugan’s bag every day, starting a couple of weeks after she found it. Lydia was mostly talk, and Lydia did, truly and not so deep down, feel pretty bad about ruining this Dugan guy’s life. She thought so much about the mess she had created, and the fleeting joy she’d experienced at running up the poor guy’s credit card, and she fell in love with the thought of him thinking as much about her as she now thought about him. Fell in love with the thought of taking as much space in his brain as he took in hers. At first the canvas bag smelled faintly of some cologne she hadn’t ever been able to put a name to, though she had tried. Eventually it began to smell like the soap she used. The symmetry of it being his and then hers, and the bag being marked by him and then by her, was lovely. Or at least that’s what she told herself. She developed some sort of symbiotic connection to this worn men’s messenger bag, couldn’t sleep unless it was in the room, couldn’t leave unless it was on her shoulder, couldn’t travel unless it was carrying something she needed. Dugan thought a lot about whomever it was that had made the following months after the bike fiasco such a painful nightmare, but when he imagined them, it was always some sinister-looking individual who was more than likely a fan of riding bikes and not looking out for pedestrians. But oddly enough, that short flight into the bus stand post made him hate people a little less. But only a little. He quit his job, changed his routine, moved a couple of blocks away from his old apartment; somewhere with a better view. He had been doing alright. Still wasn’t so into people, but he found himself less and less angry as the months went on, that eventually he couldn’t stay mad at anything for very long without getting bored and moving on to some other emotion. He was still kind of lonely though. In a city of several million it is unlikely that you will see someone more than once if you aren’t already family or friends. Fact. Dugan was just getting out of the bus, just walking away from the bus, just looking at his feet, watching the ground, minding himself, being hyperaware of himself in space. Namely, doing everything possible to invite collision of some kind. He bumped shoulders a few times, nothing major. And then Dugan stopped to look at something in a window, stayed still for a little too long to look at his reflection. Got rammed in the back. Had a flashback to the last time he’d been hit in the back, and banged into the window with his hands splayed out. This time, though, he wasn’t left unconscious in the rain. Someone apologized, and someone offered to help him, and someone couldn’t stop apologizing. Over and over again. Someone was saying in his ear, “Oh my God, I just wasn’t looking, geez, you’re bleeding, I’m sorry, here, let’s go inside and I’ll get you a napkin for your nose.” And Dugan just nodded and followed. Too surprised and worried about the blood dripping on his shirt to notice how the gaze of the woman helping him inside the restaurant lingered, just a second more than stranger courtesy dictates, at his neck as she leaned in to help him. Inside after a few minutes, after some tissues and a trip to the bathroom, and some more apologies, Dugan was sitting across from a woman who couldn’t stop staring at him. He looked at his feet and decided that he was glad he didn’t end up in a hospital today, and that he was going to take that as enough to designate today as a good day. And if today was a good day, and if he had nothing better to be doing, he could at least try to make some conversation with this woman. Because he, Dugan Leed, was a new man, and he could forgive and forget, and she must not be so bad if she said sorry, and maybe he should talk more and try not to scare everyone away. “You know, I used to have a bag like that, but I lost it a few years back.” And I could tell you that they sat there and talked for a couple hours and that Dugan didn’t freak out when she told him where she got the bag, and that Dugan chose to take her story as a sort of cosmic companion piece to his, instead of as a hideous revelation. I could tell you that he smiled when he saw the shock in her face at knowing that someone else now knew something that made her feel guilty. I could say that Dugan was learning so quickly in the space of one conversation that he had choices, and that maybe his problem with people up until now was that he always made the wrong one when talking to them. I could tell you that Dugan laughed when he saw how much time had passed, and how she hadn’t left yet. I could tell you that Lydia felt like if she stood up, if she moved, she’d be breaking something just too perfectly symmetrical. I could say that Lydia had other reasons for staying too. I could tell you that maybe they saw each other again, and that maybe they didn’t stop seeing each other, and I could tell you that they fell into some sort of connection that gave a chance at love. I could write down all of that, and then you would know. But then I guess that would mean that Dugan Leed wasn’t lonely anymore. I guess that would mean that what you thought you knew had changed. Or something like that.

	Revell Contest Winner: Essay/Non-Fiction
	Mother By My Linh Luu '14 She wears a petite, self-made dress covered with flowers. Her smooth hair, neatly tied into a bun, stays out of the way. That turns out to be helpful as she cooks dinner. The kitchen is her sanctuary where every utensil, every piece of meat or vegetable, every container is organized in its own corner. Her slender hands move quickly and she wastes no time. This is her world, the only place where she can think and choose without asking anyone else’s permission. She checks the clock on the wall. Her family will come down in one hour. There is no rush. She has learned to quiet the background to focus on her work. Without even knowing it, she has been trained to look at what’s right beneath her, not at what’s ahead. She stares at the cutting board in front of her and for the time, her life shifts around this. She sees nothing but this rectangular piece of wood. And she slices. And she cuts. And she puts everything together. When her family walks down the stairs, she has already set up the table. Everything looks perfect, everything looks right: the table, the hungry children, the woman in the white apron smiling. My mother settles in her seat, her hands pointing to each meal one at a time. She tells us the name of every dish and also all the ingredients used. In a way, she is advertising her food, making sure that her skeptical teenagers will gobble up everything without hesitation. Our eyes shimmer and we swallow our saliva. The food looks awesome: chicken bathed in pear sauce, Russian salad, spring vegetable soup, caramelized shrimp. We all pick up our chopsticks, feeling the warmth of the bowls of rice around our hands. But before we dip in, another glow carries our attention.   We silently watch Mother, her face reddened by the kitchen’s heat. Most of her hair has escaped the bun, loose and dangling by her neck. Her lips, uncovered with lipstick, form a genuine smile. Her rough fingers joined, her elbow flat against the table, she observes us too. For half a second, we see her as that woman in the white apron. We almost believe that her world too crawls at an unhurried pace. Maybe her heart belongs to the kitchen and the house she preserves in the happiest atmosphere.   We start to chew. Like a child whose work is celebrated, Mother giggles. She knows from our intense wolfing that we love everything in front of us. In the little moment between each swallow, we praise her with an interjection like “ahhhh” or “hmmm.” When each bowl is stripped of its serving, we feel like taking a nap. The family conversation, however, has pumped our moods with funny anecdotes. Back in our room, the stories sometimes emerge again in our minds and we laugh. We kids finish our homework and then jump to bed. Click, the lights are off. Little do we know, mother is still sitting at her cluttered desk in her bedroom. Her back is slightly curved and her eyes are seized by the laptop screen. She calmly types on the keyboard just as one might play the piano. She listens to a piece of music in the air or rather inside her head. That same playful melody flowing among her thoughts is written down through an awkward fingering. “I knew I wanted to become a writer,” she said, “but that was before I learned about poetry.” She works dutifully in the morning in her offices, signing documents, confirming checks, writing business letters. But at night, like an owl, she composes poetry, transporting the rhythms of her life on paper. At the age of 50, most people think about their retirements, track their banking accounts and picture a nice vacation house. My mother, however, can only think about publishing her first collection of poems.   At 50, she discovers how to open an email account or better yet, a Word document. When we first showed her the instructions, our brows condensed into one single bitter dark line. Mother, daughter of a family of eleven, who lived most of her life in the poor countryside of Vietnam, had never had the chance to practice such things.   It’s two in the morning but her Word page is still open. The artificial light is propelled onto her face, while the darkness devours the rest. It forms a bubble enwrapping her from the inanimate air, the vast walls of her room and from the lonely streets right outside her windows. Time knocks on her back, reminding her to go to bed. There will be a conference tomorrow. You need to be prepared. Before that, you will have to go to the hair salon and straighten up your look. At noon, you will meet a head of the government to present your projects on education. Then, you will have lunch with a group of foreign investors. If you want to be back for dinner, you will have to resolve that issue in the company first. She locks the voices outside of her mind. She is inside the bubble, in her true element. She cares little about the rules of nature now. Sleep will come when it comes. The day will sneak in and when it happens, she’ll be ready. So her fingers continue on pushing the buttons clumsily. Her head is low and too close to the screen. Some sleep circles show around her deep eyes and her lips feel dry. Still, her hands sink into the keyboard.   At 50, it is hard to remember everything that will come and it is hard to forget some things that already came. Sometimes, the screen fades away from her, while mountains, rice fields, herds of cows spring up. She hears her own mother’s call, early in the morning when she has to wake up and sell noodles in the market. She feels the numbing weight of books on her back when she walks alone through the mountain to go to school. She even sees her father’s tortured face when her brothers leave for the war. She experiences this and much more just by facing the computer screen. And writing. Or maybe she has already dozed off. Somewhere, in the background, she listens to the clear, strong voice of a determined child who has a dream: “I’ll escape poverty so that no one will despise me again. Then I’ll write so that everyone will have to respect me.”   She wears a petite, self-made dress covered with flowers. Her smooth hair, neatly tied into a bun, stays out of the way. That turns out to be helpful as she cooks dinner. The kitchen is her sanctuary where every utensil, every piece of meat or vegetable, every container is organized in its own corner. Her slender hands move quickly and she wastes no time. She has done this ever since her childhood. Suddenly, her mobile phone rings in the pocket of her apron. Some important partner of the company has arrived and he asks to see her right away. She directly makes her point, “No, postpone it. I have something else to do.” When her children swarm in, she kisses their heads. Outside, the clouds slip away leaving the sky blue and pure. For a moment, she can see yellow crops of rice blooming and the familiar brick house. With a pen in her hand, she writes the image down. While her children are still talking in the kitchen, she slips away to type a few notes. Everything looks perfect, everything looks right: the table, the hungry children, the woman who has made her dream come true.