We are excited to announce the winner of Chattanooga Writers’ Guild’s December Nonfiction Contest is Charlotte Olson with the submission “The Map.” In second place, our esteemed judge and president, Sherry Poff, has decided to award a rare tie to both Rick Sapp with the submission “A Persistence of Ripples” and John C. Mannone with the submission “Cardinal Directions.” This month’s theme was “Maps.” Thanks to all who participated. And thank you to our nonfiction judge, Sherry Poff!
First Place: Charlotte Olson
The Map
It’s my daughter who finds it, as she’s going through some old boxes in the attic looking for a cute baby picture of herself to post online. She runs into the kitchen where I’m preparing a pot roast, a few streaks of dust on her cheek.
“What’s this?” she asks, holding up a lumpy bundle of folded papers, tied with a brittle lacy black ribbon. I immediately recognize it.
She unties the ribbon and tosses it aside – my heart lurches for a moment – and then, slowly and carefully, unfolds the bundle on the kitchen table.
“Well, this is called a map,” I say, recovering. “Maps, you see, are what we used, back in the day before . . . “
She gives me an annoyed look, and together we smooth out the papers. Most of the creases have torn apart, and the entire bottom section is missing, but we’re able to piece it together. Western Europe, 1987. I run my finger lightly over the pen lines criss-crossing the countries.
I am suddenly there again – 22 years old, just out of college, poor but bright-eyed and able to sleep in the most uncomfortable places, even hard plastic seats on a rickety train car. This was the summer I was going to conquer Europe in two months, starting in Italy and traveling North. That was the plan anyway, until I switched everything up.
Before I left, I wrote out a vague itinerary for my mother and my boyfriend.
Saturday, July 4 – Arr Florence
3 nights – hostel near Uffizi?
Tuesday, July 7 – to Rome
3 nights – pensione near Palazzo?
Friday, July 10 – to Venice
3 nights – somewhere near Bibliotecca
My mother made me promise to call once a week, and my boyfriend promised to write me letters three times a week. He planned to send them to the American Express offices in every city on my itinerary, carefully timed out to arrive shortly before I did. Which meant he started mailing the Italian ones before I even left the country. He wanted me to go to the Amex Office as soon as I arrived in each new city, before even dropping my backpack at the hostel, to retrieve my mail. He would tell me everything going on back home, he said, so when I returned, it would be like I never left.
“He mailed you letters?” my daughter asks. “To American Express?”
“Well, yes. People could mail you a letter to the American Express office in a city. Then you’d ask for it when you got there. They’d hold it for you.”
“How quaint.”
My own copy of my itinerary I had stapled on the northeast corner of the map, covering Finland. I carefully wiggle the itinerary out from the rusted staple and smooth it flat.
“So you started in Florence?”
“Yes, and then Rome, then Venice. I’d draw my path on this map.”
“And you got your letters from that boyfriend?” A slight snicker – the idea that her mother had ever had a boyfriend.
“Yes.”
“And then after Venice, you went to . . . ” She looks at my itinerary, then at the line on the map, then back to the itinerary. “Well it says you were going to Salzburg next, but this line goes . . . “
North. The line goes north, all the way to Ireland, by passing Salzburg and Austria and Spain and France and even England. The line shoots over the continent, to the far west coast of Ireland, where I hadn’t expected to be until late August. The line is straight and direct, as if I’d flown. But what I’d actually done was zig-zag my way erratically across the Continent, taking trains from town to town. How long had it taken me, three days, four? I’d slept most of the way, and it’s all a blur now. Just as it had been then.
I’d finally disembarked in Tralee, County Kerry. It was early evening, and the station was nearly deserted. I stood there, lost in the unfamiliar quiet and stillness. Somewhere a sheep bleated. An old lady sitting on a wooden bench, a large sheepdog at her feet, smiled brightly at me.
“Hi, Luv, you need a place to stay? I am just a wee walk from here.” She held out a little card.
Callahan’s Cozy Guest House
13 IEP
Irish Breakfast Included
I nodded, mute, and she and the dog led me out of the station, down a side lane to a stone cottage with a garden full of lavender, and I got in a bed in an upstairs bedroom and didn’t get out for days. Mrs. Callahan brought me milky tea and toast with sausage twice a day, and on the third day I asked her to mail a post card to the States for me. It was to my boyfriend, letting him know I thought we should break up, and it occurred to me that it probably crossed in the air with one of his letters to me. Perhaps even the one headed to Salzburg.
My daughter, her finger still on western Ireland, shakes her head at me. “You gave up Salzburg? For sheep?”
“Well, only for a week. Eventually I made it back down there, to France and Austria and everywhere. I went to all the cities on the itinerary. Just in a different order.”
“I see,” she murmurs. She resumes tracing the pen line again as it moves from western Ireland to France.
It was Mrs. Callahan herself who, after I’d been with her for a week, barely leaving the bed, got me traveling again.
“I think you’re well rested now, Love. And healed,” she’d murmured one morning, gazing at me with bright eyes. She opened the bedroom window, and I leaned out of it and found I could take deep breaths of lavender-scented air. The next morning, she and Shep walked me to the Tralee station.
Eventually, I retrieved all the letters from the boyfriend. Some he’d mailed early on, and they were full of declarations of love and his plans for things we’d do once I was back home. Others, however, he’d obviously written and mailed after my post card from Ireland found its way to him. Those were angry and bitter. I never knew what would await me in each new AmEx Office – harsh recriminations or adoring words. I read the angry ones with dispassion and the loving ones with compassion, and all of them I tossed in the trash before heading out to explore the new city.
“But why? Why did you change your schedule?” my daughter asks.
“I love spontaneity!”
That’s also what I told my mother on my weekly phone calls home, when she wondered why on earth I was not where my itinerary said I would be.
But how could I have told my mother, or my boyfriend, or, now, my daughter? How could I have told them about that late Friday night, when I wandered lost in the maze of dark narrow Venetian alleyways that looked nothing like the city map I’d grabbed in the train station. I was carrying a bag full of souvenirs – t-shirts, post cards, a block of Parmesan, and – my one splurge – a long ribbon of black Venetian lace. I turned a corner and suddenly found myself facing three men. Maybe four. I was almost positive my hostel was just at the other end of this passageway, but the men were walking towards me, blocking me. I attempted to back out, panic bubbling in my chest, but they suddenly surrounded me. A grip on my arm, hands under my shirt, a body shoving me against the stone wall. A low ugly laugh in my ear and, roughly, fingers pushing into me. I had no voice.
And then, just as suddenly, they were gone. I was left crumpled against the wall, the bag and its contents strewn across the alleyway, the black lace ribbon, somehow, gripped tightly in my fist. In a daze, I walked to the end of the alley. My hostel was right there on the corner. I lay on my bed, eyes wide open, until 5 am when I took the first train out of the station, headed west.
Only later, after I’d returned home and shown my mother the pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Berlin wall, made my friends a spaghetti dinner using Parmesan from FoodTown, had one last stilted but conciliatory conversation with my old boyfriend, and talked nonstop to everyone, it seemed, about my love of spontaneity — only later, after all that, I folded up the map, wrapped the black ribbon around it, and stuffed it at the bottom of a box of things that’s followed me, for decades, from apartment to apartment to house to house.
And today, my daughter stretches her arm across the map, tracing the pen line across the countries and rivers and towns, the world quite literally at her fingertips. Someday, I knew, I would tell her about that night, about all of it.
Second Place Tie: Rick Sapp
A Persistence of Ripples
With the window rolled down and the pivoting vent open, the boy can fly his hand north on US 41 toward Monteagle, maybe – depending upon his mother’s patience for riding in the back seat – as far as Murfreesboro. Exotic places the family reaches only after nine or ten hours of driving from Florida in their un-air-conditioned two-door sedan. After Murfreesboro or Nashville the father will swing to the right, veer more directly toward their destination, at which point boredom descends. Flat green fields radiate heat and light, replace the inspiring possibility of mountains. Corn. Soybeans. All the way to Chicago.
Thus far the most exciting event – other than stuffing themselves into the car at four a.m. – was the encounter with the restauranteur who chased them down the street after breakfast. Waycross or Hazelhurst. Georgia.
“Hey, mister! You owe me another thirty-five cents.”
“I paid the bill,” the father said.
“We mis-figured. You owe another thirty-five cents.”
The father, the war-hero school teacher frowns, scowls, but fishes in his pants pocket for the money. The grease-stained little man grabs, backs away, then hustles off down the sidewalk.
War-hero slams his driver-side door. He stares straight ahead. He corners too fast. He falls silent. He ignores the mother’s attempts at distraction, at smoothing over war-hero’s sense of insult. Family holds their collective breath.
Hours later, in a small town in Tennessee, war-hero spots the No Vacancy neon at a family-owned motel – “With a pool, daddy, please!” the children no longer cowering – and the mother pulls on her white gloves and runs her hands over the dresser that no one uses and pulls back the covers from the beds to examine the sheets.
“Fourteen-fifty a night.”
War-hero shakes his head. Everyone follows him out the door, climbs back into the two-tone Ford and drives to the next No Vacancy where war-hero agrees to a room at thirteen-fifty, plus tax.
It all makes him angry, the war-hero father, his white undershirt showing at the neck of a short sleeve white shirt. The exhausting four-day drive – two up and two back – the money, the time. But the mother wants to see her people, if only for a few days, and despite her growing anticipation war-hero remains sullen, even hostile and the family is wary. It waits.
By Louisville, war-hero’s fuse is burning. They are close now, these people he took on when he married – coal miners, factory workers “up north.” Foreigners, really, who don’t know the difference between grits and gravy.
On the passenger side of the front seat beside him the wife holds a sleeping baby and unfolds a paper AAA map of the Eastern United States. The other children – the boy and a girl – restless now, bored and squirming in the rear seat, endlessly argue about their game of Battleship.
“I already called that square.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Momma, he’s cheating!”
“No I’m not. She is!”
“Stop it, you kids.” The nervous mother-wife already aware of the tick-tock beside her. The hands white knuckle the wheel. The stare, blind down the two-lane highway too intense for conditions.
Then the crossroads in Louisville.
“No! Louisville. Like in Kentucky. What do you mean it’s not on the map? Of course it’s on the map. Its a city on the Ohio River. You can’t possibly miss it. And will you hurry for God’s sake? We have to turn here somewhere. I can’t drive and look at the map, too.”
The heat and the hands pounding the steering wheel and the crumpled map that will never fold or unfold the same way twice and might even be upside down, flapping in the wind and war-hero takes his eyes off the road and swings a backhand at the wife’s face. The map rips, flies back into her face and out the window. In the back the children shrink, forget their game, become invisible.
There is never an apology. No one gets down on their knees, says “I’m sorry,” asks for forgiveness, swears it will never happen again.
The boy, perhaps ten years old, watches in cautious silence, hates the man, swears he will be different when he grows up. “I hate you,” he thinks. “I hate you. I hate you. I’ll never be like you.”
That night the boy begs God to kill the father, the war-hero. He knows it’s wrong, but there it is. For many years God does not answer his prayer, but when he does, the boy – now grown – is heartbroken.
__________
Years later, the boy is driving north through Italy. He twists the vent on the Volkswagen camper bus for more air, flys his left hand out the window. The highway is breathless. Inside, the camper is heavy with heat, humidity, ennui. Encased in the rear the air-cooled engine is a feverish monster, especially in the back, especially where the boy’s visiting mother and sister ride on reconditioned plastic seats.
In the right front, the young wife at last complains. She is stretched beyond her undefined limit of patience and generosity. A midnight storm outside Milan wrecked the red-and-white candy-stripe tent where the mother- and sister-in-law slept on folding cots. And so for hours the travelers huddled together inside the van as rain and wind lashed and ripped the tent fabric, twisted the poles which were only lightly attached to the roof of the van.
A hotel. Even a pension. A shower in a clean place. A night’s sleep without the heat from the motor or the whiplash of a storm or the shrewish judgment of the mother- and sister-in-law. Is it too much to ask?
Fifty. A hundred miles of grievance and heat, unreadable signs, uncertain road and indecision. A fluttering folded map of Europe and somewhere north and east of Milan the boy, now a man, lashes out with a backhand.
This time, however, once the mother and sister are off-loaded at an airport in Luxembourg he explodes with words. Hot, evil words. Stinking, mean, miserable words.
Eventually words of regret and apology follow. But it is too late and it does not end there. Nothing ends near where it began, a pebble rippling ever outward in a still pond.
I hate you. She would not say it, through the tears, in front of the mother- and sister-in-law, and even that makes him angry. If she would only curse him, give him a chance then to apologize, explain … again.
“I’m not my father. I’m not my father. I’m not ….”
Second Place Tie: John C. Mannone
Cardinal Directions
Ann Taylor and her sister, Jane, sang a hymn to one particular star in the desert sky rising in the east in soft celestial light —its twinkle cardinaling kings headed west. This particular star, the light of the world, a peculiar compass of the heart pulling yours to follow, too, to the myriad miracles —a constellation of all the dreams of men and angels.
At night, the sun offers its radiance to the moon. And Orion climbs over the mountain, throwing his legs over the rocks looming in the distance. At dawn, the peak punches through the clouds and scrapes the floor of heaven. Breathe in the wilderness, the moist pines clothed in mist.
After the dawn, sight the sun, as you had the moon and stars; measure time in heartbeats. Know where you are to move men.
We shall not cease from exploration across the great gulf of the unknown. We sail in search of answers to questions that still echo silence: And at the end of all our exploring we ask why dream of faraway places? What is the meaning of life? What is my equation? What purpose will it be to arrive where we started only to learn that we were never alone? To calculate the answers to those questions, and to know the place for the first time, we must map the landscape of purpose —not only must we have the heart of explorers, but also the soul of poets.
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Author’s Note: Jane Taylor wrote the lyrics to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The italicized lines are from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets/Little Gidding.”
The Monthly Contests rotate through a pattern of Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction throughout the year, with a new theme each month. Go to the 2026 Monthly Contest Series Info page to view the genre and theme for each month.
This contest is free to enter for members of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild. To become a member, click HERE
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