The Chattanooga Writers’ Guild is excited to announce the winners of the September Creative Nonfiction Contest. This month’s theme was “Sailing.” The First-Place prize goes to Sherry Poff with her submission “Letting Go.” Honors for second place go to Winston Grant for his entry “The Gene.” Thanks to everyone who participated and special thanks to our talented Nonfiction Judge, Michelle Rogers!
First Place: Sherry Poff
Letting Go
Some lessons in life are learned on purpose; others come as surprises. So it was with my learning to let go of fear. The first time I rode a zipline, I was genuinely afraid. It was a sunny day in mid-October. The morning started out chilly with my students and me in sweatshirts and jackets. We were on a local college campus for team-building activities. Each group consisted of one teacher and ten to twelve students.
I had spent the morning urging students to ignore their fears enough to let a tarantula crawl over their hands or to walk on a narrow beam high off the ground. It was easy for me. I was not bothered by the spider; I knew the creature wouldn’t bite despite its hairy and alarming appearance. While others walked on the beam, my feet were planted firmly on the ground. All I had to do was shout encouragement about the sturdy cable they could hold to. But things were about to change.
Our group was scheduled to ride the zipline off the top of the library, ending in a grassy area in the middle of campus visible to anyone who happened by. I had never done a zipline, and to do this one, we had to climb out onto a ledge on the side of the building. To climb out onto the ledge meant giving myself temporarily to the open air–taking my feet off the solid surface of the roof and stepping over the lip of a wall. I would be potentially off balance on a small, narrow surface.
I thought perhaps one or two of the more daring students would be eager to try it first, but as we ascended the steps to the top of the tall building and peered over the edge, everyone stepped back. My twelve students huddled in a group, shuffling their feet as each one sought to get behind someone else. They all looked at me. “You go first,” someone said.
I thought of my cockiness as I held out my hand for the spider, my bravado as I urged students up a ladder to the platform among the trees. And now everyone was looking at me. Was I really as brave as I made out to be? What could I do? I went first.
I kept a smile on my face as the attendant helped me get into the harness and adjusted the strap on my helmet. I walked forward and looked over the edge of the building. Behind me, students were whispering to one another. “Will she do it?” “Are you going to go next?” I had a question of my own. Preparing to swing one leg over the wall, I asked the man in charge, “May I hold onto you?”
“Sure,” he said. So I held on and stepped over. He explained the process to me and pointed out again how I was securely tethered to the cable. I was in no danger.
“Ok,” I said. I didn’t move but continued to hold tightly to the young man’s arm.
“You’re going to have to turn loose,” he gently said.
I looked down the long way to the ground. The green grass and the onlookers waiting at the bottom seemed so far away. If I continued to look down, I knew I would never be able to step off. Again I heard my students’ voices. This time they were encouraging. “You got this!” “We’re proud of you.” They were happy and – I think – surprised that I was really doing it.
So I turned my face away from the ground, looked at my students, waved, and stepped off!
The trip to the ground was a short one, and I was hooked! I loved it. I have since ridden ziplines at other school events and retreats and on student trips in California and Costa Rica. I even persuaded my husband to try a large series of lines in the Smoky Mountains. I eventually learned that the easiest way for me to launch is to just sit down in the harness and pick up my feet – to relax and let go of fear. And it’s been a fun ride ever since. After sailing off my first ledge on that long-ago October, I have not looked back.
Sherry Poff grew up in the hills of West Virginia. She now lives and writes in Ooltewah, Tennessee. Sherry holds an MA in Writing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is a member of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild and Poetry Society of Tennessee. Her stories and poems have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Artemis, Salvation South, and elsewhere.
Second Place: Winston Grant
The Gene
I was on my bike downtown when my stepfather called me. Shirtless, sweating, fishing my phone out of the fanny pack I always wore while biking. The call made me nervous, gave me that familiar feeling, the giant hand squeezing on my chest. My stepfather never called me. Not because we hated each other but because we had nothing much to say to each other.
When I answered the call he was babbling incoherently and I had to beg him to slow down, to be calm.
“It’s your mother,” he stammered. “She’s on the couch and she won’t wake up. I think it’s the pills, what they gave her for her anxiety. The bottle is empty and she won’t wake up. She left a note saying she didn’t want to be a burden. You know, the diagnosis, the Parkinson’s. She’s been so worried, so anxious.”
I didn’t know what to say. What it sounded like was that my arch-conservative Baptist mother had just attempted suicide. I may have replied, or I may not have. My memory is fuzzy.
“I’ve called an ambulance, they’re coming to get her,” he told me. Again, maybe I replied, maybe not. The moment is lost to time.
My step-dad hung up. He had, I assume, important affairs to tend to. I was about a block from my destination, the downtown YMCA. I stood there, straddling my bike. My mother lived seven hours away, if she indeed still lived, and I had a child who had just turned one year old. Biking back to my house and hopping in the car, making the trip, seemed out of the question. I put my phone back in my fanny pack and continued to the YMCA, lifted weights like normal. I didn’t know what else to do.
Later in the day, my stepfather called again and told me that my mother would survive. They had pumped her stomach, I guess, I don’t know all the details. But the long and short of it was that she was going to live. I thanked my stepfather. He had always been a stiff upper lip type but in these moments he seemed a man lost at sea, and that made me feel tenderly towards him. Later in the evening I did all the normal things, fed my daughter, played with her. We watched Ms. Rachel sing on YouTube and clapped our hands along with the music. At bedtime I held her in my arms and rocked her to sleep like I always did. I stared at my child for a long time. I wondered that my mother was willing to give this up, was willing to never see this special child ever again.
A few months after my daughter was born, I went out with my friends for a few beers. The Braves were on TV. I didn’t know it yet, but soon I’d watch them win the World Series, silently screaming at my TV while my sleeping daughter lay in my arms. I mournfully told my friends that now I was never going to get to kill myself. Having a child had stolen that option from me.
“Yeah,” one said, scratching his chin. “If your parent commits suicide, you’ll probably commit suicide too. Or just be, you know, really messed up.”
I think about that conversation a lot now. What happens if your parent tries to commit suicide, but lives? Does that still mess you up? And if so, how much?
My grandmother always said we had “the gene.” The gene meant many things in many situations. Proclivities towards heavy drink, womanizing, heart disease, they were all caused by it. In this case, the gene we had was for suicide. She would drink a nip of brandy and tell me about my Uncle Hubby Dub, who was my mother’s uncle, or my mother’s cousin, or something like that. He’d been a composer of jingles in New Orleans, a funny man who was classically trained on the piano. My grandmother told me about the stunts he pulled, driving lawnmowers into pools, hopping fences at zoos, dropping rotten fruit on tourists from his balcony. He had the gene, had taken his own life. She ended the story by saying that his son played piano at hotels and nightclubs in New Orleans, that he was classically trained as well but only ever played jazz. Even as a child I would wonder about this man, my relation who I’d never met, wonder where he was, what he was doing.
For weeks after my mother’s attempt, I would find it impossible to sleep. I’d be on my back in bed staring out into the darkness, mentally probing my body, searching for the gene, the timebomb that was surely ticking away somewhere. I never found it, but my inability to find it made me more and more sure that it was there, hidden in some depth too deep to plumb. Every time I got on my bike I would repeat the words, one syllable every time I pumped my legs. My moth-er want-ed to die. Over and over. It seemed so out of character, so strange. But that’s the thing about the gene.
A few days after the attempt my mother called me from the hospital.
“They’ve got me in the psych ward with all the crazy people. But they’ll let me out soon,” she said. Her voice was raspy, almost unrecognizable, a side effect of her intubation.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt embarrassed. Embarrassed like a parent would be if their child was naughty in public.
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s the pills, the anxiety pills they had me on. They really messed me up. I can tell you now that I won’t be taking those anymore.”
“Okay. Well, I hope you get to feeling better.” I was desperate to be off the phone.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too, mom,” I said.
That’s the last time we ever talked about it. I don’t know if there’s anything more to say. You just keep living. That’s what my grandmother would say. Her answer to any problem was to just keep living. In her eyes, I guess you didn’t have any choice. She’d also say that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I was an adult by the time I learned that she didn’t come up with that phrase. But what happens if your problems aren’t temporary? If they just go on and on? If you get a terminal disease like my mother, or if you learn something you can’t unlearn, like me? What then?
When I graduated from high school my mother and stepfather took my high school girlfriend and me on a sailboat in lieu of a party, which I was adamant about not wanting. The water shimmered all around us in the setting sun and we ate cold cuts as the wind blew our hair. The air tasted salty and my mother took my hand and told me that she was so proud of me, that I was a good son. The salt air, the view of the live oaks, that beautiful deep blue water. All things that my mother was willing to give up. I think about that moment and the eighteen years that came before it, when I was a burden, a helpless child who had to be dragged through life. And it doesn’t make sense to me, all my thoughts and feelings get disordered. And I think about death, and how it feels to die, to make yourself die, how it feels to overdose on pills on the couch you’ve been meaning to have re-upholstered for years. And I wonder if, in that situation, you feel panic, or regret, if you feel the urge to hop up and make yourself vomit up your death into the toilet, flush and never speak of it again. Or if maybe it feels like you’re sailing away, and instead of a three-hour trip out around the barrier islands, it’s a one way trip to who knows where, a destination where you can await your loved ones in comfort.
And who knows, maybe one day I’ll know how it feels. After all, I’ve got the gene.
Winston is a writer in Chattanooga. He enjoys watching baseball and taking his daughter to the park.
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 mon
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