“Four Words Whispered on a Smoky Field” is the third-place winner of the 2023 CRAFT Hybrid Writing Contest, guest judged by Nicole McCarthy.
“Four Words Whispered on a Smoky Field” pushes genre boundaries as it attempts to excavate troubling family history. The narrator traces the footsteps of their father, a prisoner of war during World War II, and takes the reader along through visual routes, maps, historical records, and photos. History, as the narrator shows, is an inescapable part of the land—multilayered—encountering a field of sheep grazing on grass that was once seeped with slaughter. This pilgrimage draws back the curtain on a singular experience of war and the lengths some will go in order to survive. It is a chilling, courageous investigation that benefits from its hybridity. —Nicole McCarthy
I created this piece while studying with the formidable writer Kyo Maclear, who often includes her own sketches in her writing. (See Birds, Art, Life.) She asked us to create collages.
I’d written 95,000 words about my father for my memoir called Bruno Slept Here; I’d read a score of books and interviewed a bevy of experts. But Kyo’s prompt let me vault across all the facts to a visual poem about what keeps you going amidst the mayhem of war.
I’m indebted to Rebecca Solnit’s book The Faraway Nearby for the idea of running an independent string of text at the bottom of the page.