We are thrilled to announce the winners of our 2024 Proximity Prize in Personal Essay. Daniel M. Lavery was the judge, and he told us, “It was so meaningful to get to read these essays, and I’m genuinely honored to be part of the process. My winning selection is ‘Motherlove and Memory,’ which was profoundly moving and full of incredible complexities, and seemed the product of long and conscientious thought. My runner-up selection ‘Swim Lessons,’ which was much punchier and briefer (both in scope and word count), but I really appreciated the degree to which the random and the arbitrary nature of violence recurred throughout the story.”
Daniel Lavery’s most recent book is Women’s Hotel. He co-founded and co-edited the editorial site The Toast from 2013 to 2016, and served as Slate’s Dear Prudence advice columnist from 2016 to 2021. He publishes the biweekly literary newsletter “The Chatner” at Substack and his first book, the New York Times bestseller Texts From Jane Eyre, was published in 2014.
When we resurrected true in 2023, we thought there was a gap in the conversations around nonfiction storytelling on the internet. true was originally the weekly craft blog for Proximity, a literary magazine founded by Maggie Messitt in 2014. Proximity published personal and documentary storytelling, diverse in form and length, based on a single theme. Proximity seeks to explore place, space, and connections in the modern age, and the things that connect us, across real and imagined boundaries, across time and place. Throughout almost two years of steadily publishing varied and interesting craft essays on true, we noticed a great number of our contributors were offering craft perspectives on place and relationships, themes that spoke directly to Proximity’s vision. Offering an essay contest through Proximity gave us a chance to put these two facets of nonfiction—craft and narrative—into conversation.
For this issue, we were looking for true stories that explored the many interpretations of Transplant, from the literal meaning of lifting up and placing somewhere else or giving or receiving an organ; or all the metaphorical meanings of feeling new or different from those around you, to place feelings from one thing onto another or giving your heart to someone else just to have it crushed.
Marcia Roberts Gregorio’s “Motherlove and Memory” reflects on her mother’s slipping memory, and what happens when we lose that which is so important to us as humans and as writers–our memories, our experiences–and if love can fill the gap.
In the runner-up selection “Swim Lessons,” Brendan Praniewicz shares a story of the “netherworld of violence” he experienced during his high school years in Germany, placing the reader in the middle of an escalation one night at a swimming pool.
This first resurrected prize issue of Proximity is slim–just the two pieces–but we hope to have more issues later this year and continue sharing beautiful stories of what it means to be connected to one another in an increasingly disconnected world.
