Barbara c. ewell creative writing award

Women's Studies Writing Awards

The Women’s Resource Center is proud to publish the powerful work of this year’s recipients of The Nancy Fix Anderson Women’s Studies Essay Contest (Lindsey L. Navarro) and The Barbara C. Ewell Creative Writing Award (Delaney Harper).

The Barbara C. Ewell Creative Writing Award

This award honors Dr. Barbara C. Ewell, Professor Emerita of English, a founding member of the Women’s Studies Program and the Women’s Resource Center. She is author of Kate Chopin, a bio-critical study, lots of articles on Renaissance poetry, various North American writers, and feminist pedagogy. She has co-edited two collections, Louisiana Women Writers: Critical Essays and Bibliography and Southern Local Color: Stories of Region, Race and Gender. As the Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor, she continued to instruct and advise adult students in the Humanities Program and also teaches in the Women's Studies Program. She received the Dux Academicus Award in 2003. Entries for this award may be any work of creative writing, including poetry, fiction or drama. Entries must be the student's original work, published or unpublished, relating to the subjects of women and/or gender. Entries for either contest should be sent electronically to the co-chair of Women’s Studies,

Delaney Harper

Delaney Harper is a sophomore history major at Loyola and has worked with the Women’s Resource Center for two years. She began as a staff writer for the Feminist Forum and wrote a film column about feminism in unexpected films. Currently, she serves as the Associate Director of Special Projects and has led and contributed to projects such as the partnership with NOLA4WOMEN to feature women who have positively impacted New Orleans, as well as events such as the film festival in the annual Feminist Festival. As a native of Pearl, Mississippi, Harper explores southern history in particular and has participated in writing conferences and competitions hosted by Millsaps College and the Eudora Welty Foundation. She also studies the LGBTQ+ and civil rights movements around the world. As a budding historian and screenwriter, she enjoys challenging the boundaries of storytelling, including film and television set recreation.

What it Means to be a Woman

By Delaney Harper

Throughout her life, she will be infested with blowflies. A single fly deposits 250 eggs in one birth. They buzz inside her. They were inside her since birth. A mother’s gene. There was a dull throb in her ears like tinnitus, and it grew louder as the years ticked by. Sometimes the flies were like music, her own little Muzak ditties and late-night serenades. She thought she owned them; they were her best friends, her show and tell—though, Ms. Newbury told her she’d missed the point of show and tell when she tried to present her flies to her kindergarten class, and when she got home that day Mother scolded her, saying that the flies are a woman’s private matter. Ladies don’t speak of such things. Other times there were days when her flies seemed to hate her. They pounded against her like they were imprisoned by her organs and bones, they felt like wasps in her skull. Prisoners shoving their shoulders into their papier-mâché penitentiary, desperately trying to break the surface and escape. She was angry by nature, and it was hard to lock that part of herself away when her flies were just as angry. The girl tried ice packs and Advil for her headaches, and when Grandmother said that it may be the Devil in her temple, may be the root of all that rage, she tried Jesus, too. Nothing worked, and the flies peristed. Then the Terror came. Truthfully, he had always been there, but he was Mount Vesuvius and the girl was Pompeii. They shared an inherent rage, but his was one that demanded another’s pain, like a sacrifice. Such rage frightened the flies, so when the girl morphed into a lamb on a slab of stone, she froze, her flies scattered, and she experienced the first great silence of her life. If her blowflies served as a countdown for an inevitable expiration, waiting to fulfill their role, the Terror was the first to start the clock. He was the first to hurt. It was her fault. She only had herself to blame. He choked her because she was too loud, he shoved her because she was in the way. She was seven, and she never learned. One time, when she fought back, the Terror dragged her by her hair to the bushes out back and pushed her into the soil, forcing her face in the dirt and her body into the thorns. He said, “This is where I’ll bury you.” The flies would disperse as the eclipse by his hands drew nearer, folding her into his palm and sliding to and fro like a streetside hustle. From the time she could count her flies, she also counted the minutes between breaths as the Terror did what he did best. At eight, she held those numbers close to her heart. She knew that someday, the Terror would kill her. She imagined she would not live past twenty. But the flies assured her that she was merely the victim of the artisan soul. Too soft, too impressionable was she that even her horror could not be her own. The flies loved her, in their way, but they loved the Terror more. When he bruised her, when he choked her, when he stole pieces of her little by little, they could sleep. The hands that grabbed hold and squeezed gave them their God-sent sign that then and only then could they cease their dreadful buzzing. It was nothing against their host. Tradition was tradition. Her nightmares were the price of silence. At night, when the Terror slept, her mind focused on the ocean of quiet, an ocean she found herself drowning in. She could walk out into that ocean and stay there until the tides overwhelmed her. The water was warm. There were box jellyfish and stingrays, stonefish and flower urchin, and they rubbed against her legs and slipped between her toes as she walked farther into her ocean. As their smooth sides glided across her skin, injecting their poison, the water rose to a steady boil. When the eclipses came, the tide grew. It would be easy to let the venom take over, let her muscles lock up, paralyze and drown her in a tsunami of boiling numbness. But the girl knew that she wasn’t ready to sink into the water just yet. She had twelve more years of swimming.

That’s when the Teacher came. He asked the girl what her name was, and when he looked at her, she felt safe. For a while, the Teacher made her feel like she could live past twenty after all. When the Terror came, he wrenched her from the eclipse of his hands, and he let her sit in the sun as he stood between them. Sometimes he even made her flies feel special. They rarely felt anything, and adoration is enough to make even blowflies dismiss their duty for a moment. But his lessons began and he taught her that there can be an eclipse of the sun, too. He told her to look away and he covered her eyes in case she peeked. He showed her that hands didn't have to choke and bruise to damage. That hands could hurt in other ways.

At first, the lessons were woven into daily life. The price was small: his breath was sour as he showed her the places she would grow. He told her she looked like her mother, and every ten year old girl believes her mother is the most beautiful woman in the world. Every ten year old girl wants to be beautiful.

Each day when the lesson was over, she faced the Terror already in silence; her flies awoke, then rolled back over to rest once more. Her flies barely noticed the shift from palm to palm. Each day when the lesson was over, she felt like she deserved it all. She must have done something

AWARDS wrong, must have misunderstood the lesson, because the Teacher never saved her anymore. The Terror came and went as he pleased. The Teacher’s gloom only lifted when he saw a chance to teach. The girl knew to look out in the world around her, desperately trying to pick up clues for the lesson, when the Teacher became the sanctuary he promised he was. Even sanctuary grew costly. The Teacher grew impatient. The girl began to crave the buzzing of her blowflies as he taught her lesson after lesson, each lesson instilling into her that her worth depends on her usefulness to the men around her. He grew angry when she didn’t understand, and he grew angry when she understood enough to lie there silently. He punished her for the pain he caused—she needed teaching in the first place, and he had a life to live. Eclipses came often, and she began to feel as if she walked through a revolving door: on one side was the Terror, and on another was the Teacher, and the only way out was through. She and her flies grew dizzy. She longed for reprieve, for noise so loud she could disappear. In one lesson, the Teacher taught her the art of fantasy. She was limp as he turned up the television; he too wanted noise, but his was a cruel noise, a noise to conceal a truth and preserve a lie. She lost herself in it all the same. She imagined a kind stranger who neither heard the buzzing of the flies nor tried to silence them. In her fantasy there were pools of angel tears so pure and so sweet that it melted the aberration from her. She prayed to those angels to please, please, liberate her from filth, but even in her prayer she knew she would never be clean. Some things you just know. When the lesson was done, it hurt to walk so she didn't move for a very long time. At twelve, the girl began to bleed, and the lessons stopped. The Teacher stayed in his dark place, and when she needed sanctuary he turned the other way. She had become currency for years, to be traded for peace from the Terror, no matter how brief. And then the Teacher left. His farewell lesson was rejection. She was no longer worth the paper she was printed on. She began to know a different kind of noise when her flies begged her for rest. She’d begun to learn what it meant to be used, and her flies had gotten used to their deep slumber as she drifted through each lesson. They believed she could learn to live in that silence, that pain was temporary when you knew what true suffering meant, but they were wrong. The pain and the suffering did not leave with the Teacher. She saw him in every corner, heard him in every silence. His and the Terror’s voices harmonized into a demonic lullabye, into a song of cyanide and milk. The lyrics were warped like the sound of a television through a wall. Night by night, there were subtle changes in cadence or tone, but the melody always ended the same way. She barely dreamt, but she could feel the blowflies pinwheeling like turkey vultures in their dreams. They migrated as she slept. They filled her lungs with their eggs and when she woke she could not breathe. To them she grew to be a host slowly dying. They too knew her days were numbered. As their population grew day by day, they calculated. Even maggots knew how to count to twenty. The Terror grew older, his sprees more infrequent. What the episodes lacked in number they made up for in ferocity. He could smell the looming death, he could hear the labored breathing. She repulsed him. Though denial was his main lesson, one he taught well and with passion, he also taught her the truth that year to year, change to change, childhood to adulthood, her existential offering was a sin; the only appropriate punishment was to take more from her. This was the motto of her madness. This was what her flies repeated in the pitch and unsteady repetition of windchimes. They laughed as she looked at herself in the mirror. They mocked her. On some level of consciousness she heard them and absorbed their message and thanked them for their time, but the rest of her wandered aimlessly through ghost towns and weddings, through forests and abandoned castles. She was the hero in her fantasies, the quiet beauty who could outmaneuver the villians and remain truly good in her marrow. There was always a guide, a liberator who saw her true potential and convinced her to see it within herself. No flies, no ocean. The endings were never truly endings at first. She was predictable and understandable, and people loved her so much in their own ways that she felt real enough to come back to when her other stories ran their course. The girl spent her years in those fantasies until she became a ghost in those, too. Being a good, predictable, understandable person became a hindrance. She was a husk, and the love from the people around her soured as she worked to maintain their love. The villains always found ways of coming back. An alleyway, a Thursday. A hand flicked the flies away with teenage inexperience. He was the Reminder. He told her he knew a thing or two about pain, about quiet. She believed him because she was sixteen, and she wanted a choir to sing to. He may well have told her the truth, but he was not a man whose actions mirrored his words. He rubbed her against a brick wall, he pushed her further into it as she balanced on loose blocks of concrete. A security camera blinked nearby, as if still asleep, then looked the other away. He had invited her to the alleyway and the girl accepted his invitation because everything felt crooked and she was lonely. She knew he wasn't a bad guy, but she wasn’t sure if he was good, either. He saw her as a souvenir, a character in his charming, cocktail party anecdote. So be it. Let her be the sentimental shot glass from some beach town. But for her flies, the Reminder evoked dreams of great and beautiful things like houses for four and picnics for two. She wished she could give her flies what they dreamt—then she may finally have her turn to rest—but she couldn’t. The Reminder served a purpose, and that purpose was brief. When he completed his mission, he would leave in search of another box to check. No one owns just one beach town shot glass. She went limp once more. He kissed her and she hoped it would be over soon, that he would leave, and then she could leave. But then again the alleyway would still be there. When he moaned, she thought of the movies. She thought of women on their beautiful sides, buried under motel sheets. White sheets. Her skin hissed beneath

his touch, and she was no longer just white. Mouth shaped badges covered her; purple, some green. He tried to memorize those badges as if she was an atlas for a well-planned trip. She tried to forget them, to cover them up with makeup and scarves. Those badges looked her in the eye and told her that her flies were silent, that she was silent, that she had said yes. She had no right to live a life without hiding. To fulfill her only duty as a cheap souvenir was as sinful as denying her duty completely. When he was finished, the Reminder tried to grab her hand, but hands had lost all goodness to her. They had become sabre-tooth tigers, the boogeyman. His hands seemed a gateway to flickering streetlights and her face in the dirt, no use for romance. No eyes but the stars. The moon was just as hopeless. It mocked her as he asked her to go to the alleyway again sometime. She agreed because her flies told her it’s what she ought to do, what she was good at. They told her that his uncalloused hands could not compound her marring. But he could sense her tainted soul, and soon after the Reminder found another girl whose skin did not bruise as easily. When it did, the badges looked like flowers, and this other wore them proudly, like eyes peeking out from under lashes in pillow-talk conversations. The other heard the flies too, but only out of a duty to her gender. It was almost a relief to be free of lifelessly pandering to the Reminder’s desires, desires that he was sure he was entitled to. Then the girl became overwhelmed with the realization that she would dust in the corner of his memory. The crushing weight of the reality that she did not belong there hit her cold and hard. She just didn’t belong. A fraud. There was a dam in the girl that threatened to collapse. She had not seen the ocean of quiet, the tides of numbness in years. Her flies learned the Shepard tone and made music that always felt on the verge of crescendo, but that building of intensity continued into restless nights as the girl felt the Teacher’s presence in her room. She tried to buzz along with her flies. The girl searched desperately for loopholes, for ways to satiate her flies and finally live in peace without the price of her dignity. She begged them to understand that the quiet could slowly kill her. They told her, “My girl, we are not the ones in need of understanding. You are no one without a man at the end of your leash.” She wanted to be someone. She didn’t want to be a fraud. So she welcomed strangers into her life, brought them home with her. A man’s skin rubbed against hers. Just like cicadas. Cicada wings rub together, and all at once God’s most dutiful insects sang together in a rehearsed euphony. Those were the insects men heard, too. This particular man was nameless to her, barely had a face. She knew she was just as empty in his eyes. He was a means to an end. Her flies barely hummed when they heard the cicada’s song, and through this nearsilence, the girl had learned to assemble who she could be from her stomach. Years ago, she’d set a precedent of a life best lived in fantasy. At least this way there was someone who could share in her reverie, if only for a moment. But a leashed pet gets yanked back eventually. The bars were crawling with people—some of which she once tried to convince herself could be her liberator—who took her only offering and looked her over, silently asking, “What else is there?” They were never a guide. When all was said and done, the girl always fell asleep alone, still lost. She turned nineteen, and she could feel the world ending. She turned nineteen, and she felt her life was stolen from her; the Terror, the Teacher, the Reminder, they all pulled the rug out from under her, then rolled her up and buried her in it. They each had an unrelenting hand on her chest, pushing her deeper into the water. The Terror and the Teacher watched as she hid beneath the blankets. They no longer had to eclipse. The moon was on their side now. They watched as the strangers came and went, they followed her to the strangers’ houses and back again. They laughed as she tried to distract herself with all she had to give, as she tried to construct a person she could never be. They told her not to grow angry at her blowflies, they told her to listen. She burrowed deeper into the noise but could not escape the unaffectionate voices of madness. She was weak, they told her. All of her kind are weak, but don’t blame mother or mother’s mother. In all her fantasies, she imagined a savior and displaced the blame; they insisted that she never understood that she was to blame for all of her pain. “Quantity, over time,” they said, “begins to equal worthiness.” She imagined a savior and her blowflies were there all along. As things do to survive, they learned to communicate. To overcome. To mold. Incessant buzzing was their evidence of evolution, but their silence revealed purpose. If that isn’t salvation, then there’s no telling what is. A white sheet and a companion cannot deny purpose forever. The water from the ocean of quiet was a baptism. The men show her the future: The girls, the flies, the purpose, they all end the same way. People will call it a tragedy when they find her body, spread-eagle in the dump. The flies, exiled. The purpose, fulfilled. The blowflies do what they must. They tear away rotten things, but they do not decompose completely. The flies leave remnants as reminders of the purpose; rotten flesh is their legacy, and soil is the girl’s purpose once she has given all she can give. Men are their employers, and from the moment of conception the flies understand that their goal in their brief lives is to cater to their employer’s inherent right to own, and, afterwards, they’re there to clean up the mess. Women are simply the owned. Women are moldable but they are not clay. They are what they are, and when people say it’s a tragedy, it’s because they weren’t listening, or when they did they never asked what it was. Eclipsed or not, deserving or not, there are no true witnesses. People call it a tragedy but at least the scavengers are there to clean up the mess. A customary occupation, always carried out. They eat up as much as they can. Their hunger is condemned because it’s ugly, but at the end of the day animals are never pretty on shelves, no matter how stuffed they are, or what marbles are sewn into their eye sockets. No, let her rot in the dump. Honest. The stars will whisper, but they see this sort of thing all the time. Everyone is spread-eagle from space. The heat of her time under the white sheets has cooled. Taxidermy watch dogs look away as she is covered by another sheet. Useless moon. Useless cameras. No more tides, no more dams. No crescendo, only the Shepard tone. AWARDS