I remember it like I remember dreams: disjointed moments that never say what they mean—dark rooms, closed eyes, wishes for pain to go away or sleep to find me first…

Can you remember your first underground tunnel? The bulkhead steps that were covered in spiderwebs? Your great uncle’s wine cellar? The New York subway system? Mine was a concrete pipe that the local creek ran through…

Winner of the 2022 Fourth Genre Multimedia Essays Prize. Judge Wayne Koestenbaum called the essay “delicate and textured,” a work that “beautifully captures the feelings of absence associated with depersonalization.”

“Drawing the Mall,” by Brian Kearney is our 2022 Muiltimedia contest winner. Judge Kristen Radke called the essay “a slightly-deranged, entirely-beautiful love letter to an American institution that ‘has seasons but it has no weather.’ I’ll genuinely never look at a food court the same way again. I fell in love, too.”

Images of anticipation: VHS snow and TV glow blue, a sealed box of old photos, the back of an envelope, the end of a tunnel, the blind corner of a curvy path, a mirror…

I have been writing a book–or trying to write it–for two, three years now. It’s a memoir, or maybe it’s autofiction–hell if I know. All I do know is that it hurts, yet it also feels necessary and a bit cathartic.