Out of Body

Winner of the 2022 Fourth Genre Multimedia Essay Prize

Here’s what our judge, Wayne Koestenbaum, had to say about this year’s winning essay:

“In delicate and textured drawings and text fragments, “Out-of-Body” beautifully captures the feelings of absence associated with depersonalization; whether or not we, the readers, have ourselves experienced the furthest reaches of out-of-body sensation, we have all, as readers of Emily Dickinson and Samuel Beckett and other travelers into the lands of absence, felt the chill of non-being descend upon us, and we can thus recognize (and in a sense revere) the phenomenon. “Out-of-Body,” a text/image amalgam, renders these moods and departures as spooky and fabular;  the images, like the cartoons of Roz Chast, give anomie and distress a sweetly off-kilter charm.”