Winner Announcement for the 2024 Multimedia Essay Contest
We received so many excellent submissions for our multimedia essay prize, and we’re grateful to everyone who participated.
This year’s judge, Leslie Jill Patterson, has selected the graphic essay “False Alarm” by Jennifer Murvin as the winner of the Fourth Genre 2024 Multimedia Essay Contest.
Here is what Leslie Jill Patterson had to say:
This essay has the perfect title—because it’s a literal false alarm the essay is describing but also the millions of alarms going off in the mother’s head, all of them largely based on her imagination, the maternal instinct to worry. The story here is also perfect for a brief essay—one incident that’s powerful enough to carry a story. The image of the young boy descending the stairwell one floor at a time, by himself, is there heat? is there flame? all while warning his mother not to interrogate or reprimand the father. This young boy who understands the dynamics of divorce, the conflict between the parents that’s spilling onto him. It’s a powerful narrative. I also love how the author wraps up this essay and gives it the final punch I expect from the best flash essays—how the author and the woman with cancer symbolically merge into one woman, or womanhood, imagining death, and offering up prayers. It’s a solid ending. Finally, I admire how this essay uses text—incorporating it into each frame, but also working with line and line breaks, as if the prose is almost poetry. Visually, the writer is aware and in control of both image and text. I do wish the narrative question of the cats left behind had been more specifically answered and that the point of the bare feet came to mean something (it’s such a recurring image, I just kept waiting for it to come to fruition in some way). But still, I think this is clearly the winner. The writer is fully aware of the connection between text and image, but also has a full grasp on the essay’s narrative line.
Jennifer Murvin is the author of two story collections, She Says (Small Harbor Publishing) and Real California Living (forthcoming Braddock Avenue Books). Her essays, stories, and graphic narratives have appeared in literary journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, River Styx, The Southampton Review, The Pinch, december magazine, DIAGRAM, The Florida Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Indiana Review, CutBank, Post Road, American Short Fiction (Winner of the American Short(er) Fiction Contest, judged by Stuart Dybek), Phoebe, The Sun, Mid-American Review, Midwestern Gothic, and Cincinnati Review. Jen is an Assistant Professor of English at Missouri State University, a faculty member at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Lasell University, and a faculty leader for the nonprofit community writing workshop River Pretty Writers Retreat. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University. Jen is also the owner of the indie bookstore Pagination Bookshop in Springfield, MO. Find more at https://www.jennifermurvin.com/.
Jennifer will receive a $500 prize, and you can experience her essay by following the link below: