This week I am sharing some of my favorite excerpts from contributing writers’ work for the Essays on Childhood project. Contributors range from experienced professional writers to first-time essayists.

TODAY is the LAST DAY to jump on board in 2013!

Click here to find out how to join us this year: http://essaysonchildhood.com/contact-the-project/

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Something has broken in me. I quiver head to toe, shaking uncontrollably for minutes. I do not to this day have the words to describe what broke, unless it was something like the compact between parent and child. It had something to do with the fact that never again could I look at my parents without complicity, a knowing and direct participation — both embarrassing and far too personal – in the magnitude of their estrangement.

via In a Man’s Voice: Happy Again by Douglas Imbrogno | Esse Diem.

Because we have all been children, we all have a physical place that is a part of our being, because it was the place of our becoming.  As children we are physical beings locked in the moment.   The sight, sound and scent of living, the tactile presence of it, embeds itself within us.  It is unnoticed but as constant and critical to our growing as oxygen that flows through our blood from breathing.  As adults, we live in layers of past, present and future.  When my adult present was rocked and cracked by death, sickness and separation until it split into a gaping rift, I found that childhood place.  It bubbled up, unbidden, and flowed liquid into the gap.  Some embedded tactile presence of living rushed into the emptiness that threatened to take my life and filled it.

This is a story about that place.

via The Simons House by Margaret Ward McClain

Photo courtesy of essayist Margaret Ward McClain

That love of being alone found its best expression in midnight walks during winter, the moon casting an eerie glow to the entire world, the snow reflecting the light in loving response, Endymion to Diana in every pale snow pile.  I would head out at what my mother called “the witching hour” and walk down the road until my nose got so cold it began to drip.  The silence was palpable and soothing, the world muffled with a snowy blanket, soft as a baby’s comforter.  I couldn’t have said it at the time, but what I experienced in those long winter walks belonged to the infinite–God, the imagination, time’s longing for itself–and those interludes gave me a hunger for the spiritual, an appetite that is only satisfied when I return to the mountains, those winding roads that lead to moments of mystery, found in the West Virginia hills.

via Winter Solstice by Anne Clinard Barnhill

Photo courtesy of essayist Melanie Foster Taylor

This week I am sharing some of my favorite excerpts from contributing writers’ work for the Essays on Childhood project. Click here to find out how to join us this year!

http://essaysonchildhood.com/contact-the-project/

Middle school started to show me that football could put a boy at the top of the popularity totem pole.  The players always seemed to have the prettiest girls talking to them and they got the most attention around school.  That was especially true when game day arrived.  The team members always had a tradition of wearing their jerseys at school all throughout that day.  The school would be dotted with light blue jerseys bouncing around campus.  Everybody got excited for the games, especially if they were playing at home.  Those days we didn’t have to ride the school bus home.  We could stay after school, watch the game, and have our parents pick us up after the game was over. But when you saw those blue jerseys around campus, they were not being worn by the players.

In a lot of cases, those jerseys were being worn by girls.

via In a Man’s Voice: The Jersey by Vernon Wildy, Jr. | Esse Diem.

We would meet in the parking lot of the Tech Center, a great, sprawling piece of property where most of our parents’ offices were located.  Parents and kids who were going and kids who weren’t going and kids who had already been but wanted to say goodbye to their friends all gathered.  There was always crying.  Kids crying from fear if it was their first year and frustration if their siblings got to go and they didn’t, always last minute dashes to the bathroom, and slightly controlled chaos abounded.  Parents yelling out the ever-embarassing, “Don’t forget to change your underwear!”  “Brush your teeth!”  “Use the bug spray!”  “Don’t forget to write!”

via Carbide Camp was Magic by Jean Hanna Davis | Esse Diem.

When we would spend the night with Mamaw, Shawn and I would sit up late at night and watch “Chiller Theater” on TV.  I was always such a big chicken and didn’t want to watch, so I would hide under the covers on the couch.  Mamaw would then shoo us into bed and the three of us would giggle and tell stories by the light of an eerie green colored night light.

When I was about ten years old, Papaw renovated the apartment above the detached garage next to the old homestead.  The double car garage served as Papaw Charlie’s woodworking shop and my uncle Ted’s garage band’s practice studio.  Since Ted was just a teenager when I was young, I always liked to listen to his band rehearse.  One Halloween, when I was in the third grade, I remember dressing up in my costume, a character from The Planet of the Apes, and standing in the garage door as the band practiced their rendition of CCR’s “Rolling on the River.”  To this day, every time I hear that song I think of standing there in my ape costume, wanting to just listen to the music as long as I could.

via Growing Up (part two) by Christi Davis Somerville

Next week is the deadline for jumping aboard this years Essays on Childhood project. All we need is a short bio and a head shot; you have another month to decide what you want to write, and even longer than that to actually write it. Click the link above or just click this photo here to redirect to the full project schedule.

In honor of previous essayists and to get your writing mojo flowing, I am going to republish some of my favorite excerpts from previous years over the next several days. Enjoy, and feel free to send me any questions at edg@longridgeeditors.com or just post them here in the comments. I hope to work with you this year.

Ours was the third house to be built in the ‘new’ neighborhood. A subdivision of homes was being built in the woods. THE WOODS. We moved into the house in the fall, and I played in the woods around the house beginning then and through the winter. When I turned seven in April my mother sent me outside to play.

“No really, you have to go outside… and play… Go…”

So I went. Outside. Into THE WOODS.

via In a Man’s Voice: Outside by Brent Aikman | Esse Diem.

When I went to college in South Carolina, I sometimes babysat for a young family.  The Daddy went to Episcopal High School, a boarding school in Virginia, and coincidentally was roommates with my cousin Will Carter.  He told me about his trip to Lewisburg once, his first to West Virginia, with Will to meet his family.  He remembers driving into a beautiful piece of property, open and lovely in the spring green, and as they pulled in closer to the Prichard house, two young men, not much older than he and Will, were standing naked in the field playing their stringed instruments.

via For the Love of Music by Lisa Lewis Smith | Esse Diem.

Nobody had been up the road for many months, probably since summer time, so the ruts grooved by any bad weather were deep. As we descended into the Rain Forest, the driver had to make sharp left and right juts, avoiding the big pits in the dirt road. I remember flinging right and left off the back of the Jeep as the driver jigged and jagged along the path. Sometimes we had to actually stop and fill in the ruts with brush and stones in order to create a passable road. Sometimes we would stop and pick blackberries on the way in!

via Going to the Farm by Melanie Foster Taylor | Esse Diem.