Thank you to all who entered this year's Creative Minds Essay Contest, and congratulations to our winners:

• First Place
• Second Place
• Third Place
• Honorable Mention
• About our judge

First Place

Exhilaration

by Catherine Wong

Look look, the first words after the gauze came off. I read about this man in a book, blind for forty years; in the dehumanizing clinical style of a case study, the book reduces him to two letters, V.I, and in the interest of privacy strips him of even a name. Four decades of blindness, and then the brain scan, the miracle, one surgery to flip on a switch in the mind and lo, there was light. He reported new sight like a baby’s, unfocused and unclear. A beige blur hovers by his hospital bedside, a gash opens in it and there is speech—he realizes that this is a face, his wife. I imagine opening eyes numbed by forty years of darkness into this world awash in colors, everything painted, sounds matched with newfound pictures. There are no laws of perspective, not yet. Every turn of the head brings another universe, all the colors shifting and swirling. The world was one of brightly-colored patterns to be filed away in the mind, by a lifetime of tastes and smells and once imageless sounds. If this were me, I would ask for children’s books, candy-colored prints on the cardboard. I would beg for flashcards, photos, movies and paintings and picture windows, even while the world was a mess of blurs, paint spilled all over my vision in great sweeping swaths of color. Never mind why the sky is blue, just let it be blue.

In this story, there is a window. From his hospital bed this man, the real one, counts cars, colored confetti in his vision, taxis and school buses loud against the backdrop of black city streets. Little things make his breath catch in his throat—a flame dancing in its holder, the infinite illusion of a room in a mirror, the glint of a light on a glass of water, to be looked at once and twice and again. I imagine a room papered with eclectic patterns, stripes next to polka dots, a kaleidoscopic beauty to compensate for forty color-starved years, look look.

Maybe the gauze came off too quickly. Maybe the world was like fire on his eyes, every waking moment a dream, joy melting into pain. Within one day, he was tired; within one month, he wandered the halls of his home with his eyes closed, making soft sad moans. The sheer exhaustion of sight, this marvelous dream he had wished for since childhood, overwhelmed him; he had not imagined that vision had rules, that he might have to learn how to see. A cat was a thousand cats—without a mind trained to blend, to recognize that an object seen from every angle is still a single whole, his own pet was unrecognizable, a different image each time when seen from front or behind or the side. Without an understanding of depth, the world became an obstacle course. He reached out a hand to touch houses that were, in reality, miles away; he stumbled into poles on the sidewalk, and he had never been this disoriented, not even when he was blind, and groped his way through the world with his hands.

A few years later, something burst in his brain, the switch flipped back, no surgery to correct it again. Back in his hospital room, family members came sadly to his bedside; the nurses pulled a shade down over the window in mourning, veiling the city streets and the cars he had counted.  He was pronounced a tragedy—all his colors gone—and yet peace was restored, the permanent shroud thrown over his eyes, calming. He stumbled back into the world with a brilliant orange and white cane, deliriously happy to be returned to the familiar black cocoon of his blindness.

Catherine Wong, 16, is an 11th grader at Morristown High School in New Jersey. She loves essays and hates editing. She has been recognized for her writing in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and has published in numerous literary magazines as well as on Cogito.org. When not writing, she enjoys solving physics problems and managing the website Better Than Wikinotes.

Second Place

September Bear

by John Daniel Coburn

September Bear sits in my closet smooshed behind an old sleeping bag, a Mexican hat purchased at Epcot Center, Bavarian leather shorts, and ski pants that no longer fit. September Bear reclines in a corner, a solemn soul, a keeper of secrets, a dreamer of dreams, a half deserted best friend from my past.

I was three, an only child, sometimes lonely, often serious, a reader of books, a drawer of dragons, a believer in fairy tales, when September made his grand entrance into my life. I had owned other stuffed animals before him, Father Bear, Seal Face, Ducky, Grey Elephant, enough to cover a king sized bed in layers, but September was singular. We shared a birthday, September 7^th and golden reddish hair. His eyes were somber and brown, mine somber and grey. Uncle Steven, the New York City editor, had bought him from Smithsonian, and he was spectacular. Uncle Steven had never given me a gift before, and to the best of my memory, he has never given me one since. I am not sure what possessed him to purchase September, but he told me that I needed a brother, and so that was what September became. (My quiet contemplative brother, always there and ready to listen; my strong, protective, brave brother, who would wipe out nighttime fears with the brush of his paws.)

We became inseparable. Once I left him beneath the covers in a hotel in Florida and I cried until we made the hour trip back to the hotel, almost missing our return flight as a result. I was four then, and September was still pretty solid and firm. He traveled to Canada,  France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, Italy, Monaco, Brussels, and at least 20 U.S. states with me, sharing my bed, listening to bed time stories read to me by my mother until I could read them aloud myself. For years I read to him by flashlight under the privacy of my covers long after my parents had gone to bed.

September saved my life once when I was four. We were camping and my parents got distracted while cooking and talking to the other families. I tried to get past a particularly large adult who did not see me, and fell head first into the bon fire, clutching September in front of my face. My mother pulled me out, panic and guilt written all over her countenance. She rushed me to the bathroom, past the tents and campers, and searched me for burn marks, cuts or bruises. I was fine, but September’s fur was singed and black in patches. I cried. My mother washed him, mended him, and clipped off the worse parts of the blackened fleece. She wrapped an ace bandage around his damaged arm and September survived. September was my hero; he had risked his life for me at four.  (Half of being a hero after all is being in the right place at the right time/many people we tag as heroes have performed much less in the area of valor).

By the time I was eight September had gone through many surgeries. Re-sewn, restructured and re-stuffed over the years, he was never replaced. Yes, other stuffed friends entered my life, Build a Bears with clothes, Berenstain Bears and Boyds, but September was my brother bear.  September would take occasional vacations from my bedside in order to be washed and dried. My dog knew better than to approach September, even though many other stuffed animals were torn to shreds.  During grade school September even attended sleepovers with me, when it was still acceptable, but as middle school approached, it became passé and so September began to spend more time alone on the bottom of my bedside. When my father went through chemo and radiation treatments for cancer when I was in 4^th grade, September once more slept under my covers, but as my father regained his strength, September was removed again to a shelf. While I missed him, he had become an embarrassment; big boys did not sleep with stuffed animals. But, I missed him.

Now, September sits in my closet. My mom takes him down when I go on long trips like when I went to Stanford University last summer for a three week writing program, or this year when I was in China studying economics and international relations. It is a joke we share. The other animals have all been given away long ago to Good Will or to my young cousin, but not September.  Somehow it does not seem right to throw him away, and in his “well used” state, he is not likely to find an open reception for adoption. Beautiful he is not. Still golden, a red haired bear with a concave chest and sunken stomach, worn down nose and feet pads, holes by his neck and under his arms, he is a wreck. I tell myself that someday I will give him to my son, a golden haired boy of my own, who will love him as I did, but he would need to be a sentimental child and most children are not that sentimental; they long for the brand new sparkling things, not the old worn things that still rest softly on the soul, soothing fears and promising safety in the night. Someday, in the not too far off future, I will go off to college and leave my parents behind with September; hopefully he will comfort them from his resting place in the closet, and make the transition a little bit easier for them, as he did for me.

John Daniel Coburn is from Newark, DE. He is currently a junior at The Sanford School. He is passionate about economics, environmental issues, politics, tennis, and international relations. This essay was written for an A.P. Language assignment for Mr. Fritz.

Third Place

Pancakes and Potstickers

by Anais Carell

“Allium madidum.” My lab partner said the plant name slowly and hesitantly, as if her voice was sliding through glue.

It was my first time working with this student, so a few minutes into biology class—given my racially perplexing appearance of rowdy dark hair and bronze skin—the inevitable question surfaced: “What are you?”

Until three years ago, I would always give the same response. My father is Caucasian, and my mother is French-Vietnamese. Her parents and sisters left Vietnam for France, where my mother was born.  As usual, I reveled in my partner’s reaction, listening proudly as she marveled at my heritage—Vietnamese. It sounded as if she were pronouncing Allium madidum; the word was spectacularly exotic, decadently one-of-a-kind.

As much as I loved to flaunt my heritage, I have never felt Vietnamese, nor have I felt exotic or one-of-a-kind. Apart from the occasional bowl of rice, my family’s lifestyle is as American as pancake breakfasts and barbeque. The closest we came to visiting Vietnam was our hour-long trip to New York’s Chinatown.  For years, I regretted my mother’s new Americanized life.  How could she, a woman who could call herself French-Vietnamese, accept the loss of such a striking ethnicity? She was a direct product of globalization and colonization, the fascinating clash and fusion of two cultures, and my preteen self could not comprehend her decision to take on such a ubiquitous Western identity.

To me, American meant normal. It meant agreeing to give up all other identities in favor of assimilation. It meant agreeing to trade the pungent spices of Asia for the bland grease of a McDonald’s hamburger. It meant agreeing to stifle the melodious French tongue for the regulated English language. And this was an agreement I just couldn’t reach.

Desperate to separate myself from Americanized life, I found an opportunity to revive my mother’s culture.  The plan was simple: each eighth-grader at my middle school was to give a presentation on his or her heritage at a school-wide Ethnic Fair, complete with the historical background of the country, a family tree, entertainment, and food.

This was my chance to become Vietnamese, my opportunity to bond with my ‘true’ culture. I expected a project that would allow me to connect with my mother’s family. I envisioned practicing the fundamentals of the Vietnamese language, repeating simple words such as chào (hello) and toi (me). I envisioned cooking the traditional cuisine with my mother, carefully folding and steaming the pale, soft dough of a Bành bao dumpling. I envisioned diligently researching the country’s culture, learning everything from the rhythmic characteristics of the endangered Xâm folk music to the traditional values of ancestor worship.

Instead, my mother treated the project with Las Vegas-esque mimicry and with all the classic expediency of American life. In the name of efficiency, we bought Trader Joe’s Microwaveable Pot Stickers and collected packets of soy sauce from the nearby Chinese restaurant. I was encouraged to pick generic Asian music off of the Internet; after all, who could tell the difference? My ‘diligent’ research amounted to nothing more than a basic understanding of the Vietnam War and of Communism.

The day of the presentation, disappointed with my exceedingly unremarkable project, I decided it was time to understand why my mother was so adamantly American. Before leaving for school, I mustered up the courage to ask her why she had moved to the US. Turning towards me, my mother sighed and admitted, “I expected this to come up.” And she told me the story of her family’s emigration from Vietnam.

Her father, although Vietnamese, worked for the French administration in Hanoi, where he lived with my grandmother and their children. When the Communists took North Vietnam, my mother’s family fled with the French in order to escape persecution. They spent one month on a cramped refugee boat, where my grandmother was both pregnant and sick. As immigrants to an unknown territory, my mother’s family struggled with providing for eight children, adjusting to a strikingly different culture and battling rampant xenophobia.

As of yet, my life experiences do not extend far beyond the village borders of Clarendon Hills, Illinois. My knowledge of Communism is confined to the pages of my history textbook, and I know nothing of persecution or poverty. I have been seasick for a few hours, but never feverish, pregnant, and trapped at sea for a month.  I learn French in the friendly setting of a high school classroom, not in the heated, desolate environment of a refugee camp.

My life is comfortable. The lives of countless Vietnamese, including those of my mother’s family, have been far from comfortable, wrought instead by decades of colonial government and brutal years of war. The families that once drove glittering convertibles and ate at Hanoi’s finest restaurants became refugees scrounging for scraps in a foreign land. Their urban mansions morphed into army barracks deposited in rural France, conveniently isolated from the rest of the country. As war and chaos bent Vietnam to its breaking point, my family’s existence was similarly distorted and deformed.

Ever since my mother told me her family’s story, I cannot help but feel fraudulent when asked about my heritage. The Vietnamese pride themselves in their struggles and in the obstacles they have overcome. No matter how many Bành baos I may steam, no matter how many times I repeat chào and toi, I cannot claim to have encountered the challenges faced by my Vietnamese family, and I cannot squeeze myself into the rigid frame of another culture.

To me, America means new. It means the opportunity to craft an environment that you hope will define your life. It means the opportunity to build a developing culture in the shape you see fit. This is the opportunity my mother was searching for, and this is the opportunity I cannot let slip by.

Ana Carell is a politics-loving, tennis-playing junior from Chicago. She is a piano player and self-proclaimed speech geek. Ana can usually be found reading newspapers, watching Hitchcock movies with friends or trying to speak French.         

Honorable Mention

In the Kitchen

by Ann Garth

While Dad cooks dinner, I sit at the kitchen table, every night. The table is white and wooden, the white on top chipping a bit, and the late-afternoon sun comes in slanting through the windows, starting at golden then fading to dusk and pale pink and purples and then finally making its way to dark, which is when Dad closes the shade and asks me to “Set the table please, Ann, it’s time for dinner.”

Behind him, over the sink, a flower usually bobs and twirls like a ballerina in a bright orange dress in the breeze from the open window, except on the days when the window remains closed, the rain thrumming like a heartbeat against its pane. Through the window, with the breeze, comes the scents of Nature and all of the music of the world.

As Dad works in the kitchen, I work in at the table, my pen scratching as the dark creeps in on soft-pawed feet, covering my workspace so gradually that I don’t even notice until, with a blink, I look up to find that it has overtaken me. Meanwhile Dad chops, cuts, mixes, and stirs, the tendrils of smell drawing me in like grape vines until I finally have no choice but to walk over and take a bite of whatever he’s making. Some days it is mint, as fresh and green as a Christmas tree in winter, or olive oil, collecting on the cutting board with all the color of concentrated sun. Other times it is green beans, or biscuits, or garlic, each as delightful as the next.

Mostly when I help Dad I work at the cutting board. It is old, its wood a shade lighter than the floors and worn smooth as a baby’s skin by the passage of the years, and big and thick, three inches at least. It is rounded at the corners where I hit my head once, when I was three or four, running around the corner of the kitchen island calling, “Mommy, Daddy, guess what!” Boom and I fell to the floor crying, and Daddy took the board out from the wall right away, brought it down to his shop and rounded off the edges, telling me, “See, honey, now it won’t hurt you.” Whenever I look at it I see that day again, hear my sharp cry, and the feet hurrying across the creaking wooden floor, which announced Dad’s arrival every day to breakfast, the click of whichever dog’s claws and the floorboards moving as he walked.

At night, as I lay in my darkened room, the sharp stacatto of their footsteps and the softer music of their voices would drape around me like a blanket, growing softer and darker until eventually I was forced to succumb and fall asleep. They didn’t mind, I don’t think, cleaning up. Now that I’m older and go to bed later, I have to help, but when I was little that was the end to my days- the sound of them moving around just a doorway away.

My kitchen is full of memories, stuffed with the years that my feet have pounded its boards and my hands have touched its smooth granite surfaces. My body has draped across its stools, book in hand, and I have steeped myself so deeply into every corner of this kitchen that I know that however strenuously I may wash myself, I will never get myself out.

Ann Garthis a 14-year-old middle school student who loves reading, writing, and debating. She lives in Long Beach, CA, with her family and cat.

  About our judge

Elissa Brent Weissman is the author of the novels Standing for Socks, The Trouble with Mark Hopper, and Nerd Camp. She earned her bachelor's degree in creative writing at the Johns Hopkins University and her master's degree in children's literature at Roehampton University. She now teaches Writing for Children at the University of Baltimore and Towson University, and runs creative writing workshops for adults, teens, and children. Learn more about Elissa and her writing at www.ebweissman.com.