On Emptiness Winner: Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction Selected by Dinty Moore
Joyce Dehli I pull back hard on the swing’s side chains, thrust my feet out and up, and begin—kick, pump, kick, pump. I rise high into sky, which holds me to the seat, envelops me, whistles past my ears, and through my hair. The grass below smells like summer, green and growing. My heart is thumping. My skin tingles. Kick. Pump. Thoughts evaporate. Sounds go silent, and for a moment I am sky. I slip into a gap between sensation and thought: communion. § No childhood memory is more vivid than the moment on my backyard swing when I disappeared into open sky. Nothing could have been more real. “If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory,” Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Sketch of the Past.” Her memory was of being a child half-asleep in bed in her nursery at St. Ives, listening to waves breaking and wind blowing a window blind, dragging its acorn across her floor, and “feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.” Mine was swinging in my backyard on Milwaukee’s southwest side and, in a tiny gap of time, losing all sense that I was