Contests
Timberline Review Kay Snow Winner-Summer 2022
“Here’s My Heart”: a mini version of Gudger’s forthcoming memoir THE FIFTH CHAMBER where she marries, is widowed, marries again, and ultimately witnesses her son and daughter-in-law’s beautiful wedding. A full circle, full life essay. A reminder that the heart is a muscle, a mighty one. A reminder to always choose love.
Cutthroat Barry Lopez prize 2021 honorable mention
Here’s what Drew Lanham who judged the contest said about “Just Like a Daughter”: An artful use of abundant dialogue carries the reader along. There's an empathy that pervades this work through the harsh realities of life winding down and inevitable death. Word play via the insets was an effective tool to inform and even take us across time and space of how death and dying impacts the yet living. I'll admit, the writer's brief ornithology of demise also hooked me.
Cutbank - 2022 Runner-up
“I Carry You in my Marrow”
Here’s the award: Montana Prize runner-up
Here’s the piece: I Carry You in my Marrow
An essay stitching bones through generations, from Gudger’s childhood to her supporting a dear friend after his bone marrow transplant.
"Red's Skeleton!" I yelled, pointing at the cow skull and a handful of ribs tucked in the shadow of the downed tree. Skull and ribs bleached with sun and rain and years. I always wanted to tie the skull to my saddle and pack it back to our trailer. To my room I shared with two sisters, bunkbeds stacked three high, me the middle sister in the middle bunk in the middle middle.
Columbia Journal Runner-up Spring 2020
“Family Sauce”
Here’s the piece: Family Sauce
Gudger weaves a favorite family meatball recipe with family stories. With hard stories and tender stories. All shaped around her grandma’s meatballs.
“Everything starts with garlic,” Grandma Sally said as I stretched on tiptoe. As I balanced gripping the metal oven door handle when I was hip high to her. As she pressed her belly into the oven door rather than tell me to stop. As my bare toes crunched papery garlic skin that had fluttered to the floor with the linoleum divot in front of the oven.
“Even me?” I asked.
Hippocampus - 2017 Grand Prize Winner
Hippocampus: The Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction 2017.
Here’s the award: Hippocampus
Here’s the piece: Helix
“Helix’s delivery and pacing . . . pitch perfect. I left this narrative completely satisfied.”
“…’to allow her shadow self to breathe’–beautiful; lovely language…scar on hand, carried from a former life; not wanting her depression on her sister’s chart; the whole theme of unhealed wounds was handled really well; simultaneously sad and uplifting; binds and binding (of lives and wounds)…”
New Millennium Writings
Won the 44th New Millennium Nonfiction Prize for “Dendrites.”
Here’s the award and piece: Dendrites
“From the expansive first lines to the evocative ending, “Dendrites” invites readers to speed along the author’s gray matter through her most transformative life events. It’s a ride you won’t soon forget.”
Winning Writers
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2019 Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
Here’s the piece: A Murder of Crows
A braided essay where love and death and psychopomps all dance together.
"I have to tell you about Granddad," Mama starts and sucks down air. Blows air out like a stuck valve unstuck. She pulls me to her lap, tucks my hair behind my ear.”
Columbia Journal
Runner Up in the Spring 2020 contest judged by Melissa Febos.
Here’s the piece: Family Sauce
“Grandma Sally pinched and blended. Smoothed and spiked. Followed where scent and hands led her with ‘a little of this, a little of that.’”