We asked our Schiff Award winners in prose and poetry to shoot us a few words on the pieces that garnered both praise (from our editor judges) and prizes (from our treasure palace). Here’s what they had to say.
Karrie Higgins: “The Bottle City of God” started as a spin-off piece from an essay I wrote about my early experiences in Salt Lake City undergoing a reluctant conversion—not to the Mormon faith, but to the concept of faith. In that piece, the air pollution played only a small part, but as my understanding of Zion deepened, and as I got sick from the air, I realized I was gaining what the Mormons call a “testimony.” But what did it mean to have faith without belief—and belief without faith? To be a gentile Mormon? The answer, I realized, was in the air. “The Bottle City of God” is evolving into a book: part theodicy and part grimoire wherein the pollution, the Zion grid, Mormon forger and bomber Mark Hofmann, Gary Gilmore, Ronnie Lee Gardner, Hugh Nibley, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, David Copperfield, a local weather tower, and a cast of “missionaries” are colliding to cast a magic spell for atonement/at-ONE-ment.
Martha Silano: “The World” began while in residence at one of my favorite places on Earth—a scholarly retreat center located on a small island in Northern Puget Sound. I’d brought a notebook with a quote from Georgia O’Keeffe scrawled inside. She said it was 
the unexplainable in nature that made the world feel big, far beyond her understanding. When I sat down to write this poem, I put that quote at the top of the page and began attempting the impossible: to express my awe about this place where we live. I was also thinking about my son. As the poem revved up and began to find its footing, my son and the world were both there on the page—but as two separate entities. Once the engine was humming, I relished choosing the most alliterative and slant-rhyme-y ways to describe my favorite sphere—huge and miniscule, silent and loud, what and how it spews. Turning Earth into a twelve-year-old boy didn’t occur to me in the first or tenth or twentieth pass, but much later, while working in a room along the Seine River seven months later. In a trance-like state, my fingers flying over the keys, boy and World became one. Georgia O’Keefe’s Pelvis IV provided the final image, followed by a series of “f” words I have always enjoyed on the tongue.
