The final results of the 2024 Big Moose Prize are in! And the winning manuscript is Cyan Magenta Yellow Black by Kevin Fenton.
Excerpt
No one was having a good day. It was December in Minnesota in 1993 and we were all at a stage in our life where our therapist thought we might be less loser-like if we met late Monday morning. Late morning, because early morning wasn’t an option for some of us—because some of us couldn’t keep ourselves from loitering in the hours past midnight. But it had to be Monday morning because the point of this meeting was to inflect the remainder of the week. We should have been in twelve-step programs, but we lacked the required focus to be alcoholics. We should have had families but we misplaced them or never formed them or rejected them as worse than loneliness.
It was December in Minnesota, which is to say that it had snowed last night–a wet, tenuous snow–and as I walked to group I proceeded carefully over the silvery scraped sidewalks and less carefully over the white unshoveled ones. Walking in Minnesota in the winter is always tricky. There’s always the chance you might have to wobble and right yourself.
Yeah, the weather sucks, but not really. It was warm, which meant the snow on the ground would become a part of the air. I noticed the spit of snow against the side of apartment buildings and felt the spray of slush from passing cars threatening my pants and noticed how snow turned to water and trickled down the windshields of heated cars.
And, if my fellow group members were like me, and they were, they were intermittently filled with love for the wet air and the soft grey sky and the brick buildings and the other things which we were not our agitated egos and our adhesive couches. They maybe loved the buildings most: the chocolate brick, the cinnamon brick, the ginger brick, the cardamom brick. We loved the bricks because they reminded us of spices and spices reminded us of love. We relied on the world to poke through our self-involvement a little bit. Walks improved us. Walks improved us so much they were more or less prescribed to us. Walks dissipated our sticky emotional weathers, our condensing sadnesses, our near tears, our overcast silences, our staticky thrashings, our anti-musics–whatever it is that scrapes and worries in us so at the end of the day we aren’t sure we’ve actually lived. A little wind on our necks, a small bright thing in our vision: a neon scrawl on a diner, a purple serif of a bloom in a florist window. These perforations of the self were more important to us than they were to most people. We had already been too cooked by whatever silent scream constituted our inner lives and brought us here. We loved the world because it was not us.
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Kevin Fenton is the author of Merit Badges, which won the AWP Prize for the Novel and the Friends of the American Writers Award, and Leaving Rollingstone, which Patricia Hampl called “the most important memoir to come out of the Midwest (or anywhere) in years.” He works as an advertising writer and creative director; in that capacity, he’s published essays in the design quarterlies Émigré and Eye (London), the anthology Looking Closer 2: Critical Writing On Graphic Design, and the UX design blog Boxes and Arrows. He got a slightly better education than he deserved at Beloit College, the University of Minnesota Law School, and the University of Minnesota MFA program. He lives in St Paul with his wife Ellen and his greyhound Evie.
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Cyan Magenta Yellow Black will be published in September of 2025. To see the full list of the 2024 Big Moose Prize finalists, click here.