Mirela Musić | 2024 Nonfiction Chapbook
Essayist Mirela Musić joins a salmon-fishing operation in Alaska and compares her Montenegrin parents’ Brooklyn marriage to her vessel-confinement and the boat captain’s treatment of her in the all-male fish harvesting world. The chapbook includes seven original illustrations in traditional media by Ayla Bramblett.
Guest judge Mary Cappello chose “The Nature of Alaska” as the winner of the 2024 Tusculum Review Nonfiction Chapbook Prize:
“Nothing about this essay can be anticipated. If the title leads you to assume a travelogue is on offer, or a natural history tour of a place “elsewhere,” think again. Aesthetically speaking, ‘The Nature of Alaska’ shows an extraordinary command of movement across place and time; of the sinuous possibilities of sentences, the profoundly sensory ‘rightness’ and originality of words well-chosen, of phrases that resound, and of paragraphs, whose riffs, lyrical tempos, and subtle juxtapositions animate an understanding of the forces that roil beneath our daily lives but that often go un-named. This is an essay about the precariousness of sleep; the indefinable nature of home; and the power of place to hold us or eject us. It’s about finding family or fleeing family; it’s a wrangling with the terms by which we accept our own oppression. By turns stunning and brilliant, the essay conveys extraordinary insight about the forces that shape us while also evincing empathy where it might be hard to give. Where, and how, can a woman who sets out, on land or on sea, arrive, in a world driven mostly by masculinist pathos and misogynist bleating? The first time I read this writing, I was rapt and deeply moved. The second time, caught in the undertow of its final sentence, I wept. Have I read this writer before? I don’t think so. I can’t wait to read more.”
Mirela Musić is a writer/director based in Brooklyn. After receiving her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Montana, she continues to work on the intersection of identity and place through film and essay. Pony Girl, her first professional short film, is currently in post-production.
Ayla Bramblett is a visual artist who explores illustration using various dry and wet mediums. She is interested in creating work that reflects herself and the experiences of others. Ayla resides in Richmond, Virginia, where she is completing her BFA in Communication Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. She sees herself continuing to explore the storytelling of the body and figure as an interconnected link to identity and nature. You can find what Ayla is creating now @arty.ayla on Instagram.
Mary Cappello’s seven books of literary nonfiction include a Los Angeles Times bestselling detour on awkwardness; a lyric biography; the mood fantasia, Life Breaks In; and a speculative manifesto, Lecture. She has been variously honored with Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellowships in Nonfiction; the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize for her documentary work with new immigrants to Italy; and the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative. Her third book, the breast cancer anti-chronicle, Called Back, was recently re-issued by Fordham UP. Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island, she is currently completing Frost Will Come: Essays from the Bardo based on the last two weeks in the life of her mother, poet Rosemary Cappello.