The Writing Challenge for the 2024 spring issue of Rising Voices journal invited readers to respond to the following sensory prompt:

Consider a location from an event or experience that you had during fieldwork or research. Write and / or draw a short piece (1,200 words max) that describes the scene in as lush, diverse sensory ways as possible. If you can note (ponder) how sound relates to the other sensory modalities that you noticed in your scene, please do include them.

We encourage you to attend closely to the ephemeral nature of the sensory impressions of this experience and to contemplate the different sensory changes throughout time. It may help to close your eyes and spend 5-10 minutes recreating the scene in your mind.

To our surprise, the challenge brought in a record number of submissions. The submissions hailed from across the globe, providing a wonderful perspective of the diversity of fieldwork experiences of graduate students. The committee—Olga Zaitseva-Herz (who wrote the top paper from the previous challenge), Pantea Armanfar (Rising Voices creative writing editor), and we (Hannah Snavely and Tomie Hahn)—enjoyed reading / seeing all of the submissions. We found the works compelling, creative, and rich in sensory description. 

The committee thanks everyone who submitted! We encourage readers to submit their work in future writing challenges. Until next time!