Joni Tevis, the Bennette E. Geer Professor of English at Furman University, won her second Pushcart Prize for an essay titled “If Your Dreams Don’t Scare You,” which was published in The Georgia Review.
The essay discusses hazing throughout the years, including Tevis’ experience with it during her undergrad years in the marching band at Florida State University. The Pushcart Prize recognizes the best poetry, short fiction and essays published in smaller literary journals and magazines in the United States.
“For me, being hazed in this way was a radically alone-making thing — I didn’t talk about it, not with the others who had been through it, and not with friends or family back home,” she said. “When I finally started to write about it, after many years, I didn’t realize the loneliness that I still carried with me, like a scar this experience caused me to have.”
Tevis’ first Pushcart-winning essay was titled “What the Body Knows,” published in the November/December 2013 issue of Orion magazine.
“This essay means a lot to me, not only because it was so hard to write, but because it allowed me the great gift of writing my way into a new community,” she said.
Read an excerpt from Tevis’ award-winning essay below:
If Your Dreams Don’t Scare You
Initiation
I don’t remember what they called that night. Someone drove us to a house off campus. Someone blindfolded us. Someone lined us up around the perimeter of a pool. They made us practice fundamentals—low mark time (heel up, toes down), high mark time (up to the knee), glide step (dig in the heel, turn up the toe). There was a girl ahead of me in line. I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was there.
We were in college marching band together, and there were thirty-five people in our section. Maybe eight of us were new. I tried to think how I would describe this moment, first to myself, then to someone else: that the air pressed in, humid and hot. That the pool’s cement edge warmed the soles of my feet. That layers of white tissue bandaged my eyes.
Then the girl ahead of me hit a brick wall. The impact knocked out her front teeth, bloodied her nose, and gave her a concussion. Or maybe it chipped her teeth and cut her mouth so she had to get stitches. I remember she was upset because she’ d had braces or other dental work, and her parents would be angry about the damage. Someone drove her to the emergency room, and the night ended. I remember some of the seniors were disappointed they didn’t get to do everything they had planned. They were going to tie us hand and foot and throw us blindfolded into the pool.
