Honorable Mention – Flash 405, June 2025: “Illumination”
Nonfiction
Ten days ago, I finished writing a novel after spending two years hunched over a rickety desk. Driving to a liquor store for some celebratory champagne, I pinballed between fantasies of gracing the cover of Poets & Writers and ruminations about the long odds of finding a publisher. By the time I reached the store, self-doubt had overshadowed hope, and I ended up picking out some cheap chardonnay.
“I just finished a book,” I said, setting my bottle before a middle-aged cashier. “A novel,” I elaborated, feeling an irrational need to justify my purchase.
The cashier’s face lit up. “I just finished one, too. By some guy named Murakami. What did you read?”
I might have explained that I had actually written a novel, but within milliseconds, I was overwhelmed by a sense of my own insignificance. “To the Lighthouse,” I mumbled.
With that, I established myself as an odd sort of drunk who gets sloshed reading Steinbeck, blitzed on Baldwin, and wasted to Woolf. The owner didn’t miss a beat. For ten minutes, she spoke excitedly about reading Woolf in college, and about how she reads voraciously, discovering work by browsing libraries and bookstores, ignoring reviews, and reading books’ openings to see if the writing moves her.
The cashier was precisely the kind of person exalted in Woolf’s essay “The Common Reader”—an intensely curious person who reads purely for pleasure, following her own intellectual inclinations. Barred, as a woman, from obtaining a degree from Oxford, Woolf considered independence of thought “the most important quality a reader can possess,” since preconceptions imparted by critics can short-circuit imagination. “To admit authorities … into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read,” Woolf wrote, “is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.”
For years, I’ve too often bought “buzz” books hyped by critics, influencers, and bots, only to grow envious and demoralized by my own professional struggles. Enthusiasm, fortunately, is contagious. The cashier reminded me of what originally drew me to writing—the joy of reading—and I left the store aglow, thinking more about Woolf’s shining intellect than my own insecurities, and wondering how I might again become, not only a common reader, but a common writer: a person who writes purely for pleasure and finds meaning in fleeting communion with strangers who might never know her name.
Judge’s Comments:
This succinctly captures the struggles we face as writers. How do we find pleasure in our art, in our craft? And to be reminded that we were most likely readers first? Now that is a precious gift to receive.
Alice Hatcher is the author of The Wonder That Was Ours (Dzanc, 2018), which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Fourth Genre, Chautauqua, and Bellevue Literary Review. Hatcher teaches at the Tucson branch of The Writers Studio.
Photo by Blues and Bluets