A pregnant writer goes to the cemetery to visit her father’s gravesite. She stands there, contemplating the fact that there is a body in the ground before her and a body that she carries inside her and that she can’t see either of them. She thinks about loss and about parenthood and what it means for her, standing in the middle. Then, she goes home and spends half an hour writing an essay about it.
“I am the memory keeper of all the life I lived with my dad,” she writes. “I am the hope harnesser for the future of my son.”
That is the flash, the inspiration and experience behind Alyssa Rickert’s “The In-Between,” which won Grand Prize in the Writer’s Digest 2nd
