Second place, Gotham Writer’s Workshop’s 2012 Travel Essay Contest, 2012

Originally published online by The Writer. August, 2012.

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Finalist judge Larry Habegger, executive editor of Travelers’ Tales Publishing, had this to say of the work:

The writer here took a simple concept — the footbridge — and made it a metaphor for belonging, and took the simple familiarity of fries (chips!) and drew the cultural distinctions they implied for the reader. Turning such simplicity into large concepts isn’t easy and he handled it masterfully.

His style is clear and clean and consistent throughout, and though the story is short on dialogue (there’s just enough to get us out of his head) the dialogue he uses carries enough weight so it doesn’t matter. That is, his interactions with the Big Issue seller and the Manhattan Burger owner give us just enough to see those characters as people with personalities.

His descriptions are vivid and his closing paragraph, where he describes the experience of eating a “perfect” chip, expertly wraps the story and is almost as satisfying as eating the chip yourself. And this is where he underscores the notion and importance of feeling at home.

My only quibble with the story is his use of the second person throughout. It’s a technique that seldom works, and in this case I doubted that it would work until midway, when I stopped noticing it and was swept away by the story. That tells me that he pulled it off.