Friday from the Archives: “Ultimate Trip” the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize essay by Steve Mitchell
with art by Tim Christensen in NCLR 2022
Our 2025 flagship print issue, as usual, contains our most recent Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize winner essay. This year’s piece by Ashlen Renner, sparked by a “Guest Star” she observes in the sky one night, reminds the reader of Steve Mitchell’s winning essay, “Ultimate Trip” from our 2022 issue.
“So, I devour books about space, planets, and astronauts, and watch any science fiction movie I can find. I camp out in the summer with my friends and when we aren’t roaming our suburban neighborhood peeking into people’s windows or trying to terrify each other with ghost stories we swear are true, we lie in the grass and stare up into the night sky imagining a science fiction future.”
Mitchell weaves a story of an awakened self, starting with his nine-year-old self experiencing while watching the movie “2001” in the cinema, and moving into witnessing opera and paintings.
“I tell them about light-years – the fact that the light reaching us from a distant star has traveled thousands of years before we see it; so long, in fact, that the star itself might be dead by the time we observe it. A ghost-star.”
Reporting his selection for the 2021 Albright Prize, final judge Michael Parker noted that the essay’s “real subject is the interior life, and the development of consciousness that brings us both meaning and unrivaled pleasure…. Space, consciousness, memory, time, mystery, wonder, joy, art, faith, the body, the self – all these subjects are not only touched upon but connected in . . . careful, wondrous sentences. That the essay also manages to honor, with grace, all that it cannot communicate is what convinced me of the possibilities of looking inward and upward at once.”
“One summer night, my friends and I pick a distant star, agree on it amongst ourselves, and we check it each subsequent summer night, or we think we do. We think we find it each night among the millions of stars spinning overhead.
We think to name it, but I explain that scientists use letters and numbers – that we can’t name it like a new puppy – and we come up with XJ5016. Or something. For a month, which is a long time in the summer of a nine-year-old, we check on our star each night, or think we do. Until one night, we decide it is no longer there.”
Read the entire essay on ProQuest and pick up a 2022 issue today!
