About the Contest
The winner of James River Writers’ and Richmond magazine’s ninth Best Unpublished Novel contest is “Burn” by Alexis Stratton. Stratton’s manuscript was selected from 101 entries by a panel of volunteer judges led by award-winning book publicist and publishing consultant Dawn Michelle Hardy. As the founder of The Literary Lobbyist, Hardy assists first-time as well as published authors with advice, representation and guidance in building their careers.
“The author did a great job of setting the scene at a summer camp in the South where two 14-year-old BFFs have an intimate moment that holds my attention,” Hardy says. “The writing was vivid. I saw the entire scene unfold by a dying campfire on a moonless night. The author does a great job building the heat and tension while allowing the reader to move along at a pace that makes reading literary fiction so pleasurable. By the time I completed chapter one, I was ready for more, and that is what secured ‘Burn’ as my selection.”
The contest also had three finalists: Tony Gentry (“The Night Doctor of Richmond”), Fatima Mahdi (“I Was an Alien Fashion Model”) and Chris Parthemos (“I Imagined There Were Stars”).
PART I
CHAPTER 1
The week before my house burned down, I dared Margaret to walk over hot coals.
I was fourteen, and the heat was slipping away from the bonfire that the camp counselors had built up earlier in the evening. Around the pit, deep seats were carved into the hillside like stairsteps, the dirt held in by wood thick as railroad ties. Smoke curled into the dark, and beyond it, the lake was a wide, inky mass edged by trees. We couldn’t really see much of anything else — for the first time all week, the moon was gone.
Margaret and I had been friends since grade school. Her family lived four houses down from mine when I started first grade, and we rode the bus together for years after that. We’d sit in the back and giggle when we hit that big pothole on Maple Street, our heads bumping the ceiling on days the driver forgot to slow down. When school was done, we’d go to the playground down the street or over to her house or to mine and we would play pretend or Legos or Barbies. When we’d grown up more, we went to youth group together and watched movies and talked about our futures — how she would be a famous scientist who would cure cancer and I would travel the world. This was our fourth year at the same camp — a church camp I’d gone to since the summer my mother started dating Darian. Mom called herself “spiritual, but not religious,” so it wasn’t like she wanted me to learn about Jesus or anything. But I figured she could stand to have me out of the house for a week — and besides, Mom said Margaret was a good influence.
Around us, the foothills of South Carolina nudged up into the sky, but I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking at Margaret.
Her face was golden in the light of the dying fire. The wood had turned blackened and ashy, but beneath it, deep inside, it still glowed red.
“I don’t believe you,” I said, poking a stick at the pit. We were the only ones left. The praise and worship had ended two hours before, and everyone else had made their way back to our cabins. The humid air stuck to my skin.
“I’m not lying.” Margaret was staring out at the lake. Her hair was in a ponytail, a few blonde strands slipping out in the back, brushing against her neck.
I looked down at my hands. “Well, I’ve never seen you do it.”
“I learned it at my Uncle Harold’s last spring. He did it when he was drunk, but you could do it sober, too.”
“I dare you. I dare you to do it.”
“It has to die down a little more.”
Our week at camp was almost over, and I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay there, watching the night darken, so close to Margaret that our hands almost touched. I heard some laughter from the cabins up the hill where sixty-some other kids were heading to bed.
“They’ll come looking for us soon,” Margaret said.
“No, they won’t. It’s the last night. You know they don’t care on the last night.”
“As long as you’re not out with a boy.” Margaret smirked. Tony Martinez had been giving her the eye the whole time during worship that night, and I knew she saw it. She didn’t like him, though.
I thought of the hymns that the kids had sung into the sky. Of the preacher who stood at the front of the chapel at our evening service, this guy with a receding hairline and a habit of sucking in his breath through his teeth just before he made an important point. It annoyed the hell out of me.
“Is it ready yet?” I asked.
Margaret took the stick from me and poked at a couple flames flaring up from the coals. “It’ll do.” She stood and slipped out of her flip-flops.
“You sure you wanna do this?”
“Of course. Besides, you dared me, stupid.”
“Look, you don’t have to —”
“A dare’s a dare, Angie.” She shuffled up to the pit. The remaining coals were circled by a ring of huge rocks. Margaret toed a rock on the edge and grimaced.
I jumped up. “You okay?”
She nodded. I steadied myself, a few feet behind her. I wanted to stop her, to take back that dare. But I wanted to see her do it, too, because I knew she could.
She took a breath and held a foot over the coals. Then, one step, foot flat — the next, the next — and out. Three steps.
I would think about that moment a few days later, as I watched the flames lick up around the corners of my house, the firemen shooting thick streams of water into that heat. I would think about Margaret and the night, the color of those hot embers, the soot on her feet.
“Margaret?”
She was doubled over on the other side, arms clasped around her waist like she was going to puke. I dashed around the fire pit and touched her arm.
When she turned her head to me, she was laughing. Laughing so hard that tears fell down her cheeks.
“Margaret?”
She fell back onto the ground, laughing from deep within her chest.
“Are you okay?”
Her laughter subsided into a smile, and she rubbed at the blackened bottoms of her soles. She nodded.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, sitting next to her.
“A little.” Margaret thought for a moment. “It was worse at Uncle Harold’s.”
I still felt the heat from the fire, now warm on my back. A bell rang up the hill. I looked at her, her arms hugging her knees to her chest. She didn’t look back at me. I touched her arm again, and my hand lingered at her elbow.
I would think about that moment a few days later, as I watched the flames lick up around the corners of my house, the firemen shooting thick streams of water into that heat. I would think about Margaret and the night, the color of those hot embers, the soot on her feet. I would think about what would’ve happened if she hadn’t looked at me, I would think about the pressure of my fingers on her elbow, the loudness of the crickets and the frogs and the moon that wasn’t there. The smell of charred wood, my clothing laced with smoke.
When she looked at me, I let go. Her look forced me to look away, made me ashamed of watching her. I remembered a walk we had the afternoon before, quiet and long around the lake. She made me laugh more than I had in a long time.
If it hadn’t been so dark, if I hadn’t had this feeling that things were going to change, if I hadn’t seen the way Tony had been looking at her, if I hadn’t thought about starting high school in just a few weeks, if I hadn’t felt my heart beating against my ribcage when I thought she was hurt by the fire, maybe things would’ve been different. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to say what I’d said. It was stupid, I know, and I know better now, but I was fourteen. And there we were, faces barely captured by the glow of dying coals, the lake still and beckoning, our voices masked by the chirping chorus of night noises, cocooned by the water’s edge.
“Angie.”
I stood. I watched it again in my head — those three steps.
I tried to find the moon. If I could just see the moon, I could see her face more clearly, could see if there was something there to hold onto. But there was nothing up there — no moon at all.
I felt her hand on my shoulder. “I’m okay,” she said. “See?”
I nodded. In the darkness, I wanted to open up my secrets, as if they were meant to be hers, ours. There was no Tony, no Darian, no Mom, no tomorrow, no later. It was just us.
I heard the words before I knew I had said them. At first, I wasn’t sure if I really had said them, or if maybe I had just imagined myself saying them like I had before, around the lake, or at home, or as we sat in church.
But I had said them. I had said, “I love you.” I saw by the look on her face that I had said it.
Her smile was thin. “Well, I love you, too.”
“No. You don’t understand. I —” I felt myself falling — into the water, sucked into the mud at the bottom.
“What?”
Heat was building in my cheeks, my throat, and I clenched my fists against it. I turned my back to her and trudged through the knee-high grass that led down to the lakeside.
I heard her call my name.
I imagined the water, the clothes suctioning to my skin, tight on my shorts, my T-shirt, holding my breath as I went under.
A hand on my shoulder.
“Angie. Look at me.”
I shook my head.
“What’s wrong?”
The bell rang again. They would be looking for us soon, I thought. I turned to her, but I couldn’t see her face. “You don’t understand,” I said.
“I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
Her hand dropped, and I saw myself standing alone. But then I felt it — her hand in mine, her fingers in between mine. I felt the blood rush to my face, and I froze. I heard her voice say, “It’s okay.”
I was silent. I felt everything at once, heard everything at once, saw the night as something beautiful, saw my future as something suddenly bright and beautiful.
I was silent. I felt everything at once, heard everything at once, saw the night as something beautiful, saw my future as something suddenly bright and beautiful.
Her hand slipped out of mine. “We should go back. Angie?”
I still felt her fingers there, even in that emptiness. I clenched my hand into a fist and sucked in a deep breath. “Yeah,” I managed. But when I looked over my shoulder, she was already walking up the hill.
Later that night, I couldn’t sleep. The cabin was too quiet and my head was too noisy. Margaret slept in the bunk above me. I heard her breathe in and then let it out.
At some point, I got up and went back down to the fire pit. Kenny, one of the counselors, was there. He was a college kid, home for the summer, with golden-boy hair and a deep Southern accent. “What’s up, kid?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
I remembered his fervent prayer from that evening — all the lost souls coming to Jesus, our voices beacons to the world. “Can’t sleep.” I sat down beside him.
“Something bothering you?”
I shook my head. We sat in silence and stared at the starless sky.
Meet the Author
Alexis Stratton wears many hats. They’re a partner, stepparent, teacher, podcaster, freelance writer and editor, playwright, and filmmaker, but Stratton knew from a young age they wanted to be a novelist.
“I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was in third grade,” Stratton says. “I wrote a story for a contest, and it had a trick ending of some kind, and I remember when my teacher first read it, she was so surprised by the plot twist at the end that I knew at that moment that I needed to create things that would impact people in similar ways.”
Stratton, 39, holds an undergraduate degree in English, a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing and a graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies from the University of South Carolina. Originally from rural Illinois, they moved to South Carolina while in high school. They lived in several places globally prior to relocating to Richmond two years ago, where they reside with their partner, Noell Rathbun, and stepchild.
Stratton developed their first draft of “Burn” in 2009 as part of their graduate school thesis work. “I was on a retreat with some of my friends in rural South Carolina, and one of my friends walked over hot coals. … After she did, we all dared each other to write a story or a scene with someone walking over hot coals,” Stratton explains. “I was the only one who actually ended up doing it, but what I wrote ended up being the first chapter of ‘Burn.’”
It’s been a long road to publication for “Burn.” Early attempts in the 2010s were met with rejection largely due to the LGBTQ-focused content. “I got feedback from agents that were like, ‘You know LGBTQ stuff is really selling in young adult fiction but it’s not really selling in adult fiction, so I think you shouldn’t publish this as adult fiction, you should rewrite this whole thing to be YA because that’s where you can tell LGBTQ stories.’ And I was flabbergasted and deeply offended,” Stratton says.
Upset about LGBTQ story quotas and a lack of representation, they refused to switch genres. “It’s gotten a lot better than it was in the early 2010s when I wrote this, but … I think these stories are important and this story in particular tells about how hard it was for this character to be queer and a woman in the South and the challenges of navigating that. We want to think that that is a story for the 1990s and early 2000s, which is the setting of this book, but it’s still happening today, and I think these stories need to be told.”
Stratton has made several major revisions to “Burn” since its original inception, including an update prior to its submission to the James River Writers’ and Richmond magazine’s Best Unpublished Novel contest. They plan to continue pursuing publication either through an agency or an independent press. “[I] was really excited to hear the results because, as you can tell, it’s been a long haul with this manuscript, and it was really encouraging to get positive feedback,” Stratton says. —Nicole Cohen
21st Annual James River Writers Conference
James River Writers hosts its Writers Conference Oct. 7-8 at the Greater Richmond Convention Center. The event features more than 50 literary superstars, including local favorites Tracey Livesay, Rachel Beanland, Dean King and keynote speaker Sadeqa Johnson, plus special out-of-town guests such as The Book Maven Bethanne Patrick, award winner Mark Oshiro and poet Taylor Byas. Admission includes a pitch session with one of seven literary agents, plus educational and inspiring panels and intensives on craft and business. Master classes are held online and in-person on Oct. 6. Conference tickets start at $375 for two days, $190 for one day and $135 for student tickets. Master classes are available a la carte, starting at $50 each. Visit jamesriverwriters.org/conference2023 for details.
