“Even down here, there are stars:” Thoughts on a prize-winning essay

By Jonna Nielsen ’27

Pressure, shadow, decaying matter: nothing that naturally attracts the soft, respirating, light-seeking human body. For Eun-Jae Norris ’26, though, this is a perfectly fertile ground for their mind and the endless unfoldings of their curiosity. Here, they reflect on their essay that was was the recipient of the 2024 Norton Writer’s Prize for a student at a 4-year college or university, a significant award given annually to just three undergraduates for outstanding works of nonfiction.

“A Guided Tour of the Underworld (or: Community Dinner, and Other Fun Activities to Do with Your Hagfish Friends)” was written in Norris’ first term as a submission for College of the Atlantic’s Writing the Environment course. The assignment prompt had asked them to portray a “sense of place,” which they interpreted as any place of intrigue, not just a physically accessible place from their memory. Norris takes the reader to a deep-sea whalefall—a decomposing whale carcass that attracts its own micro-ecosystem of feeders and exploiters—as that is a place on Earth they would most like to inhabit, human limitations aside. The reader is tugged along, following the bits of sinking decaying matter, or marine snow, and encounters an alien depth:

“The shade of water around them deepens from the bright blue of the afternoon sky to a dusty, muted twilight, never becoming any less empty. The ocean is vast in every direction—these bits of detritus could be swept hundreds of miles north, south, east, or west and never see their world change. Instead, they are drawn downwards, through layers of light and cold, into the darkness they have never known to the closest land there is,” Norris writes.

As a (mostly) verbal medium, creative writing relies entirely on the composer to conscientiously sculpt the sensory out of language, a seemingly static palette of symbols. Norris kept this constantly in focus, and thus brought the dead to life, drawing parallels as poignant as that of whale’s ribs that “jut upwards in a great arch, the primal predecessor to the grand domes of synagogues, mosques, and cathedrals outlined in stark white scaffolding,” making the carcass’ feeders “a loose congregation, coming and going as they please but always drawn back to this one place, this specimen of the skies that feeds them.” They concentrate in their writing practice on moving the reader from the introduction of a setting to eventual full immersion.

“They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but if you’re doing writing, you do actually have to do the thousand word legwork in order to create an image of something people might have never seen before,” Norris says. Imaginative practice, they add, is crucial to this.

Imagination does not have to mean designing something entirely novel without any input, however; Norris says they often reimagine what fascinates and stimulates their mind, and one of these sources has been the livestreams of deep-sea expeditions by Nautilus Live (the organization’s current Chief Operating Officer is COA alum Allison Fundis ’03!). Listening to the genuine excitement of the marine scientists on board, their intense love for the alien worlds of the deep is reaffirmed. For them, writing can convey this passion that may otherwise not make sense to an audience unacquainted with the sorts of environments they are mentally traversing.

Eun-Jae Norris has played around with scientific composition, creative writing, and impeccable merging of genres, shown in this winning piece. They stress the importance of paying attention to variety in narrative and genre convention, and learning other modes of storytelling besides what is immediately appealing—it is easily forgotten that science writing is also a narrative.

When asked about the focus in this piece on the grotesque, the visceral, the aquatic-adapted slimy membranes, Norris was eager to advocate for conservation and appreciation that goes beyond ideas of beauty. Something nourishing should be recognized for its vitality and importance that are present regardless of how pleasing it is to the individual taste. “It’s so inhospitable to us but it’s hospitable to something, because of those billions of years of evolution, of living in the same place with water pressing down on you. just gradually learning to have a body, and just continuing to have a body that survives that,” they say. “I think that’s really beautiful.”

Norris recognizes visual artist Pia-Paulina Guilmoth, who visited the college as the COA Kippy Stroud Memorial Lecturer, for her practice of finding wondrous beauties in the crannies of rural Maine. It can be said with certainty that Norris has also mastered making the unfamiliar open before us as somewhere welcoming, and then turning our home terrain into something strange, for example here as they begin to conclude the scene:

“…the depths are not a stranger but a front doorstep, a sanctuary where none dare to tread. The abyss wraps its children in an embrace tighter than a thousand of our atmospheres…Surely, to the few that get to see our world, it seems far too harsh, too bright, lit by a thousand giant glowing jellies—to say nothing of the two leviathan lures in the sky, behind which something truly terrible must loom.”

Norris’ advice for fellow college-going writers is, understandably, to broaden one’s horizons and experiment across conventions. In fact, they highlight that it is a duty of artists and creators to investigate the histories of the media they are working with and what others have done in disciplines outside what they are familiar with. “The more you know, the more you have to draw on…try to find people and try to find narrative forms outside of your normal comfort zone and outside of what gets the most money and gets the most popular,” they say.

The connections may not be immediately apparent, as is often true for the COA curriculum experience. The learning model that the college relies on, though, allows for this experimentation without punishment or shame. Norris went on to say that it is indispensable to find and keep peers and mentors that encourage, rather than constantly question, your interests; artistic critique is essential to growth, but should not feel like dismissiveness. Writing will not always be fun, and it may seem like the light at the surface is far out of reach, but as long as one can feel themselves moving through that bewildering depth and back to the sun, they are transforming, renewing, and nourishing the seas that surround them; “even down here, there are stars.”

Read the winning essay here.