Verily's Home Issue and Our Poetry Competition Winners

We’re excited to be able to share more about our fourth issue of 2023, which is on its way to the printers and is now available for pre-order as a single issue in our shop. This issue, on the theme of “home,” includes our fall 2023 poetry competition winners, along with articles and features exploring what it means to feel "at home" in your body when you live with chronic illness and disability, reframing how we think about homelessness in our communities, one woman reflecting on the freedom she experienced going makeup-free on her wedding day, finding contentment while taking a slow approach to decorating, hosting tips from an etiquette expert to help you make your guests feel welcome, and much more.

For this issue we wanted to do something a little different than usual for our style spread; rather than work with models and a stylist to put together a traditional style spread for you, we asked various women from different locations and walks of life to reflect on the people, places, and outfits that make them feel “at home” in their bodies and lives.

We gave the featured women a lot of freedom to choose locations and outfits that were meaningful to them, and that feel authentic to the season of life they’re in right now. Rather than glamming up, they dressed in a way that helped them to feel comfortable, beautiful, and at ease.

We’re honored to be given a glimpse into the lives of these ladies, and we hope it inspires you to find a deeper sense of home in your own wardrobe and life, whatever circumstances you find yourself living through right now.

During a season where we’re often encouraged to consume, as we’re flooded with highly idealized images of what our homes should look like, we hope that seeing these inspiring, creative women exploring this theme will help you look inwards for your truest sense of self and “home.” After all, home is ultimately something that money cannot buy, but something innate that we carry and nurture within us, with the help of the community around us.

The Home Issue will ship in December (hopefully in time for Christmas, but with holiday post we cannot guarantee this!), and a portion of proceeds from this issue will go towards a charity working to support displaced people without homes.

Announcing our poetry competition winners

Without further ado, we’re pleased to announce the winners of our inaugural poetry competition:

First prize: “Lullaby in E Minor” by Alayna Nagurny Keller

Runners-up: “The Homemaker” by Dominika Ramos and “Homesick” by Annabel Osborn

Comments from Sophie Caldecott, Verily’s creative director

“It was incredibly moving to be invited into your creative worlds and read your reflections sparked by the prompt, ‘home’; we had almost 200 entries, by writers from a huge range of ages and walks of life.

Many chose to meditate on the fruitful tension inherent in motherhood; a tension of self and other, the difficulty of finding a sense of home for yourself even while you share your body and life so generously with others. Many of you explored the loss and grief and deep yearning that ‘home’ can evoke, especially in the uniquely and tragic experience of miscarriage and infant loss, and reflections on your own childhood homes (places you long for, and are sometimes relieved to have escaped).

We were struck in particular by one theme that emerged from many of your poems: the strength it takes to own the title ‘homemaker’ in a society that often sneers at this role. It was beautiful to see this role elevated in the poetic form in so many of your submissions. There was such a palpable hunger for recognition of the importance of this role that we hope we can continue to honor in our work more widely here at Verily magazine.

Though in the end the three winners all wrote about the experience of motherhood, not all the poems we received were written from this perspective. We enjoyed reading your beautiful reflections on what it means to search for—and to create—home as a single person, moving meditations on sibling relationships, caring for aging parents, what it means to try to build a new sense of home after childhood trauma, and much more.

Above all, your poems were shot through with a deep sense of longing, and it became clear reading your submissions that home—a sense of being seen, accepted, and of belonging—is the thing that each and every human desires above all else.

We were so honored to hear that you found in this prompt such a rich theme to explore in your creative work, and we are thrilled that we inspired so many of you to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards!) amidst very full lives. Please keep writing; your perspective matters, and our culture is in desperate need of an infusion of the kind of voices, themes, and spirit that you shared with us.

Thank you, from our whole team, to each and every one of you who entered this competition for trusting us with your words. It was a privilege to read so many wonderful and heartfelt poems! We hope this will just be the first of many such competitions and opportunities to share your work with the Verily community.”

Comments from guest judge Laura Kelly Fanucci, author and founder of Mothering Spirit

“The collective poetic strength showcased here made this contest a delightfully difficult task. As I sat and savored these poems, a deep wave of gratitude rose up within me—for the power and beauty of words, for women’s desire to speak their truth, and for the collective yearning that has drawn humans to poetry since ancient times. Poetry takes a step beyond even the most beautiful prose, distilling a magnitude of experience and emotion into a single work of art: a particular moment, revelation, or encounter told with such skill and sharpness that it becomes universal. The best poetry does what my wise writing teacher advised every writer to do: to drop so deeply into the well of your own particularity that you tap into the aquifer of human experience.

For this reason, I found ‘Lullaby in E Minor’ by Alayna Nagurny Keller to be the strongest poem (among an exceedingly deep pool from which to draw!). At first read, I found myself drawn into the evocative description of a mother ‘sleep-trapped’ under a child—an experience I remember well. But upon second and third readings, I realized the poem could easily speak to the sacrifice of a caregiver or the complexity of a romantic relationship. This is the mark of poetic genius: to speak simultaneously to multiple parts of the human condition and make so many of us (or so many facets with our own selves) feel seen, especially within complicated circumstances that we struggle to put into everyday language.

I love how the poet plays with multiple layers of ‘home,’ our theme for this poetry contest. There is the physical home in which we picture the narrator, the natural world which is a home for pollinators, lily pads, and starfish, and finally the emotional state at the end: a restless home of exhaustion or unease or acceptance, yet still a place of tender love. The poem both unsettles and comforts, asks questions without answers, and draws us into an intimate reflection upon our own expectations of home—met or unmet. This is a lullaby in a minor key, after all: a song that soothes yet aches. This poem shows strength of craft and depth of thought, and its cadence keeps pulling me back—which feels like home, too.

Coming close on its heels are two poems that speak directly to home in their titles—‘The Homemaker’ by Dominika Ramos and ‘Homesick’ by Annabel Osborn—yet both stand fresh in their particularity and sense of place. ‘The Homemaker’ creates its own intricate world of tiny homes, well-known to all of us who were children once. Yet it also speaks to home as nature, home as daily vocational task, and even home as universe—evoking by its end the vision of Julian of Norwich who saw creation contained in a single hazelnut.

Turning from this joy of possibility, ‘Homesick’ speaks to the strange home-not-home of hospital life and the ache of a mother who cannot yet make the home she wants for her child. The heartbreak of the question ‘Can it be home when you’ve never been there?’ and the echoes of St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s famous line ‘The world is thy ship, not thy home’ lift this poem beyond the particular grief of loving a sick baby by inviting all of us into its loving embrace: all of us who have felt out of sorts, adrift or alone.

Ultimately, home holds joy, grief, and mystery. What a gift to have multiple facets of this rich reality lifted up for us into the light by these three poets and how they shine.”

Order your copy or subscribe and save

Would you like to read the winning poems, along with all the other brilliant articles and features we have been preparing for you in our Winter 2023-2024 Home Issue? If you’re already a subscriber, the issue will be shipped to you as soon as it prints in December. You can become a subscriber this way (for US-dwellers), and this way (for UK-dwellers), or pre-order your copy of the Home Issue by itself.

If you’re becoming an annual subscriber, don’t forget that you can either use the coupon code VERILYTREAT at checkout for $10 off a single subscription, or use the code FRIENDS241 to buy one and get one free (we think a Verily subscription makes the perfect gift for a loved one). Just put two annual subscriptions in your cart, add the promo code, and the price will automatically adjust to reflect the discount. 

To sweeten gift-giving season and express our gratitude, all annual subscribers will be entered into our prize draw to win a trip to Paris for yourself and a loved one. The drawing will take place at the end of December, and the trip will take place in 2024.

We can’t wait to get this beautiful and meaningful issue into your hands very soon!