Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction
Ploughshares is pleased to present Dantiel W. Moniz with the eighth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story “Milk Blood Heat,” which appeared in the Spring 2018 issue, guest-edited by Lan Samantha Chang. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by member of the Ploughshares advisory board, longtime patron, acclaimed writer, and former guest editor Alice Hoffman, honors a short story published in the journal in the previous year.
In “Milk Blood Heat,” thirteen-year-olds Kiera and Ava bond over a mutual feeling of drowning. They slit their palms and drink their blood mixed with milk. They wrap twine around the necks of their dolls and hang them. They imagine gruesome and graphic deaths with “a reverence other girls would their first prom.” But even with their shared fascination with morbidity, Ava feels the weight of their differences: Kiera is white, raised by lenient and non-demanding parents, and seems to be always one step ahead of Ava in the passage into womanhood. During a classmate’s pool party at a hotel, Kiera and Ava sneak off to the roof. Moments after Kiera asks how it would feel to fall from a roof, Ava turns around to discover Kiera has fallen to her death. “Milk Blood Heat” is haunting and mesmerizing, a striking exploration of how young girls shape and end their own realities.
Moniz, who is at work on a collection of short stories forthcoming from Grove Atlantic that examines the human ability to accept, dismiss, or confront the darkness in us all, is a homegrown Floridian and recent graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Apogee Journal, Pleiades, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and residencies from Hedgebrook and the Elizabeth George Foundation, and was selected as the winner of the 2018 Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award by the Key West Literary Seminars. She is also a 2018 Jack Jones Literary Arts Fellow and a Tin House Scholar.
What inspired “Milk Blood Heat”?
Usually, I know the exact seed that inspired a story because I jot down all of my ideas on my notes app. I try to write down as many details as possible so that I can find my way back to the image when it comes time to write. For this story, the first note is just Morbid girls. That’s it. So, honestly I could have been doing anything, but more than likely I was binge-watching something on Netflix. I get a lot of my writing tips and inspiration from film since I’m a mostly image-based thinker and all day I’m already translating image to words and vice versa. I can’t remember what I was watching. Whatever I saw, I understood it deeply, in that way we can sometimes feel truth with our entire body, and I wanted to figure out where that feeling led.
What did you discover or grapple with while writing the story?
I was trying to accurately capture both Ava and Kiera’s morbidity on the page. [The story] wasn’t just about being sad or wishing to die, but [was also] about wondering what life would be like without them in it. [It’s] about the curiosity of what death actually means. Just as the study of being deserves its due, so does the consideration of not being, but it’s easy to understand why people are uncomfortable with examining the latter.
As for discovery, I wouldn’t say I discovered something new, so much as recaptured a truth. I think it is a great disservice to our humanity to paint children only as frivolous thinkers and doers and to dismiss their capacity for great emotional depth. It’s very easy to discount what a child is saying or feeling because they don’t yet have years or language to their credit, or because we’re disconnected with what it was like to be so new. Being that young is the closest we are to the source without having to work at it, and most of us don’t get to return for quite a while. That should be remembered.
How does this story fit with the rest of your work?
Right now, a lot of my work centers on human connections—familial relationships, sexuality, identity, and what it means to confront (or not to confront) the darkness in ourselves. In this particular collection of stories I’m working on, I’m exploring motherhood, daughterhood, and our constant recreation of self. I’m interested in dualities, much like Ava is in the story, and how one judgement cannot exist without its opposite: How can you know good without exploring evil, and is our morality situational; should it be? As the collection formed and became more apparent, I realized the stories were tied together by more than just relationships and the seeking of self, but also this other question I felt pulsing at their core: What is the nature of God? While some of the stories deal with this question more directly, theorize about it, I think “Milk Blood Heat” actualizes it. We get to see how it plays out in these characters’ lives. The wreckage that asking can bring, but also the redemption.
Aside from your collection, What are you working on now?
Once I finalize my collection revisions, I’m taking a deep breath and diving back into my novel, which follows a mother and daughter struggling to maintain the division between reality and memory while navigating their separate and mutual ghosts. It’s kind of an extended meditation on all of the above. I have a first draft of this project, which I finished during my MFA. I usually think revision is the best part of a project, but I’m finding it much different with this longer work. It’s so sprawling, not as tidy a process. But I’m feeling happy, and, if I’m being real, terrified too, about spending some time there with these characters. I think it might be good to get a little lost.