Love Unraveled Challenge Winners

Sometimes the simplest challenges are the deepest and most revealing. For this challenge we asked you to “unravel the mysteries, joys, and challenges of love through the power of personal storytelling” — we all love, we all feel we know what it means to love. Yet this challenge offered a reminder of the infinite shapes of human connection, and what power love has over us, even in the face of struggle and pain.

Ruth K is our worthy winner with her piece simply titled: Love. She has 20 pieces on Vocal; and this is the first time she’s placed in a challenge, so extra congratulations. We were deeply moved by this piece, a paean to her lost sister Leah, who was as Ruth writes “challenging to love” — her absence is a never-healing wound. And yet: “My love for Leah is so strong that it has melded into every facet of my life,” Ruth writes in this clear-eyed and searingly honest piece. Here lies real emotional truth.

Our second place winner John Cox also places for the very first time with These Things I Remember, a meditation on parental love. He quotes from the Psalms, “These things I remember as I pour out my soul”, to track his love for his wife and children — but also to accept his failings as a father, his lack of presence; the cost of one ideal of masculinity, we might say. In naming it he vows to do better. This is personal writing as portrait and catharsis.

And we had some fine runners-up, as ever. F Cade Swanson in Letting Go writes evocatively about fostering with precision and care; Judah LoVato in Love Is a Shitload of Work uses original language and imagery to question how we think of love. Love is easy when it’s a noun; harder when it’s a verb. Nice work. And Josey Pickering is beautifully frank in A Neurodivergent Love Story. What else can we say but — we love you, Vocal creators, Thanks for the care you send out into the world, to all those around you. It means a lot, in these times. .

You can check out the full list of winners HERE and learn about our current challenges below: