In summer 2025, The Porch partnered with the Nashville Scene on the inaugural Vodka Yonic Writing Contest. Of the many submissions received, Scene staffers Hannah Herner and Laura Hutson Hunter and Porch Director of Development, Yurina Yoshikawa, selected Murfreesboro-based writer Kory Wells' braided essay, "Low Point," as the winner. "The fragmented essay form moves like memory itself, and the images — both tender and unflinching — stay with you long after you finish reading." the judges wrote. We're proud to reprint it in full, below, and are delighted to share Q&A with Wells about the creation of her prize-winning piece, which she calls "a step away from my usual optimism." —Ed.

SF: When did you start working on "Low Point"? 

KW: One thread of this essay began over two years ago as a prose fragment of all the details I could remember about the bathroom at my grandparents' house. How Mamaw folded the washcloths and towels so neatly into a red four-drawer chest. How she and Papaw taught me to conserve water. How the smells of their brands of toothpaste and lotion, different from what we used at home, linger with me still. And how I now look with some amusement on Mamaw not self-censoring her use of the term “whore’s bath” around me. 

SF: How did you settle on the structure of the piece?

KW: A few months after I wrote the prose fragment about the bathroom, my daughter and I were discussing some of the latest actions of the Tennessee legislature, plus some of the challenges I was facing as a member of my local library board. She asked that pivotal question that appears in the essay, and it wouldn’t let me go.

As a people we seem to have abandoned our desire for middle ground, and that concern was high in my mind. I was also thinking about local geography, prompted by writer Janisse Ray’s workshops on place. Much of what I know about Tennessee geography I learned in seventh grade. The “Grand Divisions” of our state came to my mind as an ironic play on words, then the memory of learning the word “basin” to describe a geological feature. I knew immediately that I needed to weave those ideas with the scene in Mamaw’s bath and the metaphor of achieving the right temperature. Although the end result took a lot of polishing, my impulse toward this braiding was true from the start.

SF: Did you receive any feedback from readers as you were drafting the piece?

KW: Oh, yeah! Quite frankly, I can’t imagine fine-tuning such a tight piece as this without reader feedback: What’s resonating? What’s awkward or confusing? What could I do without? My flash nonfiction group through MTSU Write read the piece a couple of times for me, and two critique partners also saw it more than once during its development. (Thank you, sweet people!) And then I asked everyone to read it one more time when I had to cut a couple hundred words for the contest guidelines! In the interest of word count, I had to sacrifice a bit of the story, but I don’t think that reduced the impact of the piece. I also cut some adjectives. And some more adjectives. 

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I’m obsessed with place. My poetry has always been informed by my family’s Appalachian roots and my small Southern town turned suburban sprawl, but the last few years I’ve been writing mostly flash nonfiction that’s even more intentional about examining home, travel, and my tendency to romanticize other places.

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SF: How does this essay fit into your larger body of work, and/or in what ways is it set apart? 

KW: I’m sixty years old and still hoping to have a year of study abroad. I’ve lived for thirty years in the same house and I’m still wondering if I wouldn’t like to live where it’s cooler, or by the water, or in a much smaller town, or a big city. I’m obsessed with place. My poetry has always been informed by my family’s Appalachian roots and my small Southern town turned suburban sprawl, but the last few years I’ve been writing mostly flash nonfiction that’s even more intentional about examining home, travel, and my tendency to romanticize other places. 

SF: I'm of a mind that our creative work is always teaching us something about ourselves and our evolving preoccupations, if we listen closely enough. What messages or lessons did the writing process on "Low Point" have for you?

KW: I’m accustomed to embracing and even intentionally developing some ambiguity in my work. But I had to lean further into ambiguity with how this piece concludes. I think the ending’s still open to interpretation, but it’s definitely a step away from my usual optimism. 

I once heard the poet Vievee Francis say that she didn’t feel the need for her work to comfort or soothe the reader. In a similar vein, I realized I didn’t particularly want this piece to offer the reader hope, and I had to get comfortable with that.

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Here's Kory Wells' winning essay, "Low Point," originally published the Nashville Scene:

On the first day of seventh grade, Mrs. Grubbs shut off the lights, stood in the overhead projector’s glare, and sketched our state’s three distinct regions, from Delta west to Smokies east. For our yearlong study of Tennessee history, we needed to understand the lay of the land. She marked a dot for our college town, smack in the state’s middle. Surrounded by rolling farmland, we sat at the bottom of a basin, she said — a word I’d heard only Mamaw, my grandmother, use at her bathroom sink where two faucets separated hot and cold.

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A few summers before, in East Tennessee, I’d learned from Mamaw how to save time and water by taking a “whore’s bath.” I didn’t know what a whore was, exactly, but I grasped this process: You went into the little bathroom that smelled of mint toothpaste, witch hazel and talcum powder. You turned on the sink’s left tap. You waited. When the water finally flowed hot, you plugged the porcelain drain with a rubber stopper on a chain.

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Tennessee’s Central Basin is a bowl, Mrs. Grubbs explained, drawing a flattened U shape on the map. She made a small line at the base. We lived at this lowest point, amid clouds of cedar pollen and ragweed. This was why we suffered allergies. It’s hard to rise from the bottom.

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As the bathroom basin filled with hot water, you eventually turned on the cold, then dipped and swirled your finger, checking for a comfortable temperature. Water cost money, so when there was just enough, you’d turn off the faucets. Take a washcloth from the red chest beside the sink. Smell line-dried sunshine. Soak the cloth, lather a bar of Ivory, scrub your stinky parts. Plus your neck, where granny beads — a 3D mixture of dust, humidity and sweat — accumulated on hot days and sticky nights.

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For most of my life I’ve lived in the same state as six generations before me. Though they were mountain folk, I’m always driving to reach any hills — Walter Hill, Halls Hill, Chapel Hill. Anywhere but Capitol Hill, where I’ve quit turning for hope, and where every legislative session seems to take us further back in time. Yesterday my adult daughter asked, “Do you regret staying?”

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When I was young, I was going to move to The City, any big city. But then a full scholarship at my hometown university. Then a good job at a military research base close to home. Then pheromones, a certainty in every cell of my body, a man whose roots in this state run even deeper than mine.

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Mamaw’s middle name was Tennessee, but she was born in Georgia — one of my first lessons in contradiction. As if a grandma in a floral housedress taking a whore’s bath wasn’t contradiction enough. Waiting for her to emerge in a mist of Jungle Gardenia perfume, I’d contemplate the wooden sign above the bathroom door that read, “What the heck you looking up here for?”

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When did I first start dreaming of elsewhere? Maybe in the week after we married and everyone wanted to call me by his name. Maybe a few years later, when my kids’ nursery school teacher pulled me aside and said in the South my children needed church to fit in. Maybe one of the countless times I kept my opinion to myself. Or during our travels, in those places I’ve seen more art, more preservation of cultural and natural heritage, more recycling, more Pride displays.

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I don’t believe in regrets. But another word for basin is depression, and another meaning of depression is hopelessness — something too many of us feel. State lawmakers have surely learned about the “least of these” in Sunday school, but new laws further weaken support for public schools, wetlands, women’s health, diversity, immigrants, the trans community and more. “So leave,” I hear you saying. But there are my parents to care for, doctors we don’t want to change. So much community to love.

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I also don’t want to regret. I want to be proud of my deep roots in one of the most beautiful, musical, friendly and biodiverse states in the nation. And I want to live in a place that makes a place for everybody. So I summon the ghost of Mrs. Grubbs to remind the good people of Tennessee: Our state’s three geographical sections are called the Grand Divisions, and can’t grand still mean wonderful? I summon those mornings Mamaw let the hot water flow until it warmed, then stoppered the drain and opened the cold. I’m saying that achieving a balance is a process, that it takes effort to hold what you want just right. I’m saying I don’t have an answer for my daughter. But I can’t deny: Eventually it’s time to pull the plug. To let it all wash away down the drain.

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