Enter Essay Contest

Since 2008, Appalachia, the mountaineering and conservation journal published by the Appalachian Mountain Club, and the Waterman Fund have joined to sponsor an annual essay contest for emerging writers. Writers who have not published a major work of fiction or narrative nonfiction on topics of wilderness, wildness, or the ethics and ecology of environmental issues are eligible. The Waterman Fund provides generous prize money of $3,000 for the first-place essay selection and $1,000 for a runner-up.

For 2025, we invite essays that address the following prompt:

The clash of wilderness preservation versus use and enjoyment by thousands is inherently unresolvable.  But that does not absolve any of us from striving to resolve it, from doing the best our generation can to preserve the spirit of wildness.

- Wilderness Ethics by Laura and Guy Waterman, 1993 -

Wilderness and wildness have two distinctly different meanings. Yet we have observed they can be used almost interchangeably.

Wilderness is often spoken of as a means of protecting land through an act of legislation. In this country, the ideal behind it has preserved great tracts of land for public use. It has also allowed justification for times when governments displaced and took land from indigenous peoples. And perhaps the act of codifying or naming Wilderness (with a capital “W”) only further distances humans, in an abstract sense, from their primal and profound connections to the land itself. The narrative is complex and nuanced.

Nonetheless, in today’s day and age in this country wilderness areas contain some of the more rare, wild and undefined places available to citizens. The Waterman Fund invites submissions that explore how moving through mountains and rivers and wild lands brings out the uncultivated spirit, the unscathed, non-commercial, honest primal human in all of us. What is the wild in wild(er)ness?

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The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2025. We welcome personal, scientific, adventure, or memoir essays; fiction, poetry, or songs are not eligible for this contest. Submissions should be 2000-3000 words.  Please include contact information and a few lines about why you feel your essay is appropriate for the contest.  Online submissions should be double-spaced, manuscripts in 12-point font.  Word .doc compatible files are preferred.  If submitting by mail, please include an email address.

Please send inquiries to [email protected].