Meet the winners of the 2026 CT Voices writing contest

Molly Ingram

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WSHU

First Place: Henry Hong Liu

(Henry) Hong Liu has reinvented himself as a writer after a career as a partner at global law firms and a managing director at global investment banks. Drawing on his personal journey across cultures and his international professional experience, he writes to explore the intersection of historical transformation, cultural conflict, and individual lives.

"From Connecticut"

Father:

For forty years, you have rested beneath the mountains of northern China. But you never really left me. I still ask: If you were alive, would you want me to do this?

In your last letter, you hoped I would study on scholarship in Massachusetts, then continue in California.

I did.

But you did not live to see me finish.

As a World War II veteran who lost his brother in that war, you wanted me, like you, to serve the public.

In my thirties, I left a “princely salary” in New York and returned to China to strengthen its financial market integrity and the rule of law.

Later, I returned to America and spent decades in law and investment banking–fields that barely existed in China during your lifetime. My work was recognized in America and abroad– something I wish you had lived to see.

I now live in Connecticut. Its Chinese name begins with kang, suggesting health and peace. You would have liked that.

Here, there is running water and reliable electricity–things missing from my childhood. You might wonder why I chose a lawn over vegetables.

Our new country, and the life I was building here, were not always easy or peaceful. Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, tragedy changed both my life and the country I called home.

Living between China and America became both a gift and a burden: I could see each more clearly yet felt fully at home in neither.

When you died in your mid-sixties, I was in my early twenties.

It was an afternoon in California. The setting sun was large and red. A telegram lay in my school mailbox:

“Father has died.”

I barely cried. I buried the grief.

But grief buried is not grief gone.

It became sorrow, guilt, and a haunting that followed me for forty years.

I tried not to disappoint you. But I had lost the person I most wanted to share my successes with.

When I swam in the ocean, I thought of how you never saw the sea. At my children’s graduations, I thought of how you never saw where your own son went.

Most of all, I remember leaving for America.

You walked with me along a rough dirt road. You were six feet tall but already stooped. I watched your back grow smaller until you disappeared.

I regret that I did not stop longer.

I regret that I did not embrace you.

And I regret that I never said, “I love you.”

In families of our generation in China, we rarely spoke those words. We rarely hugged. Love was parents pretending they were full so a child could have the remaining rice.

Love was letting a teenager travel twenty hours by train to college far from home. Later, love was letting that child cross an ocean to build a life ten thousand miles away.

A father’s love was a silent love.

For forty years, I carried the need to prove myself, guilt I could not escape, and a debt I could never repay. That burden sat on my shoulders like a mountain.

Recently, I joined a writers’ workshop. As I began to write, I finally understood: The person who had held me captive for forty years was not you.

It was me.

Love does not demand repayment. You let me leave home and cross an ocean so I could have choices you never had.

You did not put this burden on my shoulders.

I put it there myself.

And now, I can put it down.

Since childhood, I have dreamed of writing. Now that I have reached the age you were when you died, perhaps my next journey can begin with writing.

This time, I am not writing to prove anything.

I am not writing to repay anyone.

I am writing for myself.

I was lost, but now I am found.

I was haunted, but now I am free.

Father, if you are somewhere I cannot see, I think you would tell me to keep writing. Because forty years ago, the first person who gave me the courage to go far away was you.

Your loving son

Second Place: Margie Jacobson

Margie Jacobson is a recovering lawyer who teaches law to undergrads and works in nonprofit civil rights advocacy. A mother of writers and keeper of too many half-finished notebooks, she took her first Westport Writers’ Workshop in the founder’s living room and, many stories later, has finally let one of them out of the house.

"Teeth"

It was the least creepy of attics. Open, airy, fully finished, sun-dappled even on the cloudiest days. The stairs opened onto a playroom which, when I left more than eleven years ago, held an old white sleeper sofa and a Georgia O’Keeffe poster from my first apartment, a child-sized table and chairs and a desk loaded with crayons, stickers, sparkle glue and construction paper. Bins of girl toys lined the walls – American Girls, Barbies, Polly Pockets – and buckets of their tiny accessories.

Behind the playroom was a door leading to the storage room which was, true to form, the nicest of storage rooms. It was there I left my ketubah, our contract of marriage – a beautifully framed piece of handmade art designed just for us – and my ski clothes. The ski clothes I forgot in the rush to leave by the date set in our separation agreement. The ketubah stayed because I couldn't bear to look at it.

Nearby stood the plastic shelving unit with drawers I carefully labeled with the names and grades of my three daughters – each filled with drawings, popsicle stick projects, report cards. Then there were the boxes. Some contained photos and the detritus of our nearly 20-year marriage; the rest came from my ex-husband's family home.

It was in one of those boxes that we found them.

Years earlier, when we were still a family, one of the girls opened a random box. Hearing her scream, I ran upstairs and confirmed, yes, there were teeth inside. Not baby teeth, not animal teeth. Decidedly human, loose, yellowed with age, scattered roots and all like the Polly Pocket accessories no longer connected to the person they’d come from. We laughed uncomfortably and reasoned that the paternal ancestor who lost them to poor early twentieth-century dental hygiene decided to keep them – loose in a big carton of other assorted stuff. Rational enough – but handfuls of human teeth at the bottom of a cardboard box are rattling in unexpected ways.

After that, nobody entered the storage room at night.

More than a decade has passed. My only view of that attic since leaving came in the form of a TikTok video posted by my youngest daughter's high school band about four years ago. The toy bins and art supplies had vanished, replaced by a drum kit and disco ball. I watched that viral video along with seven million other people. Fourteen million eyeballs on a room that once held my toddlers’ toys and my first apartment's furniture. Some spaces were never meant to hold that many body parts.

I'm preparing to leave the house I moved to after that one. The settlement gave me twelve years here. Exactly twelve. The girls are mostly grown now. My ex and his girlfriend are still in the other house with the photos and the school projects and the ketubah and the teeth.

For years that old house haunted me – the dinners I cooked there, the Girl Scout campout I hosted on the lawn, the rooms I decorated. But now when I think of it, the memories feel murky. There are no fresh ones because I was never invited back in. If it contains parts of me, they are parts I no longer own. The laughter I hear comes from this house, the one with perpetually sandy floors from beach walks and picnics, my daughters’ black Hokas and our geriatric dog.

I thought being forced to leave yet another house would haunt me too, another reminder of the things ripped away from a person, leaving behind bloody roots and aching, empty sockets. But there are fewer empty spaces now, nothing anyone can take away. And I know where I'm going. To a place without ghosts, without strings. Where my name is on the deed.

And nothing upstairs I'm afraid to open at night.

Third Place: Laura Brennan

Laura Brennan is the wife of her high school sweetheart and mother of three from Newtown, Connecticut. For decades she wrote just for fun, and now she gets to write for The Healing Journey and Fairfield County Catholic.

"Inside My Head"

We know that life can change in an instant. Those instants are rare though, and they’re surrounded by ordinary moments. They start in places we've been before like Kettletown Park, a wooded park that opens to a lake beach with a roped-in swimming area perfect for little ones because it’s only maybe four feet at its deepest point. The sun was shining and my husband Mike was in Singapore for the week. Often we met friends there, but today it was just us.

I sat in the sand with my younger two digging, filling buckets, and playing defense as one-year-old Justin's sandy fingers headed for his mouth over and over. These two never went near the water. Justin didn't walk and three-year-old Kelsey "no like the dirty water."

There was a faint and irregular beeping in the distance. A man with a metal detector searched for treasures while his daughter of maybe 11 played in the park. Five-year-old Kevin swam, often disappearing under water rings and reappearing at their extending edges.

I walked to the beach bag. I checked the time; we still had an hour. I glanced back to see two in the sand and one in the water. I checked the call log for the landowners; I was anxiously awaiting news about the lot where we wanted to build a house. Nothing. Another glance, two in the sand, one in the water, and an 11-year-old girl wading her way in. I rummaged for a towel and some new beach toys. I looked up to see one in the sand, two swimming, and Kelsey's head bobbing up and down in the murky water.

In my head, I looked up in time to see Kelsey just knee-deep in the water. In my head, Kevin and the 11-year-old girl noticed a drowning child just feet away.

In my head, Kelsey took two steps backwards so her little nose and mouth could easily reach the air.

In my head, I heard splashing because in my head drowning isn't silent.

In my head, I prayed for the protection of the Guardian Angels.

In my head, I looked up and saw only one in the sand and one swimming, so I scanned the woods and ran towards the water screaming. I called 9-1-1, and they sent a rescue team. In my head, I pulled a lifeless girl from the water, and the 9-1-1 dispatcher talked me through CPR.

In my head, I dialed the 16 digits of the company-issued international cell phone from the business card in my wallet. From two continents away, I told Mike that our girl had drowned. Outside my head, I dropped everything and sprinted towards Kelsey, furious that the resistance of the water slowed my pace.

I grabbed her and pulled her to my chest. Water fell from her mouth and she began to cough with her entire little body. She reached her arms around my neck and squeezed, "Thank you, Mama." I stood thigh-deep in murky water hugging her back.

The beeping grew louder. I looked up to see two kids swimming and one boy playing happily in the sand. A male voice said, "We had a rule, you can't go in past your belly button. You need a rule."

"She's never even gone into the water," I replied.

"Never past their belly buttons," he repeated.

I carried Kelsey out of the water, her arms still wrapped around my neck. I called to Kevin, "Did you see your sister in the water?"

"No. Can I have a snack?" he replied.

"When we get home. It's time to go," I told him.

"We packed snacks, I'll get them," Kevin said.

"No bud, we're going home."

I haphazardly packed the beach toys, wet towels, and the sandy bag of wipes. I tucked the memory away, never further than my pocket.

Purse across my body, beach bag on my shoulder, Justin on my hip, Kelsey's hand in mine, and Kevin a few steps ahead, we made our way to the car. I secured each child with a five-point harness. My clothes still soaked, I sat on a towel and drove away from an instant when life hadn't changed at all.