Scott Reding
English (Creative Writing)
Poem: “The Day Dreamland Opened its Doors,” 2006

The subtitle for this four-part poem is “After a Facsimile of the Original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” a reference to an abbreviated version of the story published in 1886 by Lewis Carroll from his original self-illustrated manuscript. Reding’s entry reads like the musings of an omniscient narrator in describing Alice’s experiences in Wonderland. The first section entails a series of questions to the protagonist after her first moments in this “curiouser adventure of timelessness.” The poem continues with Alice’s interactions with the Dodo and the hookah-smoking Caterpillar, who asks her the unanswerable “Who are you?” The work concludes with playfully narrated appearances by the Queen, the Mock Turtle, and the admonition: “Remember this dream—sleep won’t often bring such wild haunting scenes.”