People's College Short Story Competition

The People's College Short Story Competition is open for submissions and I'm delighted to be judging the entries. Here's what they have to say......

'Stories can be on any topic topic up to a limit of 2,500 words, typed 1.5 or double spaced on A4 paper, single-sided, with numbered pages securely fastened. There is no limit to the number of entries submitted.

1st prize €1,000, 2nd prize €750, 3rd prize €500

Closing date February 28 2015

Judge: award-winning author Niamh Boyce

A short list will be published on the People’s College website in April 2015 and the winners will be announced at an event in the Teachers’ Club, Parnell Square, in May/June 2015. Winning stories will be published on the website and the first prize winner will also be published in our 2015 newsletter. Please submit your stories to info@peoplescollege.ie

Entry fee per story €10

Stories will be judged anonymously. Entrant’s name should not appear anywhere on the story. Contact details should only appear on a separate entry form, available online or from the competition flyer.

Stories can be emailed to info@peoplescollege.ie under subject heading ‘Short Story competition’ or can be sent by post to The People’s College, 31 Parnell Square, Dublin 1.'

For more details, or to enter clickity click HERE

Roadside Fiction & Alternative Classics

Have you a story (500 to 2500 words) looking for a home? Well, Roadside Fiction is a realist literary magazine with 'a passion for the wild, outrageous, yet realistic story.' They publish an issue of short stories and photographs quarterly and are currently seeking submissions - 

They like -
modern, urgent, honest realism. Stories need to move. We’re not interested in reflection.Tell us instead about a wild night, the strange events in your life as an expat, that house party, travelling without knowing where you will sleep that night, in short madness.

Think Kerouac, Bukowski etc and you’ll be on the right track.

More details here 

And - this has cheered my cold and rainy Friday morning - Bleach House Books have included The Herbalist on their list of Alternative Classics, I'm particularly thrilled to be alongside Beloved, one of my favorite novels. There are some great reads on the list, you can check them out  HERE

I'm working away on a novel, back writing by hand, I know a lot of writers would think that's mad, as its so much slower, but its a part of the writing process I really enjoy and I'm not willing to sacrifice it for speed - especially as I write better, freer this way. There's something about the pc screen, that brings the editing part of my mind to the fore, and I don't want to edit until I have at least 100.000 words of a fat and free first draft, so many words to go before I'm home :)

The Davy Byrne Award

 

Anne Enright, previous winner & one of this years judges

A note for your diaries short story writers…

The Davy Byrnes Award is Ireland’s biggest short story competition - the winner will walk away with €15,000, and there are five runner-up prizes of €1,000. It’s organised by The Stinging Fly and the judges are Anne Enright, Yiyun Li and Jon McGregor.  The competition is not open for entries untill December, but it’s never too soon to get writing.

They’re looking for previously unpublished stories, the maximum word count is 15,000 words, and there’s no minimum word count.  (Which I presume means they are open to receiving short short stories.) There’s only one story per entrant & a €10 entry fee. Deadline is Monday Feb 3rd 2014. 

Judges Comments...
 

It’s interesting to read what the judges like in a story…. These are extracts; you can read the full statements and further details about the competition on the Stinging Fly website – here.

…The short story yields truth more easily than any other form, and these truths abide in changing times. As a writer turned judge, I am looking for a story that could not have been written any other way; that is as good as it wants to be; that is the just the right size for itself.
—Anne Enright

…As for what I look for in a short story, to borrow from Tolstoy: 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' There are stories written like happy families, which one reads and forgets the moment one puts them down. But the stories that belong to the category of unhappy families, they can do all kinds of things: they touch a reader, or leave a wound that never heals; they challenge a reader's view, or even infuriate a reader; they lead to a desire in the reader's heart to be more eloquent in his ways of responding to the story yet leave the reader more speechless than before. A good story is like someone one does not want to miss in life.
—Yiyun Li

…What I look for in a short story is a kind of intensity of purpose and clarity of expression; something which holds my attention and rings clearly in my reading mind. For me, this is mostly something in the voice on the page; something in the control of the syntax, which immediately puts me in the world of that story. If it's there, it usually kicks in within the first few lines; after that, it's just a matter of seeing whether the writer can really keep it up.
—Jon McGregor

Clothes Poems for Magma 56

Magma want your clothes (poems...)

"In the introduction to her anthology of clothes poems Out of Fashion (Faber, 2004), Carol Ann Duffy wrote ’[these poems] examine, in their different ways, how we dress or undress, how we cover up or reveal, and how clothes, fashion and jewellery are both a necessary and luxurious, a practical and sensual, a liberating and repressing part of our lives. I hope that the anthology forms an entertaining dialogue between the two arts of poetry and fashion’.This push and pull between cover up and revelation, necessity and luxury is what we’d like to see in your clothes poems for Magma 56, whether you’re writing about dress uniforms or haute couture, morning suits or suits of armour. Tell us about your little black dresses and your lucky pants, your wedding dresses and your weeding gloves and we’ll send the best of your poems down the catwalk of Magma 56.

 The deadline is 28 February 2013. 

This is one of my favorite clothes poems at the moment, found at Poets.org

What do women want
by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress. 
I want it flimsy and cheap, 
I want it too tight, I want to wear it 
until someone tears it off me. 
I want it sleeveless and backless, 
this dress, so no one has to guess 
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store 
with all those keys glittering in the window, 
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old 
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers 
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, 
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. 
I want to walk like I'm the only 
woman on earth and I can have my pick. 
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm 
your worst fears about me, 
to show you how little I care about you 
or anything except what 
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment 
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body 
to carry me into this world, through 
the birth-cries and the love-cries too, 
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, 
it'll be the goddamned 
dress they bury me in.