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Non-Contest Contest #2
Guys and gals of The Missouri Review online world. Given the success of our “48 Hour Poetry Non-Contest Contest” last semester, we’re starting a series of brief online writing prompts. We’ll give you a topic every other week, and a week to turn your entries in.**
*E-mail address: themissourireview@gmail.com (don’t send spam. We do not want a cheap hotel in Vietnam).
*Prizes: 1-year subscription to the online Missouri Review, complete with audio access (pop it into your car, listen to fine literature on your way to work instead of Top 40. Hear the sweet dulcet tones of our soon-to-be-published Editor’s Prize winners while you bench press 300 pounds)
*Rules: 1 entry per person, stick to the word/form limit. Judges’ (biased) decisions final. We’ll put up the winning entry on our Tumblr and Facebook pages.
Week 1:
“Ringo Starr’s interior monologue while playing drums at a sold out show”
250 Words.
Due by: 8PM EST, 2/9/12
Winners Announced: You know, after that
**Not to be confused with the money-awarding “Audio Contest,” entries to which must be postdated by March 15th–details of which (including the exciting sliding scale of contest entry fees) are available in Claire McQuerry’s post from a couple days ago.
Turned off by unaffordable entry fees? Hopefully not anymore…
This year, for TMR’s 5th annual Audio Competition, we’ve decided to try an experiment. Ok, so it’s a little crazy, and we don’t really know what to expect: we’ve decided to leave the contest entry fee up to the entrants; if you decide to submit work to our Audio Contest, you choose what you feel is a fair reading fee. Your entry fee, regardless of what you pay, still gets you a one-year digital subscription to The Missouri Review.
In the past, we have always charged a $20 entry fee—an entry fee that’s fairly standard for literary-journal-run competitions these days. And while we feel that this fee is reasonable (it includes a one-year subscription to The Missouri Review, for which we normally charge $23), we also understand that the cost may be prohibitive for some very talented people—particularly in this difficult economy.
Before I give the false impression that our contest is now free to enter, however, let me be up-front about the fees associated with a literary competition and why they exist in the first place. Literary journals as big as The Missouri Review are quite expensive to run: among other things, we pay the salaries for our full- and part-time editorial staff; the salaries for the office staff; the costs of equipment, technology, and supplies; expenses for advertising and promotional events; the printing and distribution of the journal; and contributor payments (we are one of the few lit journals that pays its contributors). Some of this money comes from grants and some from generous donors, but subscription fees and contest entry fees are another important source that we rely on to meet our costs. When writers pay to enter a journal’s contest, they are acting as patrons of the literary arts, providing the journal with some of the important funding it needs to continue to exist–and ultimately supporting themselves and others in the field.
Of course, there are also costs associated with running a contest: advertising, prize money, staff hours, etc. After receiving as many as several hundred entries, a contest like our Audio Competition might just barely break even; there are years, in fact, when TMR hasn’t broken even on the Audio Contest. Which is why making the entry fee “pay-by-donation” is a bit of a risk. But it’s a risk that we feel is one worth taking: We would like you to be able to enter our Audio Contest regardless of your ability to pay. If you feel that you can afford the standard $20 or even a little beyond that, know that we very much appreciate your support. But if $5 or $10 is all that you can pay at this point in time, we will still be grateful for your donation and happy to consider your work. And rest assured that the entries are blind; the amount that each entrant pays will not be recorded anywhere in connection with his/her payment.
Please spread the word and help make our experiment a success!
Winners of the 2011 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize
We are delighted to announce the winners of our 21st annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Let’s get to it!
Fiction
Winner: Yuko Sakata of Madison, WI for “Unintended”
Finalists:
Jessica F. Kane of New York, NY, for “The Essentials of Acceleration”
Thomas Pierce of Charlottesville, VA, for “Grasshopper Kings”
Bart Skarzynski of Columbus, OH for “Project X”
Poetry
Winner: David Kirby of Tallahassee, FL
Finalists:
Steve Gehrke of Reno, NV
Cynthia Marie Hoffman of Madison, WI
Mark Wunderlich of Catskill, NY.
Essay
Winner: Peter Selgin of Winter Park, FL, for “The Kuhreihen Melody”
Finalists:
May-Lee Chai of San Francisco, CA, for “The Blue Boot”
Mako Yoshikawa of Cambridge, MA, for “My Father’s Women”
Dave Zoby of Casper, WY, for “Leftovers, 1993”
We received over 2500 manuscripts this year, and the overall quality was extraordinarily good, making our decision a difficult one. This is of course a good thing: selecting winners of a contest should never be easy, and it certainly wasn’t for us. We’re very thankful to all the writers who entered this year. TMR is only as good as the work we publish, and we are grateful that so many writers sent us their very best work.
We were particularly thrilled to find out, after we accepted her work, that “Unintended” will be Yuko Sakata’s first published story!
I also want to say “Thanks!” to our staff. Promotion of the Editors’ Prize began in May, months before we get the chance to even start reading the submissions. Also, there is the never-ending amount of administrative work that goes into promoting the contest. Then we had to make the tough decisions on semi-finalists, finalists, and making the recommendations for our winners. And, we pulled it off! All of this was done successfully only because of our contest editor, Claire McQuerry, who did all the hard work behind the scenes to make our contest a huge success. Her staff was once again tremendous this year. Thank you to all the editors, advisors, and interns who made it happen.
We’re making plans right now for our Editors’ Prize weekend, our annual spring reception and reading honoring the winners of the contest. Details will be forthcoming as soon as we lock down the date. The 2012 Editors’ Prize issue will be out in April. I’m positive you’ll find these stories, poems, and essays as engaging and memorable as we did.
Congratulations to Yuko, David, and Peter!
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
Audio on fire
Rachel Yoder: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Prose)
Greg Brownderville: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Poetry)
Ken Cormier: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Self-Recorded Documentary)
Anna Pinkert: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Professionally Recorded Documentary)
We’re excited about many of the new developments with our audio content here at The Missouri Review. We’re excited, for instance, that the opening of our 2012 audio competition follows closely on the heals of the addition of our (free) podcast feed to iTunes. If you’d like to have our weekly podcasts delivered to you, please sign up. And please, if you enjoy what you hear, give us a good rating on the iTunes site. Our podcast feed is so new that it hasn’t yet been rated.
As I already shared in a recent post, Julie Shapiro of the Third Coast International Audio Festival has agreed to serve as a guest consultant for our 2012 Audio Competition, joining TMR’s editors in the final judging round. This year, we’ve also streamlined the competition to three, simple categories–prose, poetry, and audio documentary—in an attempt to eliminate any confusion entrants experienced last year. And, we’ve improved the contest entry process. For your convenience, we now take MP3 recordings by email and accept online payments. (Submissions by mail are still acceptable as well). This should make the competition more economical to enter, especially for those submitting entries from overseas.
We wanted the renaming of our categories to convey that they are fairly open: in each we accept entries with multiple voice tracks, or with other tracks of sound or music, or simply good, clean recordings of entrants’ pieces. Any of these things are acceptable. The “prose” category includes any prose piece: fiction or nonfiction. “Audio documentary” is now open to professionally and non-professionally recorded pieces. Please see our audio contest site for full guidelines.
If you would like to check out previous contest winners and get a sense of the range of work our judges responded to favorably, you can find them in our recent podcasts. We’ve posted our four first-place winners from last year’s competition and plan to post entries from our first-runners up in the coming weeks. (So check back)!
Do-Over!
We all love to imagine what we would do if we could call a “do-over” on life. If you could revisit the moments that shaped your life, would you ask what’s-her-name to junior prom? What about confronting your elementary school bully? Would you go so far as to redo kindergarten? Robin Hemley, one of America’s finest nonfiction writers and recipient of multiple prestigious awards, raises these questions and more in his new book Do-Over! In his book, Hemley revisits some of the more embarrassing failures of his life and redoes them as a middle-aged man, attempting everything from a summer camp swimming test to taking his high school crush to prom. Do-Over! even revisits Hemley’s awkward eighth-grade year at Columbia, Missouri’s own Jefferson Junior High School. Sound interesting? Robin Hemley will be at The Missouri Review’s free Back-to-School event on September 24th at 2 p.m. in 215 Tate Hall at the University of Missouri, Columbia to discuss Do-Over! Come out, enjoy some juice and back-to-school snacks, and listen to one of the best writers in the world discuss all the flubs we wish we could fix. Robin Hemley will also read from Do-Over! at The Missouri Review’s annual benefit dinner at Murry’s restaurant on September 25that 6 p.m. A $60 ticket for this event includes wine, dinner, the music of Tom Andes, Robin Hemley’s reading, and, of course, a chance to support the literary arts. Tickets may be purchased by calling (573) 884-8851. It promises to be a fantastic evening, one you won’t want to miss!
Robin Hemley will read from his book Do-Over! on September 24th at the University of Missouri.
Just like Robin Hemley, I think we all have moments we wish we could fix. I find his work particularly inspiring because there are a few events from the past I would try again, especially when it comes to finding the source of my current bad habits–specifically my procrastination infestation. Every few weeks at five minutes before midnight, I sling my backpack onto the table in my go-to coffee shop, six books spilling out of my bag. I start flipping through the books with one hand as I pull out my computer with the other. The busboy wiping down tables is staring, gripping his dishtowel in petrified amazement as, ten seconds after bursting through the door, my fingers begin to fly across the keyboard of my Mac. I barely glance over my glasses as I bark, “Listen, I don’t know how many espresso shots you can put in a cup of coffee before it’s illegal, but that’s exactly how many I want; got it?”
This is my average night before a paper is due. The coffee shop, the sleep-deprivation, the lonesome table peppered with highlighted texts and empty cups of espresso—it’s all part of my perfected monthly procrastination ritual. I can tell you how many hours it will take to write five pages, double-spaced, APA style, give or take a few absentminded Facebook distractions. I’ve been an expert procrastinator for years. In high school, if I hadn’t studied for my Biology exam, I would draw an intricate small intestine for “points for creativity.” For my junior high book reports, I would make up whole novels, designing the plots from my own imagination. Of course, I wasn’t born finding ways to take “short cuts.” There was a time where I labored over homework like the rest of my young peers—but that was an age before I discovered White Out.
My addiction to procrastination started in fifth grade. Each week, we had to do a set of times tables through 12 times 12. It was extremely boring, and math never was my strong subject, so I started putting them off. At first, I decided that I just wouldn’t hand them in. Well, that didn’t work, that just made my parents take away the TV. With no afternoon cartoons, I came up with a new plan. I quickly copied out last week’s assignment each time it was handed back; sure it was tedious, but not nearly as frustrating. Weeks later, I found the mother lode of all shortcuts: my dad’s White Out. At the time, I was convinced that teachers didn’t actually check each individual assignment (a theory proven in tenth grade when I included a recipe for venison steak in the middle of a short paper). With a quick flick of the brush, there was a small chance my teacher could recognize the hasty “OK” he had scribbled on the previous week’s times table. I had found an ultimate solution for multiplication. I could put off learning about math as long as I wanted. I was a genius. At least, I thought I was—but my teacher? Not so much. He quickly caught onto my plot and silently handed me a pencil to rewrite the entire set of multiplicative monstrosities. A graceful loser, I surrendered and rewrote my times tables with my teacher looming over me. As I stumbled through seven times eight, I failed to mention to him that I had handed in that very same times table for the previous three weeks.
At the time, I thought I was cheating the system, but I’ve learned that once you get to college, there is no cheating the system. There’s just an empty coffee shop, Microsoft Word, and your own ingenuity. Maybe I would have never discovered procrastination and taking short cuts if I had written out the tables; maybe I’d have even discovered a love for math; maybe I’d be able to multiply by nines without counting on my fingers. One day I may just face my problems like Robin Hemley. I’ll stride right back into the fifth grade classroom at North Mercer Elementary, take my pencil, and write out every single times table from one to twelve right there. Still, I just made it through College Algebra, and I can barely remember the rules for addition, let alone multiplication. Oh, well. I have no problem leaving my do-over for another day—after all, procrastination is my best subject.
NBCC Award Nominees
No doubt by now you have seen the nominees for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Awards. If not, they’re listed at Critical Mass, the NBCC blog.
What you may not have known is that three of the nominees have had work or interviews appear in our pages.
Jeffrey Eugenides, a fiction nominee, was interviewed by James Schiff in our Fall 2006 issue (29.3). You can hear an audio clip from his nominated novel, The Marriage Plot, via our tumblr page.
Jonathan Lethem, a nominee in criticism, was interviewed in our Spring 2006 issue (29.1), also by James Schiff.
Laura Kasischke‘s poems have appeared in our pages twice, in 1993 and 2007. She is, suitably, a nominee in poetry.
If you’d like to read these poems and interviews, backissues are available.
Congratulations to these writers, and to all nominees.
In fact, congratulations to everyone everywhere – you’re doing a great job!