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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)!
Our 48-Hour Poem Non-Contest: The Winner
When we learned that Terry W. Thompson, of Zanesville, Ohio, released his menagerie of animals and committed suicide last month, we asked for poems written, in 48 hours, in response to the tragedy. It was our first-ever 48-Hour Poem Non-Contest.
We received many entries, but could choose only one winner. He is Joshua Polk, and you can read his winning poem at our tumblr page.
In days to come, we will post to tumblr other entrants to our Non-Contest, authors of which include Roxane Gay, C Wallace Walker, Divya Rajan, Murray Dunlap, and Kate McIntyre and Joe Aguilar. Together their poems make for a fine menagerie of verse, and we hope you’ll come and see it.
Our First-ever 48-Hour-Poem Non-Contest
When I learned about the amateur zookeeper in Zanesville who released his exotic animals and committed suicide, I immediately thought this is exactly the kind of event that should be written about in a poem. When I came down from the wave of enthusiasm that accompanied this thought, I had a depressive moment, as I often do, and worried that perhaps not many poems would be written about the animals in Zanesville after all. I don’t write poetry, so I can’t remedy this situation singlehandedly.
I need your help, so, as TMR’s Social Media Editor, I’d like to announce our first-ever 48-Hour-Poem Non-Contest.
You have 48 hours, after the posting of this blog post, to write a poem about the animal release in Zanesville and send it to themissourireview [at] gmail [dot] com The poem we decide is best will be featured on our tumblr page.
That makes the deadline about noon on Wednesday, October 26th. Because this is a Non-Contest, submissions will not be blind and anyone can enter, except for me. No money will be awarded to anyone.
I call it a Non-Contest because I don’t want this to be in any way confused with our actual contest, the deadline of which came and went a few weeks ago – and because this Non-Contest is not directly affiliated with our magazine, only with our blog and tumblr page.
This is strictly for fun; if you end up writing a really good poem, you’ll probably want to submit it to our magazine as a regular submission – or, better yet, to the Unleashed Exotic Creature Review.
Also, in no way is this an effort to make light of what happened in Zanesville, which was awful and tragic for man and beast alike.
Happy writing.