The Missouri Review is excited to be attending AWP’s Conference in Chicago in just a few short weeks. We are doing our best to prepare for the Windy City, but could use some help. With Oprah out of the picture, I have little to contribute to a Chicagoan presence. Our resident Cubs fan also seems to have come to terms with what little value his fandom holds. There is one famed Chicago attribute that the TMR staff seems confident enough to take on: gourmet hot dogs. In honor of these mystery meat masterpieces and in an attempt to improve our AWP readiness, @Missouri_Review is holding its first Twitter contest.

We are asking our Twitter followers to send us your literary-themed hot dog recipes. Entries should include a name for your hot dog, a list of ingredients, and reference literature in some way, all under 140 characters. Let us know that you’ve entered by including the hashtag #TMRchicago at the end of your tweet. Vegetarian and vegan tofu dog entries will also be accepted. Judging will be primarily based on the giggling and stomach rumbling of our editors and staff. Your tweet entry might look something like this:

The winner will receive a handmade literary-hot-dog-themed craft, assembled by The Missouri Review office staff. To increase your chances of winning a (better?) prize, consider entering TMR’s other contests: Our Non-Contest or our 5th Annual Audio Contest. We look forward to eating your tweets!

*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. 

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!

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

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)!

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.

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 26^th.  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.

So here you go – the most Frequently Asked Questions regarding our contest.

When is the deadline? 

October 1^st . If you are submitting online, you must do so by midnight of the 1^st. If you are submitting a printed manuscript through the mail, then it must be postmarked by October 1^st. Otherwise you will be eaten alive by a pack of ravenous wolves.

When will the winners be announced?

The winners of our contest will be announced on our website and blog in January 2012. The winners will be notified befo­rehand, so there won’t be any surprises. (Although all the winners will be invited to Speer Morgan’s surprise birthday party. Shhh… don’t tell him.)

Can I submit more than one piece per genre?

Sure you can! If you submit them online, then just make sure to upload them separately, and be aware that you will have to pay an entry fee for each submission.  Ditto for mail entries.

Are international submissions accepted?

Absolutely!  We want ‘em, so send ‘em!

My short story was published in a student literary magazine (or on a blog). Can I still submit my work to your contest?

Unfortunately, no. If your work has been published in print or online, we cannot accept it. However, in the case of the blog, if you can remove your work from the blog, then we will still accept it. So take your masterpiece off your Tumblr and submit it!

Help! I tried to upload my manuscript, and my payment went through, but not my manuscript! What do I do?

Don’t you worry, now. Just email me (see below) with your manuscript as an attachment, and I will add it to our database. Consider that mystery Scooby-Doo’ed.

Can I put my name on my submission, or is this a blind contest?

Our Editors’ Prize contest is not blind. We ask that you include your name and contact information on the first page of your submission. Or, you can use a title page if you prefer. The formatting is really up to you. Just make sure your contact information is easy to read and does not distract from your writing. So that means no size 18 Wingdings headers and footers. Please and thank you!

I sent in the wrong copy of my story. Can I resubmit it?

Only if there are major differences between your original story and the one you submitted. Meaning, if the “wrong copy” of your story is wrong because you made a few typos, or forgot to rename your protagonist Steve instead of Prince William – then you don’t need to worry about resubmitting. Mistakes happen, even in the best writing. Your story will not be deemed unworthy of our prize because of a few comma splices.

However, if you sent your poetry collection “An Ode to Laguna Beach” when you meant to send “An Ode to Jersey Shore,” then absolutely, you may resubmit. Upload your new manuscript online, just as you did before. You will have to pay again, but we will give you a refund for the second payment. Simply email me and explain the situation, and we will take care of it. If you are unsure whether or not you should resubmit, then just ask me.

Will the contest accept simultaneous submissions?

Yes, we will. However, you must make sure to contact us immediately if your manuscript is selected for publication at another journal, so we can withdraw it from our contest. We don’t want to end up in a love triangle with your manuscript and another journal – it’s just too painful.

If you haven’t submitted to our contest yet, then hop to it! And if you have any questions, no matter how absurd or silly they may seem, please feel free to send me an email at contest_question@moreview.com. If you don’t, then I will be out of a job.  So ask away!

I have to admit that when I joined the staff here last year and learned that TMR offers subscriptions in digital format (and has for some time) I was a bit skeptical. I love to hold a book in my hands—love the texture and heft of it and the aesthetic pleasure of simply flipping through the pages of a well-laid out journal. Sure, I appreciated the fact that we offered our subscribers the choice of a more environmentally friendly format, but environmental concerns aside, I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose digital over the pleasures of print. I was perplexed, therefore, to learn that over one fourth of the entrants to our contests do go digital when choosing their subscription and that that number climbs a little every year.

Then, about six months ago, a digital subscription to the journal mysteriously appeared in my inbox one day. I don’t actually know where it came from—a gift from the gods of cyberspace, I guess. Or maybe someone here at TMR decided to give all of us on staff free digital access; I never really looked into it. What I did do, though, was open the link and begin to browse TMR in its digital manifestation—or should I say, glory. I’m not kidding. The online version of the journal is gorgeous; the images are crisp, the layout (in which you are able to view two facing pages at once) is no different than in the print version, and if anything, the colors appear deeper and more vibrant on the screen than on paper. What really won me over, however, was the audio component: the clean, articulate vocals and the clear quality of the recording add a new dimension of aesthetic richness. Whether I want to hear a beautiful reading of one of my favorite poems in an issue, or whether I want to experience the entire journal (which I don’t always have time to read) while cleaning my house or walking to work, I can.

So yes, I confess, I’m a believer: a digital journal subscription can be a wonderful thing. While I still prefer to own a book in hard copy than the Kindle version or some other variety of e-book, I think that when it comes to literary journals, digital is actually a nice compromise. I’ll hold onto my favorite books, but eventually, journals, newspapers, and magazines all go.

While many TMR readers may still very well be skeptical about the beauty of a digital subscription, they don’t have to take my word for it. I hereby invoke the gods of cyberspace to grant you free access, if you follow this link, to the digital version of our Spring 2011 issue. Magic. You can browse it, download it to your desktop, and listen to the audio to your heart’s content.

This issue also happens to be the one in which last year’s Editor’s Prize winners appear. If you’re thinking of submitting to our contest this year, you can check out this contest issue to get a sense of the kind of work that has won in the past. Finally, don’t forget that your submission fee to the contest gets you a one-year subscription to TMR at a discounted rate and that that subscription is available in print or digital.

Our Editors’ Prize is now open for submissions!  This will be the 21st year of our Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, and we’re really delighted to be able to showcase the work of a few great writers, and toss a smorgsabord of love (publication in our Spring 2012 issue, $5000 in prize winnings, flown into Columbia for a reading and all-around fun weekend, shameless self-promotion on our site, etc.) to deserving authors. Finalists often are also selected for publication: our most recent issue has finalists in both fiction and poetry. What we’re trying to say (write?) is that this is the best contest ever.

Notice these two editors don't have Successories art on their walls.

We receive a ton of submissions to the Editors Prize, for which we are really grateful, and the sooner we can get started reading, the better. As our contest editor Claire McQuerry noted last year, submitting early to our contest is good. So, too, is submitting online, which is easy to do by going here. As an added incentive, all entries received in the month of July that request a digital subscription will receive a fifth issue of The Missouri Review for free! Five for the price of four!

We’re really looking forward to reading your work. Good luck!

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.