Sixteen Rivers Press is seeking unpublished poems that respond to the cultural, moral, and political rifts that divide our country: poems of resistance and resilience, witness and vision that embody what it means to be a citizen in a time when our democracy is threatened.
Sixteen Rivers editors welcome voices raised in passion and in praise, whether lyrical, philosophical, visionary, or personal.
Submit 1 to 3 unpublished poems, totaling no more than 3 pages.
Deadline: May 15, 2017
Think of a house or an apartment you lived in – either where you grew up or one that comes to you most strongly: a place that seems most pertinent or the place you want to discover more about.
Use a pen or pencil and draw a blueprint of the house or apartment.
Sketch the floor plan, include doors (front, back, side), stairs, and each room within the house. Let your hand and mind be the guides. Don’t worry about getting it exactly correct.
Use color to explore
When you feel done with the blueprint, use color to explore the house/apartment and your feelings.
Color the rooms, or outline the rooms, using the actual or basic color of the walls, the rugs and furniture.
When you feel done with coloring, write whatever comes up.
Examples
The house was yellow I hated that color. It made me think of . . .
The red front door stood out like . . .
My pink/blue room was a sanctuary. I could . . .
I liked the green kitchen best. This is where I . . .
You can also write opposites:
The house was yellow. I loved that color. I never realized until now . . .
The red front door blended in. I never thought . . .
My pink/blue room was hellish. I could never . . .
I disliked the green kitchen the most. This is where I didn’t . . .
Go where your mind wants to go. Just write.
“All humans understand and use story on an intuitive level. It’s our most effective teaching tool.” — Deb Norton, “Story Structure, Simplified,” WritersDigest, February 2017
What makes a happy reader?
Robert Keiner answers, “It’s all about being invited in by the writer. If a writer begins showing off with obscure or precious writing, that gets in the readers’ way. . . The job of the writer is to ignite a fictional daydream in the brain of the reader and then step away and become invisible so the story becomes the readers’ own.” — WritersDigest, February 2017
Pulp Fiction, a Canadian magazine, features a variety of genres: science fiction, mystery, fantasy, history, suspense, and thriller.
“We realized we knew a lot of writers who had pieces sitting in shoe boxes under their bed[s] . . . We also knew writers looking to break out.” — The Writer magazine, October 2016
The “pulp” in the title refers to “cheap pulp paper used in the dime-novels of last century.
“We love literary fiction. Beautiful prose, soul-searching themes, and powerful and complex character development are all part of the stories we like.”
From their website:
In these days of massive hardcover tomes and heavyweight trade paperbacks, do you miss the small, inexpensive paperbacks you could stuff in your purse or coat pocket? We do, which is why our print format is a digest-sized magazine, lovingly modeled after fabulous magazines which have stood the test of time.
Any genre or between-genre work of literature, or visual art (black and white) up to 75 pages in length. Short stories, novellas, poetry, comics, illustrations — bring it on. We do not publish non-fiction, memoir, or children’s stories. Aside from that we want anything entertaining and well written.
Pulp Literature has four annual contests for writers, and new this year, a cover painting contest for artists. To hear about contests in advance, subscribe to their free monthly newsletter.
“We receive fewer entries in a contest than in general submissions, so you’re more likely to get noticed.”
The Bumblebee Flash Fiction Contest Deadline: February 15, 2017
The Magpie Award for Poetry
At Pulp Literature, we have an affinity for poetry, the hard liquor of literature. We like it strong, neat, and we don’t mind if it makes our eyes water. Our judges, will be looking for a fusion of musicality, imagery, feeling, and thought. May the best poem win!
Contest opens: 1 March 2017
Deadline: 15 April 2017
Entry fee: $25 1st poem, $10 each subsequent poem
Earlybird fee (before 15 March): $20 1st poem, $10 each subsequent poem
Entry fees include a 1-year digital subscription to Pulp Literature.
The Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize
Got something short, sharp and snappy to tell? Wow us with your most economical and brilliant storytelling. This contest is for short fiction under 1000 words. Want feedback on your story? Get a professional critique from one of the Pulp Literature editors for only $15 more.
Deadline: 15 June 2017
Entry fee: $15
Earlybird fee (before 15 May): $10
Entry fees include a 1-year digital subscription to Pulp Literature.
The Raven Short Story Contest
We Pulp Literature editors collect stories like ravens in the woods, swooping down on what catches our eye and bringing the treasures — sometimes sparkling, sometimes grisly, but always fascinating — home to our nests. Want feedback on your story? Get a professional critique from one of the Pulp Literature editors for only $25 more. Show us your most scintillating treasures in the form of short fiction up to 2500 words in length and you could be the one bringing home $300 to line your nest!
Contest opens: 1 September 2017
Deadline: 15 October 2017
Entry fee: $20
Editorial critique: $25
Earlybird fee (before 15 September): $15
Entry fees include a 1-year digital subscription to Pulp Literature
This contest is for previously unpublished short fiction between 500 and 2500 words in length. Multiple entries welcome.
Short Fiction Guidelines
We are looking for entertaining, accessible stories: A story readers can sink into late at night before they go to bed. We want to stretch people’s minds, but not give them a headache.
We want a balance of serious and lighthearted stories. We strive for emotional balance in each of our issues, and want our readers to leave feeling challenged yet refreshed.
We aren’t satisfied with a joke. Some writers send shaggy dog stories that end with a twist or revelation that is funny, but not a story. A story is about a person, not a plot twist.
We take more short fiction than novellas. Stories under 5000 words have the best chance of publication.
We want both plot and character. We like some action along with those intriguing personalities, and we want to see characters that grow and change throughout the story arc.
Reading fees
Because of the large volume of short fiction we receive we charge a reading fee of $10 CAD (roughly $7 US) for short stories and novellas. If this fee is a hardship please contact us. Finances should never prevent your words from being seen! There are no fees for poetry, novel, or artwork submissions.
What is a freewrite? Why should you do it? How is it done?A “freewrite” is “free association” for a quick style of writing. It’s a way of writing freely with no worries about the end product.
It’s meant to be spontaneous, with no “real” thinking involved. Just write thoughts as quickly as they form.
No editing is involved while writing because editing means “thinking” and thinking means censoring.
Censoring and editing while writing can inhibit the freedom experienced while writing without worries about the outcome.
A freewrite is getting your thoughts written, accept whatever they are, and however they manifest.
This writing can be a catalyst for further writing and can later be revised, edited, and polished.
Choose an idea, set a timer, write for that amount of time. Topics can be whatever is on your mind or select a writing prompt on The Write Spot Blog.
Keep writing, using prompts as inspiration. Think of this as “practice” writing. Just like a baseball player didn’t walk up to home plate one day and hit a homerun . . . it took lots of practice. It can take a lot of practice to get to a deep level of writing.
Once you get into the rhythm of this type of free writing, you will be able to access that part of you that wants to express your deep, inner thoughts. It comes with time, practice, and patience.
There are over 300 writing prompts on The Write Spot Blog. Choose one and Just Write.
What participants say about The Write Spot Blog:
“I’ve been going way back through your blog. I encourage anyone interested in writing to revisit so many posts that offer help and encouragement. I cannot thank you enough for all the links, advice, and beautiful writings. The Write Spot Blog is a writing gold mine of information, help and encouragement.” —Kelly
“It means so much to me that there is a place called The Write Spot. Marlene, your level of integrity and thoroughness that is involved in this website is amazing. Your unique sense of heart and level of professionalism is really quite something. All I can say is big Thank YOU!” —Christina
Guest Blogger Jan Ellison talks about truth in short stories and novels.
Years ago, when the first short story I published was included in the 2007 O. Henry Prize anthology, I was standing out front of my kids’ school when a woman I hardly knew poked her head out of her car to say that she’d only read the first paragraph, but would I be willing to tell her how much of my short story was true? It was the first time the question had been posed to me, and I had no idea how to answer it. Did she only want to read the story if it was “true,” or if it was not?
Sometimes the question comes in other forms. What gave rise to the novel? What was the inspiration for your story? Is it autobiographical?
I am as guilty of wanting answers to those questions as any reader. After reading Adam Haslett’s heartbreakingly beautiful novel, Imagine Me Gone, I couldn’t help wondering whether the novel’s brilliance is in part born out of personal experience with crippling depression.
I read Imagine Me Gone at our place in the mountains. I sat beside a lake, oblivious to the sun burning my back and the odd little black beetles stinging my calves. It was a novel that sucked me into its psychology, drowned me in one family’s despair and unfailing love, and felled me with its humor, its intelligence, and its vision. It released me two days later furious, devastated, moved, and envious. As only the finest literature can do, it had altered me. Does it matter how much of it is “true?” It matters only in that whatever tragedies in the author’s life gave rise to it, we can be grateful as readers that he had the courage and tenacity to turn those experiences into art.
As Stephanie Harrison writes in BookPage: “Imagine Me Gone is immensely personal and private, yet feels universal and ultimately essential in its scope. The end result is a book you do not read so much as feel, deeply and intensely, in the very marrow of your bones.”
When literary realism succeeds, it feels like life. When it doesn’t, it feels contrived. In my experience, this is the case whether the events that inspired the fiction happened or not. I have often become burdened by small details from my own experience that I try to manhandle into an evolving fiction. My own nostalgia insists this gem of an anecdote or detail belongs. But often, it’s not the right thing; it belonged in my life, but not in the fabrication it inspired. The opposite is of course also true: sometimes life delivers up a line of dialog, or a situation or detail that cannot be matched by invention. When there is a risk of offense, though, sometime we writers have to suck it up and settle for an inferior construction of our imaginations.
In an interview for American Short Fiction, the lovely Rachel Howell asked me how much of my own life, and past, informed my work, and how I managed to keep narrative distance while very much writing what I know.
I responded that I often begin with the low-hanging fruit: places I’ve lived, my own experiences, emotions, memories, observations, friends, family. Stories people tell me or that I read in the newspaper. Conversations I overhear in restaurants. That’s the raw material. And often, the initial attempt to get this material onto the page is done in a voice close to my own.
But once I begin to shape the material into something resembling a story, once characters emerge, the voice, or voices, if there is more than one narrator, will necessarily be transformed. Even though some of what happened to the narrator happened to me, the voice is no longer mine—it’s one that has emerged in the service of the story over years of revision. The story is not my life but a collection of sentences deliberately, fictionally shaped to deliver an emotional truth that becomes clear only as the story unfolds.
In the last year and a half since the book came out, I’ve spoken and written at length in essays and interviews about the features of my own life that gave rise to the novel. All that I’ve said and written on the topic is true. Is it the whole truth? No story ever is.
Excerpted from Jan Ellison’s 10/7/2-16 Blog Post: How Much of This is True? And other questions authors dread.
Jan Ellison is the USA TODAY bestselling author of the debut novel, A Small Indiscretion, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. A graduate of Stanford, Jan left college for a year at nineteen to study French in Paris, work in an office in London, and try her hand at writing. Twenty years later, her notebooks from that year became the germ of A Small Indiscretion
Jan holds an MFA from San Francisco State University. Her essays about parenting, travel and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Writer’s Digest and elsewhere. Her short fiction has received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Prize for her first published story.
There are tacky gifts, insulting gifts, selfish gifts the giver secretly wants, cheap gifts and re-gifted gifts.
But some gifts are transcendent. Have you ever received such a perfect gift? One that amazed you with its imagination? Perhaps it was a gift that completely touched your heart, changed your life, or opened a new world. Maybe it was a gift so dear you held on to it for a lifetime. What was it and why was it so special to you?
Prompt: Your best gift or your all-time favorite gift.
“Forgiveness liberates the soul,” Mandela explained to a crowd. “That’s why it’s such a powerful weapon.”
The movie “Invictus,” featuring Matt Damon, Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman is about Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison. After he was released and elected as South Africa’s first black president, he preached reconciliation.
When he decided to support the country’s rugby team — long a symbol of white oppression — his countrymen were stunned.
“Forgiveness liberates the soul,” Mandela explained to a crowd. “That’s why it’s such a powerful weapon.”
When writing, especially freewrites, you may experience epiphanies that will enlighten and inform you. Best wishes to you as you write. Just write.
Cultivate creativity: Grow awareness and eliminate distractions.Like gardening: Pull what you don’t want (those darn weeds) and nourish what you want to grow.
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