| | | | | | | | | | Guest Judge: Alexander Chee
Open: March 1 to April 30, 2020 | | | The 2020 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize is now open to original fiction up to 5,000 words. Three winners will be selected by guest judge Alexander Chee, with $2800 awarded. Each winner receives publication with a written introduction by the judge; first place also wins a subscription to Journal of the Month. Entries are open from March 1 to April 30, 2020. We look forward to reading your work! | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Need a reminder to submit? Add us to your calendar with the button below: | | | | | | | | | | | The Winners of the 2019 CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest Editors' Choice Round | | | | | | | | | | | | | Inheritance by Madeline Anthes | | | Everyone expected me to take my mother's eyes. I had a right to take what I wanted, and her eyes were legendary. She'd taken them from her mother, and her mother had taken them from her mother.
They were smoky gray with a ring of dark green around the iris. Clear and unusual.
When my mother looked at you, you felt your insides seize. It was hard to say no to her.
She had already picked out a new pair at the Registry—a respectable cool blue. Everyone expected me to take her eyes, but when I turned eighteen, I took something else. | | | | | | | | | | | Coyote the Younger by Stephen Aubrey | | | In all those moments after he'd lit the fuse but before the rocket-powered roller skates propelled him across the yellow desert at sublimely sub-sonic speeds, in all those moments what came most vividly to Coyote the Younger were the memories of his father, Coyote the Elder. How he had crept across an inky horizon, quietly and carefully, instinctively. How power and grace were inscribed upon his long muzzle. How he had held the Road Runner's neck almost tenderly under his paw. How the Road Runner would stare back at him, its eyes filled with something almost like love.
Coyote the Elder had been a hunter—the last, and perhaps the greatest of a line that dwindled to an end in Coyote the Younger. The son who had forsaken the ways of his fathers, surrendered instinct and the Old Ways. Traded them for the blueprints and patents of Acme Corporation. Secrets industrial, not ancestral. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Old Girl by Virginia Reeves | | | She came to me briefly and infrequently during the school year, then stayed for the summers, long visits that charred us both with their heat and expectations.
No one was surprised when she'd chosen her dad.
Her face was too thin, her cheeks like the mountain ridges around her home where I'd once lived with her father—the three of us in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. She seemed older, too, almost elderly in her disappointment. She squinted her eyes as she looked out the window. "Look at all these roads," I imagined her saying. "All this concrete. I remember when this was pasture, back when this country grew its own goddamned food." | | | | | | | | | | | What They Didn't Teach Us
by Luke Whisnant | | | They taught us how to kill with assault weapons, bayonets, bare hands. They taught us the lay of the land, how to navigate by rivers and stars, how to use cover to outflank enemy operatives, how to make a surprise attack against a heavily defended position. They taught us the procedure for poisoning the water with coal ash. We learned to napalm the trees, scorch the already blackened earth. We learned how to pour salt in the wounds, how to twist a metaphor, how to dissemble while smiling into the cameras. They taught us corrosion, shock and awe, how to clog the system, how to throw the optimum-sized spanner in the works. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Introducing: Art of the Opening | | | In this new occasional column, we'll explore the art of the opening in an interactive way, discussing openings with their writers, peeking behind the scenes at the revision process, essaying about what we find striking. In 2018 we published Melissa Ragsly's short story " Mannequin," which is included in her new collection, We Know This Will All Disappear. Our short fiction section editor Suzanne Grove and reader Albert Liau, working together on behalf of CRAFT, explore the openings of several of Ragsly's stories via an essay, a Q&A, and a look at some editorial notes from the collection's revision process, shared as images. XXX "In each of the sixteen stories, Ragsly manages not only to hook readers with succinct and gorgeously fluid prose that elicits emotion, but also to garner our interest by raising questions to which we crave answers. It seems these stories must begin as they do; the opening ideas and images quickly cement themselves in our minds, feeling more like unalterable facts than fictional details. In other words, the places, people, and events of her fiction become supremely real to us." —Suzanne Grove XXX Albert Liau: As you begin writing a story, do you find your way in through openings, or do your opening lines tend to take shape later, perhaps after some brainstorming or drafting offers a sense of how you want the reader to enter the story?
Melissa Ragsly: While every story has its own gestation process, more often than not, it is the opening, either the line, the opening paragraph or the first scene, that take shape first and the rest of the story blooms from there. I don't usually think about plot or what I want to try to say. Most stories I write start with an image in my head of a character in the middle of something, yes; I think it's true because if you're writing literary fiction and the idea of plot isn't at the forefront, opening with a character in the midst of action gives an immediate layer of tension, of conflict with the reader themselves even. What is going on? is a more intriguing way to be seduced into a story than a setup that can become tedious and boring. I might start writing the middle of a scene and write to figure out what's the purpose of it. | | | | | | | | | | | | | CRAFT
70 SW Century Drive | | | | | | | | | | | This email was sent to aljoseph@siu.edu You received this email because you are registered with CRAFT | | | |
| | | | | | | |
Comments
Post a Comment