CRWROPPS Post: 2K Contest, Craft Literary

Closing Soon:
2022 CRAFT Amelia Gray 2K Contest
Guest Judge: Amelia Gray
$3,600 Awarded

How do you know your flash is ready to send? By now you've tinkered and fussed, swapped "and" with "but" and "but" with "how" and "how" with "and" again, fussed with fonts while avoiding the last of it entirely because for sure the ending is off, and but how someone might end it is fully lost on you, maybe it's off or not meant to be ended at all, maybe you've begun the never ending flash fiction when without warning it comes to you, maybe in line at the bank, maybe not the perfect but good or good enough, and good but good enough, but how, and how! —Amelia Gray, Guest Judge

Read our interview with Amelia here.

Submissions are open through October 31, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. PT! Guest Judge Amelia Gray will select three winning pieces from the shortlist. This contest is open to microfiction, flash fiction, and prose poetry. Your $20 reading fee allows up to two pieces that total up to 2,000 words—if submitting two pieces, please send them in a SINGLE document.

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AWARDS:

The writers of the three winning pieces will each receive:

$1,000 award and a bundle of the Rose Metal Press Field Guides.
Publication in CRAFT, with an introduction by Amelia Gray, and an author's note (short craft essay) to accompany the piece.
Editors' choices: $200 each and publication to three pieces we just can't let go.

AMELIA GRAY is the author of five books, most recently Isadora (FSG). Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and VICE. She is a winner of the NYPL Young Lion and of FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and a finalist for a WGA Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. As a screenwriter, she has written for the shows Maniac (Netflix), Mr. Robot (USA), and Gaslit (Starz), as well as the games Telling Lies (Annapurna Interactive) and Immortality (Half Mermaid). She lives in Los Angeles.

GUIDELINES:

Open September 1 to October 31, 2022.
CRAFT submissions are open to all writers.
Microfiction, flash fiction, or prose poetry ONLY! (Creative nonfiction writers, watch for our 2022 Creative Nonfiction Award to open in November! We will accept both flash and longform essays for that upcoming contest.)
2,000 word count maximum (up to two prose pieces per submission).
We review literary work but are open to a variety of genres and styles.
Previously unpublished work only.
$20 reading fee per entry allows up to two pieces that total up to 2,000 words—if submitting two pieces, please send them in a SINGLE document.
We allow multiple submissions—please submit each piece (or set of two pieces) as a separate submission accompanied by a separate entry fee.
Press 53 has generously partnered with CRAFT to offer all entrants a 25% discount on any of their flash fiction and/or prose poetry titles. Code provided once your submission is complete.

Winners from the 2022 CRAFT Hybrid Writing Contest

I carve out small, ordered spaces—smaller than my grandmother's, because I know perhaps better than her the narrow limits of my motivation—and plant tulips, roses, dahlias. They guard against the stubborn encroachment of the ghosts of her fickle attention.

The blackberry brambles take over in just one season of neglect. They have engulfed over half the yard in the past and so my summer's work becomes preventing it from happening again, instead of making progress on the beautiful space I can see in my mind's eye. I spend the sunny days bailing out a boat that's taking on water in the form of invasive vines, forbs, and shrubs.

—Chelsea Biondolillo, "Weeds"

xxx

No woman I know saw his friend blocking the door.

No woman I know saw herself from above, as if looking down through a glacier.

No woman I know pinned and flattened like a blue shadow on the bed.

No woman I know felt her shirt lift so he could take a picture.

No woman I know splintered or crystalized on the spot.

—Christine Hume & Laura Larson, "All the Women I Know (Sandra, Dani, Roma, Alex)"

xxx

My last name tells the story of my mother's fear to live in a country that orders the "White" box first, but I couldn't check this box like a daddy's girl if you knew that I didn't know how to pronounce my last name until I was in college. When I did, I laughed because of how the Norwegian phonetics felt in my mouth, and then stopped abruptly for all the times I had censured others from giggling and mocking Asian names at graduations, at the bank, in movie theaters, at home.

And what could I stand up and say, anyway, if told, "Tell me about white culture."

Maybe I could try to explain how identity works on court-ordered custody time.

—Jade Hidle, "Census"