“Writers often talk about stakes, and they mostly mean the stakes within the piece: what’s at stake for the protagonist, whether fictional or not. Yet for me, the stakes that matter most—the stakes that shape the work profoundly—are those the author faces while writing,” writes Joy Castro, founding editor of the Machete series published by Ohio State University Press, in a recent installment of our Agents & Editors Recommend series. Castro encourages writers to take “bold, huge, scary risks” and “trust that your readers are as intelligent and soulful as you are.” Inspired by Castro’s advice, write an essay that considers your relationship to risk in life and your creative work. Do you take leaps or keep your feet on the ground?

In the preface to Whorephobia: Strippers on Art, Work, and Life, an anthology of essays and interviews published by Seven Stories Press, editor Lizzie Borden writes about her experiences as a young filmmaker in the late 1970s and early 1980s in downtown New York when she worked at a brothel to support her art. Borden writes: “My way of justifying working at the brothel was to tell myself it was part of what I considered my ‘real work’ of writing and directing, so I always went to work armed with a tape recorder.” Years later Borden would run into old friends on the street who worked with her at the brothel and exchange coded looks that, as she writes, were a result of their “internalized societal whorephobia.” Write a story in which tensions rise when two characters decide to keep a secret. Try to paint a picture of the before and after of these characters’ lives and how the secret forever connects them.

“I first started writing poetry (and still write it) because the world, its people, and their ideas are wrong, insane, immoral, flawed, or unimaginably terrible. I write because I feel wrong, sad, crazy, disappointed, disappointing, and unimaginably terrible,” writes Rachel Zucker in “The Poetics of Wrongness, an Unapologia,” the first in a series of lectures delivered for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016 and collected in The Poetics of Wrongness, forthcoming in February from Wave Books. In the form of an unapologia, a reversal of the traditional apologia form that typically consists of a defense of one’s own opinions and actions, Zucker posits that “wrongness” is intrinsic to writing poetry and that poetry asserts “with its most defining formal device—the line break—that the margins of prose are wrong, or—with its attention to diction—that the ways in which we’ve come to understand and use words [is] wrong.” Write a poem in the form of an unapologia. Identify when you have been wrong in the past, and try not to defend yourself. Instead, speak through your feelings of wrongness.

Each year Oxford Languages names a Word of the Year that reflects the “ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the past twelve months” based on thorough analysis of statistics and data, but for the first time this year’s choice was open to a public vote. More than 300,000 people cast their vote and the overwhelming winner is “goblin mode,” a slang term defined as “a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” Write an essay about a time you have gone into “goblin mode.” Was the period of unapologetic behavior necessary for you to recharge?

What is the relationship between good art and bad behavior? In the essay “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” published in the Paris Review in 2017, Claire Dederer breaks down the mixed feelings she has when enjoying the art of abusive men, including her experience watching the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. Using anecdotes from conversations with friends, Dederer also reflects on her own sense of “monstrosity” as a writer. “A book is made of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people,” she writes. Inspired by this moral quandary, write a story from the perspective of a writer considering their own monstrousness.

“It was all so different than he expected,” writes Henri Cole in his poem “At Sixty-Five,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. Written on Cole’s birthday, the third-person perspective of the poem offers a distance from the poet and his life. The details in the series of observations create a portrait of a fully lived life with accomplishments and opinions: “Yes, he wore his pants looser. / No, he didn’t do crosswords in bed. / No, he didn’t file for Social Security,” writes Cole. Write a poem that focuses on what your age means to you. What details will you include to make this self-reflection unique?

As 2022 winds to a close, give your writing one last chance to shine this year by submitting to contests with deadlines of December 15 and December 30. Awards include a seven-month residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; a weeklong residency at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, New York; publication of poetry and nonfiction books; and $3,000 for a published debut novel. All contests offer a cash prize of $500 or more. We wish you success, writers!

Center for Book Arts
Poetry Chapbook Contest
A prize of $500 and letterpress publication by the Center for Book Arts is given annually for a poetry chapbook. The winner will also receive 10 copies of their chapbook and an additional $500 to give a reading with the contest judge at the Center for Book Arts in New York City in fall 2023, and a free weeklong residency at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, New York, during the Wintertide Rustic Retreat. Deadline: December 15. Entry fee: $30. 

Codhill Press
Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award
A prize of $1,000, publication by Codhill Press, and 25 author copies is given annually for a poetry collection. James Sherwood will judge. All entries are considered for publication. Deadline: December 30. Entry fee: $30.

Essay Press/University of Washington Bothell
Book Contest
A prize of $1,000 and publication by Essay Press will be given annually for lyric essays, prose poems, and works of experimental biography and autobiography that “challenge the formal possibilities of prose.” The winner will also be invited to read at the University of Washington Bothell in downtown Seattle; all travel expenses will be covered. Collaborative, digital, and hybridized work, including text and art, are eligible. Deadline: December 15. Entry fee: $20 (or $25 to receive a copy of a previous or forthcoming Essay Press book).

Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
Writing Fellowships
Fellowships for a seven-month residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, are given annually to four poets and four fiction writers who have not published a full-length book in any genre. Each fellowship includes a private apartment, a monthly stipend of $1,000, and an exit stipend of $1,000. Deadline: December 15. Entry fee: $50.

Longleaf Press
Book Contest
A prize of $1,000, publication by Longleaf Press, and 25 author copies will be given annually for a poetry collection. The winner will also be invited to give a virtual reading in early 2024. Roger Weingarten, Longleaf’s editor in chief, will judge. Deadline: December 15. Entry fee: $27.

Story
Story Foundation Prize
A prize of $1,500 and publication in Story is given annually for a short story. Deadline: December 15. Entry fee: $25 (which includes a subscription to Story).

Virginia Commonwealth University
Cabell First Novelist Award
A prize of at least $3,000 is given annually for a debut novel published during the current year. The winner and two additional guest panelists (usually the winner’s agent and editor) also receive lodging and travel expenses to attend the First Novelist Award event night at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in fall 2023. A committee of VCU faculty and MFA candidates will judge. Deadline: December 30: Entry fee: none.

Visit the contest websites for complete guidelines, and check out the Grants & Awards database and Submission Calendar for more contests in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translation.

In “Finding Comfort and Escape in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” published on Literary Hub, A. Cerisse Cohen writes about the impact the iconic cookbook had on her relationship with cooking during the pandemic when she moved from New York City to Missoula, Montana. Cohen not only discovers that “bad food is often the result of impatience,” but also finds a transformational lesson behind the patient, careful labor behind Hazan’s dishes indicating to her the many ways through which people take care of one another. Write an essay about your relationship to cooking and the impact it has had on other aspects of your life. Are there lessons you’ve learned from preparing an ambitious dish?