Marie Kondo has been making recent headlines for her Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, which follows the organizing consultant as she helps families clean up and declutter their homes. The show has sparked a wave of donations to used bookstores and thrift stores as well as social media posts of celebrities and noncelebrities following Kondo’s tips and KonMari method. For this week’s prompt, brainstorm a list of the strangest items you might find in a donation bin or out on the curb. Write a series of flash fiction stories about a few of these objects. Describe each piece in careful detail—involving as many of the senses as you can—and imagine why it was discarded and what it may have meant to the original owner.
Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.