Chautauqua, the journal of the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, is seeking entries for its annual contest, open each year to writers working in different genres. This year's competition is open to fiction writers whose stories touch on the "broadly conceived" theme of music and words. The winner will receive a prize of one thousand dollars and publication in the journal.
The judge will be David Crouse, short story writer and "fringe art" enthusiast—among Crouse's interests, according to the journal, are "punk rock, 'outsider' music, neo-psychedlia, found art, Italian zombie movies, and other odd cultural artifacts." His stories have been collected in two books, Copy Cats, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from University of Georgia Press, and The Man Back There, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books, and published in journals such as the Greensboro Review and Quarterly West. Crouse's comic book writing has also appeared in the anthology The Dark Horse Book of the Dead (Dark Horse Comics, 2005).
Chautauqua is accepting story entries of up to five thousand words, sent along with a twenty dollar entry fee, until November 15.