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Inspired by Herman Melville's masterpiece, Ohio artist Matt Kish crafted an original piece of art for each page of Moby-Dick. The resulting collection was published in October by Tin House Books. Take a closer look at Kish's work in this issue's installment of The Written Image as well as the related slideshow, which features eleven images from Moby-Dick in Pictures.
Write a story based on the following line: “I have bad news for you. You’ve been kidnapped.” Be sure to incorporate the line into the dialogue of the story.
Celebrating the kickoff of National Novel Writing Month, the website HubPages, a sort of micro-blogging community, is holding a no-fee writing contest—for poets as well as fiction writers. Prizes of five hundred dollars, one hundred dollars, and fifty dollars will be given to writers in both genres, and one overall winner will be offered publication of a poetry or story collection via self-publishing outfit Smashwords (though editing of the manuscript is not part of the prize).
Writers are invited to create a HubPages login and then publish the works they wish to enter as "hubs," or short posts that are housed on the website under a variety of topic headings: poems and poetry, creative writing, and so on. Every post must be accompanied by a photo (a separate photo competition is also being held in conjunction with the writing contests).
The winners, to be announced on December 2, will be selected by judging panels made up of staff members and HubPages users pulled from the more than two-hundred-thousand registered with the site. Entries may be posted (with the tag "contest") until November 22.
Complete guidelines, including links to the profiles of each panelist, are available on the Hub Patron of the Arts web page.
Despite the average wired American’s tendency to downsize their character counts, the page counts of newly published books of translated fiction show that the rest of the global literary community may be beefing up.
This fall the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival is sponsoring a contest for stories and essays centered on the most populous borough of New York City. The organization is looking for "compelling Brooklyn stories from writers with a broad range of backgrounds and ages, who can render Brooklyn's rich soul and intangible qualities" using their actual experiences in Kings County as inspiration.
One prose writer, selected by a panel of Brooklyn authors, will receive a prize of four hundred dollars, and the winning piece will be published on the festival website. The winner will also be invited to give a reading at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, near the borough's downtown area.
Story and essay entries, which should range from four to ten pages (up to twenty-five hundred words), should be submitted via e-mail by November 25. There is no entry fee. For more information, visit the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival blog.
The video below is a trailer for some of last year's festival offerings, featuring shots of Brooklyn past and present.
Learn how to decipher the sometimes arcane methods that publishers use to label first editions (the language and lines of numbers on copyright pages) in this incredibly helpful video from AbeBooks.
The 2011 ReLit Awards, celebrating books of poetry and fiction by Canadian authors published with Canadian small presses, were announced last night at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. Presented along with signature rings featuring movable dials of type—a gift that almost didn't come to pass this year due to funding shortages—the awards' focus is on "ideas, not money" (no prize purse accompanies the honor).
The 2011 awards went to poet Dani Couture for Sweet and Craig Francis Power for his novel, Blood Relatives, both published by Toronto-based Pedlar Press. Tony Burgess won for his short story collection Ravenna Gets, from Anvil Press in Vancouver. The winning books were all published in 2010.
There is no entry fee for presses to submit books, which are due at the end of January each year. Visit the ReLit website for submission guidelines.
In the video below, Couture reads three poems from her winning book, including the title piece.
The folks at Random House and its many imprints, including Knopf, Doubleday, Crown, and Vintage Books, have a little fun promoting Colson Whitehead's latest book, Zone One, a literary zombie novel published last week by Doubleday.
Last night in New York City the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation offered another group of emerging writers what could be a life- and career-altering gift. Since 1985, the foundation has annually offered fifty-thousand-dollar prizes to ten writers whose early work suggests the promise of a flourishing career—Jeffrey Eugenides, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and Terrance Hayes are among the 270 poets, authors, and playwrights to have received the award in the past.
The 2011 Whiting Writers' Award honorees, most of whom have published only one book, are poets Don Mee Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Shane McCrae, and Kerri Webster; fiction writers Scott Blackwood, Ryan Call, Daniel Orozco, and Teddy Wayne; memoirist Paul Clemens; and playwright Amy Herzog. None of these writers applied for the award; winners are nominated by a group of anonymous literary professionals, which have historically included editors, agents, bookstore owners, and critics.
Poet Mark Doty, who received the Writers' Award in 1994, delivered the prize address, encouraging the winners to "savor this brilliant occasion of attention and celebration" and store it for those inevitable occasions where rejection and self-doubt threaten to define the day.
"May these awards...help you to negotiate with your doubts," he said. "May this award lend you aid and comfort while you move ahead in what I hope will be a long, happy work in service of what is real."
In the video below, Don Mee Choi reads from her book, The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010).
My guiding philosophy of writing, maybe even of life, is that the path to the truth runs through shame. So dig through your memory banks and write about the most shameful episode you can remember. The challenge here is to provide the reader the basic dramatic context, then to slow down and move moment-to-moment during the worst of it. This need not be for general consumption. It's more an exercise in radical disclosure.
Today's fiction prompt comes from fiction writer Steve Almond, whose most recent book God Bless America: Stories was published this week by Lookout Books.
