OCTOBER, 2016—BULLETIN #117

Upcoming deadline:

We're at the mid-point of the Short Story Award for New Writers, 1st place $2,500, and publication in Glimmer Train. Deadline: 10/31

Blanche Howland, circa 1960 (more)

Open only to emerging writers whose fiction has not appeared in any print publication with a circulation over 5,000.

The 1st-place winner will be published in Glimmer Train and will receive 10 copies of that issue. Second- and 3rd-place win $500/$300, respectively, or, if accepted for publication, $700. Winners and finalists will be announced in the January bulletin, and contacted directly the previous week.

Most submissions run 1,000-6,000 words, but stories as long as 12,000 words are fine. (Previous online publication is okay.) Writing Guidelines

Note: 83% of our 1st-place New Writers Award winners over the past three years were their authors' very first print publications.

Last year I came across a quotation about writing: "Stories start in autobiography and end in dream." That pretty much nails it for me. I have a personal connection to most of the material in What You Have Left. By the time the book was done, though, the autobiographical impulse was barely discernible to me. The material had been thoroughly fictionalized. It had become part of the dream world of fiction.—Will Allison

Essays in this bulletin:

Robert Schirmer: When I began writing the novel, I was buoyed by the knowledge I had the short story to serve as a blueprint. The novel was already "mapped out," in a sense. What writer can resist knowing that some of the work is already done? (more)

E.A. Durden: Writing fiction gives me the perfect excuse to do what I have always loved: put myself in others' shoes. It is a kind of voyeuristic act, this business of writing fiction. You must sneak into the imagined lives of others. (more)

Melissa Yancy: But there was a lovely presentation on the theorem of regret that stoked my old poet's sensibilities and was stored away for future use. Nothing—even bad memoranda and sexual harassment webinars—is entirely wasted. (more)

Vi Khi Nao: It takes tremendous self-belief to write + to invent. It's not a life for everyone. Maybe you want to be the Caresse Crosby or Katharine Burr Blodgett of modern literature. Maybe you want to be you: a writer. (more)

Gabriel Brownstein: This shows off the true function of exposition—not to tell the reader what is really going on, but draw the reader into dramatic time, to bring them into the story's present moment. (more)

Our thanks to all of you for letting us read your work!

Feel free to forward this bulletin to your writer friends. As you know, the bulletin is free and meant to inform and to promote writers. (We never share your info.) People can sign up for bulletins themselves here. Missed a bulletin? They're archived here.

Best regards,

Discovering, publishing, and paying emerging writers since 1990.

One of the most respected short-story journals in print, Glimmer Train continues to actively champion emerging writers. The magazine is represented in recent editions of the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, New Stories from the Midwest, the O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the South, Best of the West, New Stories from the Southwest, Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading.