MAY, 2018—BULLETIN #136

Upcoming deadline:

Our New Writer Award opens today! 1st place wins $2,500 and publication in Glimmer Train Stories! Deadline: 6/30. (The grace period for the Fiction Open and Very Short contests ends 5/10.)

Linda, Susan (the farm baby), and our new-farmer father, 1959

Open only to emerging writers whose fiction has not appeared in any print publication with a circulation over 5,000. (Previous online publication is fine.)

The 1st-place winner of the New Writer Award will be published in Glimmer Train and will receive $2,500 and 10 copies of that issue. Second- and 3rd-place win $500/$300, respectively, or, if accepted for publication, $600. Winners and finalists will be announced in the September bulletin, and contacted directly the previous week.

Over the past two years, almost 90% of New Writer Award winning stories, and 48% of winning stories in all categories, have been their authors' first fiction in print!

Most submissions run 800 - 4,000 words, but stories as long as 12,000 words are fine.
Writing Guidelines

The Big Announcement:

When we started Glimmer Train in 1990, it was partly because we wanted new writers to have a real chance at being published, and because we were looking for a different kind of short fiction. We wanted to read (and we read every submission ourselves) and publish memorable stories that revealed a wider and deeper view of what it means to be human. The stories that you've sent us over the years have shown us so many perspectives and possibilities—they've opened our hearts to the lives and worlds you've revealed to us, which we would not have known without you.

Then, after nearly thirty years, we will begin a new phase of our lives with our husbands and families—still sisters and next-door neighbors, still avid readers looking back in history and forward, wondering, and discussing last night's dreams during our morning walks.

No subscribers will be left in a lurch—we've been careful not to let people renew beyond Glimmer Train Issue 106 or Writers Ask Issue 85. If there are subscribers who did manage to renew beyond those issues, they will be refunded. No authors will be left in the cold either: We will fit in every story we accept for publication in Issue 106, latest.

We will be open to submissions for the next twelve months. The final issues of Glimmer Train Stories (#106) and Writers Ask (#85) will be out in the fall of 2019.

We wanted you to know well in advance so you can make your plan, particularly those of you who value the physicality and longevity of books, the knowing that they'll be preserved in the Library of Congress, as well as on our shelves.

We look forward to immersing ourselves in your stories over the next year, publishing as many emerging writers as we can, and presenting our readers with some of the best short fiction they'll ever find.

I was just describing what my experience has been like to another writer I've been encouraging…explaining that you are honest, and a force for good, and that sets a tone that comes through in everything, and produces all its own evidence, as all good work being done out of love does, and that's what makes Glimmer Train different. It's the two of you, it's personal, and it matters. There is no warmer home for writers than what you two have built. And I feel so fortunate to have found my home early, because it's made such a difference, and by some strange magic, always when I've needed it the most.—Gabe Herron
(And more kind comments from writers and readers.)

Four more gorgeous issues of Glimmer Train Stories to go! Our last—#106—will be out in the world in October 2019, and we hope you're in it!

Essays in this bulletin:

Amy X. Wang: The stories spin out best when the body does. That night, every bone hurt, and I went home and wrote more beautifully than I ever could have thought. Exercise, today, is still the best way I write. (more)

Kim Brooks: When I first began attempting to write stories, it never would have occurred to me to depict an act of violence. I'd grown up seeing it in movies, on television, and in video games. Violence seemed an utterly un-literary aspect of human experience. (more)

Terrence Cheng: Most are immigrants, some illegal, who live and work in the same breath, many in restaurants and factories and shops, for hours and in conditions that many of us cannot begin to imagine. Yet they have homes, families, children; fears and dreams, tragedies and triumphs like all of us. (more)

Kimberly Bunker: I think it's possible to cultivate a mindset that's receptive to but not obsessive about ideas, and to be methodical about pursuing the ideas that seem worth pursuing—i.e., finding a balance between waiting for lightning to strike, and getting behind the mule. (more)

Results of the the January/February Short Story Award for New Writers

Winners have been contacted, as have the Top 25 and Honorable Mentions.

• 1st place goes to Amy Wang for "Gravity." (This will be her first fiction publication!)
• 2nd place goes to Gabriel Thibodeau for "Circling."
• 3rd place goes to Aleyna Rentz for "Con Affetto."

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.