DECEMBER, 2018—BULLETIN #143

Upcoming deadline:

It's not too late to give a final years subscription to the readers and writers in your life.

We're at the mid-point of the final Family Matters contest of 2018. Deadline: 1/2/19. First place wins $2,500 and publication.

We welcome new stories about families of all configurations. Most submissions run 500 to 5,000 words, but we accept entries as long as 12,000 words. (Previous online publication is fine.)

► This will be our last Family Matters contest of the year. The next—and final—one will be held in March/April 2019.

All stories are read and considered for publication in Glimmer Train Stories. Second- and 3rd- place winners win $500/$300, respectively, or, if accepted for publication, $700.

Winners and finalists will be announced in the March 1 bulletin and contacted directly the previous week. We look forward to reading your work!

I'm not entirely sure why I write about family, but I do know that it hasn't stopped interesting me. You meet and leave other people at different stages of your evolution, whereas family is made up of people who are links in your life, who you know over the course of time and have your complete curriculum vitae in their heads.—Antonya Nelson, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

Essays in this bulletin:

Jane Delury: Sentences are the veins that contain the blood of the story or novel that you're trying to write. So for now, instead of going back to fix a scene or make a stretch of dialogue more interesting, I suggest… (more)

Matthew Vollmer: There's often a delicious awkwardness about a story brave enough to masquerade as another form of writing, and I'd argue that it's because the chosen disguise never really quite fits; one effect of a story appropriating another form of writing… (more)

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.