Posts By: Riley Zipper

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2015 1/2 K Twitter Contest!

A work of art doesn’t have to be long to be good. Our ½ K prize proves that good stories, much like chicken nuggets, come in all shapes and sizes. Below are thirteen novels and epic poems you might have read, or pretended to have read, at some time or another. We want you to choose one and compress the whole thing into a one-tweet synopsis and send it to us @IndianaReview by July 22. Be sure to use the hashtag #IRHalfKPrize, too, so we’ll see it. Here are your options:

  1. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  2. Ulysses by James Joyce
  3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  4. 1984 by George Orwell
  5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  6. Inferno by Dante
  7. The Odyssey by Homer
  8. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  10. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

We’ll retweet the winners and runners-up, and award prizes. Our top choices will also get to see their tweets in a blog post on our website!

Oh, yeah!

The three most gifted literary shrinkers will receive an IR prize pack of our favorite back issues and official IR beer koozies.

WWE Shrinker

Good luck with your compressing! And be sure to submit to Indiana Review’s 2015 ½ K Prize.

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Interview with 2014 1/2 K Prize Winner Amy Woolard

While readying your submission Amy Woolard Headshotto our 2015 1/2 K Prize, read our interview with 2014 winner Amy Woolard. Here she discusses her good friend David Lynch, the absence of poetry in the law, and her experience with returning to writing after a ten-year dry spell.

Amy Woolard is a public policy attorney working on foster care, juvenile justice, poverty, and homelessness issues in Virginia. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Court Green, Fence, The Journal, and Best New Poets 2013, among others, while her essays have run on Slate, Pacific Standard, The Rumpus, Indiewire, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlottesville, Va. You can also find her on Twitter @awoo_, and on her website, www.shift7.me.

What was your inspiration for the character of the girl in “The Girl Next Door to the Girl Next Door”?

I’m going to pass the mic to my good friend David Lynch on this one & hope it doesn’t come off as pompous of me:

“It limits it,” Lynch said, when asked why he’s reluctant to talk about his work in detail. “It stops people from intuiting and thinking on their own. Nothing should be added. Nothing should be subtracted. A film, a book, a painting—it’s done, and this is it. There’s a comfort when your ideas are realized. You’ve worked so that all the elements are working together and it feels complete and correct. Then you say it’s done. Then it goes out into the world but it doesn’t need any more explanation. It is what it is. In cinema, cinema is such a beautiful language—as soon as people finish a film, people want you to turn it into words. It’s kind of a sadness—for me, the words are limiting. Whereas this language is the language that you love. The language of cinema. It’s about love, is what it’s about.”

Seriously: I tend to write about two girls in various scenarios. They’re two actual girls at the same time as they are amalgamations. The poem is just a scene I’m shooting of them. It’s also about love. Read more…