Posts Tagged: short-shorts

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Interview with Half-K Prize Judge Dinty Moore

Only two weeks remain to submit to Indiana Review’s Half-K Prize Contest! But before you succumb to a series of massive panic attacks that leaves you sitting paralyzed in front of a blank Word document, take a second to gain some insight from this year’s judge, Dinty Moore.

Moore is the author of numerous books including the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize Winner Between Panic & Desire, and the editor of Brevity, an online magazine that accepts brief submissions of less than 750 words (sound familiar?).

He answered some of our questions about what makes a compressed story powerful and gripping—like a “cup of coffee five times stronger than the usual.”

Click here to read the entire interview with Moore!
Read more…

Play It Till It Breaks

As a writer and especially as a student in an M.F.A. program I am often asked what it is that I write.  My answer will vary somewhat depending on the person asking and the context of our conversation but I always find that at the center of that perfectly reasonable question lies a demand to identify oneself through genre.  So the question becomes not just, what are you working on, but rather what are you?

As an undergraduate, I studied poetry and wrote a lot of short, spare, tightly enjambed poems.  These pieces were mostly bad but I was certain that they were poems and therefore I was a poet.

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After I left school and found an amazing writing community in Seattle through Bent Queer Writing Institute, I started to write stories and essays.  Complete, unenjambed sentences!  Those sentences were crammed full of sound and image but since they happily went all the way across the page I was certain that what I was writing was prose and that as a prose writer I should now set to work on writing my novel.

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I would not have owned it at the time but I had a pretty rigid view of genre.  I understood that my fiction could be memoir-based or my prose sentences could be rooted in poetic elements of sound and syntax.  But I felt ultimately that it was my job as a writer (and especially as a writer who wanted to be good) to commit to a specific genre and in doing so eliminate any problematic markers of other genres from the piece at hand.

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Lucky for me I ended up with a lot of smart friends and teachers who introduced me to work that did not easily fit into a single genre category.  I read Lydia Davis, Haryette Mullen, Maggie Nelson, Micah Ling, Michael Martone, Eve Alexandra, and Julio Cortezar.  This work was funny, smart, beautiful, and strange.  It shook my own creative sensibility, my idea of the good, genre-abiding writer. 

What I loved and continue to love about work that pushes the boundaries of genre, work that resides in in-between spaces, is the unruliness of it.  I believe that rowdiness comes not from disregarding form or genre but from inhabiting the space lineated by expectations so fully that the writer is able to push the form until it bends, blurs, or breaks.  It’s the same thing I love about a well-crafted sonnet and a mind-blowing drag performance.

When a piece of classical music like something by Bach is played on period instruments, the notes make use of the instrument to its full capability.  And so every time the piece is played there is the risk of rupture.  As a writer this is what I want to make and as an editor this is what I want to publish.

Speaking of publishing, we just opened submissions for our annual ½ K Prize and there’s been a bit of confusion about what genres we’re looking for in this contest.  And that’s because we’re not looking for a specific genre at all.  I love this contest precisely because it offers a home for pieces that are not easily categorized.  This is an opportunity for us to examine and showcase work outside the traditional boundaries of genre. 

There are a couple of great examples from last year’s contest up on our website now.  J. Bowers’ “Two on a Horse” could be called a series of historical fiction short-shorts.  Megan Moriarty’s “The Clowns Are Leaving Soon” skews more toward the genre of the prose poem.  But neither of my short descriptions here accurately encompasses the wild strangeness that Bowers and Moriarty welcome in these pieces.  So, in terms of genre we at the Indiana Review are inviting you to play whatever instrument you choose and if you play it till it breaks, all the better.

Dying to share your own thoughts on genre?  Have deep feelings about possessive apostrophe preferences?  Come at me in the comments.

 

 

2013 1/2 K Prize

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It’s summer in Bloomington, the undergraduates have fled, and Editor Katie Moulton and I are doing our best to keep things lively in the office while the rest of the staff is on break.

A couple of notes from our to-do list that we want to pass on to you:

Regular submissions are currently closed.  We will open the gates again on August 1. 

Any electronic or hard-copy submissions received between now and July 31 will be returned unread.

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I know, it is sad.

But wait!  No need to despair!

We will be accepting submissions for the annual Indiana Review ½ K Prize, judged by Dinty Moore, between June 1 and August 1, 2013.

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Yep.  We’re excited too!  Send us your very best 500-word previously unpublished pieces. Prose? Poetry? Prosetry? There are no rules, man! Well, except for these: 

You may submit 3 pieces per entry and you may also submit multiple entries. At $20 per entry, that’s a pretty sweet deal.  If you are submitting online, make sure to pay the entry fee after you have submitted your pieces. Note: You can pay now, but you won’t be able to submit until June 1.

When submitting online make sure to designate your entry as a submission to the 1/2 K Prize.  If you are paying the old-fashioned way please make checks out to Indiana University.

Full submission guidelines can be found here.

Stay tuned to the blog for more updates and summer shenanigans!

 

Summer Break-ing Away

Still from the film Breaking Away

It’s summer in Bloomington! While not *all* IR editorial meetings take place at the quarries (see above), this season comes with a to-do list more rigorous than Dennis Quaid’s late-’70s ab workouts (again, see above). What does that mean for you?

Regular submissions will be CLOSED, starting May 31. Submissions will re-open August 1, 2012. Any electronic or hard-copy submissions received between May 31 and July 31 will be returned unread.

But wait!

Do you have your own “Little 500” — a story of 500 words or fewer — looking for a venue? Submit to our “1/2 K” Prize, judged by Michael Martone! Postmark deadline is June 1, 2012. Submission guidelines can be found here.

Stay tuned to the blog for updates on more goings-on at Indiana Review. Ciao!