APRIL, 2017—BULLETIN #123

We're at the mid-point of the Fiction Open and the Very Short Fiction Award contests, prizes totaling $7,400. Deadline: April 30

Heading west to Oregon after the war, November 1945

VERY SHORT

1st place | $2,000

2nd place | $500*

3rd place | $300*

300-3,000 words

$16 reading fee

Writing Guidelines

FICTION OPEN

1st place | $3,000

2nd place | $1,000

3rd place | $700*

3,000-20,000 words

$21 reading fee

Writing Guidelines

*Or, if accepted for publication, $700.
(1st place stories are always published.)

Winners and finalists will be announced in the July 1 bulletin, and contacted directly the previous week. First-place winners will be published in Glimmer Train. (All stories are considered for publication.)

Both categories are open to all. (Over the past four years, 48% of all winning stories have been their authors' first print publications.)

A writer is someone who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do… The not-knowing is crucial to art, it is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.—Donald Barthelme

Essays in this bulletin:

Peter Ho Davies: When you publish your first story, it becomes a touchstone, a place of confidence, something you go back to in grim moments and you think, "At least I could do that." (more)

Yelizaveta P. Renfro: In the whirling cacophony of modern life—this and this and this and this—there's no time to tell how everything's connected, or maybe nothing is connected at all. Maybe life is these fragments that we string up on a framework. (more)

Daniel Torday: My novelist friend was pushing hard to accrue pages, and one of our favorite books was Infinite Jest, and according to Amazon that book is just over 484,000 words. That's a lot of words. (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.