OCTOBER, 2017—BULLETIN #129

Upcoming deadline:

We're at the mid-point of the last New Writers Award of the year, 1st place $2,500 and publication in Glimmer Train. Deadline: 10/31.

Tante Lina & Lotte on their way to Denmark, 1934

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

The 1st-place winner 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, $700. Winners and finalists will be announced in the January bulletin, and contacted directly the previous week.

Most submissions run 1,000 - 5,000 words, but stories as long as 12,000 words are fine. Writing Guidelines

Note: 83% of our 1st-place New Writers Award winners over the past three years were their authors' very first print publications.

Last year I came across a quotation about writing: "Stories start in autobiography and end in dream." That pretty much nails it for me. I have a personal connection to most of the material in What You Have Left. By the time the book was done, though, the autobiographical impulse was barely discernible to me. The material had been thoroughly fictionalized. It had become part of the dream world of fiction.—Will Allison

Essays in this bulletin:

Matthew Lansburgh: I want to talk about what kept me going all those years, what kept me coming back to the stories I'd written and re-written endlessly, revisiting and reimagining endings and beginnings and middles, and scene after scene after scene. (more)

Rebecca Podos: Once, on a drive with my dad from the nursing home where my Bubby regaled us with stories of her new and imaginary children, we passed a saltbox house hidden behind the peeling trunks of paper birches. Plastic pink flamingoes sunned themselves on the front lawn. (more)

Paul Griner: I find that memoirs, letters, and diaries are the best sources, as they're filled with the minutiae that history books often don't have time for: what the weather or cityscape was like, what scents were likely hanging in the air… (more)

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.