MAY, 2019—BULLETIN #148

As promised, the grace period for this final reading period will not end till midnight PDT on May 15th.

Dorothy Howland Burmeister in Bellmore NY, May 1947

The first place winners in both categories—Short Story Award for New Writers & Family Matters—will receive $2,500 and publication in the final issue of Glimmer Train, #106, which will be published this fall, and will likely be our plumpest issue yet.

Second- and third-place winners will receive $500/$300, respectively, or, if chosen for publication in Glimmer Train, $700.

The results of both contests will be announced in our July 1 bulletin; winners and finalists will be contacted the previous week.

We're so grateful to have read all the work writers have sent over the last three decades, and we will treasure this last run of reading your stories. We'll miss this. We'll miss you.

There have been many inquiries from people wanting to continue Glimmer Train, and we've been honored, but must respectfully decline. In case you're wondering why.

Essays in this bulletin:

Stanley Delgado: Did you know that the character of your story—right now—they could get shot? They could slip and fall and break a hip? Or they could just sit at a table and worry about paying their bills. It could happen. (more)

Polly Rosenwaike: My process usually involves going back to the beginning every time I look at the work and pruning, polishing, tweaking slow, slow, slow. And then, after all that snail's-pace work, I often overhaul the entire thing. (more)

Lee Martin: The most important thing I did as I developed my craft was to challenge myself to deepen my characters by finding something unexpected in them and to see how it could be accurate given the circumstances of their lives. (more)

Ed Allen: Remember, though, that quantity isn't the object; books are not items on a syllabus to be dutifully checked off one by one, as if on a birdwatcher's life list. You can be a good writer without having read War and Peace. (more)

Douglas W. Milliken: "His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed With Notes" eventually led to my story about a wash woman coping with the realities of her mother's senility and children's failures at adulthood (which is to say, her failings as a parent). (more)

Results of the January/February Very Short Fiction Award

Winners have been contacted, as have the Top 25 and Honorable Mentions.

• 1st place goes to Stanley Delgado for "Bicho, Bicha." (This will be his first major publication!)
• 2nd place goes to Mary Hong for "Cuts and Wounds."
• 3rd place goes to Caitlin Killion for "Washing Dishes."

Results of the January/February Fiction Open

Winners have been contacted, as have the Top 25 and Honorable Mentions.

• 1st place goes to Ed Allen for "The Whistle Car."
• 2nd place goes to Douglas W. Milliken for "A Means of Forgetting."
• 3rd place goes to Dana De Greff for "Storms."

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.) We plan to maintain our bulletin archives through 2020; they include many valuable essays by writers—we encourage you to take in their generous contributions. They're archived here. (Our next bulletin will be out July 1.)

Warm regards and best wishes,

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.