Ann Arbor Book Festival
SHORT STORY CONTEST 2009

The winner of the annual Ann Arbor Book Festival Short Story Contest receives a cash prize ($250) and the chance to be published in a to-be-determined journal.

Entries for original short stories will be taken starting May 1, 2009, in conjunction with the 6th Annual Book Festival in Ann Arbor, MI. Entries will be accepted until the deadline of September 1, 2009.

Stories may be up to a maximum of 7000 words in length and should be submitted as double-spaced printed pages. The entry must be unpublished in any form.

The author's name must not appear on the entry. A separate cover page with all identifying information should be included with the submission.

An entry fee of $10 for each story submitted. Checks may be made payable to Ann Arbor Book Festival or you may submit payment online.

Entries not conforming to all guidelines will be disqualified. Entry fees will not be refunded.

Mail your entry, along with a self-addressed, stamped business envelope, to:

Ann Arbor Book Festival
500 S. Main St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
c/o Kathy Robenalt

To submit electronically, send your story to aabf@aabookfestival.org with "Short Story" in the subject line.

Yesterday was the opening of the graduate exhibition at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, an annual event at the Bloomfield Hills, MI school, which is considered among the top of its kind in the country. This year’s art ranged from performance pieces that reminded me of art “happenings” in the sixties to illuminated sculpture, interactive art, and music enhanced meditation.

 My son, Christian Jay Sienkiewicz, is a 2009 MFA graduate in the Department of Print Media. He also holds a Bachelor Degree in Illustration from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. His exhibition is titled "There is a Light that Never Goes Out," and the work is "mixed media: acrylic on canvas, scrap wood, house paint, silver screws, electronics, paper and glue."

 

Dan, keyboards, and Christian, on guitar, performing


 

This is a chair Christian designed that was in the Cranbrook grad-student chair-design exhibition, a most anticipated annual design show called "Chairs that Rock" this year. It was held in April. His chair is titled "Uhteen Jatteet," which means made from scrap in Finnish.
 

Ah, the things people use to nail a picture hanger into the wall or to unscrew a battery case.

For a hammer, I have substituted a rock, a coffee mug, a paperweight, and an iron skillet. All worked fairly well. Never a shoe. Most of mine have rubbery heels.

For a screwdriver, I’ve used the nail file on a fingernail clipper, a butter knife, a letter opener, and scissors, all of which worked, but were disastrous to the implement. We have a few sharp things with no tip (or bent) in the junk drawer.

How about you?

Does everyone have a junk drawer? What’s in it? When was the last time you cleaned it?

What I found most refreshing in Poets & Writers' interview with four editors about publishing in today’s weak economy was their enthusiasm. They still watch for that next manuscript to come across their desk that will fill them with excitement. They described the feeling when they've found it as that moment of knowing:

…when you want to meet the author because there's such intensity of imagination to the mss. You want to know who the man or woman who's writing it is because there's a real sensibility in the writing.

…when the language just goes click and the whole thing has gone up a notch and you know at that point that you're going the distance with it. The gears just click into place.

…when there's a kind of intensity of imagination and a way of articulating things that goes beyond good writing.

…when the writer has access to something larger than himself. The novel possesses social force and a concatenation of relationships and responses to the world lived in a certain kind of way.

The editors also discussed what goes into the decision to push a manuscript for publication. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, they say the novel has to feel almost necessary. It needs to be significantly different from any other number of novels that deal with the same subject matter. It has to feel alive. It has to have believability, even if it's fantasy or science fiction. It’s got to have enough “juice" in it to actually go somewhere, so that the editor can sell it in the editorial room, sell it to the reps, and get the book into the hands of readers.

And this juice or fire or potency is something that actually starts with an author who, these editors feel, is writing about something that’s bigger than themselves, as opposed to writing for the sake of writing. This electricity lights up the agent, it flows to the editor, and then there are a lot of other conduits it has to jump to from there. If the force is lacking in any way, the electricity is going to fizzle out and the novel won't last.

Other questions asked in the interview were: What mistakes do authors make? Do the editors think it’s “too hard” to get published today? How have editors’ jobs changed over the years? What’s the difference between a good agent and a bad one, and how does an author decide? What are the biggest mistakes that writers can make in dealing with their editor or agent?

 Agents and Editors: a Q&A with Four Young Editors

Interviewed by Jofie Ferrari-Adler, editor at Grove/Atlantic are Lee Boudreaux, editorial director of Ecco, Eric Chinski, VP and editor in chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Alexis Gargagliano of Scribner and Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press.

Culturally, we have short attention spans, and what’s hip today may not be so hip next year, and worse, what you thought was funny or relevant might be meaningless (or worse, give the wrong implication) to the next generation. Consider Frank Sinatra. To my mother’s generation, he was a teen idol. My daughter knows him only as an Italian singer with a big nose who sang in Vegas. Britney Spears is still evolving—who knows how she’ll be viewed ten or twenty years from now? Any specific name brand as well can lose its relevance over time.

 These were some of the issues discussed in a worthwhile seminar I attended at the AWP Conference titled Bob Hope, Joey Ramone, the Wolfman and me: The Use of Pop Culture in Writing.

 Authors need to think deeply about why the reference is there. Points to consider:

1. Does it make sense in context? Is it there to enlarge the scene, or is it just wallpaper?
2. Is the reference from the narrator, or the author?
3. Is it appropriate for the overall tone of the writing? The wrong reference can add to or completely derail a scene. 

There is no middle ground—either it will engage the reader by creating a common reading experience, or it will leave them cold. The worst thing to do is create a negative reference in the reader’s head. Imagine a comedian wearing a Lucille Ball tie--the audience can’t help but make comparisons, and the act might not hold up to Lucy’s slapstick.

 This negativity can be worked to your advantage, however. Think about the implications of having a character who’s a fan of the band Kiss vs. a character who flat-out idolizes them. The degrees in which a character in invested in pop culture can help define personality. The pitfall is trying too hard to capitalize on cultural references. One of the presenters says he uses them cautiously because he feels references are like cheating, and he doesn’t want to rely too heavily on shared associations to evoke place and time.  

One option is to riff off names and create your own fictitious brands, bands, TV shows and labels that evoke what you’re trying to achieve.

Most importantly, consider your audience. Have you ever come across the lines of a particular song in a story that was meant to evoke a particular feeling, but because of your personal experience, it fell short? Have you ever been annoyed by pop culture references? How much is too much? Portions of my own novel are set in the seventies, and I'm going to have to take a hard look and determine what's really necessary. I think I'll have my daughter give it a look and share her impressions with me.

Only half the respondents have a carbon monoxide detector at home and 61 percent don't have a rubber mat in the shower. Oops on the rubber mat, but a carbon monoxide detector alerted us when our furnace malfunctioned. I'd thought my husband was being paranoid when he bought the detector. I was glad he did.

13 percent of the adults surveyed also admitted drinking beer while using power tool. I'm sure they didn't consider a car to be a power tool, but they should.

An earlier survey found that 58 percent never wear a helmet while bicycling and 27 percent never use sunscreen. I'm a 45 SPF gal. My bicycle is a stationary recumbent.

Another bit of Mike's advice that stayed with me is to avoid on-the-nose dialogue. An example of this is when the wife walks into the bedroom and sees her husband having sex with another woman, and she says "Oh my God! You're having an affair!" How different it would be if she said, "For God's sake... your brother was the same way."


 

Any Joe who comes up with the dough can self publish, but not every Joe who aspires to be an author can market their book. Mary Patrick Kavanaugh, a writer with a BA and MFA, came up with a unique publishing campaign where she mourns the death of her manuscript before she self-published Family Plots: Love, Death and Taxes with iUniverse.

Mary held an actual funeral with a casket, pallbearers, and weeping mourners, all posted on her incredibly clever website. There is also a “Bury Your Dead Dreams” page where visitors have the opportunity to mourn their own dead dreams properly, and a media press kit titled “Media Seeking a Tragedy.” She’s even got a book trailer.

On her website, Mary writes: “The novel was born in 2001 at the University of San Francisco’s graduate creative writing program. Despite beginning its life babbling and confused, early caretakers said it demonstrated great potential to entertain. With the assistance of professors, writing students, editors, book agents, and a snappy blurb from one of the author’s famous writer friends, the novel made its debut in the offices of sixteen New York publishers, all of who flat out rejected it. The rejecters have each been invited to serve as pallbearers at the open casket service.”

The sad part is Mary’s manuscript drew praise from the publishers who read it. So why didn’t they bite? There are a number of reasons. 1) she’s an unknown, 2) the market sucks, and, 3) it was a hard book to place, not fitting any one genre, described by Mary as a loosely autobiographical mystery. The author used praise from the publishers who read the book on her book jacket: "Ms. Kavanaugh is a laugh-out-loud hilarious writer, one who uses cutting humor to get at the heart of a situation," was from someone at Riverhead Books. "Great comic timing," from Penguin. "I found the narrative voice to be engaging, and the mystery pleasantly quirky," from St. Martin's Press.

Her book is listed at Amazon, and unfortunately, the first “customer review” is poorly written with misspellings by someone who bears the same last name as Mary. But hey, so someone in her family loves her. She definitely has my respect. I wish her the best of luck (and I believe I'll support her by purchasing her book). You can read about her at the East Bay Express. Anyone who aspires to publish should check it out. Her website is My Dream is Dead But I'm Not