GRAIN contest- deadline April 1

Grain Magazine's 25th Annual Short Grain Writing Contest

We thank Cheryl & Henry Kloppenburg, Barristers and Solicitors, Saskatoon, for their ongoing support of Grain and the Short Grain Writing Contest.
For the list of past contest winners, click here.
About Grain and the Short Grain Writing Contest: Recent issues have featured the work of such literary luminaries as Xi Chuan, Tim Lilburn, Guy Maddin, Miriam Toews, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Eleanor Wachtel. And you could join them in the pages of Grain.

Contest Guidelines

Contest prizes donated in part by Cheryl & Henry Kloppenburg, Barristers and Solicitors, Saskatoon.

$4,500 in prizes to be won! Each entrant receives a FREE subscription to Grain Magazine!
DEADLINE: APRIL 1, 2013 (POSTMARKED)
Judges:
POETRY: Méira Cook, Author of A Walker in the City
FICTION: Stan Rogal, Author of Bloodline
Categories: Poetry: (to a max of 100 lines) Poetry of any style - including prose poetry - up to 100 lines.
Fiction: (to a max of 2,500 words) Short fiction in any form - including postcard fiction - to a maximum of 2500 words.Prizes:3 prizes will be awarded in each category:

• 1st = $1,000
• 2nd = $750
• 3rd = $500

Entry Guidelines:
1. The basic fee for Canadian entrants is $35 for a maximum of two entries in one category. The fee for US and International entrants is $40, payable in US funds. Make your cheque or money order payable to: Short Grain Contest.
2. Every entrant receives a one-year (four-issue) subscription to Grain Magazine.
3. All entries must be POSTMARKED by April 1, 2013. Entries postmarked after this date will not be accepted.
4. Each entry must be original, unpublished, not submitted elsewhere for publication or broadcast, nor accepted elsewhere for publication or broadcast, nor entered simultaneously in any other contest or competition. Work that has appeared on the internet is considered published and is not eligible.
5. All entries in this contest will be judged anonymously, on merit alone. The judges' decisions are final. Judges reserve the right not to award a prize in a given category if no entry is of sufficient quality to warrant publication.
6. Entries must be accompanied by a maximum of one cover page, regardless of the number of entries submitted, and must provide the following information:

• Your name, complete mailing address, telephone number, and email address.
• Title of your entry(ies).
• Category you are entering: Poetry (to a max of 100 lines) or Fiction (to a max of 2,500 words)
• Word Count (Fiction) / Line Count (Poetry). An absolutely accurate word or line count is required.

Judging is blind. Do not print, type, or write your name on the text pages of your entry.
7. Your entry must be typed (double-spaced for fiction) on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper. It must be legible. Faxed and/or electronic entries not accepted.
8. Entries will not be returned. Keep a copy of your entry.
9. Names of the winners and titles of the winning entries of the 25th Annual Short Grain Contest will be posted on the Grain Magazine website in August, 2013. Contest winners will be notified directly either by telephone or by email prior to the website posting.
10. Make your cheque or money order payable to Short Grain Contest.
11. Send your entry or entries to:
Short Grain Contest
P.O. Box 67
Saskatoon, SK
Canada, S7K 3K1
12. Entries by email or fax will not be accepted.
DEADLINE: APRIL 1, 2013 (postmarked)

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. When you say, "...a maximum of two entries in one category..." does that mean I can enter one piece of Fiction and one piece of Poetry with one $35 entry fee?
No. For each $35 entry fee, you may enter one or two pieces of Fiction OR one or two pieces of Poetry. If you do send one piece of Fiction and one piece of Poetry, we will choose one of them at random to be considered. The other piece will be recycled.
2. Can I enter more than once?
You may enter as many times as you like, provided you include another entry fee for each entry beyond the first. Therefore two Canadian entries would cost $70.
3. If I enter twice (for $70), can I enter two pieces of Fiction AND two pieces of Poetry?
Absolutely! Or you could enter four pieces of Poetry. Or two pieces of Poetry and one piece of Fiction. But not three pieces of Poetry and one piece of Fiction. See how this works?
4. Do I need to send a separate cover page for each piece of writing I enter?
No. Send only one cover page that includes all the information for every piece of writing you are entering. Don't forget to include your complete contact information!
5. And what happens to my free subscription if I enter more than once?
Your Grain subscription will be increased by four issues for each entry fee received beyond the first. So, if you enter twice, you will receive a two-year (eight-issue) subscription to Grain Magazine. If you already have a subscription to Grain, we'll simply add another four issues to your current subscription for each entry fee received.
6. What if I enter something that's over the word count? Will that piece be disqualified?
The contest judge will only consider the first 2,500 words of each piece of Fiction. If you enter a piece of Fiction that is 3,000, for example, only the first 2,500 will be considered. The last 500 words will be discarded. The same rules apply for Poetry entries over 100 lines.
7. Can I enter three or more pieces of poetry for $35 if the total line count is under 100 lines?
No. Guideline #1 above states: "The basic fee for Canadian entrants is $35 for a maximum of two entries in one category." This means that you may enter two poems maximum, but each individual poem may be up to 100 lines in length. If you wish to enter a third poem, you will need to pay an additional entry fee.
8. For poetry, do titles or line breaks count as lines toward the 100 line maximum?
No. Titles or line breaks or spaces between lines of poetry do not count toward the 100 line maximum. Only lines of text count.
9. Will entrants be notified of the winners?
No. Winners and the names of the winning pieces will be posted on this website in August, 2013.
10. What if the postmarked deadline falls on a weekend when the post offices are closed?
Because we are using a postmarked deadline, If the deadline falls on a day when the post offices are closed, we will accept entries postmarked on the next business day. April 1, 2013, however is a Monday and all post offices should be open.

The Wait

It has been 5 years since my debut book launched. 

5

friggen

years

I sat up in bed last night - sweaty limbs, heartbeat in ears, twitching feet- when I realized this. I have not produced a book in 5 years. Well, let me re-phrase that, I've written 2.5 books in the past 5 years since Red Rooms came into the world, but as far as the reading public is concerned, I've been watching too many episodes of Sons of Anarchy online (true) eating too many Kit Kats (also true) and doing nothing at all with my literary career. And dammit, that sucks. I don't mind when people see my tattoos and assume I'm an unemployed ne'er do well. I don't even mind when people judge me wearing pyjama bottoms to drop my kids off in the morning, but the book thing... well, thats a little harder to take. 

Invitations are slowing down. My cache (what little there was to begin with) in the literary world is slowly losing colour, and my credibility for why I am resistant to a full time job, why I need hours tucked away in pockets of quiet to sit at my desk, well I'm hard pressed to defend it. But why? What is the hold up?

Well, for one, there are less and less publishers in Canada, and therefore, less and less pie for all the blackbirds pecking about the crust. For another, submitting a manuscript is epic in itself. An agent demands a good three months of exclusivity to review a ms. Now times that by 6 submissions and you're already looking at a year and a half. Its a waiting game.

So what do you do? Well, for one, you start a blog and rant. Another good (better) option is anthologies, magazines, periodicals and journals. Just write. Write because you have to. Write like somebody's reading.

One of my mentors, Lee Maracle, said to me once, "Write to bring excellence into the world. Worry about the business of it all later. Publishing has nothing to do with writing, don't ever get them confused." And yes, spoken like a woman with a dozen books, but true none the less. And so, here is my blog, and this is my rant. And also, after my trip to India in 2 weeks (on an invitation to an international literary gathering, so I guess I can't whine too loud), look for an increase in articles, stories, submissions and anthologized pieces. I figure, if I keep writing, even in the long, empty voids between published books, maybe I can convince myself that someone is reading.

xo

Indigenous Writers' Gathering - OCTOBER 18: Do not miss this one, Toronto!!

Nuit Blanche just got a little rouge

 

Yay! I get to work with the amazing people at Diaspora Dialogues again. This time we're rocking Nuit Blanche- the all night art party in downtown Toronto. Check out the link and visit us after dusk on September 29!

www.diasporadialogues.com

excerpt from The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy (Theytus, Spring 2013)

“Hey… hey,” a voice hollered from a balcony sagging under the weight of a past capacity crowd. “Show me the goods, sweetheart!”

Ruby laughed at the slurred stupidity.

“Hey! Don’t be shy sweetie,” the voice called again, somewhere above her head. “Let me see your tittays!”

Ruby looked up and saw a young man in a University of Colorado T-shirt spotted with sweat stains shouting down to her. She still wasn’t sure so she looked around her and found herself surrounded by men. Not another pair of ‘tittays’ in sight.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “You” he pointed down at her.

Ruby felt the point like a small knife in her chest and put a hand there to hold herself together. She opened her eyes wide and felt a deep blush start in her neck and crawl quickly upwards like rising mercury in a glass thermometer.

He screamed, “WHOOOO!!” as if she had agreed to his proposition, shaking a hand full of beads in the air, clenched in his fist like plastic pirate booty that had tumbled out of a piñata. “Yeah! Show me your tittays!!”

Ruby shook her head and tried to wave him off. People were starting to look at them. “No, please don’t shout like that.” She held her finger to her lips.

He untangled a string of blue beads and dangled them over the edge of the balcony, waiting like a hyperactive child, hopping from foot to foot. “WHOOOOHOOO!”

There was no way in hell Ruby was going to take her damn top off. Not for this geek, licking his lips and clapping his hands like a perverted jester, not for a million dollars, let alone a lousy string of plastic baubles she could buy herself. She had no interest in amusing a street full of tipsy tourists, no interest in becoming a spectacle. She backed away from the balcony, off the sidewalk and into the street.

“Awww,” he pouted, teetered and then leaned the upper half of his heavy body dangerously over the edge of the railing, beads dangling, sweaty t-shirt pulling up over his prematurely flabby belly. “Fine, have'em anyways.”

He half-heartedly threw the blue strand down to her as she turned on her heel towards the other side of the street.

In that moment, both the boy and Ruby would have sudden intuitive leaps of understanding - unexpected epiphanies. Theirs were diametrically opposing visions, though both involved Ruby standing in the middle of Bourbon Street and a set of scuffed blue plastic beads.

Those beads looped through the air like a Mardi Gras lasso, spinning around and around with the precision of a drunk’s aim , descending towards Ruby as she turned away. She saw them out of the corner of her eye and immediately wished them away, didn’t even want the acknowledgement of them glancing off her shoulder and clattering to the ground with the tiny tinkering of hollow plastic.

She waited for them to hit. Instead, she felt the warm steam of a halted engine when the waxed string hooked onto the curves of an inconspicuous cranial universe. The diamond cut beads, like two-dozen blue disco balls, fell into the orbit and became a garish milky way that inexplicably hung above Ruby’s head.

Almost immediately she could smell the stench of burnt plastic, an invasive smell that made her think of old curling irons and hot August days when the rancid garbage on residential curbs keeps kids from their hockey. She reached above her head, perfectly aware of what had happened and not at all surprised. She grabbed a handful of beads before it got too tightly wound like a shoelace in a bicycle wheel, and yanked.

The beads snapped along the thin string and fell to the ground. She looked at them, lying in a puddle of spilt beer at her feet instead of being draped gracefully around her collarbone like the other girls she saw making their way, arm in arm, up the street. And although she didn’t want them to begin with, there was a part of her, a hard lump of Longing that burrowed through Envy’s wake, that did. Why was she never the beautiful one? Why did all the flattery, all the attention get caught up in the turning of a dozen planets and fall at her feet, broken and forgotten? She blinked three times and walked away, stepping over the broken beads.

The boy on the balcony almost looked away from the pretty girl in the black skirt. It was clear she wasn’t going to take her top off; it was obvious he wasn’t going to see any boobs. He’d been throwing these damn beads all night with not one lousy nipple to show for it. Unless those ‘Girls Gone Wild’ videos lied, he’d been having an unusually slow night. And they couldn’t be lying. He’d gone through too many bottles of baby oil in his dorm room by himself and now his summer job savings on the ideology they espoused. But something made him hesitate, arms dangling off the balcony after his heroic throw. And just before he stood straight, intent on getting to the bar to grab another Bud, he saw something miraculous, something that would haunt him even as he slept fitfully, hung-over beyond all recognition, on the plane back to Colorado, even years later, lying in bed beside his quiet suburban wife in their red brick bungalow with the extended back sunroom.

The beads spun towards the girl as she turned away. He grew excited, thinking that he may have just made the perfect throw with an aim that might garner him a quick flash of skin. It looked as though the necklace was actually going to make it. How awesome would that be? He raised his arms as the necklace descended, falling straight over her head. He filled his lungs with warm Louisiana night air, ready to scream it back out in victory. But instead of falling around her shoulders, the beads just hovered there, blurry as if they were being viewed through an unfocused lens.

Before his inebriated mind could wrap around the phenomenon, she reached up and yanked them down, not once looking back at her dumbfounded spectator. The string broke and the beads floated like hardened wontons in a puddle of spilt beer, but still he stared. She walked away, up onto the sidewalk on the other side, and he continued to stare, arms still raised above his head, warm night air still trapped in his lungs.

He knew the girl was pretty, that’s why he’d propositioned her. But he never would he even have guessed that she was an angel, a real live angel. How else could he explain the beads caught up in a halo just above her hair? With the beads hanging there, as ordinary and astounding as planes in the sky, she was rendered beautiful, became inconsolably heartbreaking. It was a miracle, a bloody miracle. He, Jonathan Davidson from Littleton, Colorado had seen an angel in New Orleans. It was amazing, it was historic and he would never forget her, even if he didn’t get to see her tittays.

Ruby walked under a green and white striped awning on the other side of the road. “C’mon now Miss,” a tall man holding a leather bound menu in one hand ushered her into a smoky doorway. “Best jazz in New Orleeens.”  She allowed herself pliancy and was ushered into the club.

Creating Yourself- one online purchase at a time

Summer was always my most favourite time of the year, but not for the usual reasons of sun and beach and that strange erotic mixture of sunscreen and sand grinding beneath the seams of swimwear. It was intoxicating in its power- a break, a chance to create a whole new persona. What's that Eliot line? "A time to create a face to meet the faces that you'll meet".  I think thats how it goes.

I'd spend each summer finding the version of myself the world would have to deal with come September. Its not like it was ever very far off the mark to my casual, non-theatrical, everyday self, and it was definitely a shade of the true colour of my guts (I should say heart or soul here but I can't bring myself to type those words- I'm allergic to trite). It was exciting to pick clothes, and make-up, and hairstyles, and books, and even language to fit whichever Cherie I was going to introduce to the school that first week of September. I'd forgotten about that joy. I forgot about how fucking amazing it can be to go into the summer cocoon and bust out nearing Fall in all your goth/nerd chic/introspective/artistic glory.

I think its a practice I just might have to revive this summer. That being said, he's a rad new pair of tights I just ordered off my favourite (and dangerously addictive) shopping site, etsy.com. 
(I LOVE Pippi Longstocking!!) These are from Carouselink's store. Check'em out.

Great Blog for Writers

http://quick-brown-fox-canada.blogspot.ca/