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South of Presidio
From Presidio south, the land is like burnt bread.
The Chichimec's scavenged here, naked, mud-caked, moon-crazed;
Voluptuaries of the blood, ancestors of the Aztecs.
If you see a stovepipe cactus, it's a crucifix, nails and all.
By some law of rot, all weather has stopped;
It's hot, but, it's not—it's dead temperature.
It's got no color—that's what is not—no color at all.
Space, sky, nauseates the eye. The hue of elephant.
You're inside a boundless canvas tent, riding on canvas cement.
And if you break down, thousands of miles from the next town,
And suns and moons fade in and out beyond your count,
You won't die—never! Won't age. Here you remain the same—forever.
Firing across
The abyss
Between
The synapses
The neural messenger
Crackling silently
Through the branches
Of the nerve tree
Arrives
And speaks to the receptor
Soundlessly.
From where does the message come?
What is the message's origin?
What could the message be?
Spoken to the deep ear soundlessly?
And what if
The messenger slows
Stumbles and trips
Into the abyss
And the message doesn't arrive?
Could we survive—south of Presidio?
As I drive, the only thing I can think to do is whistle:
A fountain of melody
Sparkling and crystalline
Flying like glistening water
In arches of baroquean
Architecture
Yet fresh with the freedom
Of a jazz improvisation—
Charley, Antonio, Diz, Johann Sebastian...
Music is
The message
Of what
The message
Is!
South of Presidio
I pull the pick-up over,
Cut the motor,
Get down,
And all around is
Absoluteness
A wall-less
Invisible
Cathedral
Copyright 2005 by Ron Wertheim
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "South of Presidio", impressed me with its gripping depiction of the harsh yet sublime landscape of the desert Southwest. (Based on the references to the Aztecs and Chichimecs, I'm guessing that the author is referring to Presidio, Texas, a small town near the Mexican border.) Though the poem loses focus after the first four stanzas, the strong opening convinced me that the author has the talent to make this piece even better.
Poems that try to capture the spirit of a place are most effective when they make the place the central character. The author must find a delicate balance between too much and too little personal involvement in the story. Too much, and the poem becomes about the speaker's feelings about the place, not the place itself; the narrator acts as a barrier to the reader's direct experience of the location. Too little, and the poem falls apart into a collection of impersonal snapshots that exert no emotional pull on the reader.
The 20th-century poet Richard Hugo was a master of the poetry of place. He excelled at choosing the right details to reveal the souls of forgotten towns. Writers interested in exploring this genre should check out his work, as well as Philip Levine, a notable American bard of working-class people and settings.
In the first four stanzas of "South of Presidio", Wertheim's confrontational imagery draws the reader into the scene by implicitly challenging us to survive in the brutal environment he describes. The first line establishes the land as the main subject. The humans who passed through here, "naked, mud-caked, moon-crazed;/Voluptuaries of the blood," were only a moment in the history of the eternal desert, despite the terrible intensity of their animal lives.
The desert itself is the antithesis of life, where time is suspended and consciousness blurs for lack of any object to fix its attention upon. "Space, sky, nauseates the eye." This unnatural state calls forth a violent reaction from the living things that try to assert themselves against this void: "If you see a stovepipe cactus, it's a crucifix, nails and all." By contrast, those who "break down" and succumb to the desert's elemental power gain a mummified sort of immortality: "You won't die—never! Won't age. Here you remain the same—forever."
These four stanzas successfully capture the essentials of the landscape, using its distinctive physical features not only to make the scene recognizable but to illuminate the powerful emotions that the desert inspires in us. The long lines are well-paced and broken up by internal rhymes, particularly in the third and fourth stanzas. I would have been happier if the poem had ended with a fifth stanza similar to those four in style and tone, perhaps introducing a new feature of the landscape (birds, plants?) that brings in a different kind of energy or a tiny, fragile exception to the oppressive sameness.
Instead, the style and focus of the poem abruptly change, presenting a string of short lines that take place within the narrator's consciousness. For me, the second half of this poem lacked the originality and dramatic interest of the first part. The speaker's introspection did not add to my appreciation of the landscape, and the more simplistic style was a disappointment after the rich imagery and superior craftsmanship of the preceding stanzas. In the second half, the speaker is telling me how he feels about the music that he hears in his head. But in the first half, I heard the music myself—jagged, strange and compelling, like Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"—in the dance of the desert and its inhabitants.
I'm not a fan of the super-short line, popularized by poets like William Carlos Williams and Charles Bukowski. In the hands of less-experienced writers (and even in the work of these canonical authors), the technique can be exploited to make weak phrases sound more profound than they are. "Music is/The message/Of what/The message/Is!" Delivered with fortune-cookie solemnity, artificially intensified with an exclamation point, this pronouncement actually says very little, and says it without precision.
In writing the conclusion of this piece, Wertheim correctly intuited that the poem needed a change of emotional state to turn a mere description into a true narrative. The second half tries to move the poem toward a hopeful resolution, suggesting how humans can come to terms with the infinity of the desert. Our capacity to articulate and appreciate the transcendent, as manifested in music, helps us comprehend and even revere a natural phenomenon that is greater than ourselves. "Absoluteness/A wall-less/Invisible/Cathedral." Here, the short lines are more effective, letting us hear each word resonate in the slowness and spaciousness of the desert.
Altering the style can be a daring choice to highlight a change of subject and mood. However, in this poem, the shift feels jarring because there is no evident connection between the two halves of the poem until the line "Could we survive—south of Presidio?"
The imagery of the second section is also unrelated to the desert environment that the author so vividly created in the first four stanzas. The nerve tree, the abyss and the messenger are vaporous metaphorical constructs that pale in comparison to the reality of burnt, blood-soaked land and crucified cactus. The crystalline baroque fountain belongs to an entirely different time and place, as well as a more sentimental poetic tradition. Planted amid the desert's tumbleweeds and cow skulls, such a fountain would look more absurd than inspiring. The effect is of a jumble of inspirational images whose lack of connection to the original, vividly imagined setting makes them ineffective to provide narrative closure.
I've been blunt about my problems with the second half of this poem, because I love the first part so much that I want to liberate it from self-consciously poetic musings that it doesn't need. I would delete the lines from "Firing across" till "And all around is," and replace them with one or two stanzas in the same style as the first four, ending with "Absoluteness/A wall-less/Invisible/ Cathedral." Those last words do recover some of the power of the opening, and provide the key to the poem's dilemma: how we can learn to live with the desert's alien grandeur by letting reverence drive out terror.
Where could a revised version of this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
The MacGuffin Poet Hunt
Postmark Deadline: June 15
https://www.schoolcraft.edu/macguffin/poet-hunt-contest/
$500 and publication in this well-regarded literary magazine
Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: June 15
http://www.bitteroleander.com/contest.html
$1,000 and publication in The Bitter Oleander; editors are seeking "serious work that allows the language of your imagination to reveal in you a new perception of your life"
Guy Owen Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
http://www.southernpoetryreview.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4&Itemid=12
$1,000 and publication in Southern Poetry Review; well-established journal welcomes image-rich narrative poetry
Erskine J. Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
https://smartishpace.com/poetry-prizes/
$200 and publication in Smartish Pace; atmospheric narrative free verse predominates among the winning poems
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Southern California Review
Send 1-3 unpublished poems or one story or essay, maximum 8,000 words. Editors say, "We do consider genre work (horror, mystery, romance, and sci-fi) if it transcends the boundaries of the genre." They also occasionally publish one-act or ten-page plays, scenes, and monologues, and scenes from screenplays.
Speak Up: Responding to Everyday Bigotry
The Southern Poverty Law Center has published this free online guide with suggested scripts for compassionate, appropriate conversations to interrupt prejudice and bullying in everyday social settings. Topics include becoming aware of our own biases, responding to prejudiced comments in the workplace or family gatherings, and ways to fight structural inequalities like racial profiling and discriminatory corporate policies. For writers, this guide will also be useful for correcting stereotypes in our own work, and writing dialogue for characters who are dealing with these issues.
Speaking of Marvels
Edited by award-winning poet William Woolfitt, Speaking of Marvels is a blog that features interviews with authors of chapbooks, novellas, singles, and other shorter forms. Past interviewees have included Allison Joseph, Karen An-hwei Lee, Rajiv Mohabir, Carl Phillips, Cecilia Woloch, and many other notables.
Speed (Sean)
by Gil Fagiani
When a three-day bender
costs me my bank clerk's job,
my mother makes the sign of the cross
and calls me Good-Time Charlie.
I'm her last-born and she dotes on me,
so I laugh, wave her words away
tell her not to worry
I'll lay off the lush
and find another nine-to-five.
But work's a grind.
I'm into fun, high times
and along with Nicky De Vito,
start messing with crystal meth.
Our veins hum like high-voltage wires
moonlight melts into sunshine,
motion becomes our devotion.
At home I clean the upstairs crapper
twenty times,
the bowl blazing
the pine soap and ammonia scalding my lungs.
My mother says enough already
and swats me with a toilet brush
after I scrub out the grout between the floor tile.
At his house, Nicky sits by a basement workbench
polishing a new pair of shoes
until he wears through the soles,
breaks off heels,
hiding the ruined footwear from his father,
who dishes out bare-knuckled discipline.
Once at Nicky's place,
we mainline two hype sticks of meth,
guzzle all the guinea booze in the liquor cabinet:
Strega, Compari, Frangelico, Anisette, Grappa.
Nicky flips on the new Motorola TV
complains about snowy reception
and begins taking the TV apart,
swearing he can fix and reassemble it
before his folks return home.
We spread all the screws, springs,
wires, tubes, and knobs across the carpet floor,
the first thing his parents see
when they open the front door.
Bricklayer by profession,
his father can haul a hod of cement
like it's a foam cushion.
He flattens Nicky with one blow,
knocking over a lamp,
killing the light.
I rush the front door
weave between cars
until I reach my house,
my ticker feeling like it's going
to tear through my rib cage,
my mother throwing holy water on me
as I run up the stairs.
Spider in a Tree
Set in Western Massachusetts in the 18th century, during the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening, this luminous novel re-creates the domestic life and spiritual development of the theologian Jonathan Edwards. Stinson allows the complexity of the Puritan worldview to speak for itself, setting Edwards's mystical delight in nature and his deep compassion alongside his severe views of God's judgment and his defense of slave-owning.
Spillway
Submissions of poetry, interviews, and articles should be made online only.
Spine Magazine
Spine is an online journal profiling contemporary authors, illustrators, and book designers. In-depth pieces on great cover designs will be useful to self-published authors in packaging their own work.
Spinning Silver
By Naomi Novik. This fantasy novel about the braided destinies of three resourceful young women draws on elements of Eastern European fairy tales to create a legend all its own. In a twist on the story of Rumpelstiltskin, a Jewish moneylender's daughter in an alternate-history 19th-century Lithuanian village is kidnapped by the king of the Staryk, sinister ice fairies who want her to turn their enchanted silver into gold. Meanwhile, her peasant housekeeper finds heroism thrust upon her as she strives to protect her young brothers from their abusive father. Their adventures intersect with a reluctant tsarina trying to save her people from the fae's perpetual winter spell. Multiple narrative viewpoints weave a complex tapestry of conflicting loyalties that are ingeniously resolved. Though the book ends, as a good fairy tale should, with some romantic happy-ever-after's, the primary narrative thread is how the three girls grow into their unchosen obligations and become brave leaders.
Spirit Captive
By Helen Bar-Lev
This is a city that does not let me go;
it accosts me in its alleyways,
nails me to its crossroads,
fixes me to its doorposts
Humanity pours through its gates
tainted honey and soured milk,
poets and priests, politicians and heretics,
kippah and kefiyah
it sings in harps and sirens and muezzins,
in the chanting of its many religions,
the holy now polluted, at battle with itself
Every street and corner
is inscribed in my genetic memory,
its stones are engraved in the shape of my face,
chiseled into my bones,
glow golden as clouds turn red at sunset
and a huge moon illuminates its night
I have lived here forever, a captive from the past,
since King David through Romans, Crusaders, Mamelukes,
I am buried in the tombs of prophets and messiahs,
in the rhetoric of their memories, sacred and blasphemed,
now corrupted by greed, zealots and bigotry
Yet each time I return I tumble back into a history
that has forfeited its right to claim me,
and emerge into a present not worthy of those ancient memories
How I long for the peace of the nomad,
unattached, not attracted to any land,
whose home is the world
but I cannot escape the magnetism of these mountains
where my blood flows best,
familiar forever, so compelling so repelling
I must obliterate Jerusalem from my chromosomes,
sever the silver cord that connects us,
to negate the forces drawing me here eon after eon,
to correct some flaw in my destiny
that causes my soul to resonate to its elevation,
its light, its sunsets, its stones and moon
until I am able to resist this repetition of fate,
escape the multiplicity of beliefs that stimulate and stifle
so that I may continue without the burden of its presence
invading my dreams
Thus I entreat as I hover over synagogues and mosques,
churches, museums, schools,
markets, over this city that flows through my veins
and into the soil in which I am embedded,
and from which I recoil
I need to be free, for Jerusalem to release me,
so I may replant myself in other places,
to find the peace that has never existed here,
but my roots...
What shall I do with my roots?
Spoonie Magazine
Spoonie Magazine was a weekly webzine that published creative writing and artwork by authors with physical or mental disabilities, neurodivergence, or chronic illness. There was also an annual print edition, Spoonie Journal.
Sport Literate
Personal essays, travelogues, first-person journalism, interviews, and humor are welcome. No fiction. See website for their annual contest.
Sporting Poems by Carol Ann Duffy and Others
In this July 2010 feature from The Guardian newspaper, UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has collected sports poems from such well-known authors as Billy Collins, Wendy Cope, Lavinia Greenlaw, and Paul Muldoon.
Spotify “Poetry: In Their Own Voices” Playlist
Created by the music streaming service Spotify for Women's History Month, this playlist features recordings of famous poets such as Marianne Moore, Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks reading their own work. You will need a free or paid subscription to listen.
Spring Tide
By Sherri Felt Dratfield
A woman stands on a dune, orange vested.
Her eyes, green, command the sea, will it to stay calm.
Her wavy, sand-colored strands sway in synch with a harmless breeze.
Her heart beats with a rhythmic shoreline that has already forgotten
the ruin left in the wake of its recent
outburst.
The woman stands among a swarm of men in neon-yellow jackets.
They drill holes—
poking in pollen.
She nestles in dune brush,
leans like the patches of tall sea-grass surrounding
her. They are survivors of past storms.
The dune grassers
drill, hum, plant sticks in
slim cavities, dry but willing
to receive these straw bits—
will moisture come,
will roots dig in before more hurricanes arrive?
She bends and plants
on a barren crest,
bends and plants
small stalks,
bends and plants,
bends, plants.
The beach reclaimed, giant pipes are stacked.
The ocean revs, drowns out tractor growls;
the elephantine CAT army scoops up each rusty trunk
to lead the way, bob, sway,
mount, then cross the boardwalk bridge.
Soon all traces of beach-fill machinery will be
gone
to the next site,
down coast.
The woman removes her vest.
She darts a look at the
unrepentant sea.
spunk [arts] magazine
Spunk was started in New York City by Aaron Tilford in the fall of 2003.
Squircle Line Press
Founded by award-winning poet and artist Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde, Squircle Line Press is a boutique press that publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and whatever else strikes their fancy. Their catalog includes a series of illustrated broadsides with text by notable writers such as Dan Chiasson, Dean Young, Ilya Kaminsky, Amy Gerstler, Forrest Gander, Dan Beachy-Quick, Michael Ryan, Steven Cramer, Orlando Menes and John Wilkinson. Visit their website for submission guidelines for poetry prizes honoring Gertrude Stein and Octavio Paz, and anthologies on unique themes like "pincushion cupcake" and "sandwich wallism".
ST Literary Agency - writers’ break, or just crooked?
Firstwriter.com advises writers to think carefully before signing with ST Literary Agency. ST asks you to provide a $129 "Admin Fee" when you sign up. Other areas of concern: ST is not affiliated with an official industry association such as the Association of Authors' Representatives; few well-established agencies advertise much, since they already receive plenty of manuscripts. ST, however, advertises aggressively; most agencies cultivate a specialty, and reject manuscripts that fall outside it. ST, however, is willing to accept most any manuscript. This caution appeared in Firstwriter's August 2004 newsletter. Subscribe for free.
St. Katherine Review
Founding editors include such notable writers as Scott Cairns and Kathleen Norris. They accept poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and critical essays. Enter by email. No simultaneous submissions.
Stage 32
Stage 32 is a screenwriters' social network and resource site. Basic membership is free. Paid membership tiers include online webinars and intensive classes by entertainment industry professionals, and access to script consultations and pitch sessions.
Stages and Pages
Writer, editor, and theatre professional Francine L. Trevens reviews books, movies, and stage productions at her blog.
Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-run nonprofit that converts public domain literary classics to attractive, professionally formatted e-books that are compatible with the most popular e-reader platforms (iBooks, Kindle, and Kobo). If you don't see the book that you want, look for a plain text version at Project Gutenberg and contact Standard Ebooks for help converting it to their format.
Stanley Joel Crown
See website for flash fiction and Mr. Crown's favorite sports novels and movies.
StartBloggingOnline.com
Blogger and social media expert Mike Wallagher created this site to give writers a simple step-by-step introduction to creating their web presence. Topics include choosing a blogging platform, the pros and cons of free versus paid hosting, promoting your blog on Twitter, search engine optimization and digital marketing.
Steel Womb Revisited
Plain-spoken poetry stands up for working-class America with humor, lucidity, and political outrage. Douglass is the publisher of the acclaimed small press Main Street Rag.
Step-by-Step Guide to Dealing with Content Theft
In this article at The Book Designer, a resource website for self-published and indie authors, attorney Helen Sedwick explains how to combat unauthorized uses of your writing. Common infringements include websites offering unlicensed electronic downloads of your books, or reposting or republishing your blog content without attribution.
Steve Fellner
Mr. Fellner's blog features book reviews and critical essays about contemporary LGBT poets.
Stillborn
In my groins the fire of your passionate kicks
Still burns, though lifeless on my lap
Lie your little legs limp and still.
Last night I heard little footsteps on my wooden floor
They scurried through the open door and faded fast
On the wet wings of the monstrous darkness
Tailed by explosion of liquid light and thunder
That unnerved the firmaments and ripped my inside.
Now I know it was you leaving.
Silence sits so serene on your soft blue lips
That never learned to curse and lie.
Though you speak not I hear you loud
As I always have, when you flipped and tumbled
In your cozy water world deep in my belly
That became your deathbed.
What did you say you'd become?
A president, a preacher, pilot, piper, pauper?
It doesn't matter now!
I'm content to know you were here—one of us.
And in your still little veins ran
The hopes and dreams, the passion and pain,
The frailty and fear that make us human.
Copyright 2007 by Obed Dolo
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Obed Dolo's "Stillborn" as this month's critique poem for its intense imagery and assured pacing. There is a wonderful strangeness to this poem that reveals the clashing spiritual forces contained in the child's death, without sacrificing the tenderness and immediacy of the particular relationship. Birth and death: so commonplace yet so mysterious.
I admired this poem's consistency of tone and its use of varied sentence lengths for dramatic effect. Dolo is not embarrassed to employ a prophetic voice worthy of his serious subject matter, and does not break the spell with interjections of casual diction the way a beginning poet might. Minor suggestions for the first stanza: I would change "groins" to the singular "groin" because that is the more common usage, and the unusual form of the word here is distracting. Instead of repeating "little" in two successive lines, perhaps use a different modifier for "footsteps" in the fourth line (e.g. "faint" or "light"), or none at all. The alliteration of "Lie your little legs limp and still" is effective, so I would preserve that instance of the word and replace the other one.
Elegies work best when they connect the commemoration of a specific person to broader insights about finitude, love and loss. Thomas Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" still resonates with us today because its theme is the universality of death. Gray emphasizes how much is not known about the souls asleep beneath their humble markers, and we nod in recognition because each of us feels like that "mute inglorious Milton" whose significance is obscured by time and mortality.
Against this temptation to despair, the mother in Dolo's poem insists on the preciousness of her child's existence and his membership in the human family. Though he never had a life outside her womb, he was a person, not a thing. Her empathetic imagination turns an unnatural and grotesque object, the corpse of one who died before he could live, back into a baby. Stillborn is transformed into "still born".
In the first stanza, the dead child is alien, characterized in terms of his effects on the mother and the world. She does not yet perceive him as a person, but as a gateway for the chaotic swirl of spiritual power from which the individual soul emerges and to which it returns. He inhabited her body like a fire. Now his departing spirit is glimpsed indirectly, through the sound of ghostly little footsteps or the passage of the storm, which Dolo magnificently describes as "the wet wings of the monstrous darkness/Tailed by explosion of liquid light and thunder". The use of "tailed" instead of the more predictable "trailed" evokes the image of a dragon sweeping by overhead. After these long, action-filled lines, the terse declaration "Now I know it was you leaving" is stark and powerful.
This depiction of the world's darkness and violence sets us up to view the child's death in a new way, as an escape from the potential for misery and wickedness in every human life. "Silence sits so serene on your soft blue lips/That never learned to curse and lie." The mother turns away from the horrors of the first stanza and chooses to re-value both his life and his death. She finds herself able to be grateful for the Edenic existence he must have had inside her body, "when you flipped and tumbled/In your cozy water world deep in my belly," almost as if he were a pre-human innocent creature.
Where a lesser poem might have left us there, with a sentimentalized vision of death as sweeter than life, Dolo comes full circle to acknowledge the tragedy of wasted potential, as well as the tranquility of an unfinished life onto which we can project our own idealized vision of the future. "What did you say you'd become?/A president, a preacher, pilot, piper, pauper?/It doesn't matter now!" The mother acknowledges that the human condition is duality: "The hopes and dreams, the passion and pain,/The frailty and fear that make us human." Birth and death can each be a cause for rejoicing and gratitude, as well as a source of danger and fear.
Where could a poem like "Stillborn" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Eden Mills Writers' Festival Literary Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Canadian festival offers C$500 for poetry and short stories (both genres compete together) by new, aspiring, and modestly published writers
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Prizes of $100 in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpts
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Stock Photo Resources at Canva
Canva, an online community sharing best practices in web design, has compiled this directory of sources for free stock photos that writers can use for blogs, book covers, and other promotional materials.
Stock Photo Secrets: Best Free Stock Photo Sites
Based in Germany, Stock Photo Secrets is a leading digital magazine dedicated to the stock photography industry. This section of their website explains the legal issues and hidden copyright pitfalls of using photos found online, and reviews two dozen favorite sites for free photos.
Stone. Bread. Salt.
By Norbert Hirschhorn. These wise, good-humored poems explore Jewish legends and mysticism, the blessings and pains of approaching one's ninth decade, and the author's experiences as both physician and patient.
Stoned
By Des Mannay
I'm like a pebble on a beach
with shingle running over me—
A scraping of ecstasy
with the passing of the tides
which are over too soon,
and I am left alone again
With the sun beating down on me—
bleaching me white
and baking the residue of salt
Until I crack—
at least inside I feel I do
But this is never really true
Appetite's whetted by the sea in you—
in reality
you were a piece of shingle
which was soon past
And only myself, the sun and sand
are still here
The skimming stone of life goes on.
First published in the No Tribal Dance anthology in the UK in 2017
Story Circle Book Reviews
Story Circle Book Reviews provides a review venue for women author-publishers and for women's work published by independent and university presses. The site's sponsor, Story Circle Network, also offers the Sarton Women's Book Awards for small press and self-published books by and about women, published in the US or Canada.
Story Monsters Ink
Story Monsters Ink publishes a glossy monthly magazine with children's book reviews, author interviews, and industry news. They also offer contests and publicity packages for indie authors of children's books.
StoryADay Writing Prompts Archive
StoryADay is a twice-yearly writing challenge where participants complete one short story per day in May and September. This website is the online hub for participants, offering inspiration and tips to keep the momentum going. The site includes an archive of prompts from past challenges, going back to May 2010.
Storyathon
Storyathon offers free competitions for students in grades 3-6 to write stories that are exactly 100 words. The challenges are designed to get young people excited about writing and teach them how to tighten their language, experiment with words, and focus their message. See website for new themes offered every semester.
Storyhouse Weekly Reader
The nonprofit Preservation Foundation was born in 1976 to encourage and preserve the "extraordinary stories of 'ordinary' people." Anyone can submit a personal life story or short fictional work for posting on their website. Their e-newsletter, the Storyhouse Weekly Reader, highlights one of the 1,000+ anecdotes in their archives.
Storyline Online
Storyline Online features picture books being read aloud by well-known actors such as Kristen Bell, Ernest Borgnine, Viola Davis, James Earl Jones, and Kiernan Shipka.
Storymatic
Storymatic is a box of writing prompts that doubles as a party game. The box of 360 cards has a shape and layout similar to Trivial Pursuit clue cards, with each card featuring a short phrase for a character trait or situation. Pull random cards from each section to generate an impromptu storytelling session or ideas for writing a scene. Other products in this series inclue Storymatic Kids (simpler language and concepts for ages 5+) and Rememory, which can be used for memoir-writing or icebreaker conversations at a party or reunion.
StoryQuarterly
SQ pays $150-$200 for accepted submissions, 8,000 words maximum. Enter online only. They seek to publish both prominent and first-time authors in every issue.
Student Scholarships
This website collects links to academic and vocational programs, grants, and scholarships. Free registration allows you to receive listings targeted to your geographic area and field of study.
Stunning Design Examples to Inspire Your Book Advertising
This 2024 article from the e-book bargains site BookBub showcases 25 well-designed advertisements for books in various genres and explains what makes them so effective.
Subject to Change
Accomplished collection of lively contemporary formal verse, ranging from a punning ode to the Nissan Stanza to a crown of sonnets that depicts the birth of feminism ("Notes from the Good-Girl Chronicles, 1963").
Submishmash Weekly
Free weekly e-newsletter from Submittable, a popular online submissions platform, contains news and opportunities for writers, artists, and filmmakers.
Submission Strategies: Advice from The Masters Review
In this blog post from the literary journal The Masters Review, editor Kim Winternheimer discusses the submission strategies that work best for different writers. Topics include whether to re-submit original or edited stories, targeting the right mix of top-tier and more accessible magazines, and how many pieces to send out at a time.
Submittable
This online submissions manager is used by a growing number of contests and journals. You can also use it to manage resumes and job postings.
Submittable’s Universal Submission Tracker
Launching in 2020, Submittable's Universal Submission Tracker is a new record-keeping feature available to anyone with an account at their online submissions platform. The designers say: "In addition to tracking the progress of submissions made using Submittable, you can now add submission details for any opportunity made outside of our platform, including the status, submission date and title, name of the organization reviewing your work, and internal notes specific to that submission."
Subscriber Poems for Black Lives Matter
Winning Writers launched this feature in June 2020 in response to police brutality against black Americans. Below is a selection of subscriber poems inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.
COME BACK HOME! (Letter to a Moving Target)
by Mike Guinn
Dear Son,
This life is nothing but Saturday night autopsies, pre-ordered grave stones, a freedom you'll never know. It's hoping the Negro National Anthem justifies your skin just enough for you to realize that tattoos and K2 will never replace the scar tissue on your soul.
Your heritage is more than rope burns around history's black neck. It’s a deep desire for survival no matter how loudly homicide speaks of rivers.
This melanin is so rich that when this nation denies you your color, it will be impossible to feel safe in this house arrest called America.
And even after you've given this country all of your Africa and your life light goes dim because the sun refused you immunity. You'll realize that our fragile lives began on the back porch of shotgun houses, where camouflaged chalk lines silhouette themselves in the shade of a lonely bulls-eye searching for another black target and you already fit the profile!
And it's not your fault that you were born a verb in past tense, an unwilling subject in a sentence that kept on running.
This curse, this prison we call life is like playing peekaboo with Satan. And I'lI be that gospel stripper, quoting scripture, god's reluctant theologian. Because here you are, fractured by the manner in which the wind whistled and Emmett-Tilled your future.
Boy my love is rugged remnants of pain polished smooth by trial and error. It knows your heart like skeletons know crowded closets.
These streets will eat and rip and tear you apart SON!
They are as relentless as hurricanes and as unforgiving as white privilege. And I am dying inside the way this life intended, but not you!
You will not be blood stains on sidewalks or a redundancy of clichés rewinding themselves into tornadoes of fully refurbished lies.
You will not sag or smoke or walk around here entitled with the audacity to hold up clean hands like this world owes you something.
Because it don't.
Listen...I don't want your existence to be another statistic on the back page of history.
This life needs to know that if you died, at least you stood for something far more substantial than a bag of weed or pride.
There are good things to come son. But you have to be here to see em.
So do me a favor, lose the attitude, put down your ego, pull up yo pants and remember this!
That whether it be cop or stranger Just SHUT YO MOUTH. SMILE! STAY ALIVE...and Bring Yo Ass Home!
Cause these streets don't give a damn about young black men.
Reprinted by permission from Crying in Colors (Jazzy Kitty Publishing, 2010) by spoken-word poet and motivational speaker Mike Guinn.
****
I Can't Breathe!
by Yassin Senge
(in loving memory of George Floyd)
Blood from my father
And milk from my mother
We're both used to make
Milkshake
And yoghurt
For the hypocrite
Claiming that an ox was not productive
And the cow not reproductive
That their manure
Was not pure
That crops could not grow
Anymore
Then I as a calf
Was not strong enough
To stop the hypocrite
From taking me for meat.
Yassin Senge is a Tanzanian poet whose work has appeared as a contest winner in the League of Poets' anthology Songs of Peace: The World's Biggest Anthology of Contemporary Poetry 2020.
****
Make America Love Again
by Mike Quinn
America is back on their civil rights home run
In the land of the brave and the home of the gun
Where a black man is not let catch his breath
We mourn his murder and his unlawful death
The President's dark heart amplified their pain
He's singularly Made America Hate Again
So it's a crime now if your live's black
Will they ever get America's "free" soul back?
George Floyd's "ambulance was his hearse"
While Uncle Sam hosts this Covid curse
The flames of hate are burning brightly now
This matter should Make America Think Again somehow?
Until they bend their collective knee of shame
Can this too begin to Make America Love Again
Mike writes: "I am an Irish person deeply touched by George Floyd's cruel murder and also the deeper Viruses of Hate in America."
****
The Journey
by Mary Brooks
I was brought here many years ago from a distant land, deep in the bowels of a hellbound ship to this unknown land we sailed.
I raised my head to heaven and planted a seed in my heart, then put the rest in a treasure chest where in heaven it might prevail.
Sold on the block like an antique clock whose chimes they dared to sound, then I saw hope die and rise again with thorns upon his crown.
So the antique clock from the auction block could stay its chimes no more and it told of strife and the loss of life on this foreign shore.
I still see God's face in this far off place and his promise still rings true, when darkest night falls down on me Lord I'll remember you.
****
The Human Family
by Alisha Rodrigues
The color of one's skin
does not define the person.
We are all human
and
come from the same source.
Therefore we are all interconnected.
We are a human family
of
brothers and sisters.
Alisha is the Vice President of Artists Embassy International, which sponsors the Dancing Poetry Contest.
****
Civil Rights and Its Role With the Military
by Denise Jones
As an African American retired U.S. Army soldier,
I would like to point out civil rights and its role with the military.
The President and Commander-In-Chief involved
Had the last name Truman and the first name Harry.
The military's integration in the 1950s
Was based on Truman's mandate.
It made it unlawful for the military
To continue to segregate.
Military personnel like the Tuskegee Airmen
Could finally join General MacArthur's ranks.
So to Commander-In-Chief Truman,
I give thanks.
Truman's mandate also opened the door in the 1960s
Where President Lyndon B. Johnson signed various legislation.
This would include the Civil Rights Act of 1964
And the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to prohibit discrimination.
Jones writes: "I am an aspiring black poet who would like to share an unpublished poem in the midst of a grieving and outraged country where black people are still, to this day, victims of systemic racism. In the way that things have been unfolding in recent days, this is definitely a watershed moment for civil rights right now. This poem is to show that there is still hope for black people in the United States."
****
Substack
Substack is an easy-to-use platform to create free or paid-subscription email newsletters. Good for sending out short articles, poems, or blog posts.
Subtropics
Simultaneous submissions accepted for prose but not poetry. Past contributors include Steve Almond, Charles Wright, D.A. Powell, Anne Carson, and Billy Collins. Read editors' preferences on website before submitting. Best for authors with some professional publication credits.
