Rose Metal Opportunities

Our friends at Rose Metal Press announce a call for anthologies, craft guides, and brief prose chapbooks:

SPECIAL READING PERIOD FOR HYBRID-GENRE ANTHOLOGY PROPOSALS

Rose Metal Press announces a special reading period for pitches for creative, innovative, hybrid-focused anthologies, craft guides, or other types of multi-author projects. This reading period will run from October 15 to November 15, 2012, and have no reading fee. Please review our catalog and website to ensure that your proposal fits with our mission and focuses on hybrid work of some kind. Your proposal should be a full professional pitch including a description of the project, a list of potential contributors, your bio and qualifications to edit the book, the potential market for the book, and comparative titles already published. During the reading period, please email your pitch as a Word document or PDF to rosemetalpress@gmail.com.

ANNUAL SHORT SHORT CHAPBOOK CONTEST

Our Seventh Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest submission period begins November 1 and ends December 1, 2012. Our 2012 judge will be Deb Olin Unferth. The winner will have his/her chapbook published in summer 2013, with an introduction by the contest judge. During the submission period, please submit your 25–40 page double-spaced manuscript of short short stories (fiction or nonfiction) each under 1000 words to us through our Submittable page with a $10 reading fee. Individual pieces in your manuscript may have appeared in journals, both in print and online, as long as the entire collection itself is unpublished. Please do not send or email unsolicited manuscripts to the Press outside of the specified reading periods.

Turning Fact Into Fiction: Aaron Teel’s Shampoo Horns

Aaron Teel’s new chapbook, Shampoo Horns, winner of the Sixth Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest, contains a version of a powerful essay published many years back in Brevity, “The Widow”s Trailer.” Teel changed that essay some, along with other early work based in memoir, to fit into a fictional narrative, and he published the chapbook as fiction. Teel is one helluva writer; the book is startling, vivid, sharp as a chicken’s teeth, and the prose is on fire. Thinking that Teel’s decision to move to the fictional frame was an interesting jumping off point for discussion of genre, Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore asked to interview Teel and explore his decision.

MOORE:  I’m curious why you now call the essay, included in the chapbook, fiction, and what you’ve changed now that it has been re-categorized?

TEEL: Thanks Dinty, I’m really grateful to you for publishing that piece. It was the second one I’d written from this collection, after ‘Tater’s Nipple.’  The responses I got from those two pieces were sort of the impetus for the rest. I was reading a lot of Nabokov at the time, and I had this idea that I wanted to write my own kind of Nabokovian memoir inspired by the early chapters of Speak, Memory. But instead of being about a kid surrounded by servants and a comfortable aristocratic life in the Russian countryside, it’d be about a kid growing up in a trailer park, in Texas– but still with the lush sensory detail, word play, and fragmented, self-contained stories that added up to a larger narrative. After about five or six pieces were written, I kind of hit a wall with it and lost the inspiration. I put it away for about a year. When I came back to it, I had the idea that it needed a traumatic central and symbolic event that everything else could spin around. A tornado just made the most sense. I also changed the names of the characters to put a layer of distance on them, and that was really freeing. Wherever that nebulous line between fiction and creative nonfiction lies, I was pretty sure I had crossed it at that point, so the whole thing had to be called fiction. I was never interested in writing ‘essays’ or using any kind of journalistic approach. It was more about mining my own experience for inspiration. I struggled with that for a while, but I think now that I probably stayed truer to my Nabokovian ideal than I would have otherwise, unless you believe he literally lost a butterfly when he was a kid that he found forty years later, halfway around the world.

MOORE: Your decision to add the tornado as a central event is a beautiful illustration of how sticking to the nonfiction account of life can reveal one truth and how moving the story into the fictional realm can reveal a different truth, neither being better nor worse than the other. What did bringing in the tornado allow you to see about your childhood story that you might not have seen had you not made that choice?

TEEL: I agree with you completely about fiction and non-fiction revealing different but equally valid truths.

The tornado was more of an organizing device than anything else, and a convenient metaphor for adolescence, the sense of having your life dictated by forces beyond your control. It also fit nicely into the trailer park motif. I liked the idea of playing with some of the clichéd trailer park associations, but presenting them in a way I hadn’t seen before.

MOORE: And if you had stuck to the truth – the truth of your memory, at least – how do you think the book would have resolved itself differently?

TEEL: I don’t know if it allowed me to see anything I hadn’t seen about my own childhood experience as much as it provided an objectified symbol for some of the emotions I wanted to convey and allowed me to do it succinctly. I’m not sure how the book would have resolved without that frame either, which is probably why I put it away for so long before coming back to it as fiction.

Shampoo Horns at Rose Metal Press

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Rose Metal’s Sixth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest

Our good friends at Rose Metal Press are launching their Sixth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. The submission period begins November 1 and ends December 1, 2011, so move quickly.

The 2011 judge will be Randall Brown, author of the award-winning flash fiction collection Mad to Live (Flume Press 2008) and founder of Matter Press, a community-based, non-profit literary press that publishes The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.

The winner will have his/her chapbook published in summer 2012, with an introduction by the contest judge. The contest considers 25–40 page double-spaced manuscripts of short short stories (fiction or nonfiction) under 1000 words.  Individual pieces in your manuscript may have appeared in journals, both in print and online, as long as the entire collection itself is unpublished.

More details here:  Rose Metal’s Sixth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest