Call for submissions: the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction 2015 competition

Announcing the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction 2015 competition! For a list of previous winners, please visit here.

Dates for submission: Manuscripts may be submitted between 9:00 a.m. on April 1 and 5:00 p.m. on May 31. Winners will be announced by late summer.

We only accept electronic submissions.

Our online submissions manager is available here: georgiapress.submishmash.com/submit

Tech support for using the submissions manager is available at 1-406-480-6274. The $30 entry fee can be paid online via credit card or PayPal.

This year's judges are Hugh Sheehy, Karin Lin-Greenberg, Anjanette Delgado, Kristen Nichols, and Sandra Muñoz.

Selection process: Each of the four contest judges reads approximately one-fourth of the manuscripts submitted to the competition, with a fifth judge available if needed based on the total number of submissions. Judges select seven to ten finalists each; the pool of finalist manuscripts is read by series editor Nancy Zafris, who makes the final selection of two winning manuscripts and a runner-up. Authors of winning manuscripts receive a cash award of $1,000, and their collections are subsequently published by the University of Georgia Press under a standard book contract. Winners have ten days to accept the award and ten days to sign the contract once it is received.

Eligibility: The competition is open to writers in English, whether published or unpublished. Previous winners of this award are not eligible to win again. Writers must be residents of North America.

Manuscript Guidelines

• Manuscripts should be 40,000-75,000 words in length. 
• The award recognizes outstanding collections of short fiction. Collections may include long stories or novellas (est. length of a novella is 50-150 pages). However, novels or single novellas will not be considered. 
• Please be sure manuscript pages are numbered. 
• Please include a table of contents. 
• Please use a standard, easy-to-read font such as Times New Roman in twelve-point size. 
• Stories included in the submission may have appeared previously in magazines or anthologies but may not have been previously published in a book-length collection of the author’s own work. 
• Authors may submit more than one manuscript to the competition for consideration as long as no material is duplicated between submissions. Each submission will require a separate entry fee. 
• Manuscripts under consideration for this competition may be submitted elsewhere at the same time. Please withdraw your manuscript if it is accepted by another publisher and should no longer be considered for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award competition. Withdrawal can be completed via the submissions manager website. Entry fees are not refundable.

Blind review: The intent of this contest is that manuscripts will be considered on the merits of the fiction and that judges will not be aware of the names or publication records of the authors.

• Please do not include your name on the pages of the manuscript—only in the form boxes of the electronic submission manager. The first page of the manuscript should include the title of the collection only. 
• Please do not include a list of acknowledgments crediting where stories have been published. 
• Judges who recognize work will recuse themselves, and the submission will be reassigned to a different judge.

Confirmation of receipt and notification: You should receive an e-mail confirmation immediately after submission. An announcement of winners will be sent to all entrants via e-mail by late summer. If you have any questions or concerns other than technical issues with the submissions manager, please contact us via e-mail at press@ugapress.uga.edu. The press will not accept phone calls regarding the Flannery O’Connor Award. 

Statement of Integrity: The University of Georgia is thoroughly committed to academic integrity in all of its endeavors, and the University of Georgia Press adheres to all University of Georgia policies and procedures. To help ensure the integrity of the competition, manuscripts are judged through a blind review process. Judges in the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction competition are instructed to avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds. 

Announcing the Winners of the 2014 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

Congratulations to Toni Graham and Siamak Vossoughi, this year's winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction! The competition continues to be a celebrated route to publication for literary short fiction collections. UGA Press is glad to have Graham and Vossoughi carry on this tradition.

Graham’s The Suicide Club and Vossoughi’s Better Than War will be published by the University of Georgia Press and will be available in fall 2015.

Toni Graham is a native of San Francisco. Her story collection Waiting for Elvis was winner of the John Gardner Book Award from Binghamton University. Her collection The Daiquiri Girls won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). She is an associate professor of English/Creative Writing at Oklahoma State, where she serves as editor in chief and fiction editor for the Cimarron Review.

Flannery O’Connor series editor Nancy Zafris on Graham’s collection: “Already aliens in a strange faraway land called Oklahoma, the endearing characters in The Suicide Club are further alienated by the one event that unites their otherwise disparate group: the suicide of a loved one. In addition to marvelous language and descriptions, the author deftly employs humor not to deflect but to dig deeper into the undercurrents that our humankind try hardest to ignore even as these very undercurrents sharpen our sorrows and scrub us into the beings who stare back at us in the mirror. Often hilarious, the soaring funny asides accrue into piercing insights that begin to sear the soul. As we turn the last page, we are left better for having journeyed through a work that seeks higher ground and profundity, that seeks to unite heart and cerebrum and make sense of it all.”

Siamak Vossoughi was born in Tehran and grew up in London, Orange County, and Seattle. He graduated from the University of Washington and has lived in San Francisco since then. Along with writing, he works as a tutor and substitute teacher. Some of his writing has appeared in Faultline, Fourteen Hills, Prick of the Spindle, The Rumpus, and Washington Square. He is also the recipient of the 2013 Very Short Fiction Award from Glimmer Train. He is currently writing a novel. He is tremendously honored to have received the Flannery O'Connor Award.

Nancy Zafris on Vossoughi’s collection: “The short shorts that comprise Better Than War examine the fitful ways of assimilation and the particular loneliness of alienation, especially as they apply to Iranian immigrants. Although told from the point of view of several characters, the first-person tales dominate. What emerges is a bildungsroman mosaic constructed in pieces of language that are less idiomatic than philosophical. The puzzle-piece ruminations evoke reminders of Calvino and Kundera, American Iranian style. This is a young writer venturing into territory that will define his aesthetic style and ambitions.”

The finalists in this year’s competition are Kathy Anderson of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Oscar Cuevas of Brooklyn, New York; Emily Doak of Greencastle, Indiana; Louise Jarvis Flynn of Durham, North Carolina; Dana Fitz Gale of Missoula, Montana; Debbie Graber of Studio City, California; Becky Hagenston of Starkville, Mississippi; Liz Windhorst Harmer of Riverside, California; Christopher McCann of Bainbridge Island, Washington; and Jennifer Anne Moses of Montclair, New Jersey.

Congratulations to all participants and thank you for creating compelling short fiction. The award-winning books selected in last year's competition, Faulty Predictions by Karin Lin-Greenberg and Bright Shards of Someplace Else by Monica McFawn, will be published on September 15, 2014.

Call for submissions: the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction 2014 competition

Announcing the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction 2014 competition! For a list of previous winners, please visit here.

Dates for submission: Manuscripts may be submitted between 9:00 a.m. on April 1 and 5:00 p.m. on May 31. Winners will be announced by late summer.

We only accept electronic submissions.

Our online submissions manager is available here: georgiapress.submishmash.com/submit

Tech support for using the submissions manager is available at 1-406-480-6274. The $25 entry fee can be paid online via credit card or PayPal.

This year's judges are Frank Soos, Amina Gautier, Dawna Kemper, Antara Brewer, and L. Rebecca Harris.

Selection process: Each of the four contest judges reads approximately one-fourth of the manuscripts submitted to the competition, with a fifth judge available if needed based on the total number of submissions. Judges select seven to ten finalists each; the pool of finalist manuscripts is read by series editor Nancy Zafris, who makes the final selection of two winning manuscripts and a runner-up. Authors of winning manuscripts receive a cash award of $1,000, and their collections are subsequently published by the University of Georgia Press under a standard book contract. Winners have ten days to accept the award and ten days to sign the contract once it is received.

Eligibility: The competition is open to writers in English, whether published or unpublished. Previous winners of this award are not eligible to win again. Writers must be residents of North America.

Manuscript Guidelines

• Manuscripts should be 40,000-75,000 words in length. 
• The award recognizes outstanding collections of short fiction. Collections may include long stories or novellas (est. length of a novella is 50-150 pages). However, novels or single novellas will not be considered. 
• Please be sure manuscript pages are numbered. 
• Please include a table of contents. 
• Please use a standard, easy-to-read font such as Times New Roman in twelve-point size. 
• Stories included in the submission may have appeared previously in magazines or anthologies but may not have been previously published in a book-length collection of the author’s own work. 
• Authors may submit more than one manuscript to the competition for consideration as long as no material is duplicated between submissions. Each submission will require a separate entry fee. 
• Manuscripts under consideration for this competition may be submitted elsewhere at the same time. Please withdraw your manuscript if it is accepted by another publisher and should no longer be considered for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award competition. Withdrawal can be completed via the submissions manager website. Entry fees are not refundable.

Blind review: The intent of this contest is that manuscripts will be considered on the merits of the fiction and that judges will not be aware of the names or publication records of the authors.

• Please do not include your name on the pages of the manuscript—only in the form boxes of the electronic submission manager. The first page of the manuscript should include the title of the collection only. 
• Please do not include a list of acknowledgments crediting where stories have been published. 
• Judges who recognize work will recuse themselves, and the submission will be reassigned to a different judge.

Confirmation of receipt and notification: You should receive an e-mail confirmation immediately after submission. An announcement of winners will be sent to all entrants via e-mail by late summer. If you have any questions or concerns other than technical issues with the submissions manager, please contact us via e-mail at press@ugapress.uga.edu. The press will not accept phone calls regarding the Flannery O’Connor Award. 

Statement of Integrity: The University of Georgia is thoroughly committed to academic integrity in all of its endeavors, and the University of Georgia Press adheres to all University of Georgia policies and procedures. To help ensure the integrity of the competition, manuscripts are judged through a blind review process. Judges in the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction competition are instructed to avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds. 

UGA Press at AWP 2014

Last week, this year's Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference was held in Seattle, WA. Throughout the week, attendees enjoyed an exciting array of quality literature, informative panels, and a relaxed atmosphere.

Here is Publisher's Weekly recap of AWP:

Amid the usual panels about how to write, publish and teach books of literature, publishers reported strong book sales and attendees noticed a friendlier atmosphere than in previous years. Although there was no major announcement, this year's AWP shows literary--and print book--culture to be thriving.

The book exhibit ran from Thursday, February 27 through Saturday, March 1. More than 12,000 attendees visited the 650+ booths.

At our booth, numerous past and present UGA Press authors stopped by, as well as several previous staff members and interns. On Friday, we held book signings for six books: PIRATES YOU DON'T KNOW by John Griswold, AMERICAN AFTERLIFE by Kate Sweeney, THE VIEWING ROOM by Jackie Gorman, THIEVES I'VE KNOWN by Tom Kealey, EXIT, CIVILIAN by Idra Novey, and THE CLOUD THAT CONTAINED THE LIGHTNING by Cynthia Lowen. A few other authors stopped to say hello, including Julian Hoffman, Peter Selgin, Melinda Moustakis, John Chasteen, Allen Braden, Hugh Sheehy, Sue Silverman, Robin Ekiss, and Sean Hill.

A highlight of UGA Press moments and people at AWP 2014.

Director Lisa Bayer, assistant acquisitions editor Beth Snead, and publicity manager Amanda E. Sharp were in attendance.

During the conference, Buzzfeed Books had attendees share their responses to a variety of questions. Victoria Chang, Tom Kealey, and Amanda E. Sharp were featured in its list of "What Does the Term 'Successful Writer' Mean to You?" Their answers can be found here.

Short Takes

Three Flannery O'Connor Award winners (Geoffrey Becker's BLACK ELVIS, Harvey Grossinger's THE QUARRY, and E. J. Levy's LOVE, IN THEORY) had an event at the Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore on Tuesday night. In advance of the event, the Baltimore Sun interviewed the three authors about short story writing.

You all have either written novels or are in the process of writing them. Can you talk about the difference between long-form and short-form writing?

Levy: The short story has a density and richness and beauty and intimacy that it's hard to find in any form of writing other than poetry. Writing a short story is a little bit like making love. There's an intense pleasure that may be brief and that leads to an illuminating conclusion.
I'm pregnant now with my first child, and it seems to me that writing a novel is more gestational than writing a short story. Reading a novel takes more time and writing one takes more time. It slowly reshapes your world.
Becker: I love E.J.'s metaphor. It's sort of the difference between making love and being in a long-term relationship. Writing a novel takes forever, and you're not the same person at the end. You've changed. You've moved. Real life tends to filter in when you're writing a novel in an ongoing way that it probably doesn't when you're writing a short story.
Grossinger: I don't consider myself a natural short-story writer. When I entered a graduate writing program in the '80s, my short stories were just novels in disguise. I had to keep chopping them down. I'm just more drawn to the long form. Short stories have a much narrower vision. They're a moment in time. You can't exfoliate the entire life of a character, with their beginnings and ends, in a short story in the same way you can in a novel.

Booklist reviews the two newest Flannery O'Connor Award winners: THEIVES I'VE KNOWN and THE VIEWING ROOM. According to Booklist, THIEVES I'VE KNOWN is "a memorable THE VIEWING ROOM is described as "hard-hitting."
collection," while

Flannery O'Connor Award winner, Alfred DePew (THE MELANCHOLY OF DEPARTURE) has a piece on e-books in the Vancouver Observer.

WUKY 91.3 features selections from TURN ME LOOSE, along with historical context commentary and music, to mark the 50th anniversary of Medgar Evers' passing.

Last Thursday, two UGA Press books, REMAKING WORMSLOE PLANTATION and ATLANTA'S OAKLAND CEMETERY, received awards from the Georgia Historical Society during a ceremony held on the University of Georgia campus. The Malcolm Bell, Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award for best book on Georgia history went to Drew Swanson's REMAKING WORMSLOE PLANTATION and the Lilla M. Hawes Award for best local or county or history book pertaining to Georgia went to ATLANTA'S OAKLAND CEMETERY by Ren and Helen Davis. For more on the event, including quotes from the Georgia Historical Society (GHS) President & CEO Todd Groce and GHS trustee Vince Dooley, read the article in the student newspaper, the Red & Black.

Right to left: Todd Groce, Ren and Helen Davis, Vince Dooley, Lisa Bayer. Not pictured: Drew Swanson.

The Decatur Book Festival was held in Decatur, GA over the Labor Day weekend. Here are some photos from the event:

Winners Announced for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

Congratulations to Karin Lin-Greenberg and Monica McFawn, this year's winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction! The competition, now celebrating its 30th anniversary, continues to be a celebrated route to publication for literary short fiction collections. UGA Press is glad to have Lin-Greenberg and McFawn carry on this tradition.

Lin-Greenberg’s FAULTY PREDICTIONS and McFawn’s BRIGHT SHARDS OF SOMEPLACE ELSE will be published by the University of Georgia Press and will be available in fall 2014.

Karin Lin-Greenberg's stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, The North American Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. Currently, she is an assistant professor at Siena College, where she teaches creative writing.

Flannery O’Connor series editor Nancy Zafris on Lin-Greenberg’s collection: “The many, diverse tales in this collection deliver the realism and emotional heft of a Chekhov story: full, total experiences that pause along the way for laughter and insight into the human condition. The author is a sublime chameleon who takes us deep into lives so varied and different that a map of the characters would simply read: The World.”

Monica McFawn has published fiction, poetry, and is currently working on a play. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Georgia Review, Confrontation, Gargoyle, Web Conjunctions, Conduit, Hotel Amerika, and others. McFawn holds an MFA in poetry from Western Michigan University and currently teaches in the writing department at Grand Valley State University. In her spare time, McFawn trains her Welsh Cob cross pony in dressage and jumping.

Nancy Zafris on McFawn’s collection: “The writing and language soar in these amazing, unusual, funny stories that whip away that familiar rug under our feet and turn it into a magic carpet. Journeys through the initially familiar terrain of babysitting or the death of a pet paint new constellations in the sky, and the reader, really, must look up in wonder.”

The finalists in this year’s competition are Thomas Benz of Evanston, IL; MaryEllen Beveridge of Cambridge, MA; Polly Buckingham of Medical Lake, WA; Serena Crawford of Portland, OR; Geeta Kothari of Pittsburgh, PA; James Mathews of Adamstown, MD; Ann Ryles of Moraga, CA; Jay Shearer of Chicago, IL; Adam Stumacher of Jamaica Plain, MA; and Seth Brady Tucker of Lafayette, CO.

Congratulations to all participants and thank you for creating compelling short fiction. The award-winning books selected in last year's competition, THIEVES I'VE KNOWN by Tom Kealey and THE VIEWING ROOM by Jacqueline Gorman will release this month.

Short Takes

Over on today's Wall Street Journal Japan blog, Japan Real Time, poet Cynthia Lowen talks about her new book, THE CLOUD THAT CONTAINED THE LIGHTNING.

JRT: What prompted you to write poetry about the atomic bomb?
Lowen: Initially, I thought I would be writing about my own family history. I knew from a very young age that my grandfather was involved with the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb–he was a nuclear physicist on the Project in the earlier phases, and I remember feeling terrible that my own family was part of something so horrific. As I started to uncover my grandfather’s history, I was looking for ways to write about it, ways to find out about the bomb, and the human feelings attached that led to the creation of this book.
My family history is what led me to write the material, but J. Robert Oppenheimer was the figure that I wanted to be the central force because he’s so emblematic. He became a metaphor for something much larger than he was, and I thought it would be a good way to enter the material. From there, I did extensive research into his life, and I got into the psychology of the bomb, using the splitting in fission as a way to talk about our own departures from our conscience.

Kirkus Reviews describes THE SMALL HEART OF THINGS as a "sharply observed" and "deeply felt book."

KATHARINE AND R. J. REYNOLDS is both a "tour de force" and "top-notch study," according to the Journal of American History.

ISLAND TIME author Jingle Davis had a talk and book signing at Avid Bookshop in Athens, GA this past Saturday. Athens Patch recommended the event to its readers, saying "If you love St. Simon’s, the beach, or just good writing, be there." Thanks to everyone who came and to Avid for hosting it!

"[Novey's] modes vary from flashes of anecdote to surreal narrative, from prose to brief lyrics to long-lined poems. The effect is one of an extended reach toward concretions, routines and environments that won't yield to mere wishes to understand or change them. . . . In Exit, Civilian, the thing is the prison, intractably present—and freedom, more than simply a life outside a jail, comprises an infinite speculation on the meaning of itself. The tonal gives way to the atonal, the fuzzy."—Ron Slate's review of EXIT, CIVILIAN on his website, On the Seawall.

WFPL 89.3 talks with Frank X Walker about his new book, TURN ME LOOSE. Listen to the interview here:

Southern Spaces features an excerpt from Candace Waid's new book, THE SIGNIFYING EYE.

CHICKEN DREAMING CORN author Roy Hoffman has a piece in the New York Times in which he comments on the experiences from his youth. In particular, he reminisces on hitchhiking in the 1970s.

From left to right: Saisha Grayson, Judy Chicago, and Jane Gerhard

A few weeks ago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art hosted an event for author Jane Gerhard and artist Judy Chicago to promote the new book, THE DINNER PARTY. Below is a YouTube video from Judy Chicago that features audio of the conversation between Chicago and Gerhard, moderated by Saisha Grayson, Assistant Curator.

Don't forget about our Flannery O'Connor Award 30 Years | 30 Books Giveaway!

Sign up for our newsletter and qualify for our Flannery O’Connor Award 30 Years | 30 Books Giveaway! Stop by our booth at the Decatur Book Festival to enter in person or sign up online by noon EDT September 1st—winners will be announced later that day. You need not be present to win.

Prize includes:
• 30 titles from the acclaimed short fiction series
• Our great new UGA Press canvas tote

Winners will be announced at 2 pm and notified by telephone and email.

Want to win a free book? Take our new survey

Like to read? Want to win a free book?

Tell us all about your reading and book-buying preferences in our new survey and you could win one of our new Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction books before it hits shelves next month.

After you complete the survey, email us your response to question #10. You'll then be entered into a drawing to win an advance reader's copy of the forthcoming Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction winner, THE VIEWING ROOM, by Jacquelin Gorman.

Based on author Jacquelin Gorman's personal experience as a hospital chaplain and pastoral counselor, the stories in THE VIEWING ROOM share a unique view of people who are misunderstood and unseen. The book lays bare nine parallel worlds of suffering in stories of unflinching detail that follow two hospital chaplains who work to console survivors of patients in a large urban hospital in Los Angeles.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Giveaway Alert!

Sign up for our newsletter and qualify for our Flannery O'Connor Award 30 Years | 30 Books Giveaway!

This year is the 30th anniversary of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The University of Georgia Press publishes the winning collections each year. All of the collections are currently in print and most are available in either paperback or ebook editions.

The award was established to encourage gifted young writers by bringing their work to the attention of readers and reviewers.

Sign up for our newsletter by September 1st to enter the drawing.*
Sign up here.

Prize includes:
- 30 titles from the acclaimed short fiction series
- Our great new UGA Press canvas tote

*One entry per person, please. Deadline to enter is September 1, 2013 at 11:59pm EDT.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 30

Sydney Dupre on the conclusion of the "30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award"

65 winners, 63 original books, 53 paperback editions, 43 ebooks, two series editors, numerous judges, thousands of submissions, uncountable readings and panels and author events, 4 anthologies, and 30 years later, we find ourselves at the close of the "30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award." Thanks for joining us everyday to re-visit these short story collections, old and new. Thank you, too, to all of you who have participated and will continue to participate in honoring this milestone.

We kicked off our anniversary celebrations at this year's AWP annual meeting in Boston in early March. E. J. Levy (LOVE, IN THEORY), Jessica Treadway (PLEASE COME BACK TO ME), Hugh Sheehy (THE INVISIBLES), Lori Ostlund (THE BIGNESS OF THE WORLD), and Amina Gautier (AT-RISK), awed listeners at a panel, which was followed by a Q&A with series editor Nancy Zafris. (Shout out to E. J. Levy for organizing a great event!) Several previous winners were in the audience as well as aspiring short fiction writers. Love for the FOC award lives on!

Next we raised our glasses at the UGA Press booth while panelists signed books. Being a first time
AWP-er and relatively new to the Flannery O'Connor Award, I was especially pleased to meet so many award winners and FOC award fans. It's a welcoming and supportive community of people.

If you are an Athens local, feel free to drop by the Press's open house on April 18th from 2:00-6:00pm to see the Flannery O'Connor series books on display. Also, stay tuned for Flannery O'Connor Award readings across the country in the months to come.

For more on the 30th anniversary, please visit the Flannery O'Connor Award 30th anniversary page.

The 2013 contest is now accepting submissions at https://georgiapress.submittable.com/submit.


Sydney Dupre is assistant to the director and development coordinator at the University of Georgia Press. She also coordinates the annual Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction competition.

30 days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 29

Catherine Brady on Molly Giles' ROUGH TRANSLATIONS

The stories in Rough Translations are delicate, wry investigations of what it means to struggle for personhood—how that performative act sometimes mistranslates the essential fiber of someone’s being, sometimes wildly affirms it, and sometimes teeters, hopefully or precariously, between these two possibilities. In “Peril,” these concerns are vividly set forth as Joan, a character we’ve seen in two earlier stories, rescues a stray cat, which triggers an excruciatingly heightened awareness that “disaster… is always out there,” threatening to topple her into despair over the fragility of her seemingly settled life. In the opening story, “Old Souls,” a determinedly anti-romantic narrator skewers her mystically inclined family, only to be haunted by the voices of the dead in the night, demanding to know “Who’s there?”: Who are you, then, if you define yourself by a hollow defiance? In “A Jar of Emeralds,” a woman makes a match with a man who seems to want to “see the someone” in her, and as the two of them flounder at this essential act of love, her husband wakes up one night to exclaim, “I feel like a jar of emeralds!” An anomaly, utterly untranslatable, as one person can be to another, and yet it tantalizingly encapsulates the truth of their impasse.

Re-reading these stories, I was captivated by their lightness, which seems paradoxical when you consider that most of them are situated at the lip of the existential abyss. That sense of lightness owes a great deal to Giles’s gift for storytelling, her ability to generate cumulative complexity from the simple materials of straight-ahead narrative. The stories are structured to snare the reader immediately in anticipation of literal outcome, whether it’s the possibility that in watching her husband bargain for a used piano, a wife will grapple with or deny the mounting evidence of his untrustworthiness, or the anticipation that antipathy-at-first-sight will transform into some genuine connection between a woman and a man who meet in a bar and then get mugged.

Giles’s stories startle you first and persuade you second. Her often anthologized story, “Pie Dance,” illustrates just how artfully she welds dissonant literal circumstances to their potent implications. Here are the story’s opening lines: “I don’t know what to do about my husband’s new wife. She won’t come in.” These sentences crackle with compressed tension, presenting us with a dramatic discrepancy between what we can assume old wives feel about the new and the seeming proffer of hospitality and intimacy. We quickly learn that the new wife, Pauline, has been making a habit of coming to the old wife’s house, and “just dropping by” to chat on the porch is only the first of the lies that bind them together. We’re compelled by the story first because of the unexpected reversal of the usual power dynamic between old (discarded) and new (younger) wife and then because we witness the unexpected emotional intimacy generated by these lies. What does that new wife want here, anyway? And what should we make of the irony that a man whom neither woman can trust provides the literal connection between them? The old wife, “beginning to realize that there isn’t much to love in this world,” struggles not to betray to Pauline her passionate feelings for her dog and disguises as maternal concern a possibly vengeful satisfaction at whatever has driven Pauline to her door. Pauline, isn’t, in fact, allowed in: she stays on the porch the whole time, where the narrator deploys the standard feminine camouflage of housewife-and-mother to keep Pauline in her miserable place. When her three daughters come home from blackberry picking, smeared with juice, they rush to embrace Pauline, and their instinctive, unclouded affection presages the toppling of the narrator’s defenses. As Pauline leaves, she looks at the house, and then the narrator turns to look too: only a curtain fluttering at an upstairs window. Behind which their shared man, Konrad, is hiding, waiting for Pauline to leave so he can make his own escape. What’s perfect about this kind of storytelling is how the plot throws off the shadows of the whole story for us to imagine rather than illuminating in detail what lurks there: a dissatisfied Konrad has been showing up for reliable sex with his old wife, a fact Pauline suspects but cannot prove, and he’s just as quick to abandon his old wife this time as he has been in the past. As he rushes to dress and go, his ex-wife tells him, “it seems I’ve grown morals.”

These are stories written in an era—the mid-eighties—when women were struggling to live out newly won freedom from oppressive conventions, but they are in no way dated, because through a feminist lens, they pursue the truth of our conflicted understanding of ourselves in relation to others. Throughout many of these stories, music and other art forms constitute a recurring refrain—a hopeful one. However the characters struggle in these stories, there’s always the chance of some genuinely truthful and essential self-expression, some connection that, even if tenuous, affirms the importance of their striving, the value of fully opening one’s eyes in the ephemeral present moment.




Catherine Brady is the author of CURLED IN THE BED OF LOVE (2003), as well as three story collections. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2004 and numerous journals and anthologies. She is also the author of a biography of a Nobel laureate, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA, and has a forthcoming book on the craft of fiction.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 28

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction 2013 competition is now accepting submissions!

Dates for submission: Manuscripts may be submitted between 9:00 a.m. on April 1 and 5:00 p.m. on May 31. Winners will be announced by late summer.

We only accept electronic submissions.

Our online submissions manager is available here: georgiapress.submishmash.com/submit

Tech support for using the submissions manager is available at 1-406-480-6274. The $25 entry fee can be paid online via credit card or PayPal.

This year's judges are Lee K. Abbott, Ted Obourn, Jessica Treadway, Lori White, and Dawna Kemper.

Selection process: Each of the four contest judges reads approximately one-fourth of the manuscripts submitted to the competition, with a fifth judge available if needed based on the total number of submissions. Judges select seven to ten finalists each; the pool of finalist manuscripts is read by series editor Nancy Zafris, who makes the final selection of two winning manuscripts and a runner-up. Authors of winning manuscripts receive a cash award of $1,000, and their collections are subsequently published by the University of Georgia Press under a standard book contract. Winners have ten days to accept the award and ten days to sign the contract once it is received.

Eligibility: The competition is open to writers in English, whether published or unpublished. Previous winners of this award are not eligible to win again. Writers must be residents of North America.

Manuscript Guidelines

1. Manuscripts should be 40,000-75,000 words in length.
2. The award recognizes outstanding collections of short fiction. Collections may include long stories or novellas (est. length of a novella is 50-150 pages). However, novels or single novellas will not be considered.
3. Please be sure manuscript pages are numbered.
4. Please include a table of contents.
5. Please use a standard, easy-to-read font such as Times New Roman in twelve-point size.
6. Stories included in the submission may have appeared previously in magazines or anthologies but may not have been previously published in a book-length collection of the author’s own work.
7. Authors may submit more than one manuscript to the competition for consideration as long as no material is duplicated between submissions. Each submission will require a separate entry fee.
8. Manuscripts under consideration for this competition may be submitted elsewhere at the same time. Please withdraw your manuscript if it is accepted by another publisher and should no longer be considered for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award competition. Withdrawal can be completed via the submissions manager website. Entry fees are not refundable.

Blind review: The intent of this contest is that manuscripts will be considered on the merits of the fiction and that judges will not be aware of the names or publication records of the authors.

1. Please do not include your name on the pages of the manuscript—only in the form boxes of the electronic submission manager. The first page of the manuscript should include the title of the collection only.
2. Please do not include a list of acknowledgments crediting where stories have been published.
3. Judges who recognize work will recuse themselves, and the submission will be reassigned to a different judge.

Confirmation of receipt and notification: You should receive an e-mail confirmation immediately after submission. An announcement of winners will be sent to all entrants via e-mail by late summer.
If you have any questions or concerns other than technical issues with the submissions manager, please contact us via e-mail at press@ugapress.uga.edu. The press will not accept phone calls regarding the Flannery O’Connor Award.

Statement of Integrity: The University of Georgia is thoroughly committed to academic integrity in all of its endeavors, and the University of Georgia Press adheres to all University of Georgia policies and procedures. To help ensure the integrity of the competition, manuscripts are judged through a blind review process. Judges in the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction competition are instructed to avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 27

E.J. Levy on Nancy Zafris' THE PEOPLE I KNOW

Good short stories, I’ve always believed, draw you into their worlds, but great stories convince you that their characters are out there, living their lives beyond the borders of the page. Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” is great by such a measure, as is Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” so, I would say, is Amy Hempel’s “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” George Saunders’ “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” and the title story from Nancy Zafris’ hilarious and heartbreaking collection, The People I Know.

Each of these stories haunts me as if I had lived among its characters and leaves me with the sense that they are living still, somewhere out there, making their way through the world as we are. Unlike stories that I study for their craft or to steal moves, I read and reread Zafris’ collection because the stories leave me amazed by human character, baffled by how love is forged of such flimsy material as we.

In Zafris’ magnificent title story, “The People I Know,” a daughter in her senior year of high school and her mother battle with their alcoholic roommate, as the daughter battles for a foothold in her mother’s affections and the world. There is a best friend, a Heimlich maneuver, a hypochondriac, a poolside encounter, a heroic restaurant rescue, but it’s not what happens that matters so much as the sensibility it is refracted through. The daughter is indelible in a way I cannot take apart, in the way that people I love are. The things she thinks and experiences linger in my mind and return to me like memory:

“In my heart I don’t believe that he ever existed, biological necessity to the contrary. Nevertheless, references to my father always intrigue me. Because I have never seen him, not even in photographs, I dream of him in my own version of Braille—odors and shadows, and sounds (usually of a pan being thrown). There’s never a face, though often the camera follows a pair of feet. Sometimes there are several pairs of feet. They follow behind me like visible footsteps of invisible men.”

These stories range broadly in subject and setting—from a Japanese businessman pursuing a fleeting affair in Tokyo to an American metal shredder discovering riches in the trunk of a corpse-reeking car, from a mother who loses her eldest son to drowning to the widower of an alcoholic wife who finds consolation in an AA meeting.

What unites these seemingly disparate fictions is their concern for what’s missing: these are stories haunted by absence (missing corpses, missing family members; missing feelings). The Japanese businessman is mystified by his demotion to a remote island town, the coldness of his marriage, the disappearance of his childhood friend—unsure how he has lost what mattered most. The successful lawyer narrator of the final story seems mystified by her inability to feel more fiercely, as her chaotic older sister does. “Could I sense already that my future contained a procession of humble pleasures which would give more joy to others than to me…that the more alarming passions would not be mine?”

Bleak and beautiful, these stories are the best kind of funny—rising above sad; here, wit comes of close observation until heartbreak gives rise to something else, as when the protagonist of “Cosmetic Surgery” observes: “Men who liked themselves, she noticed, tended to keep their hands in their pockets, jangling their change as if their pennies were bonus testicles.” Or “Even so young, she was full of untimely obituaries. She watched each year contribute to a growing casualty list. Death of her face. Death of pleasure from being slightly ugly. Death of social embarrassment. Death of gustatory excitement. Great passions of a year ago lacked so much as the tingle of taste you get from licking a postage stamp.”

These are terrifically smart stories about which I find it hard to be smart, because to do so would reduce them, make them smaller than they are. The highest compliment I can offer. All I can really say about The People I Know is, Read It. These are people you want to know, too.

E. J. Levy is the author of LOVE, IN THEORY (2012), which is a finalist for the Edmund White Award and the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Orion, the New York Times, and Best American Essays, among other places.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 26

Peggy Des Jardines on the influence of Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor and I are on a first name basis. Having lived in Milledgeville for four years to attend Georgia College and State University before moving to Athens, I, like everyone else who has lived in Milledgeville, feel that I have a certain claim over her, as if she were a good friend of mine who everyone else only thought they knew. Just this morning I walked into the offices of the UGA Press, saw a dish of pins with peacocks on them, and assumed they were in celebration of the Flannery O’Connor award. I picked one up and thought, “Yeah right, UGA, you WISH you were GCSU.”

That may seem like a ridiculous thing to think, but when it comes to Flannery, it truly is not. Flannery O’Connor Studies is one of GC’s Programs of Distinctions, and our library boasts an extensive collection of her correspondence, original manuscripts, and her personal library, as well as many of the prints and comics she created while in school. The Flannery-centric single author class with Bruce Gentry holds the reputation of one of the most challenging and rewarding literature classes offered at GC. Students regularly reap the benefits of well-established visiting scholars, authors and poets who admit they were at least partially drawn to Milledgeville because of Flannery’s mystery and allure. Milledgevillians and GC students read and talk so much Flannery that we feel we have the right to poke fun at her every once in a while. We came to know our school as “Flannery O’College” instead of Georgia College. She is at once our big and little sister.

When I served as editor of The Peacock’s Feet, Georgia College’s literary journal whose name is obviously in honor of Flannery’s favorite bird, she was something like our badass grandmother who liked to say inappropriate things at a formal dinner table. When things went wrong, we blamed her for playing tricks on us. We advertised for poetry readings by drawing her head on the body of a peacock monster all over the campus sidewalks. We put her face on Uncle Sam’s body, saying, “Flan Wants YOU… to submit to the Peacock’s Feet.” We put her face on bags and shirts and constantly asked ourselves, “What would Flan do?” whether we were rationalizing something devious or trying to live up to her name.

I once took a class of middle-schoolers to Andalusia, Flannery’s home, where they resented me for expecting them to write about nature, and I was taken there by a poet that I resented for expecting me to write in iambic pentameter. I was also, though, distracted by the thought that she might actually be a superhero, and when she was selected by Claudia Rankine to win the 2010 Kore Press First Book Award, she served as another reminder, alongside Flannery, that big things do happen to people in small places.

Flannery gives a sense of legitimacy to the literaries of a town that most outsiders (undeservedly) pity you for having to live in, and I constantly took comfort in knowing I wasn’t alone in the cynicism that comes with studying the arts in a small conservative town in the south. She’s our mascot. She’s our security blanket.

Just like Milledgeville would not be the same without Flannery, I don’t think Flannery would’ve been the same without Milledgeville. Reading her there is eerie—you can feel her and her characters everywhere. If you are a person who feels ghosts, you feel a lot of them in Milledgeville. Its history, its solitude, the antebellum architecture and the mental hospital, all of the graveyards and all of the dark corners, all the abandoned and tottering buildings that might collapse if you forget to hold your breath next to them—all of this adds up to a mystifying sense of entrapment and freedom at once. Perhaps that mystery is what allowed Flannery’s writing life to flourish there.


Peggy Des Jardines is a marketing intern at the University of Georgia Press. She graduated from Georgia College and State University in December 2012 with a BA in English/Creative Writing and a BA in Studio Art.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 25

Jackie Gorman on Mary Clyde's SURVIVAL RATES

We are all survivors of some sort or another. That is a given. And there are as many types of survivors as there are types of events that tried and failed to destroy us, private wars with illness, grief, betrayal and loss. In Mary Clyde's superbly crafted collection of nine stories, Survival Rates, winner of the 1999 Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction, she uses the starkly beautiful desert landscape to sharpen the focus of upon this very cactus-like quality of resilience in the harshest of circumstances. She has equal compassion for both the lost and the found in these stories, observing that the difference between those who survive and those who don't may be one of the great mysteries of life and death.

In her first story, "Howard Johnson's House", the wealthy plastic surgeon takes inventory of his prized possession, this over-developed, overly decorated former home of the son of the hospitality mogul:

"Cecil's giving a tour. He's shown the saltwater fish aquarium, with its pulsing sea anemone and fluorescent pink starfish. Then the kitchen where the fireplace is large enough to roast a boar, according to a Southwest Home article. In the living room, Cecil motions toward the view, the cactus-studded mountains with their sudden bizarre rock formations. He feels daring living here, where the landscape doesn’t want to be inhabited and seems to wait patiently for him - for all of them - to go."

I read Survival Rates a decade ago, after hearing Clyde read, "in one sitting" as the saying goes, but sitting straight up in my chair and hardly blinking. And then, I read the collection again, right after attending a recent AWP session, where Alice Hoffman observed that she did not necessarily always follow the writers mantra "Write what you know" but changed it to "Write what you feel."

And my immediate thought was that Mary Clyde brilliantly ups the ante in her book. She writes exactly what her characters know and feel, but even more importantly, what they finally come to understand. In the aftermath of some sort of personal disaster, her characters painstakingly search for and eventually find a way to fit that jagged piece of despair into the rest of their lives, a fragile peace with a tragic past. It is remarkable to me that Clyde is able to accomplish this feat in each and every story.

When writer friends have found out that I was honored to be a co-winner of the Flannery O'Connor award, they tell me that they also have a collection of stories, as well. When I ask what makes it a collection, they may shrug and say that they are the best stories they have written put together in one file and sent to various contests. One thing I have learned about this award is that there must be as much attention to the structure of the collection as to the structure of each story itself. There needs to be more intensity of purpose holding them together than the writer's name. It may be a distinct yet consistent emotional tone, a pervasive landscape, or an underlying moral question that is explored, but it has to be clear to the reader that there is a careful architectural plan here that holds up until the end. For me, I often see the stories begin in darkness and literally tread forward to lighter, easier terrain.

Clyde's nine stories do exactly that, with the first story of an older man dealing with his mother's death from cancer, stories about teenagers dealing with stomach cancer, adults fighting crippling depression and disintegrating marriages, children losing parents and the parents losing children, and finally to the last one, "Jumpers" completing the cycle of life. A middle-aged woman is haunted by witnessing the death of a sixth grade friend and her favorite teacher on a church camp outing, and yet finds new comfort in the other survivor's memories at a high school reunion, thirty years later. The narrator remembers jumping from the ski lift that threw others off fatally, and graces herself with this tiny, perfect moment of revelation.

"Action won't always save you but it at least allows you to imagine you can be saved. Here is the difference. They fell to their deaths. We jumped to life."

Nine months to create a human life, and nine stories to deliver the miracle of the writing and reading life, the gift of human perspective. My story collection, The Viewing Room, shines a close-up camera upon shell-shocked survivors who are viewing the bodies of loved ones freshly dead. In Survival Rates, Mary Clyde takes that same scenario and expands it into a grander, panoramic shot, giving us the best view of all, the long view of life, that is gratifying beyond words.


Jackie Gorman is the author of the forthcoming THE VIEWING ROOM (2013). She is currently a mental health activist, training volunteers to speak to families whose loved ones are hospitalized in psychiatric centers and crisis centers. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and published a memoir about her family, The Seeing Glass, fifteen years ago. She has a law degree from UCLA School of Law and an MFA in Fiction from Spalding University in Louisville.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 24

E.J. Levy on Ha Jin's UNDER THE RED FLAG

Ha Jin was a poet with two collections of poetry already published when he won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction, but the 12 short stories collected in his prize-winning book, Under the Red Flag (1997), have always put me more in mind of a painter’s work. A Chinese Chagall, to be exact, conjuring a mythic village life in which mix animals and humans, celebration and sorrow, in which both people and beasts seem capable of fantastic and terrible feats.

The stories’ names often have the mystery and descriptive force of painting titles: “Winds and Clouds over a Funeral,” “In Broad Daylight,” or “Again the Spring Breeze Blew.” But the painterly quality of these stories comes from the fact that almost all are distilled to essential images and marvelously visual, as when the cremation of a grandmother is described thus: “…the flames grew lower and lower as the whirring in the furnace stopped. By and by, an empty chamber could be seen through the small hole. A worker opened the furnace, in which remained a layer of ashes that looked like broken clamshells.”

Although it has been 15 years since the collection was published, these stories feel entirely fresh, like urgent news; they remain captivating and timeless, in part because of their folkloric cast. One of the pleasures of reading Jin’s collection is the glimpse it seems to offer of post-Revolution village life. Although Jin seems less documentarian than alchemist, mixing details of village life--bride prices, gang rapes, pig breeding, and the pleasures of sorghum wine and stewed hairtail, jellied bean curd and fresh jellyfish, mourning rituals, and picture-books rented from a bookstand at a village fair—with the stark unsentimental storytelling of Grimm’s fairytales.

Here post-Revolution village life is revealed in tales both grisly and mythic: In the first story, “In Broad Daylight,” two village boys witness a local beauty put on trial for seducing men away from their wives, but the trial reveals the community’s character as much as the defendant’s; through the Red Guards’ interrogation, we learn that the accused seductress has been raped and remains beloved by her cuckolded husband, who is the trial’s true victim; in ”Sovereignty,” a neighbor asks for help breeding his sow, only to inadvertently provoke a competition between his neighbors’ boars—one domestic, one foreign--which ultimately damages them all; in “Man to Be,” a young soldier engaged to the town’s most eligible young woman loses his fiancé and his prospects when he refuses to join in a gang rape, which reveals him (in his neighbors’ eyes) not as honorable but weak. Jin stories reveal both the tenderness and cruelty that distinguish village life, perhaps all rural life, where one is more keenly aware of the fact that survival is born of slaughter. At the same time, Jin’s villages are (Flag Village, Horse Village) are wonderfully particular.

In contrast to the didactic cast of many folktales, Jin’s operate outside easy morality; many of his stories conclude with a deadpan abruptness that adds—rather than detracts—from their power. These sudden endings seem an apt aesthetic given the Chinese history he lived through as a young soldier, reminding us that difficulty is rarely redemptive, that suffering does not necessarily instruct or ennoble, that change (whether political or personal) can be as sudden and pointless as death.

Ultimately, Jin’s emphasis on village traditions bespeaks the vitality of folk culture, despite the impress of political ideology. His stories attest to the endurance of those most human faults and virtues—love and jealousy, cruelty and class difference, drunkenness and rape, tenderness and sorrow—in spite of revolutionary change, regardless of the color of the flag overhead.

E. J. Levy is the author of LOVE, IN THEORY (2012), which is a finalist for the Edmund White Award and the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Orion, the New York Times, and Best American Essays, among other places.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 23

Frank Soos on David Crouse's COPY CATS

I read for different reasons. I read for well-made sentences, for fully imagined characters, for events that push characters into revelation or discovery. But I reread for stories that explain the world to me, that reveal possible ways I might fit into the world. And the stories that compel me the most are the ones that force me to see elements of myself that I'd rather not know are there.

The stories in David Crouse's Copy Cats work that way. These are fearful stories, stories about people, mostly men, who've run off the rails in one way or another. These are not evil, vicious people, rather they are delusional, inept, representative of what any of us might become when our ordinary lives are upended and we don't know what to do next.

Here's a middle-aged father in "Morte Infinita." Maybe his wife has run off with a dark handsome stranger, Stephano, or maybe she has simply run off to her sister's house because his neurosis is just too hard to take. He seems incapable of loving his wife; actually he seems incapable of loving himself which makes it hard to love anybody else, even his thirteen-year-old daughter who finally begins to understand him better than he can understand himself. The two of them go trick-or-treating as father-daughter vampires, but his costume with its white Converse All-Stars is lame, and his gestures more resemble Groucho Marx than Bela Lugosi. His final gesture, to throw a rock through his neighbor's picture window won't solve his Kiekegaardian dilemma, "To be sick to death is not to be able to die," but it is at least an action, an ugly step toward some possible meaningful action.

Kierkegaard also recognized the cure for despair was in the recognition of its symptoms. In this regard, Jonathan, the central character in "Click" is farther along. A scholarship student at a privileged school, he has fallen into a romance with Margaret, child of a successful businessman. What she has seen in him when they were students seems to have been a spark of rebellion, of creativity. Jonathan would be an art photographer, though it is hard to know whether this is a true ambition or one that Margaret has wished on him. They are living together and soon to be married despite the fact that Jonathan has lost his job—he's been fired, actually, for habitually skipping work. In his idle time, he's connected with a drug-addled woman, maybe a prostitute and a woman more sexy, vulnerable and dangerous in Jonathan's mind than she may really be. Through his photographs, he would bring her tortured qualities to the surface. But these qualities don't show up in the pictures Jonathan takes. He takes fewer pictures with each visit.

Jonathan knows he is a fraud, living a fraudulent existence. He sees the loafers outside his model's window as kindred spirits. They aren't going anywhere and neither is he. The question he cannot resolve is what to do about it. The men in "Code" and "Retreat" face similar problems. They have failed, are failing, but they don't work to solve their problems, but find short cuts for escaping them.

If there is a character who makes some effort to solve his problems it is Tom in "Swimming in the Dark." His high school hero older brother has drowned swimming in the middle of a lake, a metaphor for the family's confusion. But Tom's mother, needy and weak and hoping for a man who can save her, keeps trying to make a life for herself. Her latest loser, Harris Fencer, drives an ice cream vending truck. Tom is a passive observer of his mother's struggles to the point that he doesn't intervene when she gets in a tussle over a lamp. But he does listen and consider. And he does grow up and away from his mother and older sister and their small town. In his telling of this story, Tom begins to grow into a more thoughtful person, somebody able to see the limits of his younger self. He's been damaged by what he's experienced as a kid, but he's not ruined. He, of all the characters in Copy Cats seems to have made the best of his tumultuous circumstance.

I think of myself and most of the people I know who have decent credit ratings, whose checks don't bounce, whose lives mostly navigate between the ditches, and I wonder how much of this is just a matter of luck. A little mistake here, another there, a stumble, or an unexpected reversal and the life of a character in Copy Cats is waiting to unspool. So I reread these stories and when I don't reread them, I think of them often, troubling, cautionary tales. These people could be me; they could be any of us.

 


Frank Soos is author of UNIFIED FIELD THEORY (1998). He is also professor emeritus of English at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and author of the essay collection Bamboo Fly Rod Suite.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 22

Hayley Esther on E. J. Levy's LOVE, IN THEORY

I know the author of Love, In Theory as Professor Levy, the slightly intimidating, blazer-and-jeans wearing woman who stood confidently at the front of our classroom in Middlebush and told us that we would be writing essays that semester, and that "essay" meant, quite literally, just to try.

It was my junior year in college at the University of Missouri-Columbia and I decided to be gutsy and take Levy's creative writing class, my first in my three years as an English major. It was called "History of the Personal Essay," and we began with Montaigne and ended with David Foster Wallace, reading theory and writing our own pieces as we went along.

To put it mildly, it was a fabulous class. It was the kind of rare classroom experience that shakes you out of your comfort zone but simultaneously makes you more comfortable with yourself, and by extension, with your writing. Good or bad, Levy found a way to address our wide range of ability levels, whether we were journalism students, creative writing students, or completely inexperienced writers like myself. She told us to look at the essayists we were reading and apply aspects of their work to our own essays: the creativity of Eula Biss, the lyricism of Lia Purpura, the emotion of Cheryl Strayed.

Although Levy's essays and fiction deserve to be read alongside these "greats," she never gave us any of her work during our class, and I never sought it out until Love, In Theory was serendipitously placed in front of me when I came to work at the University of Georgia Press. I took home a copy on my first day and found Levy's stories to be exactly what I expected: detailed, precise, intelligent, and overflowing with the kind of wit and insight that made me want to underline every other sentence on the page.

For instance, the opening line of "Theory of Enlightenment": "Ever since her lover left her for an ashram in the Catskills, Renee Kirschbaum has been picking fights with strangers." This blunt, detail-packed sentence hooked me. And, throughout the story, Renee never disappoints. Her character constantly delivers sarcastic one-liners that made me want to laugh and cry. The philosophical protagonist of "My Life in Theory" created a similar response in me with her abundance of analytical and intellectual tendencies and observations. The realness of these characters and the carefulness with which Levy constructs them keeps me reaching for her collection again and again.

While I am no critic, and though I may be slightly biased, I agree with the countless number of positive reviews of Love, In Theory. Levy's stories are remarkable, and they are highly deserving of the Flannery O'Connor distinction. Levy does everything right—details, characters, language, form—while still managing to surprise and enlighten the reader. In essence, Levy accomplishes everything that she taught us to look for and pushed us to try in our personal essay class.


Hayley Esther is currently a marketing intern at the University of Georgia Press and a graduate student at the University of Georgia. She will graduate in May 2014 with a Master of Arts in English.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 21

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction attracts brilliant writers from all over the United States. To illustrate the diversity of the award-winning group of writers, we compiled the authors' locations and their story settings into a comprehensive Google map available via the link below.

These authors truly come from all over the place. On the Google map, some of the authors show up in clusters in California or New York or Arizona, while others are only visible in a zoomed-out screen, as they currently live in countries as far away as Mexico and Japan.

The authors' constructed settings are as varied as their home bases. In many collections the stories all revolve around a specific location--the fictional town of Windfall, Pennsylvania in EYESORES and a close-up view of Brooklyn in AT-RISK. In others, the characters and individual stories jump from place to place--from Jerusalem to Manhattan in THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT and in places as different as Morocco and Minnesota in a collection with a title that says it all, THE BIGNESS OF THE WORLD.

The Google map of Flannery O'Connor winners and their story settings offers a visual representation of the wide-ranging backgrounds of this group of sixty talented writers. Click on the link below to see for yourself just how spread out the Flannery O'Connor Award winners really are.



View Celebrating Thirty Years of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in a larger map

The above map shows where the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning authors live (blue pins) and--for those collections in which place is an especially strong element--where their stories are set (red pins).

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 20

As part of the 30th anniversary for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, we are introducing two e-book only anthologies.

STORIES FROM THE FLANNERY O'CONNOR AWARD: A 30th ANNIVERSARY ANTHOLOGY: THE RECENT YEARS is edited by Nancy Zafris and includes selections from volumes published in the past fifteen years (1998-2012). Contributing authors include Amina Gautier, Andrew Porter, Anne Panning, Barbara Sutton, Bill Roorbach, Catherine Brady, Dana Johnson, Darrell Spencer, David Crouse, E. J. Levy, Ed Allen, Eric Shade, Frank Soos, Gary Finke, Geoffrey Becker, Gina Ochsner, Greg Downs, Hester Kaplan, Hugh Sheehy, Jessica Treadway, Kellie Wells, Linda LeGarde Grover, Lori Ostlund, Margot Singer, Mary Clyde, Melinda Moustakis, Peter LaSalle, Peter Selgin, Randy F. Nelson, Robert Anderson

STORIES FROM THE FLANNERY O'CONNOR AWARD: A 30th ANNIVERSARY ANTHOLOGY: THE EARLY YEARS is edited by Charles East and covers the first fifteen years (1983-1997). Contributing authors include Alfred DePew, Alyce Miller, Andy Plattner, Antonya Nelson, C. M. Mayo, Carol Lee Lorenzo, Carole L. Glickfeld, Christopher McIlroy, Daniel Curley, David Walton, Debra Monroe, Dennis Hathaway, Dianne Nelson Oberhansly, François Camoin, Gail Galloway Adams, Ha Jin, Harvey Grossinger, Leigh Allison Wilson, Mary Hood, Melissa Pritchard, Molly Giles, Nancy Zafris, Paul Rawlins, Peter Meinke, Philip F. Daver, Rita Ciresi, Robert H. Abel, Salvatore La Puma, Sandra Thompson, Susan Neville, T. M. McNally, Tony Ardizzone, Wendy Brenner

Both e-books are available from Amazon for the Kindle and Barnes and Noble for the Nook.

For THE RECENT YEARS:
Download the Kindle version here.
Download the Nook version here.

For THE EARLY YEARS:
Download the Kindle version here.
Download the Nook version here.