Archive for the ‘Games, Contests, & Diversions’ Category

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Game of the Month: Guidance for Guidelines

Monday, October 10th, 2011

We’re so excited about our new online submissions system that we can’t stop celebrating. Not with alcohol—that’s not our style—but with lots and lots of sugar. We’ve consumed rafts of Laffy Taffy, Bottle Caps, and those hard candies that resemble (sort of) strawberries, and we’ve taken to singing the Willy Wonka soundtrack and miming exaggerated falls into a turbulent chocolate river.

Lisa Ampleman has built a small popsicle-stick structure in one corner of the office that she refers to as her Shrine to Skittles, and Becky Adnot-Haynes is threatening to order a gross of those fluffy orange fake peanuts. Obviously a big distraction is in order so that we are not drawn still deeper into the cavity-filled maw of the god of sucrose. To bring us back from the brink, we have devised a new Game of the Month! Due to the new online submission system, we updated our guidelines, and we want to hear YOUR suggestions for appropriate submission guidelines for a lit mag. What do you think we should be asking for? “Desperately seeking epic poems about sea crustaceans”? “Only your best short-shorts about girls in short-shorts”? “Please affix three paper clips on each side of your manuscript to prevent unseemly paper flappage”?

The composer of the best guidelines submitted by next Monday, October 17, will receive a Cincinnati Review–branded thermos or slingpack (which we’ll send through the U.S. Postal Service and not through the inter-webs). To enter, simply post your comments on the blog by clicking the post title above. Happy submitting!

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Posted in Games, Games, Contests, & Diversions, Uncategorized |

The Blue Pencil Prize

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

Issue 8.1 has officially “dropped.” And now that it’s in, it’s out (soon). Which means another five lucky winners will be eligible for the “elite” Blue Pencil Prize! What is this Blue Pencil Prize? It’s a chance for you to win your choice of a free issue, a free thermos, or a free slingpack—all emblazoned with CR’s oh-so-tasteful logo. So, for you fans of heated beverages, sensibly-sized nylon bags, and incredible writing, this contest is for you! All you have to do is find a legitimate typo (subject to editorial review) in issue 8.1, and we’ll post the results on our blog. The first five to respond will have their choice of free issue, thermos, or slingpack (as well as, of course, a blue Col-Erase pencil, the old-timey editor’s tool of choice).

Just leave your comments on the blog by clicking on the post title above. We get a lot of spam, so you’ll have to wait for your comment to be approved.

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Posted in Games, Contests, & Diversions |

Game of the Month: Late Entry

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Yesterday, we at CR received a cover letter simply titled “cover letter.” Aside from this single sheet, there was nothing else in the envelope. The letter was not signed, nor was there a return address. After a puzzled moment, we realized it was a late, and brilliant, entry in our cover letter contest (that’s what we’re hoping anyway; if not, we’ve seriously misjudged the anonymous submitter). It was a shinning buoy in the dense, frozen sea that is our lives as we await the shipment (pun, get it?) of the summer issue. To view the epistle as it was mailed to us, click here. We’ve also reproduced in this post:

Esteemed Interns, Clerks, and Editors,

Whatever nights of discomfort and days of distress you may have endured up to this point can now, thankfully and mercifully, be placed firmly in your past.

You have an opening and I, my fine women and men of respectable emplacement, am your person. It would be belligerent, violent even, of me to claim to contain within myself a capability of adhering to your lofty standards, unless I was so overwhelmingly confident of my steadfast commitment to said standards that I would rather dash my young brains out on a table corner, like a ship on the rocks, than disappoint your potential trust in me, this potential trust beginning today, this morning, this minute, on this paper of this letter.

Let me speak like mountain water. I am she. I am what you seek. If you need sharpness, I will stab. If you need dead men, I am a murderer. If you need life, I am a midwife. If you need saving, I am you know who.

If you wish to see my references, the place to start is in your mother’s handshake. A trustworthy impression of my character has been made across the clouds in your hometown.

Let us be frank and serious. You know it’s me.

In Sincerity,

Though the author who penned the above missive chose to remain anonymous, we’re almost certain she looks like one of the following people:

Edith Sitwell

Edith Sitwell

Queen Elizabeth the 1st

Coco Chanel

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Posted in Games, Contests, & Diversions, Uncategorized |

Game of the Month: Cover Letters

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Though we read cover letters with interest here at CR, they don’t really play a part in our decision-making process. Cover letters are kind of like internal organs. You don’t think too much about them unless they’re bloated or causing you pain. Sometimes we’ll receive cover letters in which authors try to sell us on a submission or explain the social import of their work (“My wrenching tale of an agave-harvesting desert hermit who nurses a mistrustful, snake-bitten coyote interrogates the conflicts and complications arising in the post-capitalist global marketplace”), or they’ll claim their work will change our lives (in the same manner the inventors of  The Clapper© promised to change our lives but could never live up to the impossible dreams their infomercials engendered in our hopeful, longing bosoms). Of course, we would never dismiss a submission based on a silly cover letter, but we will admit, sometimes these hyperbolic efforts do bring us joy—especially the ones that come with photos and illustrations. In honor of the deep-down happiness a truly goofy cover letter provides, we invite you draft for us your most bombastic attempts at the genre. Make us impossible promises. Tell us it was your fiction, and not Jonas Salk, that rid America of Polio. Explain why your poems about losing your virginity in an Applebee’s restroom demonstrates the decadence and cultural decay of Western civilization better than The Wasteland.

Send us your imaginary cover letters, and we’ll award logo–emblazoned thermoses or slingpacks to our winners next week. To enter, simply post your comments on the blog by clicking the post title above. (Due to the volume of spam we receive, we have to approve each comment individually, so bear with us as we upload your entry.)

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Posted in Games, Games, Contests, & Diversions, Uncategorized |

Game of the Month Winner: Chelsie Bryant

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Thanks to those who played our 1961 National Book Award mix-and-match game! Three people—Jodi Hader, Chelsie Bryant, and Laura S.—correctly matched each excerpt with its author. When we put their names into the randomizer, it chose Chelsie as the winner, so she will have her pick of prizes (thermos, slingpack, or issue). Everyone else gets a free back issue of his/her choice. Congratulations, all!

PS—PARTICIPANTS (whether you guessed correctly or not), please email your choice of issue and mailing address to editors@cincinnatireview.com.

Posted in Games, Contests, & Diversions |

Game of the Month

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

For this month’s contest, we’re excited to present a matching game for our National Book Award feature. As you may have read, our upcoming issue will contain a reassessment of the 1961 fiction prize. Contemporary authors Leah Stewart, Alexander Chee, Keith Lee Morris, John McNally, and Justin Tussing serve as the judges, documenting in essay form their process of narrowing the NBA contenders to a shortlist of five, then picking a new winner. You’ll want to check out the new issue to see which novel they selected as their number one, but in the meantime we offer this bit of trivia to test your knowledge of classic American fiction.

The five finalists are listed below, along with an excerpt from each work. Anyone willing to try his/her hand at matching the excerpts with the authors/titles will receive a free back issue (your choice). For those who answer correctly, we’ll pick one of you at random (Seriously! We found a randomizer online!) to win either a thermos, slingpack, or the upcoming issue.

To enter, simply post your comments on the blog by clicking the post title above.

We stop taking entries on Monday, so enter soon, and good luck!

  1. John Updike’s *Rabbit, Run*
  2. John Knowles’s *A Separate Peace*
  3. Flannery O’Connor’s *The Violent Bear It Away*
  4. Harper Lee’s *To Kill a Mockingbird*
  5. Wright Morris’s *Ceremony in Lone Tree*

a. With nothing to block it the wind flung wet gusts at me; at any other time I would have felt like a fool slogging through mud and rain, only to look at a tree.

b. Down the tracks to the east, like a headless bird, the bloody neck still raw and dripping, a tub-shaped water tank sits high on stilts. Bunches of long-stemmed grass, in this short-grass country, grow where the water drips between the rails.

c. He used to love to climb the poles. To shinny up from a friend’s shoulder until the ladder of spikes came to your hands, to get up to where you could hear the wires sing.

d. She was horrible. Her face was the color of a dirty pillow-case, and the corners of her mouth glistened with wet, which inched like a glacier down the deep grooves enclosing her chin.

e. It had taken him barely half a day to find out that the old man had made a wreck of the boy and that what was called for was a monumental job of reconstruction.

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Posted in Games, Contests, & Diversions |

Fiction Game of the Month

Monday, March 14th, 2011

For this month’s game, we’re going to test the fiction wonks among you. Correctly match the CR contributors below to the excerpts that follow—and choose your prize (slingpack, thermos, or issue of your choice). May the best wonk win!

1. Steve Almond

2. Aimee Bender

3. Judy Budnitz

4. George Singleton

5. Kevin Wilson

a. Our mothers saw that the world was ending. Everything beyond the island had been destroyed. They were the only ones left. They cupped their hands over their bulging bellies and realized they would be the ones to replenish the human race. It was their duty and their privilege. They began to carry themselves even more proudly. They felt godlike and strong.

b. During this stint, I played in a punk band called Anthrax Ballet, one of several thousand such bands—perhaps the worst—in the Los Angeles basin at that historical moment. I played bass in the Sid Vicious style, a concerted twinge only loosely concerned with notes. We released a grand total of one record, a self-funded seven-inch of our hit single, “Girl Fight.” (Scratch face/ Pull hair/ Girl fight!/ Girl fight!)

c. I felt the ghost of her passing through me as I mixed and dyed, and I felt the rage in me that she had to be a ghost: the softness of the ghost, right up next to and surrounding the sharp and burning core of my anger. Both guided my hands. I picked the right colors to mix with blue and gray and more blue and more. And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fist at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world.

d. She brushes her tongue along Tommy’s left eye, the glass peeling away, and then she spits the shards on the floor. She does the same with the other eye. She brings eyesight to the blind, and Tommy watches as her face comes into focus. She is naked, her tongue bubbling with blood, and when she smiles at Tommy, it drips down her chin.

e. I pulled out my wallet, then listened to a strange tale about Billy Crume’s older brother ending up in India somehow, hiring locals, going out into some dense forests and capturing a half-dozen bonnet macaques, sending them back illegally aboard a sloop, breeding them in what used to be a bear enclosure bought from some Cherokees up in North Carolina, training the things to be comfortable around humans, then setting them free to roam Waterloo’s environs.

To enter, simply post your comments on the blog by clicking the post title above.

The Cincinnati Review is available for order through our secure online form

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Posted in Games, Contests, & Diversions |

Game of the Month

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

REJECT REJECTION!

Attribute it to post-AWP punchiness, but for this month’s contest, we’re going to try something a little risky. At the mag, we’re all writers too, which is to say we’ve all been rejected, numerous times, which is to say we know well the lowering moment of finding a form response in the mailbox’s mournful maw—or the inbox’s sorrowful cybercircuitry. That last bit of overripe ridiculousness should set the tone for the contest, whose purpose is to dull rejection’s power to pierce us. Basically, we want you to devastate us with your own worst rejection note—one you make up. No actual, real-life rejections, please, because that is just going to make us feel crappy.

Especially if they are from us, because contrary to popular myth, we don’t enjoy rejecting submissions. In fact, we die a little every time we do it, and none of us has slept in years.

So send us you best imaginary rejection letters, and we’ll award logo–emblazoned thermoses or slingpacks to our winners next week. To enter, simply post your comments on the blog by clicking the post title above. (Due to the volume of spam we receive, we have to approve each comment individually, so bear with us as we upload your entry.)

Posted in Games, Games, Contests, & Diversions, Uncategorized |

Poetry Game of the Month

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Well, the tinsel is in the attic, the fruitcake has been taken to the proper recycling facilities, and we’ve sworn off eggnog forever. But we’re still in the gift-giving mood! So we offer the following quiz to test your poetry knowledge and general CR street cred. Included below is a list of some of our most widely known contributors and a series of excerpts from their poems. The first person to match correctly each excerpt to its poet gets the choice of a free back issue, thermos, or slingpack. Who’s ready to throw down?

(To enter, post your comments on the blog by clicking the post title above. Due to the volume of spam we receive, we have to approve each comment individually, so bear with us as we upload your entry.)

We’ll post the correct answers as soon as we have a winner!


Poets:

  1. Billy Collins
  2. Molly Peacock
  3. J. D. McClatchy
  4. Bob Hicok
  5. Claudia Emerson

Excerpts:

a. The South walked up a gentle hill
into sun and Northern guns, it was stupid
but accurate, according to Tony, who shouted,
“Way to die, baby, way to die,” when Bill went down,
gut-clutched. Real smoke from sham shots
tufted and rolled in the barely breeze.
Bill writhed ten minutes and stopped.

b. Or the loose change of stars on the night table
Over Cholula, the dust from yesterday’s eruption
Still settling in cracks along the pyramid’s mural
Of warriors with jaguar heads pulling ribbons
Of gut from slave-birds, men from further
Inland lured by the promise of a god.

c. Your eye is like the eye of a dog
I met as a child. I felt it was about
to speak to me the wisdom I would need
for my whole life, if only it would talk.
And understanding nothing would be spoken
made me vow to pledge my life to it.

d. After I had beaten my sword into a ploughshare,
I beat my ploughshare into a hoe,
Then beat the hoe into a fork,
Which I used to eat my dinner alone.

e.     She is antique
but not inaccurate—headless, armless,

all torso, a sculpture mutilated. The breast
lifts off, easy as the lid from a pot, the heart

and lungs beneath; the belly comes away then
from neat intestines, from the chalky fetus nestled

in the womb worn smooth from all the hands
reaching in for this conclusion.

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Posted in Games, Contests, & Diversions |

The Blue Pencil Prize

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

It’s here! It’s here! The new issue has arrived, and because this puts us in a jubilant mood, we’re going to offer fabulous awards and prizes to FIVE of our readers. But, um, first you have to earn them. In short, the first five people to find a genuine, bona fide typo in volume 7, number 2, get a choice of a free issue, a free thermos, or a free slingpack—all emblazoned with CR’s oh-so-tasteful logo. We’ll post your findings in the blog. So get cracking, all you sharp-eyed subscribers! If you succeed in out-proofreading us, we’ll even throw in the old-timey editor’s tool of choice, a blue Col-Erase pencil. That’s why we’re calling this THE BLUE PENCIL PRIZE.

(Just leave your comments on the blog by clicking on the post title above. We get a lot of spam, so you’ll have to wait for your comment to be approved).

Look! If you win, you’ll feel as happy as Lisa and Matt!

Posted in Games, Contests, & Diversions |

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