Writers: Polish up your best poems, stories, and creative nonfiction, because we’re gearing up to read entries for the 2012 Robert and Adele Schiff Prizes in Prose and Poetry. One winning poem and one prose piece (fiction or creative nonfiction) will be chosen for publication in our 2013 prize issue. The entry fee of $25 includes a year-long subscription.

Submissions will be accepted in June and July; all entries will be considered for publication. For complete contest guidelines, please go here.

While we’ve accepted postal entries in the past (and will continue to do so this year), stay tuned–we’re in the process of setting up our website to receive submissions and entry fees through our submission manager, so we’ll update the guidelines accordingly when we know more.

We look forward to reading your entries this summer! And don’t forget: the reading period for non-contest submissions ends on May 31.

Jody Bates, Don Bogen, Mica Darley-Emerson, Danielle Deulen, Ben Dudley, Luke Geddes, Michael Griffith, Alli Hammond, Chris Koslowski, Margaret Luongo, Laura Micciche, Don Peteroy, Laura Thompson, Gary Weissman

Sara Bradley “Brad” Watson (born December 18, 1963) is an American actor and film producer, as well as graduate student in creative writing. Watson has received four Academy Award nominations and five Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one Golden Globe. Watson first gained recognition as a cowboy hitchhiker in the road movie Thelma & Louise (1991).

Watson in Johnny Suede

Watson’s onscreen career began in 1987, with uncredited parts in the films No Way Out, No Man’s Land and Less Than Zero. Her television debut came in May 1987 with a two-episode role on the NBC soap opera Another World. She appeared in four episodes of the CBS primetime series Dallas between December 1987 and February 1988 as Randy, the boyfriend of Charlie Wade (played by Shalane McCall). Watson described her character as “an idiot boyfriend who gets caught in the hay.”

In the same year, the Yugoslavian–U.S. co-production The Dark Side of the Sun (1988) gave Watson her first leading film role, as a young American taken by his family to the Adriatic to find a remedy for a skin condition.

Watson in Cool World

Sometime after this, Watson decided to (1) run the Pittsburgh half-marathon and (2) pursue poetry full-time, possibly after making her two most notably bad films, Johnny Suede and Cool World. This is fortunate, as poetry, and not acting, seems to be where Watson’s true talents lies, demonstrated by her apt appreciation of Angela Ball’s “Testimony” from our upcoming issue, 9.1.

Sara Watson: There’s something inside-out, audacious, even, about a testimony written in second-person that I find immediately charming. Angela Ball isn’t giving her testimony, after all; she’s giving ours. “You saw your love pull up,” Ball writes, “You saw him.” Well, I think, here we are, all seated and sworn in. To what might we bear witness?

I like a poet who builds a world. “You saw him enter the continent/ of a pond,” writes Ball, in a line likely to haunt me for decades. I think of Alice on trial in Wonderland, her world inverted, everything topsy-turvy, white roses painted red. In the world according to Ball, bodies of water are continents. There is a magical quality to Ball’s rural summer— a season passed in the slow heat of some greener place, a place of swimming, baseball, and dancing— that rings true (as all good testimony ought). The otherworldliness of summer, that quality of being outside of time, of being carefree and outdoors, is one that we recognize. Moreover (and Ball is banking on this), this season of joy is one that we can affirm, one that we know. We saw. This is our testimony.

Angela Ball’s “Testimony” whispers joy, but the piece is a heartbreaker, too, “adding bitter to sweet.”  Our summer ends (just as Alice wakes up in the upright world). We, the speakers, must all get back to work, minding our little superstitions, now more questionable than ever. What can we do now but tell what we have seen, dream of it, perhaps, and hope for the next warm season.

David Yost, from “The Carousel Thief”:

Farzad’s first experience with competitive eating had been at a picnic table outside a slaughterhouse in Evansville, Indiana: the Second Fried Cow Brain International Challenge.

Vladimir Vulovic, from “Why Chess?”:

In chess, a queen is the strongest piece, but it is the fate of a much weaker king that determines the game. Does chess need queens as hunters and kings as prey to be interesting? If the powers of kings and queens were reversed, would chess turn dull, with kings too strong to be checkmated?

Emma Törzs, from “Safe Word”:

Three years had gone by since Gretchen had been killed, and this past year, working for Lisa, he’d talked about her more than ever before—but on some level the woman he spoke of was just a construct of his sister, a symbol instead of a real person. A well-recited story. It wasn’t until moments like this—alone in his dark kitchen, cheek against his refrigerator—that he really thought of her, her memory pummeling him . . . , a steady rain of anguished, unrepentant fists.

Elisabeth Cohen, from “Mollusks and Optics”:

You regret naming this child Percy. It was a compromise: You wanted Ethan, and your spouse wanted Walter. It seemed a sensitive name for the bookish child you envisioned, who would read Tolkien in an armchair for hours as your older children pursued their complicated social agendas and you cheerfully pulverized the hummus. It now seems unduly like the name of a victim.

Angela Ball, from “Remarks You May Have Prepared for the Dinner”

. . . Excuse me, does this by any chance contain
Potash or sundries? I’m allergic

To sundries, especially anything
The color of baby chicks.

Is this a premises? If so, we may have to leave. I think
I’m feeling queasy. . . .

Patrizia Cavalli, translated by Geoffrey Brock:

Love that’s not mine nor even yours
but a fenced field we entered once,
which you a little later left,
and which I, lazy, made my home. . . .

Gregory Lawless, from “Foreclosure”:

. . . You call me back to the car. The way a man loses his hands between ladder rungs. You with your guardrail beauty. Sloping gently out of view. With your dents and etchings. . . .

Medbh McGuckian, from “The Flower of the Moment of What Comes Easily”

. . . Even the daylight feels as mute
As the fourfold halo of the May moon
Or the thoughts we say are ours
When stars lose their nests,

Pearllike letters hidden down
A mineshaft. . . .

Handyman

I am walking down to the beach in Maine to see if my husband is having sex with our friend Levi. It’s an idea so crazy it makes sense. Sex would be the culmination of what I’ve been feeling all summer: that my husband likes Levi more than he likes me. Daniel slips out of bed at six a.m. so he and Levi can climb twenty-foot ladders and reshingle our house. All day long, the men work shoulder to shoulder, making jokes I can’t hear. Daniel tells Levi about his hemorrhoids. They sing “Penny Lane.”

Levi is like Jesus. A carpenter who builds things and fixes things and never loses his temper. Levi rolls his own cigarettes and never wears sunblock and plays War nicely with our children and sleeps in a tent and grows bean sprouts and is thinner than a cricket. He isn’t gay as far as I know. His partner is a Mexican woman, Ana, but he hasn’t seen her in months, and men being men, needing sex as often as they do, something may have bubbled to the surface.

All summer, Levi has taught Daniel the construction skills he never learned because Robinson men are lawyers, tax lawyers, estate lawyers, loophole lawyers, men in wool suits who call people like Levi to fix whatever is broken. The more cocky Daniel becomes, flexing his biceps, swinging his hammer, the more he expects me to play wife: produce cookies, applaud progress, take photographs documenting each miracle. And I did this for a while until the whole setup got on my nerves. Everything slid into two against one.

Recently, the men started taking a midmorning break to eat peanuts and skinny dip. They call it “refueling.” They walk to the beach, strip down, and dunk themselves in the ocean, which is freezing. You can hear the screams. Later, they come up all doggy grins, hair dripping salt water, ready to shake. Daniel tells me to stay up at the house.

But it occurs to me now that something else is going on. I march past the daisies like the commander-in-chief I’ve felt like ever since I became a mother. I can’t be as nice as Levi, and Daniel knows it. Gravity pulls me to the shore like the moon pulling tide. Things feel weighted, inevitable, a movie I’ve already seen. The wind blows past my ears. The spruce don’t budge. Old trees rarely turn around.

Getting closer, I brace myself to see what I can’t imagine: my husband, the former Catholic choirboy, making out with our houseguest. How will I tell the kids—years later—about this summer, the summer of reconstruction, the summer where their father learned how to cover old siding with fresh shingles, learned to snap a plumb line, learned that male friendship is easier than marriage?

I can see the little changing house now. The bluff above the shore. Compass Island. The view. Everything that happens happily ever after depends on what happens next. But this is always true. Every minute of your life.

Lili Wright is author of the travel memoir, Learning to Float. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Florida Review, Southern Indiana Review, Cream City Review, The Normal School, and other publications. She won the Mary C. Mohr Nonfiction Award in 2008 and the inaugural nonfiction prize given by Wag’s Revue. Her work was noted for distinction in Best American Essays 2010 and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, she teaches writing at DePauw University in Indiana.

Lili Wright: I wrote “Handyman” in one short blast. A friend of mine had recently learned her husband was having an affair, a discovery that reminded me of the precariousness of marriage. We also had a house guest for the summer, a wonderful man who was far more patient and kind than I am. One day, I walked to the beach and had a rush of “what if” thoughts. So I took these elements and told the story in a voice not my own. As I was writing, I felt I was channeling Grace Paley, though the story probably doesn’t sound like her at all.

“Handyman” is essentially a travel piece, though it’s only a walk to the beach. A walk to the beach might change your life. I knew the story had to be short because I wanted to leave the ending ambiguous. The reader’s wondering would mimic the wife’s wondering, her fear about what she might find, her fear that she might deserve it. Most of the editing I did was designed to heighten the drama and select details that carried the greatest metaphoric weight. This is the fun stuff: Compass Island, Penny Lane, the card game War—all there for the taking.

Recently, I’ve fallen in love with the short form. I am not a poet but this is the closest I can come. Moments like this one bubble up, unannounced, usually when I am traveling, when I’ve left my heart ajar.

Becky Adnot-Haynes: Lili Wright’s “Handyman” encapsulates a moment both small and large: small, because it is one afternoon in a woman’s life; large, because it may be the moment that changes everything. It accomplishes what flash fiction does at its best: captures something on the cusp—a brief but important point in time, a moment which may or may not transform the course of her marriage. It’s a statement on the precarious state of our happiness, on how close we may be to the beginning of our worst-case scenarios—or how far.

The story’s sentences are both economical and incisive, describing richly the narrator’s feelings toward her husband’s newly developed bond with their handyman without rendering the subject matter sentimental. The narrator tells us that “Levi isn’t gay, as far as I know,” but that “men being men, needing sex as often as they do, something may have bubbled to the surface.” These are the facts as she sees them; these are the facts as she delivers them to us. Levi is the man who may or may not be sleeping with her husband, but he is also a man who plays war nicely with her children and who never loses his temper. The story doesn’t attempt to incite anger or pity on behalf of the narrator—there are no villains, no martyrs, only people—and it is all the more emotionally resonant for that.

Nicola Mason: The short-short, as it’s known, has really taken off in recent years. There are even e-zines and print mags devoted to exclusively to this compressed mode of storytelling. The fun thing about the short form is its surprising versatility. It’s often unclear whether a given piece is poetry (a “prose poem”) or fiction—and even when the category is clear, the work can go in any number of directions. The most successful short-shorts are often ones that present an intriguing, offbeat idea and then elaborate on it, building a meaningful context for the idea to inhabit. Thomas Israel Hopkins’s three short-shorts in our Winter 2012 issue are delightful examples of surreal scenarios that are grounded in real emotion. For Soapbox’s feature, however, we chose to highlight Lili Wright’s “Handyman” (from the same issue), in large part because it is the hardest kind of short-short to pull off. Often such submissions feel like half-baked entrees, missing a crucial ingredient, cold in the center. Wright’s offering, however—though only a page and a quarter in the journal—manages to complete an arc of story that could well spool out in a dozen pages, but is even more fulfilling as a swift dive into a charged moment.

One of the accomplishments of the piece is how efficiently it settles us into the physical and emotional landscape using recognizable tropes: the “cocky” lawyer proud to conquer new territory, the bromance, the wife-become-mother who, in her role as commander-in-chief, feels she “can’t be nice.” Wright smoothly joins the physical and psychological, imbuing concrete details with a shrewd significance: “How will I tell the kids—years later—about . . . the summer when their father learned how to cover old siding with fresh shingles, learned to snap a plumb line, learned that male friendship is easier than marriage.”  The story ends inconclusively by design, the moment’s potent uncertainty exemplified by the “changing-house” near the water as well as the view of “Compass Island.” In the last line we, like the speaker, are poised at the brink, not knowing which way the needle will swing.

Michael Griffith: What I love about “Handyman”: the bracing directness of our entry into the story; the way it establishes immediately that its length does not doom it to simplicity or lack of range (by the end of the second paragraph, we’ve encountered Jesus, the Beatles, hemorrhoids, bean sprouts, a Mexican woman, male lust, sunburn, and feats of carpentry); the easy self-assurance that lets the reader know straight off, “I am in good hands. I trust this writer.” But best of all, from my point of view, is the sense of rich, complex uncertainty Wright conveys here. Is there an affair? Consider the evidence. Pop duets and bathroom confidences? Hmm. “Refueling” with peanuts and a skinny-dip together? Uh-oh. But what her suspicion proceeds from is not facts, but rather the sense that what’s gone wrong with their marriage has to have a name, a proximate cause, lest it be just a slow, inexorable, terrifying slide toward unintimacy and indifference. Does she hope to catch them making out? At least a little . . . because that’s a narrative she knows, “a movie I’ve already seen.” What she fears most, it seems, is not so much that she’s lost her husband to this other person (which would be awful, but she can deal with it) as that she’s doomed now, for the rest of her life, to keep losing him minute by minute, day by day.

When he’s not answering trivial questions (in every sense of the word), Brian’s the host of his own blog, How a Poem Happens. We coaxed him into contributing to our blog, too, and after asking very politely if he could remove his shackles so he could get to class on time, he tweeted out this message on John Poch’s poem “Two Rooms,” in Issue 9.1 (due out next month)—not on Twitter, but to the tune of the yellow-bellied sapsucker’s call. We made him then type it, double-spaced, with one-inch margins in 12 pt. Garamond.

Brian Brodeur: We often praise a piece of writing for risk-taking. John Poch’s poem “Two Rooms” risks pornography and, shockingly, gets away with it.

As the title suggests, the action of the poem happens in two adjacent “temporary” rooms. The shoddy “tin ceiling” and “minuscule cracks” of the first room, the room in which the speaker wakes, anticipate “the two porn actors” practicing “their visceral art” in the second. But before we discover the neighbors, Poch emphasizes the idea of making, of craft and workmanship, the way the “you” of the first stanza, “if [. . .] patient,” may glean a structure’s inner architecture. The poet then complicates this idea:

Above the ceiling, you know there are wooden beams

to which the tin is nailed. If you could see them,

the pine would be crude, but you accept the purpose

holding it all together and up, as a soul holds the body.

The “you” deduces from the shoddy tin that the beams are not only “pine” but that they are “crude.” Implied here is the fact that a deduction, however logical, is still an act of imagination. There is also an implied analogy: the “you” believes in or “accepts” the hidden beams just as the “you” accepts the existence of the soul.

This sets us up for the poem’s major turn, which is marked by a shift from the second- to the first-person point of view, and the more radical leap from the sacred “soul” to the profane “porn actors.” Here the speaker recovers the theme of fact and belief by confessing: “I [. . .] think I know the dark house/ they are headed for” in “the room of needles and no thread.” Curiously, though, the actors “are not acting” but “making love.” They do not want the worry or concern of the speaker and his “late understanding.” They desire only the carnal “heaven” of their “visceral art” that we, the viewers, “become lost in,” an art “that is, in this counterfeit way, a kind of beauty.”

“Counterfeit” or salacious as it may be, “beauty” here still has the final word. By manipulating the “cracks” in easy perceptions of the beautiful, Poch transforms his subjects through his own “visceral art/ never done exactly this way,” redeeming the scene by “look[ing] past” the surface into “the very medium” of things. If what the poet finds above ceilings or through the walls seems “arbitrary” or “temporary,” why shouldn’t this be celebrated, too?

Anna Carson DeWitt (on “On Nighttime Lawn”): I’d just moved back from Honduras and was living in my childhood home with parents and school-aged sisters. During my time away I’d become interested in landscapes for the first time—probably because it was a way for me to revel in the different-ness of my surroundings without fetishizing human beings (a real fear of mine). When I returned to North Carolina, I was surprised to find that I was almost equally enthralled with the autumn landscape of my childhood—the light, the woodland creatures, the different shapes of leaves. I would come home from work at night, keep the brights blazing in my car, and watch my parents’ yard come alive for a few moments. My father was having health problems at the time, and for some reason this moment of the day was especially poignant for me—watching hidden life play itself out over one patch of grass and thinking about my family, eating dinner inside. All the poems I was writing at the time seemed to be about Honduras, and so I was very pleased when I finally wrote “On Nighttime Lawn”—I had finally broken away from ‘foreigner poems’! It was only in revision that I realized that, in my process, Honduras was deeply present in the piece, if only as an opposite, or a tension in my own imagining. I think I’m trying in this poem to make sense of a world that is both familiar and uncharted, and to depict my growing realization that home—the place and the body—is just as ‘wild’ as abroad.

Martha Collins: Ngo Tu Lap (Ngô Tự Lập) was born in Hanoi in 1962, just as the American military presence was escalating into what we would eventually call the Vietnam War.  He spent his childhood in Vinh Phu, about sixty miles from Hanoi, from which he and his family were evacuated.  He now lives in Hanoi.

Our collaboration began in 2004, while Lap was working on a PhD in Illinois; that summer he came to Boston for the annual Joiner Center Writers Workshop and asked me to help him with an English version of one of his poems. That was the beginning of a collaboration that has resulted in a co-translated volume of his poems called Black Stars; it includes the poems in this issue, and will be published by Milkweed Press in 2013.

Joshua Harmon (on “The Annotated Mix-Tape, #17″): Two years ago, I became what has become termed an “extreme commuter,” someone who spends at least ninety minutes a day driving to and from work. I set my iPod to shuffle during my drive time—and for the first year I commuted, I listened most often to my iPod’s vast 1975-1983 playlist. One morning, as I drove down the Taconic State Parkway, the iPod spun up Section 25’s instrumental track “Trident”—an old favorite by a favorite old band—and it suddenly occurred to me how much of Section 25’s music involved nuclear dread. I spent the rest of that commute listening to that band, then spent the rest of the winter terrifying myself by researching the specifics of the Trident submarine program, ICBMs, the construction of the local Strategic Air Command bunker, and many related things that had, since the early ’80s, been crowded out of my mind. When I had my first nuclear-war nightmare since childhood, I figured it was time to move on to a new song.

L. S. Klatt (on “Waterway”): I often, in my work, probe the illusion of stability, so the fact that I was living on a houseboat on Lake Union during a recent sojourn in Seattle only amplified my sense of vulnerability to sudden movement—whether that be a houseboat rocking on its moorings or the wild fluctuations in weather that can bring a snowstorm to an otherwise temperate climate. This poem also is interested in the ways the mind, perhaps language itself, tries to stabilize and restore order to an unpredictability that may be outside the domain of words.

(on “A Natural Museum”) This particular rendering of a river in winter, like all landscapes, is artificial and imposed. There’s a playfulness here in the framing of the scene and the taking up of different perspectives. Light, as it does for the landscape painter, creates a changeability that I am trying to capture in the poem. I suppose I am asking: what makes metamorphosis possible? And how is consciousness—illumination—significant in the natural world?

John A. Nieves (on “Suppose Us South” and “Cartograph”): When I first arrived in Missouri from Florida to enter the University of Missouri PhD program, I started to notice the differences almost immediately. I grew up in New York City and Connecticut, and contrary to popular opinion, Missouri is much more “Northern” than Florida, which is often billed as the “Northern” southern state. Aside from culture and politics, the geography of climate had an immediate impact on me. The poems in the issue deal with the musings on geography that came from this. “Suppose Us South” figures physio-geographical changes in a brief, intimate, and immediate gesture. “Cartograph” takes on the larger idea of borders and the depictions of geography. The poem is concerned with the faith we put into symbol and delineation as opposed to people and land. The ghosts of history and historiography also play heavily on the poem because maps give far more information than location. They tell us who we are, who we were, who we aren’t. This poem attempts to subvert some of those powers by allowing the living to repopulate the map’s flat surface.

Lauren Groff is the author, most recently, of the novel Arcadia (Voice, 2012), as well as of The Monsters of Templeton (Voice, 2008) and the story collection Delicate Edible Birds (Voice, 2009). Her short stories have appeared in many journals, including the The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and Glimmer Train, as well as in the Best American Short Stories in 2007 and 2010. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Question: Where are your shoes? I’m not talking about your literal shoes, but your metaphorical ones.

LG: To understand where exactly my shoes are—which is a very good question for me, in truth, because I prefer to go barefoot at all times, splinters be damned—I need to first understand what my shoes are. Is it strange that I thought at first of the less-common genre of shoe? Not the kind that lovingly cups tender toes and protects those sad and fallen arches from shattered glass; not my authentic cowboy boots, bought in a flush of glee when I found out I’d won a fellowship I was longing for; not the soccer cleats, a whole size too small, to which I’d sacrificed many blackened toenails, but which were the only shoes ever to allow me to score. No; I thought of a rusted horseshoe above a barn door at a farm in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, where my family lived for a few years before returning to Cooperstown for good. The horseshoe door led to the paddock, where our tiny pony, Imp, lived. Imp was a nasty bastard. Once, when I was five years old, I was contentedly riding on Imp’s back when the jerk tore out of my father’s grasp, rushing me headlong toward a fence, an oak, an apple orchard; I narrowly escaped brain damage by clinging to his mane with my fists and teeth like a flapping human limpet. His horseshoe had been nailed up above the door—for good luck, I was told. On the day I noticed that one nail had come loose, canting the horseshoe down and spilling some of its luck, I found our poor white cat, Marshmallow, in a trough inside the barn. He was stiff and, it finally dawned on me, dead. For a long time afterward, I stood in the doorway, under the horseshoe, unable to go in or out. Inside, all was dark, humid, stinking, a trash-bin full of dog food crawling with maggots, the beloved cat who wouldn’t stir. Outside was an angry pony, ready to spill my brains. Inside, safety but obscurity; outside, risk and sun. We are born with a certain amount of luck, and the rest we have to make for ourselves. I took a step, choosing the light, the flight in the face of the demonic. That’s where my horseshoe still swings, half full of luck, half ready to be filled.

A former Peace Corps Volunteer, David Yost has served on development projects in the United States, Mali, and Thailand. His fiction has appeared in more than twenty publications, including Southern Review, Witness, Pleiades, Asia Literary Review, and The Sun. His anthology Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy is forthcoming in November 2011 from Continuum, and his story “The Carousel Thief” will appear in our next issue, due out in May. An appreciation of that story—written by Luke Geddes—appeared on our blog earlier this week.

Question: Let’s say that an angry God has put a curse on you. The God says, “Every time you write a new story, poem, play, or essay, a Shakespeare play will vanish from both history and collective memory.” Would you continue to write stories?

DY: Do I get to pick? A world in which nobody reads Pericles, King John, Cymbeline, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII, and the three plays of Henry VI would be basically the same as ours, so that buys me eight more stories at least. I imagine I’d draw the line at Coriolanus and The Merry Wives of Windsor and then try to break into television.

Luke Geddes: I wish I could say otherwise, but my first read-through of David Yost’s “The Carousel Thief” was frustrating—but only because my cruel tormentors, the CR senior staff, had charged me with the task of entering their copy-edits into the story’s electronic file. I tried to stay focused on the editorial notations, but so seductive was Yost’s prose (deceptively straightforward and rife with surprising, vivid details—such as epic lists of regrettable QVC purchases including ostrich steaks and embroidered His and His bathrobes, and of equally regrettable extreme-eating competitions involving cow brains, SPAM, Ramen noodles, and pigs’ feet); so wittily and realistically developed were the characters (a quirky gay couple struggling to live above their means in the dreary Midwest); so unique, expansive, and expertly re-created were the cultures surrounding antique carousels and competitive-eating contests, with the latter’s bizarre but plausible rules about “chipmunking” (stuffing your cheeks without swallowing) and “reversal” (vomiting); so wry and hilarious was the first-person voice; so clever was the way the story combined and subverted the domestic and heist genres, I kept getting sucked into the drama and humor and could not concentrate on my editorial assignment. (In other words, the story was so good that only a long, self-indulgent, semicolon-abusing sentence can capture its greatness.) I hope my evil overlords in the CR offices will forgive my gross insubordination, but if they don’t, I blame author David Yost for writing a story that’s too damn engaging.