FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Bookends by Harry Vandervlist Writing: art or sport? With all the prizes and contests you hear about in this column you’d be excused for thinking it’s the latter. But where would just-starting-out artists of all types be without a variety of back and side entrances into the great Public Palace of the Arts, where the audience expands beyond your living room to include total strangers and even professional practitioners of your chosen craft? Whether you’re a writer, dancer or hammer dulcimer improviser, you need ways to get past the towering slush piles of manuscripts/demos/audition tapes beneath which agents and editors lie crushed, feebly moving their arms and legs like Gregor in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. So, for those who have work all printed up and ready to go, here are a couple of contests with extremely imminent deadlines. AlbertaViews magazine wants previously unpublished stories from Alberta residents. If yours is about 2,000 to 3,000-words long, then send your story (with no name on it) along with a cover letter (your name and story title goes there instead) and a cheque for $20. You’ll get a year’s subscription to the magazine, which is now bi-monthly, and a chance at publication in the January issue, along with the $1,000 prize. The deadline is June 30, i.e. right now, so get your story in by e-mail at contactus@albertaviews.ab.ca, or saunter over to the AlbertaViews office at 520 — 23 Avenue S.W. (An easy stroll from The Planet, for example.) Mark your envelope or your message "Short Story Contest." If you want your manuscript back, include a SASE. (Funny how you should never ever send the originals of your original work.) Another great magazine, another contest worth entering: This Magazine’s annual literary contest is in its fourth year now. Encouragingly enough, in This Mag’s current issue you’ll find a story by Calgary writer Julia Gaunce. You could be next. Like last year, you get up to 100 lines if you’re sending poetry, and up to 5,000 words if you’re sending fiction. Just unpublished stuff, of course. You can send a whole bunch of entries, but each entry costs $10. As in the AlbertaViews contest, keep your name on a separate cover sheet, not on the entry itself. Winners get published in the fall – they’ll call you, so make sure your phone number (along with your address, e-mail, etc.) is on your cover sheet. Prizes are $750 (that’s 10 per cent of the average annual income for a Canadian writer!), $500 and $250 for the top three poems and stories. They want entries by mail, so you’re gonna have to spend the extra cash for quick delivery – because the deadline’s July 1! So don’t think, just do it. Send that writing you’ve been polishing up for weeks now to: The Great Canadian Literary Hunt , c/o This Magazine, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 396, Toronto, ON, M5V 3A8. All of this info and more appears at http://www.thismag.org/.

| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |