Masters Review Winter Short Story Comp

[Pamela Jo]

Submissions Open for the 2023-2024 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers, Judged by Kelly Link! – The Masters Review

mastersreview.com

 

[Peyton Stafford]

Great! Buy a place at the table and hope the roulette table chooses you.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Great! Buy a place at the table and hope the roulette table chooses you.

Hey, you got a better chance than the national lottery.

 

[CarolMS]

I got curious and checked The Master Review website to get more info and learned something I didn't know. I've always seen "chapbook" used for poetry collections, but I see the word can refer to many kinds of prose collections, too, as long as they are of limited pages. Interesting! They say they do NOT want poetry. No excerpts, no chapters from novels or any work-in-progress.This is from their contest page:

The Masters Review is open for submissions of literary prose chapbooks! We’re interested in collections of flash fiction, creative nonfiction essays, short stories, and anything in-between. We encourage you to be bold, to experiment with style and form, as long as you stay under 45 pages.

Prize is $3000--but there is an entry fee of $25.

I entered one of their contests a few years ago--one for chapter excerpts from novels-in-progress--and had a somewhat unpleasant experience, though I think it was perhaps unique rather than typical for them. I hadn't expected to win, but thought it was a good thing to do for experience, and also they offered an editor's review for a nominal fee as an option for all entries, and I thought that would be useful. I sent my opening chapter at that time (now totally different), and indicated that it was both mainstream literary fiction, as I then saw it, and historical (1968-1970). I inserted several descriptive details right from the start to alert readers to it being set during an earlier era, and one of those on the first page, when my protagonist had just arrived at an airport and was checking in, was the line, "Krista handed her suitcase to the Negro skycap and tipped him a quarter." I received an "editorial letter" with no feedback on the chapter except the editor's view that I was being "racist" and she and the MR weren't interested in such a book. (By the way, this is the only mention of this character in the book--I just took out the word Negro, even though it was actually the official policy of the airlines to employ black POC as their luggage handlers). I guess she didn't know that in the late 60s the word "Negro" was actually considered the most acceptable one to use, or perhaps "colored." The word "black" was only first used in 1969 to apply to people, and that was by Bobby Seale, leader of the Black Panthers based in Oakland CA. The word was only gradually more widely used. "African American" wasn't used until the 1980s. I researched this to be historically accurate, which I thought important. I suggested the editor listen to some Martin Luther King speeches. And I suspect she was very young, fresh out of college with her MFA and an inflated ego along with it. She suggested a couple of commercial romance genre magazines for my chapter--my novel is NOT a romance, though it has romantic elements in it (it's a coming of age story about a wounded young woman's sexual awakening). Thought I'd share my experience, but don't let it stop you from entering one of their contests. I'm not so sure the editing is worth it, though. Also, they mean it when they say be "bold," too, since a lot of their winners seem to write very experimental kinds of fiction.