The Raven Short Story Contest always rounds out our year nicely, and Autumn 2019 produced a wonderful crop of tales sure to sustain us well into the new year. JJ Lee joins us fresh from Issue 24 as our featured author, now acting as ultimate decider for this season’s winner. From his deliberations, a clever raven emerges victorious:
Mike Donoghue for ‘Life4Sale’
‘Life4Sale’ showed in its epistolary structure a great command of character voice. The world building and the weird factor are efficiently established without ever forgetting that character motive and conflict are what make a short story tick. It never bogs down in the spec fic mechanics. I appreciated how it is the kind of story you may find on Black Mirror or, if you’re old enough, classic Twilight Zone.
The runners up garnered additional praise
MFC Feeley for ‘Dannemora Sewing Class’
‘Dannemora Sewing Class’, a very short short story, daringly makes a section and POV break in the middle and it works. The focus is on a single interaction and we discover through the POV switch that it has ramifications. The story demonstrates the writer’s skill and his or her ability to inhabit characters with a realistic diction.
Rob McInroy for ‘Zoroman’s Cave’
‘Zoroman’s Cave’ is a throwback with the hyper intelligent yet sinister narrator reminiscent of Lovecraft’s high-pulp style narrators. The volume of verbiage and contortion of the narrator’s thoughts can come across as quite dense, high falutin’ even, yet it flowed. It made for a smooth read. For that I thought it should be recognized as a standout and a great nod to the classic weird story genre.
Congratulations to these authors! Thank you to JJ Lee for his perspicacious eye, and thank you to all submitting authors for bringing us your best and supporting Pulp Literature Press.
What’s unkind about the Raven Short Story Contest? Why, making us choose, of course! It’s never easy deciding which stories will make the cut. Sometimes it’s like choosing between apples and automobiles: both are useful, and many are beautiful, but I wouldn’t want to ride in one or eat the other.
But choose we must. And so here are the authors on the longlist, alphabetically by first name:
Ariel Basom
CC Smith
Claire Lawrence
Dave Kunz
Dawn Miller
Doug Harrison
Elizabeth Cockle
Erin Evans
Hannah Van Didden
John Shea
Jonathan Sean Lyster
Kim Martins
KT Wagner
Laura Kuhlmann
Leslie Wibberley
Mara Vranjkovic
Matthew Vickless
MFC Feeley
Michael Donoghue
Rob McInroy
Robert Bose
Robert Runte
Soramimi Hanarejima
Taryn Pearcey
VJ Hamilton
Thank you, writers, for being so unkind to us, and congratulations on winning us over this far with your words. The shortlist will be published soon!
It was a hard fought battle between our top ten feisty hummingbird entrants, and the skirmish between the final two was fierce indeed. After careful scrutiny, our judge declared the winner by a feather to be …
‘Afterlife’ by Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki
Judge Bob Thurber had this to say:
In ‘Afterlife’, the author skillfully tiptoes around grief and heartache, presenting a nicely woven, quirky portrait of life coming at you, whether you’re ready for it or not.
‘Featherweight’ by Chad V Broughman
The runner-up, ‘Featherweight’, was a close contender with an ache all its own. Two fine stories with dynamic voices.
– Bob Thurber
These two stories will be published in Pulp Literature Issue 25, Winter 2019. Congratulations to the winners as well as the top-notch shortlist, which included:
‘The Decline of the Human Race: Volume 01100’ by Mike Donoghue
Hummingbirds are quite competitive, and this year we have 10 hummingbirds vying for the sweet $300 grand prize. The shortlist is in the hands of former closet writer and current flash fiction master, Bob Thurber. Best of luck to the following authors!
Ariel Basom Chad V. Broughman Dylan Sealy Emily Ruth Verona Hannah van Didden Mack Stone Mike Donoghue Patricia Sandberg Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki Teya Hollier
It’s said Jeki la Njambe has one crow’s foot and an antelope’s hoof besides. Jeki, they say, huddles around little liver-pecked fires, has one arm and it’s a real Misha. They say he fishes with it and you’ll know it’s that time by the smell of wet maple and iron-wood, or the whistling of hollow bamboo. Sure, they ramble such as it’s cooked, but you don’t go blaming a fire for making smoke. So just gather your ears from the field. I’m to straighten things, if my name ain’t Jeki la Njambe, and I tell you I know the right of it …
Truth was, Mrs Cole had become a little afraid of 902. Late in the evenings she’d hear 902’s footsteps slide across the tiled hallway, hesitating outside her door. “Is this my place?” her neighbour would ask. Mrs Cole would mute the volume on her TV and hold her breath as she sat quietly in her tidy living room waiting for the woman to shuffle away. The last few times Mrs Cole had encountered her, 902 was wearing nothing but a gray slip that blended with the colour of her skin and matched her hair — she appeared little more substantial than a shadow or dust mote hovering in the hall …
Xuefei sat on a metal stool in the corner of the operating theatre. He’d been awake all night, and now, sitting in the quiet of the deserted room, he felt drowsy. He had transported the heart of the criminal executed at dawn from the prison infirmary to the university hospital’s surgical suite, built especially for this demonstration. American transplant surgeons, collaborating with Chinese colleagues, were scheduled to do the first heart transplant on Chinese soil …
You say, No one is going to eat us, but I know better. The path of the forest is necklaced in footprints. The surface of the snow is scuffed and bloodied. They left no remains of skin or bone, just a fistful of hair that looks like our own. We stop and watch, for a long time, as if the blood was an outline, a shadow, a spirit blooming in the ice. You say the soul lifts from the body, but I see that it doesn’t …
Hayim lifted Mima toward the dhow. The captain knelt, grabbed her by her armpits and lifted her up, then lowered her into the hull. Hayim tossed in his duffle bag and for a moment, in the thin skim of ocean and sand that skirts Bagamoyo, stood apart from all that mattered in his world. Then he hoisted himself on board. Mima was already playing with the livestock and making friends with the other children. In the weeks since their arrival in Tanzania she had learned a mouthful of Swahili and was now in full song. Samaki! Kuku! Mbuzi! she pointed and guessed, and the children laughed and nodded and were impressed. Hayim climbed atop a mound of rice bags, maybe seven or eight deep, and pressed his duffle bag into the curve of the hull, punching it here and there with his fists, pounding out their shape. Between punches images of Tel Aviv flashed in his mind — their old apartment, the table and chairs, dishes and books he’d filled it with. Those few weeks when Mima had gone to preschool and life had felt normal and the word normal had plumped with meaning. Then Hayim lay down and his mind cleared …
The scent drifting from our window sill must have let you know the pies are done … and the results are finally in. We have a Magpie Award for Poetry to dish out! Contest Judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar mulled it over, sampled each offering, and came to these conclusions:
Kudos to all the entrants for a strong showing in a short-list of 10 poems, each with merit . I enjoyed the intelligence, beauty, wit, and ambition of each of the poems on this year’s short-list. Here are my three top choices.
First Place Winner: ‘A Short History of Space Travel’ by Susan Haldane:
Everything works in this finely wrought poem filled with metaphorical layers, weaving together myth, space, and gorgeous imagery.
The title situates us into a narrativearc, comprised of four specific prose poems whose sentences end in line-breakstimed to please both eye and ear (no easy feat). We are entranced by the poem’s atmospheric pulse that merges prosewith lyricism, and takes us on a journey of parallel, closely observed moments, each one evoking something far larger than the created snap-shot. “If we are made of stardust, we are made of ashes too.” I couldn’t stop thinking about this poem! I want to meet its maker!
First Runner Up: ‘whiskey breath’ by Jack Waldheim
I loved the audacity of this unabashed ‘country ‘n’ western’ style lyric columnar. A song of heart-break, whiskey, cats, dancing: a whole ecosphere of longing, just madefor saying out loud, thanks to precise line-breaks. This poem stayed loose on my tongue, with each linefalling into the next.
Second Runner Up: ‘The Last of the Iron Lungs’ by Roxanna Bennett
A most excellent title, enticing us into this long concept poem. Its metre is a bit like blank verse, with over-flowing four-line stanzas that utilize a wonderful poetic device, the ‘drop down line’. That movement on the page instills in our eyes a visual space that adds to the overall experience of the poem. (see Dylan Thomas in his poem, ‘Fern Hill’).
The striking thing about this poem was the way the ‘factoids’ of the Greek myth were used to evoke a kind of fable-warning about our current eco-crisis as well as share the story of a speaker with a disability.
– Renée Sarojini Saklikar
You can’t keep the magpie down, much like these winning poets, whose poems are as tenacious and flashy as this contest’s namesake. See them in all their glory in Issue 24, due out this autumn. And for those of you who identify with another flashy avian creature, the Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize is just around the corner, opening May 1st.
About the Judge
Renée Sarojini Saklikar recently completed her term as the first Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey, British Columbia. Her latest book is a BC bestseller:Listening to the Bees (Nightwood Editions, 2018). Renée’s first book, children of air india, (Nightwood Editions, 2013) won the 2014 Canadian Authors Association Award for poetry. Renée co-edited The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press/SFU Public Square, 2015,) a City of Vancouver book award finalist. Renée’s chapbook, After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees, (above/ground press, 2016), was a finalist for the 2017 bpNichol award. Her poetry has been made into musical and visual installations, including the opera, air india [redacted]. Renée was called to the BC Bar as a Barrister and Solicitor, served as a director for youth employment programs in the BC public service, and now teaches law and ethics for Simon Fraser University in addition to teaching creative writing at both SFU and Vancouver Community College. She curates the popular poetry reading series, Lunch Poems at SFU and serves on the boards of Event magazine and The Capilano Review and is a director for the board of the Surrey International Writers Conference. Renée belongs to the League of Canadian Poets and The Writer’s Union of Canada (TWUC) and is active on the TWUC Equity Committee. She is currently working on an epic-length sci-fi poem, THOT-J-BAP, that appears in journals, anthologies and chapbooks.
Let’s cut to the chase; you’ve been waiting to hear about the Magpie Award for Poetry results for a while now! We offer up the shortlist as a means of compensation for the weeks of suspense. Poets are listed alphabetically by last name.
Kelli Allen Roxanna Bennett Chelsea Comeau Susan Ford Charlene Kwiatkowski David Ly Pattie Palmer-Baker Roger Vickery John Waldheim Cara Waterfall
Congratulations to the shortlisted poets, and many thanks to all those who submitted, as well as to our hardworking first judges Emily Osborne and Daniel Cowper!
Now we really hate to do this, but this is a tough field of competitors and the final results are going to be in the oven a bit longer. We hope to release the names of the winner and runners up of the 2019 Magpie Award for Poetry, as chosen by final judge Renée Saklikar within the next week. Please be patient as the shortlist bakes to a delicious golden brown!
The competition standard was very high. There wasn’t a bad story amongst them, and they were varied, with several in different styles pushing this one close.
I liked many things about ‘Girls’. The language was completely believable, with dynamic metaphors drawn from the narrator’s crazed imagination and steeped in the Southern Gothic world from which she comes. ‘come back home stained with his child’; ‘but I’ve cut my lifeline real long, long and round my hand like a ribbon ‘cross a Christmas present.’; ‘she talked all sand’. So many others. Yet the elegance of the writing never detracted from the flow of the story just swept me into another, so different world. The construction was good too, a steady development to the fiery climax.
The narrator’s voice was strong, clear, twisted, disturbing. Very well realized, and completely believable. I kept thinking that she might back away from her extremity, but she kept upping it. A lot to cram into a five page story. Yet it held me throughout, had a clear arc, and left a disturbing aftertaste.
So well done. It will stay with me and I have no hesitation, despite other strong contenders, of awarding it this year’s Raven.
– CC Humphreys
Congratulations to Cheryl Wollner, who wins the $300 prize, and whose story will be published in Pulp Literature Issue 22, Spring 2018. Many thanks to CC Humphreys for his careful reading and for returning to judge this year’s Raven Contest. And as well, thank you to all the entrants who provided such excellent stories and made our job and Chris’s so much harder …. and yet so enjoyable!
CC (Chris) Humphreys has written more than a dozen novel for adults and young adults, including the Arthur Ellis winner, Plague. His latest book, Chasing the Wind, is available here.
November 15th draws near, and soon the winner of the 2018 Raven Short Story Contest will be announced! As the days grow shorter, so to does the list of contenders. Below, listed alphabetically by author first name, are the authors whose stories have made the shortlist.
Cheryl Wollner for ‘Girls Who Dance in the Flames’
Colin Thornton for ‘Ten Minutes in Maine’
Erin MacNair for ‘Camping with Narwhals’
Jody Hadlock for ‘She Walks Alone’
KW George for ‘Shadows’
Kate Felix for ‘Fingered’
Kim Clark for ‘Pissing in the Pocket of the Lone Arbutus Estates’
Margot Spronk for ‘The Web’
Shanon Sinn for ‘The Proposition’
Stephanie Vernier for ‘Cashew Milk’
The big reveal from judge CC Humphreys is just around the corner. Sign up for the Pulp Literature newsletter to receive updates on our submission windows or future contests.
Get an editorial critique for only $20 more. 
Facebook
Google+
Twitter
