Unpublished Writers: Just a Few Days Left and It’s Only Offered Every Two Years

Years ago I was a finalist for the Barbara Kingsolver-founded Bellwether Prize in Support of Literature of Social Change, which this year has become the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Even though I didn’t win, it changed my literary life. A new agent sent out my manuscript and The Language of Light was picked up by the first editor she sent it to.

The entry date is coming up: January 1! And the prize is $25,000 AND publication with Algonquin Books, which is a fabulous press.

What have you got to loose?

If you’re a SheWriter who is submitting, please post the title and your first sentence here so I can live vicariously, and I’ll ask my agent to take a look at the thread. No promises, but you never know! And the contest site is here if you haven’t already entered. Good luck! – Meg

THE SUBMISSIONS:

Cassandra Dunn
Julia’s Well
It’s an insignificant detail, but the thing I remember most from that first visit to my father’s new home is that it was raining.

Melissa Aki
All Fall Down
Hearing Wei-Ting Liao’s voice on the phone after three years teleported me back to the last time I saw him—the day he held me at knifepoint in my apartment.

G. Donald Cribbs
The Packing House
My brother’s being nice to me all of a sudden.

Meleesa Stephens
Change
It was early June, and I had big plans for my weekend.

Anjali Enjeti
Secrets of the Sari Chest
Somewhere in the atmosphere between Hyderabad, India, and Atlanta, Georgia, the newspaper securing Shiva’s four arms unravels, exposing him to the residue of shaving cream, the sticky outside of children’s liquid antibiotics, porous containers of red and gold kum-kum powder, and the sharp edge of a toothpaste cap.

Petrea Burchard
Camelot & Vine
The day before my fortieth birthday was my last day as Mrs. Gone.

henya drescher
Blow Forward
Lizzie swung the truck around, shifted into reverse, and began backing into the indoor dock.

Lisa W. Rosenberg
Birch Wood Doll
There is a big party for my father, only he is not here and will not be coming.

Barbara Shallue
Tales of a Virtuous Man
Using his cane, Gautier gingerly made his way down the steps of the Confederate Veteran’s Home, leaving the creaks of rocking chairs and the whistles and snorts of old men’s dreams behind him.

Lori Duffy Foster
Spring Melt
The tall, slender woman did not move or even blink when George Alberts spoke.

Marilyn Bostick
The Ride
“I thought we are going for ice cream,” I say to break the silence.

Kaitlin Solimine
Empire of Glass
If I could tell you the story Baba never told me, it would begin the day he rides the subway from Dongzhimen to Chaoyang to tell his daughter Chenxi he is dying.

Claire McAlpine
A Piece of the Mosaic
“I have decided to spend the summer in the south of Italy this year and I was hoping that you might accompany me.”

Susan
Gently Used
Beneath the ash trees on Johnson Street, just east of campus, Hourglass Vintage stood in a weathered brick building, wedged between a fair trade coffee shop and a bike repair business.

Michele Order Litant
Starkeeper
As day began the long, slow slide into night, light stretching out across the sky with one last breath, the shadows of the trees lengthening and weaving a deep carpet on the forest floor, dark ascending the horizon in ribbons of lilac and blue, Mariel ran as if being pursued in a nightmare, tears blurring her vision, causing her to stumble, and then when, regaining her balance, she looked up, she stopped, staring, wondering if she was indeed dreaming—there was a house in the forest that hadn’t been there before.

Sarah Shellow
Slack Tide
There is something vacant about the calls of crows–how they scrub the blood out of a November sky and turn it winter’s pale; every sign of avian life fled that year before the first frost, but those crows remained, falling out of flight and onto the bare-branched maples –- black and tousled leaves lifting and settling over and again like funeral veils being tried on for size.

CJ Rice
Rambler
After all this time, “You don’t look the way I thought you would” is the first thing she says to me.

Charlene Logan Burnett
The Wardrobe
Stirring through the air with just a trace of cigarettes, white lily petals, a rustling sound like crinkled taffeta, he stepped, wearing his lime-green heels, into the baby’s room.

Kathleen Kern
BECAUSE THE ANGELS
Spike bounced the condom balloon against the office ceiling’s trapezoidal light fixture fifty-two times before she missed it.

sara selznick
The Color of Safety
Less than a mansion, more than comfortable, the house is built on eroded mountaintop—as solid as ground gets in the City of Angels—which perhaps explains how it has managed to survive earthquakes, but not what has saved it from Depressions, recessions, mass city demolitions, riots, “And really bad taste,” said Molly, surveying the diagonal rough pine siding someone had once nailed over the living room walls.

J. Dylan Yates
The Belief in Angels
My body is a coffin for my soul.

Keisha
No Heaven For Good Boys
Throat parched, lips dry and cracked, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and Ibrahimah has yet to eat today.

Nancy E. Frank
Placid Manners
The summer of the moon landing, the first that Dara, nearly 10, joined the grown-ups for cocktails, she wondered what a whore was.

Olga Godim
Mother-Daughter Minuet
Amanda stared at the gray teary lines streaking across the window and hugged herself tightly, but the goose-bumps refused to go away.

Lorraine Duffy Merkl
Hi Hi, Hi Ho, It’s Back to Work She Goes
“Please let me get a job,” I say while I inhale like as though instructed by a physician whose stethoscope is pressed against my chest because I need to produce enough wind to blow out all 50 – count ‘em 50 – blazing candles atop my Carvel cake.

Beth Griesmer
Wishing Away – I am the princess and the pauper living in the castle of clocks and mirrors.

Lisa G.C. Scheffer
Title: The True Chronicle of the Expedition to La Florida
First line: On the ninth of June, 1538, seven fierce and haughty ships sailed past the cliffs and into the jewel bay of Santiago de Cuba.

Julie Farley
Magician was attempting to pull another rabbit out of the hat in the oversized yard – her fourteenth rabbit pulling this week.
The Magician and the Mapmaker

lisa terry
Title: White Star
The tribal drum thumped in my head, animal skin stretched over hollowed wood.

Amiee White Beazley
On Mermaid Avenue
“Take it or leave it,” he said, pushing a piece of paper across the table with two fingertips.

Amiee White Beazley
On Mermaid Avenue
“Take it or leave it,” he said, pushing a piece of paper across the table with two fingertips.

Hope A. Perlman
Second Growth
Hannah looked with resentment at the stranger answering her brother’s door.

Shari A. Brady
Wish I Could Have Said Goodbye
I hug Francesca’s purse tight against my chest, nestled into the corner of my closet.

Sarah Martin Byrd
“The Color of My Heart”
I wake with my head against Momma’s shoulder.

farzana
Chai
First line: “Later, in the twilight haze of regret and despair, she thought back to the moment when she had gone astray and sacrificed everything she loved.”

Adela Crandell Durkee
A Land of Milk and Honey.
Sometimes I wish I never met Ephraim. Then it would be just me and Dallas and once in a while, Nate, like it was before we ever moved to the country, before we got splip up on Vermillion Street, before the fire, maybe even before Daddie got a job at the Plant and we moved away from Pearl.

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis
Title: A Season of White Flies
Not the wheel of dried figs kept in the drawer next to the sink, not the crema in the morning
made on the old stove parked on a dirt floor in a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet, not the fresh figs sunset-garish and afternoon-warm on their thin branches, or the way my father’s face went serene when he spoke of it, serene with a dash of the sad, not that I was the only child, a daughter and therefore a suspect heir to the little house connected to the vineyard, the farm where my father chased songbirds down with a slingshot, where what he brought down he learned to cook and what he cooked, they all ate, it was world war II, after all, and it was his home and I, his daughter and that land, and every step from the soles of my father’s bare feet that the path between plants recalled, every sigh shot and sending up the soil from my grandmother’s wearied and worried lungs, I was certain—bone-certain that they already belonged to me.

Sarah Martin Byrd
“The Color of My Heart”
I wake with my head against Momma’s shoulder.

Jean Mishra
Title: Falling Up
Opening sentence: The child hugged herself in hopes of keeping the clammy darkness from touching her.

Barbara Shallue
Winston
“On the day before Winston Clary met Nate Keetch, two weeks before the last day of fifth grade, life was normal.”

EVERYONE ON THIS LIST, PLEASE CONFIRM BELOW THAT YOU DID SUBMIT TO THE BELLWETHER PRIZE, AND THAT YOUR MANUSCRIPT IS COMPLETE. IF YOUR FULL NAME DOESN’T APPEAR, PLEASE NOTE THAT IN THE COMMENT AS WELL.

If you listed on the original thread a novel that you submitted to Bellwether, please accept my apologies and post what you originally posted along with which page of the comments the original post was on.

I’m trying to make this easy for my agent, in hopes it will inure to your benefit. Thanks!

- Meg

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