Monday brings the weekly batch of no-fee competitions/contests, paying submission calls, and jobs for those of us who write (especially those of us who write fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction).
Hurry, hurry! “Grub Street is pleased to offer $200.00 scholarships to twenty selected writers each year. Recipients may use their scholarship at any time in the year and toward any class they desire, though not for Muse and the Marketplace tuition or manuscript consulting. There are 4 application deadlines throughout the year– one in each term. We’ll give out 5 scholarships after each deadline.” Scholarship applications for Summer 2013 must be e-mailed by Wednesday, June 12th at 12:00pm (remember that Grub Street is in Boston, folks, though they’ve recently added online classes).
“The Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University [U.K.] seeks to appoint a new member of staff [part-time Lecturer] in Creative Writing.”
“Witness is now accepting submissions of photo essays for our Summer and Winter online issues. All submissions will be considered for both issues, but you must submit before June 22, 2013 to be considered for the Summer issue. Submit a photo essay of 5-10 photos in jpeg format with a detailed caption for each, including time and place of capture. All images must be previous unpublished, either in print or online. Contributors will be paid $250.00 for each selected photo essay and may have a photograph from the essay featured as the online issue’s cover image.” (h/t The Review Review)
The Quirk Books “Looking for Love” Fiction Contest is “accepting submissions for novel-length manuscripts featuring fresh, fun, and strikingly unconventional love stories. Boy meets girl, girl meets girl, girl meets shark, shark meets pirate – anything goes.” Grand prize includes $10,000 and publication by Quirk Books. There is no entry fee. Deadline: October 1, 2013. (via @femministas)
“Columbus Monthly, the city magazine of Columbus, seeks experienced, published freelance writers for assignments covering news, arts and culture. Pay varies by assignment length and complexity.” See the announcement on Ed2010 for contact info. (The same magazine is also seeking a dining critic.)
Erika, good morning. Re: MJHnews exhibit link. The photo of Jews lining up at the American consulate in Vienna is at least as upsetting and as painful to see as the photos of Jews and other prisoners in the death camps. The details of urban, ordinary life reduce the protective distance between us : these were people in up to date clothes who showered, brushed their teeth, used telephones, made appointments to see dentists, attended weddings, and maybe stopped off at a bookstore to pick up a copy of the latest Agatha Christie, or a grocery to buy milk and bread, suddenly forced to acknowledge terrifying realities and make awful decisions. Many were faced, likely within hours or even moments of that picture being taken, with the fact that America, the Golden Land, was not an abstract, warmly welcoming, just and merciful haven for everyone-but a bureaucracy of cold blooded officials who didn’t very much like Jews. I imagine that most of the individuals on that line, or in that crowd, would soon be without changes of clean clothes, reading material, running water, privacy, dignity, or hope. People who, a week ago consulted their doctor for a sprained ankle or earache would be beaten to unconsciousness and left in their pain and fear, to die.
The photograph magnifies, somehow, the ordinariness of these people who were made to suffer. I have read much about how ordinary the bad guys seemed to interrogators and interviewers, with their authority gone. I disagree: ordinary means we can identify with them, share many of their essential values and standards. The bad guys were evil. Their values were evil. Their standards were evil.Their feelings and attitudes, their insides, were different. Evil isn’t visible on faces; life isn’t a comic strip. It was the murdered and injured people who were ordinary, in the sense that we can identify with the values and essence of many, perhaps most of them. They must have died completely bewildered by the violence of a hatred that has no rational explanation.