Short Story Award Winners – Agency Review
WINNER – “The Sisters” by Angie Ellis
“The Sisters” won me over in its very first sentence. Language, imagery, rhythm, all of these are tools for spell casting, just as much as the everyday household magic which these characters seem to have access to. Though the arc of the story is never particularly surprising, it is nevertheless extremely satisfying—and the pace at which we learn more about each of the sisters, the ways in which the story reveals them to us, is delicious. — Guest Judge Kelly Link
Contact Information: ang.f.ellis@gmail.com
Biographical Statement:
Though I’ve dabbled in writing since childhood, I was 40 before I started my first novel, A Snake and a Feathered Bird. Dealing with themes of motherhood, loss, and the lies we choose to believe, this novel is set to come out in the fall of 2025 with Thistledown Press.
Since its completion I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with short stories, with a second novel in the works as well. My stories range from modern tales with a hint of strangeness, to historical pieces firmly rooted in magic. The latter has been an especially fun detour and I am currently working on linked stories in that particular genre, of which The Sisters will be one.
I’ve had stories published in Narrative, Grain, Juked, The Fiddlehead, The Lascaux Review, and others, as well as stories that have won Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net. Two of my pieces were listed in the CBC Short Story Prize and I’m grateful to have received two writing grants—one from the Canada Council for the Arts and another from the BC Arts Council. I graduated with distinction from the Humber School for Writers program, under mentor Colin McAdam.
Personal website: www.angieelliswriter.com
Interview with the author at The Masters Review
SECOND PLACE – “Feu Follet” by Rebecca Meredith
“Feu Follet” uses an excellent admixture of the real and the fantastic and the historical. I never knew quite what to expect from this story even as it met many of the beats of a classic fairytale, and the ending made me sit up straight in my chair. What, exactly, has happened? Something marvelous, something dangerous, something that feels utterly right. I loved this. — Guest Judge Kelly Link
This world was grey-green, black, brown, the water truculent, the air thick with the smell of decay. Now and then Ellie would poke Red and point, and Red would look, and have the feeling she had looked just a moment too late, into the space where a candle had just gone out, or a creature she wouldn’t even recognize had pulled behind a clump of swamp grass or sunk beneath the surface, leaving unexplained concentric circles that made her think of being pulled under.
Contact Information: rmeredith@mail.com
Biographical Statement:
Let’s get this out of the way first: in December I will be seventy years old. On the downside, I doubt I have a ten part young adult series in me. On the upside, I have years of experience with both writing and life, experience gleaned in remarkable places and times. I saw desegregation in the 1960s South, lived during times when women and girls had virtually no agency, and was intimately acquainted with the myriad workarounds people who had no power sought to thrive, and often to simply survive. My story, “Feu Follet,” reflects this fact in a magical, yet historically accurate, way.
This search for female identity and agency is what informs most of my fiction. This, and a life that turned to reading and writing as a defense against early parental loss and constant upheaval. In those years I found a deep connection with the magic that writers could pull from the mundane, the world building that held hope and power and joy. The fact that I lived in a place where, as my people would say, “the veil is thin,” and life, death and emotional well-being wore many faces led me to explore, in my own work, many facets of how women and girls in particular navigate those things.
I have been involved in the literary world in various ways most of my adult life, as a poet and fiction writer. In 2011 I became the first poet laureate of the city of Redmond, Washington (think Microsoft—I was there when that was founded too). I was a founder of the Redmond Association of Spokenword, a still active organization that promotes writing of all kinds in the Pacific Northwest. While working as a psychotherapist for twenty years I wrote and taught writing as a form of therapy to cancer patients, girls in a children’s prison, schools and senior centers, among others.
In 2014 I self-published my first novel, The Last of the Pascagoula, a coming-of-age story set on the Gulf Coast where I grew up. It took First Place in the literary genre in Writer’s Digest’s Self-Published Fiction Contest. Subsequently I was contacted by a literary manager and for an exciting time the novel was shopped for possible film adaptation. It was never picked up, but I learned a great deal and went on to write a sequel, Look Up from the Water.
After retiring I returned to college and in 2022 received my MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. I concentrated on short fiction, a fascinating art form in itself, and my thesis was a manuscript consisting of short stories and a novella. I have since worked on turning the novella into a full-length novel, The Tally, in which an older, irascible woman takes a cross country trip to scatter the ashes of the husband whose life she had hid behind for years, and tries to decide how, and if, to go on. She is accompanied by Oliver Hardy, her late husband’s bulldog companion, who, along with the women she meets along the way, teaches her to once again assume her lost agency and power. The book is in mid-process but so far I like it. Given the changing views on elders these days, and their—our—place as a large part of the reading public, I think it has promise.
Interview with the author at The Masters Review
THIRD PLACE – “Linoleum People” by Eliza Gilbert
“Linoleum People” is generous toward its characters, and faithful to the strangeness, the boredom, the safety of routines set out for one by other people. The sentences are energetic, colorful, rich in the kind of specificity of detail that, stripped down, feels exactly right. I’m intrigued by the shifts in POV, and I’m interested in everyone we meet. And—no small thing!—I appreciate the humor, which serves as another kind of texture layered in over everything else. — Guest Judge Kelly Link
The Rule of Ryan Seacrest, exhibit B: At dinner, I eat spaghetti and meatballs with a plastic spoon. The hole in my nose is closing up.
There is no uncrossing these wires. One truth relies on the other.
Contact Information: egilbert@vassar.edu
Biographical Statement:
As a child, I was adamant that I did not want to be a writer. It’s my father’s career, and as much as I’ve always admired him, the fluster and frustrations of his work used to alarm me.
When my brother and I needed scrap paper for our homework or art projects, we used the blank backsides of his manuscript drafts, and I was forever off-put by the slashes of his pen poking through. I found it endlessly frightening that a person could spend years crafting a story world, only to end up unsatisfied with its constituents. It kept me up at night. It appeared in my dreams; adult me in a carbon copy of my father’s office, hunched over a computer, watching the cursor blink. I should’ve known, then, that when something haunts and hounds you like that, it probably means you’re a little bit in love with it.
I started at Vassar College in 2021 as a prospective Biology major on the pre-med track.
Now, I’m entering my senior year as an English major, Film minor, and Editor-in-Chief of the Vassar Review. I’ve been lucky enough to spend these past four years funneling energy into writing, despite the discomfort it still fills me with. As a young writer, I’m lucky enough to have a relatively undeveloped style; I have so much room to grow, and learn, and discover the voices that fit me. Currently, I write and publish everything from narrative poetry to poetry-driven prose, from autofiction to magical realism. I’m interested in character- and place-driven work, which is to say, I’m interested in our dysfunctional psychosocial selves, and how they come to know each other. Maybe it’s because I was born and raised in Greenwich Village, and spent long hours after school sitting on the steps on Union Square, watching people move around each other. Maybe it’s because I watch too much Survivor.
Over the past four years as an undergraduate, I’ve been lucky enough to publish poetry in journals such as The Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Iowa Review. My fiction has appeared in Split Lip Magazine and The Masters Review among others, and I received LitMag’s 2022 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction. Last summer, I began an MA through Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English, and I plan on applying to MFA programs in the coming year. Alongside midterms and essays on Milton, I am currently working on a group of short stories that chart the eerie happenings at an all-girls summer camp in the Adirondacks. I also recently began a novel-in-progress in which two troubled step-siblings on a camping trip come upon a strange house in a strange wood with a strange woman inside, who may once have known Hansel and/or Gretel. Recently, through my work at Bread Loaf in Oxford, I completed my first poetry chapbook.
Other important parts of my life: I have one dog, two step-dogs, and two step-rabbits. I had a secret career in high school as an online special effects makeup artist. I am passionate about caesar salad and being a sister. Despite my childhood fears about my father’s job, he has always been my favorite writer.
Interview with the author at The Masters Review
HONORABLE MENTION – “The Two Things Blassie Knows” by Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal
Blassie really only knows two things in life: that his back will break and when it does, he will live almost exactly two years beyond that. Don’t ask him how or why he knows. He says he just does.
Contact Information: writerclaytonb@gmail.com
Biographical Statement:
I became a writer out of necessity. My pathway to writing wound through a tumultuous childhood peppered with abuse and homelessness, a stint in the Army that ended with further homelessness, and time in and out of jail cells—an inappropriate social response in place of mental health care for my myriad traumas and suicide attempts. I became a writer because there was no other space for me, and I, like Samad Iqbal in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, felt a need to etch my name into the world.
It was through writing that I explored my queerness (I am gender-fluid and bisexual) and where I developed the idea for a queer, working-class imaginary to celebrate the queer working class and breathe safe spaces for this identity onto the page. I have attempted to bring attention to an evolving language and to challenge a common notion that queerness is not present within working-class settings.
My writing journey has led to an BA in English from Sam Houston State University, an MFA in Fiction from Texas State University, and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi. I am a MASS MoCA Fellow, an alum of the Vermont Studio Center, an alum of the Tin House Winter Workshop, and a former editorial staff member of Mississippi Review and Porter House Review.
Presently, I am the Creative Writing professor at Gannon University, the managing editor of New Ohio Review, and the No Place is Foreign Editor at Another Chicago Magazine. My writing has appeared in Story, Fairy Tale Review, South Carolina Review, F(r)iction, American Literary Review, The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Hole in the Head Review, Consequence and additional journals. My work has been won or been a finalist for the Plaza Short Story Prize, the Saints + Sinners LGBTQ Fiction Prize, the Kinder-Crump Award at Pleiades, the Charles Simic Poetry Prize, the Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Contest, and the Neutrino Short Short Prize at Passages North, among others.
Writing Statement:
While working on my MFA, after workshop one day, Tim O’Brien told me that realist stories must always contain a bit of magic, and magical stories should always remain grounded in reality. I’ve taken this to heart and learned to push the boundaries of my fiction into places where perspective blurs, magic thrives, and meaning is drawn from relationships between character, place, and situation. Workshops with Karen Russell, Jennifer DuBois, Doug Dorst, Olivia Clare Friedman, and others helped me to hone the experiment and to pull out the way a viewpoint influences a story.
While working on my PhD, I developed a theory around the queer, working class imaginary as a way to envision how my work fits into contemporary conversations. I use magical realist and speculative modes to push taboos and envelop queerness in a safe space where untrue cultural narratives lose their chokehold on how we see the queer population of working-class communities. My work arises from a desire to define the undefinable, to ask questions of my place in the world, and a need to position my characters on the boundary of the real and the magical. I want to address the harshness of working-class language and re-envision an inclusive vocabulary that reflects the very real existence of the queer, multicultural working class.
Current Projects:
Currently, I am sending out my 70,000, LGBTQ, magical realist story collection SOFT GOODBYES THROUGH BROKEN VEILS (of which “The Two Things Blassie Knows” is part) while I finish a speculative novel—THE EDUCATORS (currently at 25,000 words).
SOFT GOODBYES THROUGH BROKEN VEILS is story collection that explores the life of a young, gay artist in the West Texas desert as he navigates relationships while creating art that comes to life through a tear in the veil that separates the living from the dead. This art takes the form of linked short stories including those of a lesbian combat veteran dependent on her emotional support chupacabra in the Tennessee countryside, the youngest member of a roofing crew in Alabama in a gay relationship with a client whose roof perpetually reverses each repair, and a dying sound editor whose grasp of reality breaks down when he begins to hear the voices of dead audience members in the canned laughter he is adding to an afternoon sitcom—among others.
The characters of this collection demonstrate the audacity to confront their world with optimism and defiance, an audacity that leads the gay artist through the broken veil and into a world that is neither living nor dead.
Stories from the collection have been published in literary magazines and anthologies, including Story, The Masters Review, Fairy Tale Review, South Carolina Review, F(r)iction, American Literary Review, The Saltbush Review, and Remington Review. Several have won or been finalists for prizes, including the Plaza Short Story Prize, the Saints + Sinners LGBTQ Fiction Prize, and the Kinder-Crump Award at Pleiades.
The collection itself has been a finalist for the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize, the Iron Horse First Book Prize, the W.S. Porter Prize at Regal House Publishing, the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and others.
THE EDUCATORS is a speculative novel-in-progress that follows a nonbinary teenager and their lesbian best friend in a world ravaged by climate change where their teachers have been replaced by robotic Educators. In the course of leading an anti-Educator movement, they encounter the consequences of machine learning and truths about their own dark motivations. After one of them suffers an injury during an incident with a group of Educators, the other must navigate the souring responses of peers and neighbors to their protests.
Website: https://writerclaytonbradshaw.com/