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Writer and editor Home > Blogs > Brain Droppings > Archives > 2010 > March > 15
Monday, March 15, 2010
How cool! A new Shakespeare play
Hey, fans … this just in from the BBC.
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Time to enter our writing contest!
All right, friends, you can stop calling now. You can start typing, instead.
We’ve been getting calls and emails over the last few weeks from readers wondering when we were going to announce the start of this year’s Short Story and Poetry Contest, an event the newspaper has organized for the last 14 years.
The answer to the the “when?” question, I’m happy to report, is: Now.
Follow this link and you’ll find the rules for this year’s contest.
Followers of the contest will notice right away that there are a few differences this year, starting with the name. What last year was the Dayton Daily News Short Story and Poetry Contest is now something new: the Dayton Daily News/Antioch Writers’ Workshop Creative Writing Contest.
Here’s the story on what we’re doing differently.
Your truly cooked up the idea for the contest back when I had the job of arts/entertainment editor at the DDN, as a way to highlight and encourage the large number of creative writers in our area. The contest, which initially accepted short fiction only, was an immediate hit — we got just over 1,000 entries that first year, from writers young and old. We published the winners in the paper and started something of a tradition.
Teachers, we’ve found, use the contest as a class assignment year after year. The members of writers’ groups help one another with entries. Some of our winners have gone on to publish books, or to study creative writing in college.
Over the years, we’ve made modifications. We added a category for poetry, attracting a whole new community of writers. We began posting winners online. A couple of years ago, we teamed up with the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs to offer a full scholarship to the weeklong annual event as the top prize in the contest.
And now, we’ve gone a step further — entering into a full partnership with the workshop and its staff to co-manage and blend the two enterprises into one.
The reasons for doing this are several. At the paper, as jobs evolve and change and new priorities emerge, it’s become difficult to keep running the contest in-house as we have in the past. At the same time, we know it’s popular — it’s never drawn fewer than 600 entries, which is a lot of people doing a lot of writing, all of it local — and we wanted to keep the contest going.
The Antioch Writers’ Workshop, meanwhile, has entered its 25th year in 2010 looking for new ways to flourish as an important local cultural institution. The annual, weeklong workshop teaches poetry, essay-writing and fiction each summer in Yellow Springs. It has been working closely with Antioch McGregor to improve and grow, and was looking for more partnerships. The connections between the paper and the workshop — I’m a member of its board, along with former Daily News Editor Jeff Bruce, and the AWW executive director, Sharon Short, is a longtime columnist in the DDN’s Life section — helped a blending make sense.
As the rules make clear, the AWW will coordinate the contest and judging, and offer scholarships to all the winners. The DDN will publish winning stories and help underwrite the workshop this year. The contest and the workshop both will be stronger for it, we think.
And most importantly, the community of writers here, and the people who read and enjoy their work in our pages, should be better served.
To all of you who have been looking forward to entering: Get started! And good luck.
