Cover Story: CL’s third annual fiction contest
Dirt, the lowly substance from which all things must rise, was the key thematic ingredient for CL’s third annual Fiction Contest. Dirt has easily identifiable connotations to the South, both past (dirt farmers, dirt roads) and present (dirty air, dirty rivers). It lends itself to metaphor — dirty minds, dirty laundry, dirty words. Really, how could we go wrong? And so it was with great expectation — and more than a bit of apprehension — that we awaited the inevitable landslide of entries.
Not surprisingly, some of the stories only had a tangential connection to dirt, including two of our winners. But for the most part, the 300 or so writers who participated in this year’s contest dug into the concept with a very literal shovel. Story titles encompassed every possible variation on the theme: “Dirty Girl.” “Dirty Little Secrets.” “Dirty Thoughts.” “The Dirt.” Some crafty writers submitted their stories along with bags of actual dirt. They didn’t win, but earned praise here in the office for creativity. When the time came to choose the winners, our intrepid judges threw out all the gimmicks and excavated only the piles of paper before them.
Third-place winner “One Hundred Paper Cranes” by Christopher Bundy takes place on a filthy train car in Japan. The second-place winner, “News Travels Fast Down Here, or The Gospel According to Queen James” by M. Ayodele Heath, features a down-and-dirty catfight between two drag queens.
But our first-place winner, “Hope Under My Fingernails” by J.D. Jordan, not only rhapsodizes on the textural allure of dirt and its unsung sibling, mud, but it plays with the spiritual concepts of mankind’s origins in clay.
<font size=”+2”Meet the judges
Hollis Gillespie is the author of Moodswing, a weekly humor column that has appeared in Creative Loafing for four years. She is also a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Look for her book, Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood, featuring a collection of her favorite CL columns, to be published this March by Regan Books/Harper Collins. The daughter of a traveling mobile home salesman and a bomb-building expert who longed to be a cosmetologist, Gillespie works as a flight attendant and translator. She lives in Atlanta with her 3-year-old daughter.
Frank Reiss grew up in Atlanta, graduated from the University of Georgia and since 1989 has owned A Cappella Books, a new and used bookstore in Little Five Points. He is also the founder of everthemore books, a new publishing venture devoted to resurrecting out-of-print titles. Reiss has written for newspapers and radio, and, for almost 20 years, has reviewed books for publications in San Francisco and Atlanta. His unsold writing efforts include country songs and a children’s book, so he identifies with those aspiring writers who entered the Creative Loafing Fiction Contest with dreams of fame or fortune.
Jack Riggs spent 10 years in Hollywood working as an assistant director and story analyst, before earning an MFA in creative writing at UNC-Greensboro. His stories have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Crescent Review, The Habersham Review, and Writing, Making It Real. In 2000, he was selected “Emerging New Southern Voice” at the Millennial Gathering of the Writers of the New South at Vanderbilt University. Riggs’ work was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Fiction Contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches creative writing and film studies at Georgia Perimeter College.??