“Now you’re fourteen, standing in awesome slacks and looking at an ungainly body in the mirror,” writes Lana Bastašić in “Bread,” a short story translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth and published in Freeman’s issue on change. “In the mirror is a mutilated body, and inside that body is you.” The story follows a fourteen-year-old girl going through puberty and engages the reader through a second-person perspective in which the “you” makes the awkwardness of the prepubescent body more visceral. This week, write a story from the perspective of an adolescent in the second person. How will you build intimacy in this voice? What are some thoughts only the speaker knows?
Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.