In “The Linguistic Case for Sh*t Hitting the Fan” at JSTOR Daily, Chi Luu writes about the functions of idiomatic speech, their linguistic origins, their usage and effects, and their power to draw people together with a feeling of intimacy or community, citing examples such as “chew the fat,” “pull someone’s leg,” “kick the bucket,” “shoot the breeze,” “let the cat out of the bag,” and others. “Idioms, though seemingly mundane, are the fossilized poetry of language,” writes Luu. Write a poem that springs from one of your favorite idioms, perhaps one you use frequently or one with particularly evocative imagery. What memories, associations, or resonances arise?

Submissions are open for the 2020 Richard J. Margolis Award. Established in the memory of journalist, essayist, and poet Richard J. Margolis, the annual prize awards $5,000 and a one-month residency at Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, to a journalist or essayist whose work “combines warmth, humor, and wisdom and sheds light on issues of social justice.”

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Submit a cover letter, a project description that includes details of current and anticipated work, a short bio, and two to three writing samples totaling no more than thirty pages by July 1. There is no entry fee. The winner will be announced in November, with the Blue Mountain Center residency to take place in summer or fall 2021. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Over the course of his career, Richard J. Margolis worked as a writer, educator, editor, and activist. He wrote widely on education, healthcare, poverty, rural America, and racial justice, among other topics, and his articles appeared regularly in such publications as the New York Times and Washington Post. His friends and family founded the Richard J. Margolis Award in 1992, a year after he died due to sudden heart failure at age sixty-one.  The award’s most recent winner is memoirist Mansoor Adayfi, who received the honor for work that turns his “fourteen-plus years of captivity at Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp into compelling narratives of human connection and hope.”

Conceptual artist Christo, who died on Sunday, was known for his large-scale environmental pieces mostly created in partnership with his wife Jeanne-Claude and involving the cooperation of many others—including politicians, legal workers, landowners, environmental groups, engineers, and city administrators—and often taking decades to complete. In a 1972 New York Times article, Christo said: “For me esthetics is everything involved in the process—the workers, the politics, the negotiations, the construction difficulty, the dealings with hundreds of people. The whole process becomes an esthetic—that’s what I’m interested in, discovering the process. I put myself in dialogue with other people.” Find a personal essay you wrote in the past, or perhaps one you never finished, and work on adding a new layer that incorporates all of the people and things that have to be in place for you to do your creative work. You might include documents, photographs, found text, or other ephemera in your piece.  

“One week before my wedding day, upon returning to my hotel room with a tube of borrowed toothpaste, I find a small bird waiting inside the area called the antechamber and know within moments it is my grandmother.” In Marie-Helene Bertino’s second novel, Parakeet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), the narrator’s dead grandmother returns to life as a parakeet and bestows the bride-to-be with the task of finding her estranged brother. Write a story in which your protagonist is confronted with a lost loved one who has come back to life in another form. What is the significance of the form you choose to house the spirit? Is there an important purpose or mission handed down?

“Grief is a heated iron comb: // The kerosene of grief, it doesn’t age well, it degrades: / Grief is a kind of time: // Sign your name. Become a series of signals...” For the Academy of American Poets’s Poem-a-Day,  Sun Yung Shin writes that her poem “A History of Domestication” is part of a forthcoming collection exploring “how climate threat and mass extinction may affect our social relations, our sense of death and the afterlife/underworld, and how we think of violence in our species.” Write a poem that explores issues that have become important to you as you think about current forces of destruction. When you imagine the near future, how do you envision priorities shifting? What about further on down the line?

In Tracy O’Neill’s new novel, Quotients (Soho Press, 2020), one character says to another: “When the luck is good, the answer is not why. It is yes.” Over the years countless authors—and their characters—have shared a range of perspectives on the notion of luck, many of them leaning toward skepticism or wariness. Emily Dickinson wrote: “Luck is not chance— / It’s Toil— / Fortune’s expensive smile / Is earned.” In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy wrote: “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” And in The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.” Write a personal essay about a time when you experienced a stroke of luck, good or bad. Has the significance of luck in your life changed over time?

With a new month approaching, contests with a deadline of June 1 are upon us. These poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation awards are meant for college students, established authors, and everyone in between. All offer a cash prize of $1,000 or more. You could even win the opportunity to have a free glass of wine every day for a year!

American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize: A prize of $2,500 and publication in American Short Fiction is given annually for a short story. Manuel Gonzales will judge. All entries are considered for publication. Deadline: June 1. Entry fee: $20.

Boulevard Emerging Poets Contest: A prize of $1,000 and publication in Boulevard is given annually for a group of poems by a poet who has not published a poetry collection with a nationally distributed press. The editors will judge. All entries are considered for publication. Deadline: June 1. Entry fee: $16 (subscription included).

Crook’s Corner Book Prize: A prize of $5,000 is given annually for a debut novel set in the American South. The winner will also be entitled to a complimentary glass of wine every day for a year at Crook’s Corner Café & Bar in Chapel Hill. The author may live anywhere, but eligible novels must be set primarily in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, or Washington, D.C. Monique Truong will judge. Deadline: June 1. Entry fee: $35.

McGill University Montreal International Poetry Prize: A prize of $20,000 CAD (approximately $14,500) and publication in the 2020 Global Poetry Anthology is given biennially for a poem. Yusef Komunyakaa will judge, and Jordan Abel, Kaveh Akbar, CAConrad, Wendy Cope, Susan Elmslie, Steven Heighton, John Leonard, Marilène Phipps, Sridala Swami, and Gillian Sze will serve as jurors. Deadline: June 1. Entry fee: $25 CAD (approximately $18).

PEN America PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants: Grants of $2,000 to $4,000 each are given annually to support the translation of book-length works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an “outdated or otherwise flawed translation.” An additional $5,000 grant, the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature, will be given to support the translation of a book of fiction or nonfiction from Italian into English. Manuscripts with up to two translators are eligible. Deadline: June 1. Entry fee: none.

Salamander Fiction Prize: A prize of $1,000 and publication in Salamander is given annually for a short story. Elliot Ackerman will judge. All entries are considered for publication. Deadline: June 1. Entry fee: $15.

Stony Brook Southampton Undergraduate Short Fiction Prize: A prize of $1,000 is given annually for a short story by a college student. The winner also receives a full scholarship to attend the Southampton Writers Conference in July 2021, and their winning work will be considered for publication in Southampton Review. Deadline: June 1. Entry fee: none.

Visit the contest websites for complete guidelines, and check out the Grants & Awards database and Submission Calendar for more contests in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.

“In the hollow of her throat, a tendon was jumping. I felt it in my own neck. The rigid angle of her arm: my arm, too, was oddly bent. Always between us there had been this symmetry,” writes Kyle McCarthy in her debut novel, Everyone Knows How Much I Love You (Ballantine Books, 2020). This scene, in which the protagonist reunites with a childhood friend and experiences a rush of intense feelings, serves as a portent of the story that follows: a dark exploration of the secret and inexplicable longings present in ourselves and our relationships with others. Write a short story that begins with a main character coming face-to-face with an old friend. Do sentiments that went unarticulated as children surface in unexpected ways years later?