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At long last, in fear and trembling, the judges have reached a final, final decision (first there was a five-way tie, and then there was a three-way tie). We have checked the auguries, read the entrails and mapped the scapular fissures. This was a fantastic contest. Explosions of rampant creativity, blazing moments of brilliance. It’s a shame and an anti-climax, in some ways, to name a winner. For most of you, the act of entering, of creating the piece, was an epic of adventure and discovery. I’ve had emails from entrants saying they discovered new secrets about writing and process from the form. And your readers won because they got to see these delightful, witty, funny, and surprising texts appear each day on the entry page. Everyone who entered should be an inspiration to the rest of us.
The winners this time (may there be many more) are Julie Marden and Christopher Willard for their novel-in-a-box entitled Novel in a Bottle (thus doubling the metaphor). Novel in a Bottle is the tale of a doomed ship in a cracked bottle floating in the sea, its passengers embarking on a frenzy of decadence & despair as they await the final catastrophe. The text is itself a frenzy of allusion and technical play. The blank chapter (borrowed from Tristram Shandy), the poem chapter, the textual quotations. It’s full of character (how many characters inhabit this tiny text?) and sadness and comedy and eroticism. And at the end, Gerdy, the steward, swims for the surface and, perhaps, survives. It’s the Titanic in a bottle and, this time, Leonardo DiCaprio escapes.
See all the entries here. See the finalists here. And, as a reminder, here is the winner of the memoir-in-a-box contest.
Read the winning entry below!
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