Checking in with the Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest

Rose Metal Press is opening its doors for the annual Short Short Chapbook Contest today. I myself may enter if this interview doesn’t disqualify me. We’re into Short Shorts here at Fictionaut. I figured, “Tell them Tell them Nicolle. There is a contest.” Our very own Sean Lovelace was a winner one year. Damn fine work. Anywho, the smell of reading season is upon us. Be gutsy and stand by your work and go forth and enter it. You are already awesome.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): RMP, today you are open for submissions for your annual Fiction Chapbook Contest. Way I figure it is, we have some Fictionaut members who would probably like to know about the contest and submit. Tell us all about it here.

What you need to know is: Our Fifth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest submission period runs from today through December 1, 2010, and our 2010 judge will be Kim Chinquee. During the submission period, you can email your 25-40 page double-spaced manuscript of short short stories under 1,000 words each to us at rosemetalpress@gmail.com either as Word docs or rtf files. Individual stories may have appeared in journals or anthologies, but we ask that collections as a whole be previously unpublished. Please accompany your entry with the $10 reading fee, either via the payment button on our website or by check. We prefer the former, but the latter can be sent to PO Box 1956, Brookline, MA 02446.

Writers of both fiction and nonfiction are encouraged to enter, and we are open to short shorts on all subjects and in all styles. The winner and finalists will be announced by February 2011. The winning chapbook will be published in July 2011 in a limited edition of 300 copies, with an introduction by the contest judge. As with all of our previous winners, we’ll be letterpressing the covers of the winning chapbook by hand at the Printing Museum in North Andover, Massachusetts.

Tell us again about Rose Metal Press. History, ethos, jive in general.

We’re an independent, not-for-profit publisher of work in hybrid genres, specializing in the publication of short short, flash, and micro-fiction; prose poetry, novels-in-verse or book-length linked narrative poems; and other literary works that move beyond the traditional genres of poetry, fiction, and essay to find new forms of expression.

Short shorts are one of our flagship genres, and for the last 5 years we’ve run one of the only chapbook contests for manuscripts of short short stories in the country.

What sort of fiction does Rose Metal Press love to read?

Well, in this contest, we will also consider flash *non*fiction. We are equal opportunity about short short prose.

But in general, we prefer stories that operate on more than one emotional level simultaneously, achieving an atmosphere that is, for instance, funny-sad. We also love stories that exhibit some kind of formal inventiveness. It’s one of those stock answers, we know, but if you’re really curious about what exactly we’re “into,” the best thing is to check out one of our previous winners: Claudia Smith’s “The Sky is a Well,” Geoffrey Forsyth’s “In the Land of the Free,” Sean Lovelace’s “How Some People Like Their Eggs” and Mary Hamilton’s “We Know What We Are.”

Tell us anything else you’d like us to know up in here.

Our latest greatest author, Adam Golaski, is currently on tour behind his collection of strange and dreamy short fictions: Color Plates. Catch him and his tour mate John Cotter in a town near you–details for upcoming readings can be found here.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.