Deadline: June 30th, 2020
Prize: $350
Theme: a personal history of how you dealt with being isolated from your community, we would prefer stories of a more distracting nature
Note: Apologies for the short window, thought we published this one already!

Send us your stories, be they poetry or prose,
to be published in a forthcoming compilation

In 1348, the Black Plague hit Florence, Italy, and it would kill tens of thousands of the city’s residents by the time the pandemic was over in 1351. Among those who lived in Florence at the time was Giovanni Boccacio, who would become famous for writing The Decameron. A collection of 100 short stories, The Decameron‘s main narrative tells the tale of seven young women and three young men who escape the plague by travelling to a countryside villa. There, they each tell one story each night for ten nights. The title “Decameron” combines the Greek words for “ten” and “day.”

The stories themselves were not about the plague. The 10 characters wanted to escape its horrors mentally as well as figuratively. They told stories of love, of lust, greed, of the fickleness of fortune, of the power of the human will. These stories would inspire the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Moliere, to name a few.

We’re now living through a similar moment in time, as we each do our part in fighting the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. At Muskeg Press, we look back and admire the attitude of Boccacio, who, in the midst of a terrible pestilence, wrote a great work of art that survives to the present day.

With that in mind, we are putting out a CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS for any author out there who would like to spend this time in self-isolation to write a story for a forthcoming publication of Muskeg Press. We’ll select 10 stories from all the submissions, and publish them in a book around Christmastime of 2020. If your story is chosen for the book, we’ll pay you $350.

Please note that our preference is to receive stories that have nothing to do with this strain of the coronavirus. Instead of a personal history of how you dealt with being isolated from your community, we would prefer stories of a more distracting nature, similar to those 10 storytellers in The Decameron.

If you’re up for this challenge, we salute you! The details for submission are below. We look forward to reading your manuscripts! And remember, the only limit is your imagination.

The Muskeg Press coronavirus story collection
Deadline: June 30, 2020
Length: Up to 5,000 words

To submit, send a Word document or a PDF to [email protected]

We will read all submissions, but we will only select 10 for submission. We will let you know whether or not your story has been selected.

Thank you, and stay safe.

Via: Muskeg Press.