Reading Local Seattle

Doug Fir Writing Award Looking for Submissions

Bear Deluxe Magazine is looking for fiction submissions for the Doug Fir Fiction Award. The stories will be judged by Jon Raymond, the great Portland writer who has written Half Life and the collection of stories Livability. They are looking for stories about the natural world, sense of place, or environmental issues. The stories are limited to 5,000 words, and there is a kicker: no simultaneous submissions. Although you can send in more than one entry, each story requires an entry fee of $15. See www.orlo.org for the complete entry process and requirements. Oddly, they are requiring the very ungreen practice of receiving mailed and paper checks or money orders rather than using online submissions.

Andrew Gottlieb – First Place in American Fiction

Former Seattleite Andrew Gottlieb won first place in  American Fiction for his story “Stickmen”.

Matthew Simmons Defeats All in Literary Death Match – Seattle

As predicted by Reading Local: Seattle (and earning us a tidy sum from our bookie), Matthew Simmons, (whose book was recently reviewed here), won the Literary Death Match this week.  Peter Gajdics, Matt Briggs, and Ryan Boudinot were all defeated, but in a bit of false advertising, not actually killed. You can see Simmons’s beautiful victory medallion at HTML Giant. You can read the account from from host Todd Zuniga at Literary Death Match. It was an enjoyable evening. The structure of the competition added a much needed structure to a group reading. Each reader had an extra purpose in standing up to read besides reading — they needed to read in order to kill their opponent. The judges, Mary Guterson, Lindy West, and Luke Smith, were obliquely insulting (and sometimes not so obliquely), and openly involved in paying attention to (or not)  to the pieces read, thereby removing from the audience the sometimes tiresome responsibly of paying attention. Not slam and not college lecture, The Literary Death Match will return to Seattle in November after visiting LA, England again, and Topeka, maybe.