Announcing The True Life Story Contest
So you’ve had that story in the drawer or in your head all these years, the one about when you were a kid and your older brother talked you into buying a bag of fresh fish and then camping out with him one night and sneaking over to Miss Mustian’s store, climbing her sign pole to get up on the roof to the chimney, tearing open the bag and dumping all the fish down into her pot bellied stove to stink her store up by morning because she’s the one who told the cops that your brother rode the highway on his motorcycle without a license.
Life is about stories. Your stories. Their stories. Our stories. And we want to help you get them out there.
Or the one about … well, you know the one. We want to publish it. We want non-fiction stories about life. So we’re holding a story contest and we want you to submit and to tell all your friends who have stories to submit too because life is about stories. Your stories. Their stories. Our stories. And we want to help you get them out there.
The contest is open to anyone in the Pioneer Valley, as broad as that definition might be. We want approximately seven double-spaced pages in 12 point Arial. Please include a cover page with your name, phone number, email, and the name of your submission as well as a title page with only the name of the story. Please put the name of your story on each page as a header and number your pages .
Anyone submitting a piece for consideration for publication by The Collective agrees to grant The Collective permission to publish that piece without recompense. All rights are retained by the author. While there are no cash prizes, the top three submissions will be published in The Collective and we will bring the winner into the studio for an interview about their piece. The Collective reserves the right to consider other submissions for publication and will contact authors accordingly.
We prefer submissions by email, preferably as pdfs so they cannot be altered. But we will accept regular mailed submissions as well as long as they are copies, not originals. Regular mail manuscripts will not be returned.
Please email submissions to storycontest@amherstcollective.org with TRUE LIFE STORY CONTEST in the subject line.
You can regular mail them to The Collective TRUE LIFE Story Contest, 246 College Street, Amherst, Ma., 01002
Submissions will be accepted until Friday, July 21, 2017. Regular mail submissions must be postmarked by that date to qualify. Winners will be announced by Tuesday, August 1, 2017. You can email us with questions but please, no phone calls.
We are open and open minded, but we also ask you to be aware that The Collective is open to all ages to view so be mindful of their sensibilities. Submissions will be judged by a panel of staff and selected writers and publishers from the area.
Good luck to everyone and we look forward to hearing from you!
