Billy Collins to judge the Fish Publishing Poetry Contest 2011/2012

United States Poet Laureate (2001–2003)

Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. His readings are usually standing room only, and his audience – enhanced tremendously by his appearances on National Public Radio – includes people of all backgrounds and age groups. The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight.

Billy Collins has published eight collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Picnic, Lightning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, Nine Horses, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, and Ballistics, and most recently, Horoscopes for the Dead. A collection of his haiku, titled She Was Just Seventeen, was published by Modern Haiku Press in fall 2006. He also edited two anthologies of contemporary poetry: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2006, and edited Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds, with paintings by David Allen Sibley (November 2009).

Included among the honors Billy Collins has received are fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also been awarded the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, and the Levinson Prize — all awarded by Poetry magazine. In October 2004, Collins was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry.

In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003. In January 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate 2004-06. Billy Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, as well as a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College.

(Excerpt from http://www.barclayagency.com/collins.html#)

David Mitchell to judge the Fish Publishing Short Story Contest

Fish Publishing are very proud to announce that the author David Mitchell will be the judge of the Fish Publishing Short Story Contest that opens on 1st August.

Prizes and awards

1999 Guardian First Book Award (shortlist) Ghostwritten

1999 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Ghostwritten

2001 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (shortlist) number9dream

2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) number9dream

2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Cloud Atlas

2005 British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award Cloud Atlas

2005 British Book Awards Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year Cloud Atlas

2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) Cloud Atlas

2006 Costa Novel Award (shortlist) Black Swan Green

2006 Quill Book Award (USA) (general fiction - shortlist) Black Swan Green

2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region Best Book) (shortlist) Black Swan Green

David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England, where he could live on his earnings as a writer and support his pregnant wife.[1] After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Clonakilty, Ireland, with his wife Keiko and their two children. In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote: "I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself."

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His two subsequent novels, number9dream(2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. In 2007, Mitchell was listed amongTime magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World. Mitchell's American editor at Random House is novelist David Ebershoff.

For more information go to http://www.thousandautumns.com/

The Fish Publishing Anthology Launch 2011

The winning writers and  the dedicated organizers of the Fish Publishing Anthology Launch 2011

The Fish Poem

Centos are collaged poems made up of fragments of other poems. For the official launch of the FISH Anthology in Bantry, Ireland, Brain Turner composed a Cento from the winning Fish poems — otherwise known as “The FISH Poem” 

With the Sails Unfurled

At the border, I forget who I am—

like a leaf changing into a verb, I toss and turn,

going nowhere. Now,

                                     let us speak of love.

Don’t think I don’t know

the crackle of the fire at night, how

the granite boulders burned

like nascent magma

as we waited there. For you,

               I’ll search until the end of time,

with the wind from the west,

sea spray on my face, ‘til the grass is gone

and the rivers run dry, ‘til the end of time,

wherever that is—now,

and now  

and now.

 Brian Turner reading at The Fish Publishing Anthology 2011 launch

The work of the following poets were included:

Ken Taylor, Jean Tuomey, Stephanie Scott, Diana Adams, Michael McCarthy, Jo Bell, Kita Shantiris, Cecile Callan, Malissa Priebe, Kirsty McCormack 

Poem celebrating the launch of the Fish Anthology by Ken Taylor, winner of the Fish Publishing Poetry Prize 2011

in st brendan's church, bantry



the collar of christ is not mock

incantation but gothic & round

with nimbus behind coming off

as the lid of a shell so he has

the bearing of heroic oyster or

even pearl with steely eyes to

meet the mouth that will take

him in: grim push toward or

rebuttal of transubstantiation.

then it’s an oyster disguise as

he rises from canonical camo,

right hand in nonchalance,

aimed loosely at heaven. is

this my struggle or intention

of the stained-glass maker who

crafted a righteous sword stare

or the happenstance of sand

becoming both lucent, colored

glass & trope of grain of sand

becoming pearl becoming savior.

his stare goes over my head

through parallel stained window,

past wolf tone square as if call

to the halal falafel shop across

the street, with no customers –

the owner’s head bowed to allah.

New Contemporary Memoir Course

With the success of the Flash Fiction Course, Fish Publishing  is very excited to announce  a new Contemporary Memoir Course.  This is a one-to-one online program that should take no longer than 6 months to complete and students can choose their own pace.

This course is designed to stimulate, organise and craft your writing and develop an ability to write based on personal experience and with literary purpose. The aim of this course is not necessarily to come away with a full-length memoir under your belt but it will point you in the right direction by focusing on elements of the genre including characterisation, plot, dialogue and description that you can build upon. Most importantly it will make space in your life for writing. 

Details of the course can be found at www.fishpublishing.com

Fish celebrates One Year of the Flash Fiction Creative Writing Course

The Fish Publishing Online Flash Fiction Course continues after a successful first year. One of this year’s graduates: Jette-Julie Rosendal,  was a runner up in the Fish One-Page Story Competition with “Cover”.

These are some of the things that former students said about the course:

I enjoyed the course very much and it provided me with more than I expected. It was a tool to motivate me to write on a continuing and regular basis and it also introduced me to the pleasure and challenges of flash fiction work. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Mary Jane. I would say there was the right level of straight forward critique balance with positive prompts and encouraging feedback.

Andrea Wicks

It helped me focus on my writing much more than before, the combo of being able to take my time, still someone waiting for my stories made WRITING a much more “real” thing. My writing has improved greatly, I can see that myself when rereading some of my stuff.

I´m much more aware of making choices rather than just scribbling along, which has made me feel I have a pretty great toolbox now. And it was great fun too! Great variety in exercises, additional stuff to do, and constructive, hands-on advice! One of my stories written on the course made it into the Fish Anthology 2011, which I´m still trying to fathom, but have no doubt is a direct result of the course – and its teacher. The teacher- Mary-Jane Holmes had a feel for what I wanted to say, where I wanted to go with my stories, and guided me with clarity, professionalism and human warmth. She has made me much more aware of making choices rather than just scribbling along, which has made me feel I have a pretty great toolbox now. And she made it great fun too!

Jette-Julie Rosendal

I found the course to be hugely beneficial, challenging and also a lot of fun. For me, it was also a great driver to actually write “stuff” day in-day out for an extended period.

Mary-Jane was very encouraging right from the start and she always found something positive to say about each assignment. Her criticism/analysis was always very clear and accurate (when I read it, I could immediately see the pertinence of it). At one point, I described her criticism of an assignment as “gently incisive” and I think that could be use to sum up just about all her interaction.

Kieron Lyons

Mary Jane is an excellent teacher – prompt, direct, precise, encouraging and clear. This is my first experience of tuition in writing. It’s been enjoyable and stimulating in equal measure.

Nancy Fermanagh

Thank you for a high quality course with prompt, valid feedback from an engaging writing professional.

Fiona Sussman

Details of the course can be found at www.fishpublishing.com

Simon Mawer on Judging the Fish Short Story Competition 2010/2011

On Judging the Fish Short Story Competition, 2010/2011

Short story writing is a bit like painting in water colours. It’s an art of precise strokes in which you need to be deft, accurate and sensitive to the faintest imbalance. And if it’s good then the finished whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, novel writing is more like painting in oils. You can layer, rework, scrub things out, move near, stand back, live with the thing in your studio for a year or more, counterbalance a lapse here with a successful passage there. And all too often the whole is somehow less than its various parts. As a writer I feel I can do the oil painting, more or less; it’s the water colours that make me feel inadequate.

So it was with some trepidation that I received the final twenty stories that had made the cut in the Fish Short Story competition this year. No committee decision from now on: it was up to me alone. Aside from being a novelist I have also been a teacher – not of English or Creative Writing but of workaday Biology – and as soon as I turned to the first story I found the teacher in me asking questions: what are the criteria? where is the mark scheme? how can you be objective about this? The answer is, of course, you cannot. Assuming all the stories are competently written (they were) any further judgement must be purely subjective. So, feeling guilty, I threw years of pedagogical conditioning out of the window and sat down to read. I wasn’t a teacher marking exams, I was a writer doing the impossible: trying to rank works of art. And the only way I could do it was by deciding which of these stories I liked best.

What struck me forcibly was the preponderance of family anguish stories. Isn’t this theme a trifle hackneyed? Perhaps it comes from that injunction of the Creative Writing course, that you should write about what you know. I’d say, write about what you imagine. Let your imagination take you to places and inside people whom you couldn’t possibly otherwise have known. Imagination is the key, the crux, the hinge on which all art turns.

So I was captivated by the desolate mining world evoked in Big Spirit Blow with its awful shrivelled corpses and the bewildered Ozzies trying to make out what was going on. And the biologist in me loved the gruesome mutated Cordyceps fungus attacking humans as the current species attack insects. The tone is right, the language is right, threat is expertly hinted at. You breathe in the spores as you read.

Closer to home, La Paix seemed a beautifully oblique portrait of a marriage broken by a single, mundane tragedy – half a lifetime distilled into a few thousand words, emotions alluded to rather than stated bluntly. I enjoyed the bleak detachment of the narration and the bitter irony of “insurance”, which is the leitmotiv of the story.

Finally my winner was The Space Between Louis and Me, for its humour and its gentle mockery of our current obsession with the virtual world. With social networks and online gaming replacing human interaction, who can doubt that someone like Louis, or Louisa, is waiting just round the corner for you? Yet beneath the veneer of humour was a real evocation of the isolation that imbues so much of modern life. And, as with a fine water colour, this piece was created with minimal brushstrokes. 

So that’s my verdict. And why do I still feel guilty? It's the damn teacher in me again, having awarded marks and then thinking, "Have I got it right?" as though there is some absolute rightness against which we will all eventually be judged …

Simon Mawer

Rome

March 2011

The Fish Anthology 2011

The Fish Anthology was launched today at the West Cork Literary Festival. You can obtain a copy from www.fishpublishing.com

TWO DAYS LEFT TO ENTER FISH POETRY PRIZE

The Fish Poetry Prize closes in 2 days. Brian Turner, author of Here Bullet and Phantom Noise is judging and this is an opportunity to be recognized by one of the most interesting and powerful poets of our time, and be published in the 2011 Fish Anthology. The first prize is €1,000 and the best ten poems will be published.

Brian Turner will launch the Anthology on July 6 at the West Cork Literary Festival.

Poetry is just the evidence of life.  If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

Leonard Cohen

Entry is online – €14, or by post – €16.

If posting, the address is:

Fish Publishing,

Durrus,

Bantry,

Co. Cork,

Ireland.

Make cheques payable to Fish Publishing. Do not put your name or address or any other details on the poem – use a separate sheet. Receipt of entry will be acknowleged by email. Poems will not be returned.

Maximum words for each poem is 200, and you may enter as many as you wish, provided there is an entry fee for each one. Full details and rules are here, and are listed below in brief. Entry is deemed to be acceptance of these rules.

Publishing rights of the ten winning poems are held by Fish Publishing for one year after the publication of the Anthology.

Last year the prize was won by Catherine Phil MacCarthy with Limbo.  reproduced here –

Limbo

The firstborn   was handed back to them 

in a small cask   not much bigger than

a shoebox   only wooden   no more about it

they took it home by pony and trap

wasn’t the river in flood at the gate?

they had to climb down   and wade through it  

and she went alone with him

to the corner of a field   below the house

a dry shaded place   where he opened a grave

for it was April then   and the pinkish

blossoms of whitethorn were emerging

and they lifted it low together

onto sods of damp earth  

placed holy water with it

and everything she could to lay  

a holy innocent to rest

as far as  giving the boy    a name

it was Martin    the brother in Chicago

and when it came to saying good-bye

he had to draw her away    she was so

lonely   that shook him   while

he covered it with clay   for up to then

never a care   but a demon for style

high heels   you’ve never seen the like

though she gave birth again 

she was often seen    alone   in that field

Catherine Phil MacCarthy

For writers who wish to improve their skills, the Fish online course in Flash Fiction offers a ten module course over three months. It is designed to be useful and fun, and includes free entry to next year’s One-Page Prize.

The 2011 Fish Short Story Prize will open on 1 June and close 30 Sept 2011.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. 

W.B. Yeats

Poetry Contest Rules

No entry form is needed. Entry is mostly on-line, or by post if required.

You can enter as many times as you wish. One poem per entry.

The poetry contest is open to poets of any nationality writing in English.

There is no restriction on theme or style.

Poem length is restricted to 200 words.

The winning poems must be available for the anthology and, therefore, must not have been published previously.

Fish holds publishing rights for one year after publication. Copyright remains with the author.

Notification of receipt of entry will normally be by email.

The judges' verdict is final.

No correspondence will be entered into once work has been submitted.

Poems cannot be altered or changed after they have been entered. Do not put name or address with the poem, but on a separate sheet if entering by post, or in the correct place on the online entry system.

Overall winners of the Fish Poetry Prize may enter again, but will not be eligible for the first prize.

A poet who has had two poems in Fish Anthologies may not enter for three years. They may enter other Fish Prizes in that time. (This is designed to give opportunities to a wider circle of emerging poets).

Entry is taken to be acceptance of these rules.

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. 

André Gide

End

WINNERS OF THE 2010/11 FISH SHORT STORY PRIZE

17 March. St Patrick’s Day

WHITE SMOKE!

WINNERS OF THE 2010/11 FISH SHORT STORY PRIZE AS CHOSEN BY SIMON MAWER. (See Simon’s thoughts on the judging process and the stories below).

Winner:

The Space Between Louis And Me by Mary O’Donnell (Ireland)

Second:

La Paix by Hannah-Fleur Fitz-Gibbon (UK)

Third:

Big Spirit Blow by Robert Porteous (Australia)

Runners-up, not in order:

Bread and Stone by Sylvia Torti (USA)

The Yellow Cardigan by Vicky Woodcraft (UK)

The Blue Notes by Jenni Lawson (USA)

You Only Know Who Your Mummy Is by Kelly Holman (UK)

Off My Trolley by Jude Bridge (Australia)

Casting for Parts by Caitlin Greene (Australia)

Daddy's Rich and Mummy's Good-Looking by Jo Campbell (UK)

All of us at Fish would like to congratulate these ten writers. The Fish editorial staff worked diligently over the winter to read and shortlist the 1,900 stories that were entered, and I want to thank them for their time and care.

There will be some very disappointed writers on the shortlist that were not selected for the Anthology, and I would like to commend them highly on their achievement. As Simon Mawer indicates in his notes below, all on the shortlist were worthy of inclusion and there was little or nothing separating them from the winners. On another day, they might have been the ones. On another day, they will be.

The prizes will be awarded at the launch of the 2011 Fish Anthology of short stories, flash fiction and poetry. Bantry in west Cork is the location, on Wednesday 6 July, at the West Cork Literary Festival. The ten winning stories will appear in the Anthology alongside the winners of the Fish One-Page and Poetry Prizes.

Winner Mary O’Donnell, already a prominent Irish poet, receives €3,000. Second Hannah-Fleur Fitz-Gibbon gets a week at Anam Cara Writers’ and Artists’ Retreat in West Cork and €300, and third Robert Porteus receives €300. We at Fish hope that all of the writers can join Mary O’Donnell and read from their work at the launch.

Simon Mawer on Judging the Fish Short Story Competition, 2010/2011

“Short story writing is a bit like painting in water colours. It’s an art of precise strokes in which you need to be deft, accurate and sensitive to the faintest imbalance. And if it’s good then the finished whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, novel writing is more like painting in oils. You can layer, rework, scrub things out, move near, stand back, live with the thing in your studio for a year or more, counterbalance a lapse here with a successful passage there. And all too often the whole is somehow less than its various parts. As a writer I feel I can do the oil painting, more or less; it’s the water colours that make me feel inadequate.

So it was with some trepidation that I received the stories that had made the cut in the Fish Short Story competition this year. No committee decision from now on: it was up to me alone. Aside from being a novelist I have also been a teacher – not of English or Creative Writing but of workaday Biology – and as soon as I turned to the first story I found the teacher in me asking questions: what are the criteria? where is the mark scheme? how can you be objective about this? The answer is, of course, you cannot. Assuming all the stories are competently written (they were) any further judgement must be purely subjective. So, feeling guilty, I threw years of pedagogical conditioning out of the window and sat down to read. I wasn’t a teacher marking exams, I was a writer doing the impossible: trying to rank works of art. And the only way I could do it was by deciding which of these stories I liked best.

What struck me forcibly was the preponderance of family anguish stories among the twenty. Isn’t this theme a trifle hackneyed? Perhaps it comes from that injunction of the Creative Writing course, that you should write about what you know. I’d say, write about what you imagine. Let your imagination take you to places and inside people whom you couldn’t possibly otherwise have known. Imagination is the key, the crux, the hinge on which all art turns.

So I was captivated by the desolate mining world evoked in Big Spirit Blow with its awful shrivelled corpses and the bewildered Ozzies trying to make out what was going on. And the biologist in me loved the gruesome mutated Cordyceps fungus attacking humans as the current species attack insects. The tone is right, the language is right, threat is expertly hinted at. You breathe in the spores as you read.

Closer to home, La Paix seemed a beautifully oblique portrait of a marriage broken by a single, mundane tragedy – half a lifetime distilled into a few thousand words, emotions alluded to rather than stated bluntly. I enjoyed the bleak detachment of the narration and the bitter irony of “insurance”, which is the leitmotiv of the story.

Finally my winner was The Space Between Louis and Me, for its humour and its gentle mockery of our current obsession with the virtual world. With social networks and online gaming replacing human interaction, who can doubt that someone like Louis, or Louisa, is waiting just round the corner for you? Yet beneath the veneer of humour was a real evocation of the isolation that imbues so much of modern life. And, as with a fine water colour, this piece was created with minimal brushstrokes.” 

Simon Mawer, March 2011. Rome.

Finally, there are just three days left to the close of the Fish One-Page Prize, which will be judged by Chris Stewart. You can enter a story of 300 words or less online or by post – as long as they are post-marked before the closing date they will qualify.

The Fish Poetry Prize closes in 13 days. Brian Turner is judging and this is an opportunity to be recognized by one of the most interesting and powerful poets of our time.

Fish Publishing, Durrus, Bantry, Co. Cork, Ireland is the postal address. Entry for each competition is €14 and the first prize is €1,000. The ten best from each competition will be published in the 2011 Fish Anthology.

For writers who wish to improve their skills, the Fish online course in Flash Fiction offers a ten module course over three months. It is designed to be useful and fun, and includes free entry to next year’s One-Page Prize.

The 2011 Fish Short Story Prize will open on 1 June and close 30 Sept 2011.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, wherever you are in the world.

Clem Cairns

Short Short Story Contest

Flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, micro-story, short short, postcard fiction, prosetry and short short story are but a few of the terms used to describe the increasingly popular genre of the short short story. ‘One-page story’ is Fish’s preferred title, and The Fish One-Page Story Prize has been an annual event since 2004.

10 short short stories are selected each year to be published in the annual Fish Anthology. This year novelist Chris Stewart (author of Driving Over Lemons, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society and Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat) will be put to the pin of his collar to select 10 stories from the entries - a difficult task when, if history is to repeats itself, writing quality is so high, themes so varied and styles so unique.

Quote from our website:

This is an opportunity to attempt what is one of the most difficult and rewarding tasks - to create, in a tiny fragment, a completely resolved and compelling story in 300 words or less. Flash Fiction is wonderfully entertaining to read and challenging to write, but we love it and so do the readers of our Anthology. This is another chance to get a story, however small, into this year's Fish Anthology.

P.S Only 5 more days until closing date

Reminder!

Flash Fiction or One-page Short Stories are due in 11 days, on March 20, 2011! Polish up your ideas, turn a draft for a Short Story into a One-page Story  or start from scratch. You can do it! Send in your entries now, time is of the essence. Good Luck!

Fish Publishing

Fish Publishing adds a new Facebook Page to widen our scope as we're going global.
Check out the Fish image from the first Fish Publishing Anthology published in 1994!
Please join us and tell your friends - no matter where you are! With your help this can become
a vibrant connecting place for writers from around the world.

Who is Brian Turner?

Fish Poetry Prize judge this year is acclaimed poet and US Army veteran Brian Turner, who has earned nine major literary awards with his poetry collection Here, Bullet, (Bloodaxe Books, 2007). Turner has been the recipient of several literary fellowships, as detailed on our website www.fishpublishing.com, and his second collection Phantom Noise was published in the US as well as in the UK in 2010. He can’t wait to read your entries!

Deadlines coming up!

Fish Fans everywhere, please spread the word:
Don't miss your chance to win and get published at current
Fish Publishing contests for Poetry and Short Fiction!
Deadlines:
One-Page Short Fiction (Flash Fiction) = March 20, 2011
Poetry = March 30, 2011
Send or E-mail your entries now!
Go to www.fishpublishing.com/ and check out more details.