Short Story Competition: World Stopping Events

Closing Date: Midnight NOVEMBER 30th 2010

Have you ever thought about the big events that stopped the world and you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing?

I had the same thought and wrote a short story that I am now adapting into a novel called While No-one Was Watching. This is the story of a little girl that went missing at the exact same moment JFK was shot. So then I got to thinking about other events, the World Trade Center, the London bombing, Diana’s death, the Tsunami, Elvis’s death, the outbreak of war, the atom bombs, assassinations of world leaders….?

Can you write a short story up to 5000 words telling another story about something that happened at the same time as one of these world stopping events? The event has to be real-not fictitious and it has to be something that was big enough to shock the world (not small events, they have to be ones that we will all remember and relate to) but what you choose is up to you and it doesn’t matter if we have more than one story about the same event.

The main thing is that the world event has to be the back-drop of the story and have some relevance to the story but the story has to be about what happened to someone else when the eyes of the world were turned away.

This competition will make you think out of the box and the best 15 stories will be published in a special Competition Anthology in November 2011 on the anniversary of the JFK assassination.

There will also be additional prizes for first and second prize stories.

• 1st Six month one-to-one mentoring (by email) with a published writer, also editor and Creative Writing Lecturer to help you work on a novel or short stories- constructive feedback and advice to help you shape your work and hopefully lead you to further success 
• 2nd Written critiques of ten short stories or a novel 

The cost to enter is £5 but £1 from very single entry will be donated to this year's chosen charity The Born Free Foundation.

See details at http://bridgehousepublishing.co.uk/2010ShortStoryCompetion.aspx

Transgression and its Limits - PG Conference CFP

Transgression and its Limits

29-30th May 2010
University of Stirling

Plenary Speaker:
Professor Fred Botting
Reading followed by Q&A Session:
Iain Banks

To discover the complete horizon of a society’s symbolic values, it is also necessary to map out its transgressions, its deviants ~ Marcel Détienne.

Rule-breaking has always been a central aspect of literary and cultural development. The works of Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs and Kathy Acker help define the canon of transgressive fiction, while Bakhtin, Bataille and Foucault have become its philosophers and apologists. From the law-breaking obscenity of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover to the immoralilty of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, transgressive art has offended the old order for the sake of a new.

The commodification of extreme horror in recent movies and the faux-antagonism of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk both reveal the paradox of a transgression which has now established its own conventions. Is transgression more than the tradition of subverting tradition? Have the conditions of post-modernity exhausted our ability to be shocked?

The aim of this conference is to provide an interdisciplinary forum to consider transgressive tactics in literature, film, critical theory and other cultural productions. To what extent has transgression helped shape sexual, cultural and artistic landscapes of its own period? We invite abstracts for 20-minute papers focusing on transgressive, taboo-breaking and politically resistant acts in literature and the arts.

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Violence
• Profanity
• The Sacred
• Sexuality and the body
• Obscenity and pornography
• Aberrance, Fetish, Perversion
• The New Horror – ‘torture porn’
• Avant-garde cinema, Cinema of Transgression
• The Carnivalesque
• Gender roles
• Censorship – cultural reactions to transgressive texts
• Violence against the text – formal/textual transgression
• Postmodernism’s transgression of the high/low cultural divide

Please send a 300-word abstract and a 50-word biography to Aspasia Stephanou, Matthew Foley and Neil McRobert at transgression@stir.ac.uk by March 19th 2010.

(www.transgression.stir.ac.uk)

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The Sunday Times Scottish University of the Year 2009/2010
The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland,
number SC 011159.