Short Fiction Competition
Many thanks to all who entered the 2020 Short Fiction Competition. We appreciate the opportunity to read such bright and brilliant new work. From more than 2,200 submissions, guest judge Téa Obreht has announced results.
Many thanks to all who entered the 2020 Short Fiction Competition. We appreciate the opportunity to read such bright and brilliant new work. From more than 2,200 submissions, guest judge Téa Obreht has announced results.
The editors are thrilled to announce the release of the Spring 2021 Edition, designed by the acclaimed artist Jeffrey Gibson, with contributions from Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Millhauser, PEN/Hemingway Award-winner Tommy Orange, and 2020 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition-winner Deborah Forbes, among others.
Why did you accept the invitation to design the Spring 2021 edition of All-Story?
It was an opportunity that I’ve not had previously, and I’m working on a book project for which I’ll be the editor. So I’ve been paying a lot of attention to print material lately, and I thought this would be a perfect chance to have some fun with the format of a publication.
My connection to “Natasha” stretches back nearly two decades. I wrote the original story, adapted it into a screenplay, and subsequently directed the film. I had achieved very little as a writer before I wrote “Natasha,” and I have at times wondered what my life would be like if I hadn’t written that story. It feels odd to invest so much significance in a single work, and a short one at that, but it was this manuscript, in draft form, that caught the attention of my first book editor. As it transpired, I chart the beginning of my mature life, as a man and as an artist, with the writing of “Natasha.”
To give a sense of the gestation of the film—and to remind myself of what it all entailed—I returned to my journals to see what I’d recorded in connection to the story: the initial anecdote that inspired it, the conception of the form of the narrative, the decision . . .