We’re thrilled to announce that our judge for this year’s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize will be the brilliant Manuel Gonzales, author of the acclaimed novel The Regional Office Is Under Attack! and the prize-winning short story collection The Miniature Wife and Other Stories. Gonzales’s work is wildly inventive and deeply moving, and as he is a contributing editor to ASF, we’re especially pleased to have him judge the contest this year.
General Guidelines
— Submit your entry online between April 5, 2020 and June 1, 2020.
— The winner will receive a $2,500 prize and publication in an upcoming issue of American Short Fiction. All submitters will receive a complimentary copy of the prize issue.
— Please submit your $20 entry fee and your story through Submittable. We no longer accept submissions by post. International submissions in English are eligible. The entry fee covers one 6,500 word fiction submission.
— All entries must be single, self-contained works of fiction, between 2,000-6,500 words. Please DO NOT include any identifying information on the manuscript itself.
— You may submit multiple entries. We accept only previously unpublished work. We do allow simultaneous submissions, but we ask that you notify us promptly of publication elsewhere.
Conflicts of Interest
Staff and volunteers currently affiliated with American Short Fiction are ineligible for consideration or publication. Additionally, students, former students, and colleagues of the judge are not eligible to enter. We ask that previous winners wait three years after their winning entry is published before entering again.
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American Short Fiction: What kind of story do you most want to read?
Manuel Gonzales: I’ll read any kind of story. It can be a quiet bedroom drama, it can be a coming of age story, it can be a story of a love triangle or a story with no love in it at all, it can be a sci-fi fantasy epic (if it fits inside the story limits)—it can be, literally, any kind of story. All I ask is that it make me feel something—a heartache, like laughing, a sadness, unnerved, unsettled, unmade—when I go to read stories, I go to be surprised by how much a story can make me feel.
ASF: What time of day do you write?
MG: I’m answering this during the COVID-19 Shelter-in-Place quarantine epidemic, so right now, whenever I can, whenever I have the emotional or mental space in which to think about creating fiction, making up people and things for those people to do. Generally, I write in the mornings, before everyone else has gotten up, or as soon as I’ve shipped everyone off to school, because my mind is sharper in the mornings and after seven or eight pm turns mushy and suitable only for some reading or, more likely, watching shows or playing board games.
ASF: How do you tackle writer’s block?
MG: When I suffer from something like writer’s block, it is because the thing I want to write isn’t coming out the way I want it to, and so far (knock on wood) never because I couldn’t think of something to write. And so my way of tackling my particular problem is to have a lot of different things I want to write running at the same time, so I have always something else to play around with. I’ve also been working with a lot of students having difficulty—because of the quarantine and pandemic—finding motivation or even ability to write, and I’ve started giving them prompts—just simple prompts that sometimes turn into really interesting stories, or, more often, remind the writer what it feels like to be writing again—and sometimes I’ll run through those prompts with them, quietly on my computer, while they’re writing quietly on their own.
ASF: Which stories do you return to again and again?
MG: Lately I’ve been turning to “Mermaids” by Deborah Eisenberg pretty frequently. I’ve also been re-reading Maggie Shipstead’s story, “Cowboy Tango,” and “Superstar” by Susan Steinberg. I cycle through a few stories, though. For a while, I was reading “Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours” by Marie-Helene Bertino and “You Can Find Love Now” by Ramona Ausubel over and over again, and I feel like every year or so I assign students all of these stories and take great pleasure in re-reading them myself. Also—jeez—”Christmas” by Owen Egerton and “Today Will Be A Quiet Day” by Amy Hempel, which I often pair together when teaching.
ASF: What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
MG: Write in a way that makes you feel unsettled, which I’ve tweaked—I don’t always want to feel unsettled, ha—to “write in a way that makes you feel however you want your reader to feel—write to make yourself laugh, to make yourself sad, to unsettle or creep yourself out.” Arguably, Write in a way that makes you feel unsettled is more succinct.
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Manuel Gonzales is the author of the The Miniature Wife and Other Stories and the novel The Regional Office is Under Attack! A recipient of the Sue Kaufmann Prize for first fiction, the John Gardner prize for fiction, and the AYLAS Alexandra Prize, Manuel is hard at work on a new novel and currently teaches literature at Bennington College and is a faculty member for the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program.
Right now he is living inside of his house, six feet away from the nearest person, just like everyone else, and promises his wife and kids that if he becomes a Jack Nicholson writer from the movies, it will be the version of Jack Nicholson from As Good As It Gets and not from The Shining.
American Short Fiction is grateful to The Burdine Johnson Foundation for their grant in support of this prize.
As Far as You Can See: Picturing Texas, by Kenny Braun, whose beautiful photograph of Halifax Ranch we used above, was published by the University of Texas Press in May 2018.