Kenneth Patchen Award

 

Kenneth Patchen is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s.  His three great innovative novels, Sleepers Awake  The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, have long been a benchmark for beats, postmodernists, and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers on to greater significance and innovation in their own work.

 

Manuscripts must be submitted via email as Microsoft Word documents or as PDF files.  The $25.00 reading fee is payable via Paypal to egerdes@experimentalfiction.com.  Send documents without identification of author anywhere in the file.  The name “Patchen Submission” should be followed by a four-digit number of your choice as the file name (i.e. “Patchen Submission 1234”).  Attach a second file that states author’s name, your four digit number and actual title).  Do not mention the name of the work anywhere in the body of your email.  Preliminary selection of manuscripts will be done by JEF and CCM editors, who will select the ten finalists, which will then be sent on for selection by the judge, famous novelist Harold Jaffe.  The winner receives $1000 and publication by JEF/CCM as well as 20 complimentary copies of the book.  Deadline for entry: All submissions must be postmarked between January 1 and July 31, 2012. Winner will be announced in September.

 

Journal of Experimental Fiction

CCM is the new home of the Journal of Experimental Fiction, edited by Eckhard Gerdes. Together, we’ll be releasing a series of 4 innovative novels per year, including the Patchen Award winner, as well as one traditional JEF anthology selected and edited by Eckhard himself. Fans of JEF can continue to expect the highest quality in innovative and experimental fiction.

Here’s The Journal of Experimental Fiction’s forthcoming publication list. Exact dates are prone to change.

Fall 2010 — Frederick Mark Kramer (JEF 40)
Winter 2010 — Dominic Ward (JEF 41) & JEF 39 (anthology)
Fall 2011– Yuriy Tarnawsky (JEF 42)
Winter 2012 — James R. Hugunin (JEF 43)
Spring 2012 — Brion Poloncic (JEF 44)

Summer 2012 — Patchen Award Winner published!

Summer 2012 — Robert Casella (JEF 45) & JEF 46 (anthology)
Fall 2012 — Erik Belgum (JEF 47)

For additional information, as well as links to past issues:

Contact: Eckhard Gerdes, egerdes@experimentalfiction.com

http://www.experimentalfiction.com

 

Civil Coping Mechanisms

Civil Coping Mechanisms (CCM) is a DIY kind of literary press. We take the same level of angst as our brethren in shunning those that would be in the immediate position of neglecting our efforts as artisans. Oh yes, we rant. This is our place. We’ll do as we damn well please. This press is a place for coping with the contemporary ennui of the modern literary artist. You need not fret. Your work shall stretch out its wings and flutter as far as its desire.

 

In Fall 2010, to help commemorate this publication event, Civil Coping Mechanisms will also be publishing the novel Hugh Moore by Eckhard Gerdes, a novel inspired in large part by Kenneth Patchen’s writing (Patchen had a brother named Hugh) and containing a preface by Kenneth Patchen’s late widow, Miriam Patchen, whom Eckhard met and befriended at the Kenneth Patchen Conference in Trumbull County, Ohio, in 1989.

 

http://www.copingmechanisms.net

 

Pig Iron Press

 

Pig Iron Press is a trade publishing company that is indexed and circulates internationally.  Areas of interest center in the Humanities, including Poetry and Fiction; the Fine Arts; History; Living History; Education; Scholarship; and Critical Study.  Founder, Publisher, and Editor is Jim Villani.

 

Pig Iron Press sponsored the early incarnation of this award, the Kenneth Patchen Prize, and is the publisher of a book of Kenneth Patchen’s short fiction and miscellany called Still Another Pelican in the Breadbox.

 

Submission Form: Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel

 

I.  Fill out the information below:

 

Name of Author: __________________________________________________

 

Title of Submission: __________________________________________________

 

A four-digit ID number chosen by you to represent this submission:  Patchen Submission ________________

 

II. Format your submission as follows:

 

A.  Use standard submission formatting

 

1. Double space

2. On the first page, top right, include your self-selected four-digit Patchen Submission number.  Do not list your name or address on the manuscript itself.

3. Include title and page numbers in headers top right on page two and following.  Do not include your name.

4. The rest of the formatting issues are up to you.  But, in order to avoid things getting messed up in the formatting when the text is transferred electronically, make sure you send a PDF version of your manuscript. Word is okay if formatting is not a major issue in your work.

5. Make sure you submit this form (scan and submit) separately from your essay.  They may be sent with the same email, but send them as two separate attachments.  Manuscript will not be connected to writer until after the judging is over.  This is going to be a completely fair award. Experienced writers and novices have equal opportunity.

6. The work submitted must be an original single work of fiction long enough to be generally regarded as a novel and to be published individually.

7. Simultaneous submissions are okay, but do let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere so that we can withdraw it from the competition.  The reading fee is non-refundable.

8. If parts have been previously published elsewhere, do not identify those sections on the manuscript itself.  Acknowledgments, dedications, and the like will be dealt with after the winning text has been selected.  Exclude forewords, prologues, prefaces, indices, afterwords, and glossaries unless they are absolutely integral to the novel.  A table of contents for chapter titles is acceptable.

 

 III. Either submit a Paypal payment of $25.00 to cover the reading fee to: egerdes@experimentalfiction.com 

   or send a check to 

Eckhard Gerdes Publishing 

              12 Simpson Street, Apt. D

Geneva, IL 60134

 

 IV.  Submit the work as email attachment or mail as file on CD (include the check).  If you want confirmation of snail mail receipt, send the CD certified or enclose a self-addressed stamped postcard.

 

V. The winner will receive an award of $1000  and a publishing contract with JEF Books/CCM for publication as the Patchen-Award novel of the year.  Winners will be announced at the end of September 2012 and will be published.  All submissions must be postmarked between January 1 and July 31, 2012.

 

2012 KENNETH PATCHEN INNOVATIVE FICTION AWARD WINNER ENCOMIUM

HOW TO BREAK ARTICLE NOUN

 

by

 

Carolyn Chun

 

You can break many things, especially the fragile ones, but also feelings and concepts.  In her novel Carolyn Chun touches on the subject of breaking the former two—a  bottle and a glass fish—but even though she doesn’t say it openly, the book is really about the latter—breaking a person’s heart and the traditional form of the novel.

How to Break Article Noun is a carefully crafted work consisting of seven parts, with seven chapters each, which are intricately interwoven to make up for the absence of a plot.  “I didn’t want to have a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with the world.  I didn’t want to write a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with words,” the author tells the reader in the two-sentence Introduction.  It is the love of words—language and the forms it may take on—that shapes this elegantly presented story of the breakup of a relationship. The reader is told that this is what the book is about on the very first line with the words “Can you close the door and sit down?  Something bad,” which are repeated throughout the book many times like sequences in a Resnais movie.  In addition to influences from film, Chun brings into her novel such diverse elements as pictures, terms and formulas from physics, botanical names, Latin words, poetry, and even an essay; all of this while documenting a touching and psychologically convincing case study of two people growing apart. 

How to Break Article Noun was chosen as the winner of the Kenneth Patchen Innovative Fiction Award over a number of worthy candidates for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written as well as for an insightful and precisely rendered depiction of a crisis in the life of two human beings.

Yuriy Tarnawsky