by Editor
on November 22, 2021
Tara Lynn Masih
Our Winter 2022 Screw Turn Flash Fiction competition opens to submissions on December 1—and we’re delighted to have award-winning novelist, flash-fiction crafter, flash-fiction teacher, and anthology editor Tara Lynn Masih on hand to choose our winner and two honorable mentions.
Tara is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of a Julia Ward Howe Award for her debut novel, My Real Name Is Hanna. Her anthologies include the acclaimed Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. In addition to other collections, her flash has been anthologized in Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose, Flash Fiction Funny, and W. W. Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, and was featured in Fiction Writer’s Review for National Short Story Month.
Awards for her work include the Lou P. Bunce Creative Writing Award, The Ledge Magazine‘s Fiction Award, Wigleaf Top 50 recognition (judged by Roxane Gay), a finalist fiction grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Pushcart Prize nominations. She has taught flash fiction workshops around the country, and is Founding Series Editor of The Best Small Fictions and a Founding Donor to the Harry Ransom Center’s Flash Fiction Library in Texas.
Her second story collection, How We Disappear, is forthcoming from Press 53 and Blackstone Audio in September 2022. www.taramasih.com
Welcome Tara! It’s going to be fun working with you.
by Editor
on November 10, 2021
TV, Newspapers, YouTube . . . TGS Has Been Getting Around
You likely have already seen the Boston Globe review of 21st Century Ghost Stories—Volume II, the latest addition to our ongoing print anthology series. The Globe‘s take on the stories that are winners or honorable mentions in our competitions:
“[S]trange and smart and upends ideas of what a ghost story is, and expands, with verve and unsettling bizarrity, what it can be.“
And we’ve recently received some other attention as well.
There’s a television interview
There’s a newspaper feature article about us in the Maine Sunday Telegram.
In addition, for your listening pleasure, two of our stories have been narrated and uploaded to YouTube from the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast:
The Beast of Blanchland, by Rowan Bowman
and
Snake in the Attic, by Garret Johnson
Both are read—in his natural British accent, no less—by Tony Walker. Enjoy!
by Editor
on October 31, 2021
Our Short Story Competition Winners Feature The Ghost Of A Notorious Murderer, A Shape-Shifting Grandma, Phone Calls From The Dead, And A Slavic Nightmare
We’ve selected four fine short stories as the winner and three honorable mentions in the Fall 2021 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition. Accompanied by original illustrations from artist Andy Paciorek, all are now available for your reading pleasure right here.
These four pieces will be included in Volume III of our ongoing print anthology series, 21st Century Ghost Stories. Volume III is due out from Wyrd Harvest Press (Durham, U.K.) in 2024. Meanwhile, don’t forget to get yourself a copy of Volume II, which was just published in August. All profits from the sale of our books are donated to the Wildlife Trusts, a British wildlife conservation organization. Cheers.
by Editor
on October 1, 2021
. . . . And A (Glowing) Boston Globe Review For 21st Century Ghost Stories
It’s October 1, which means that we’ve stopped taking submissions for the fall 2021 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award Competition. Everyone who submitted a story will be hearing from us over the coming weeks, and the winner, along with two honorable mention pieces, will be announced and published on Halloween—complete, of course, with a custom Andy Paciorek illustration for each.
Our next supernatural story contest, the winter 2022 Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition, opens to submissions on December 1. By flash fiction we mean 1,000 words or fewer—and for further information, have a look at our guidelines.
Further news: A few hours ago, our just-published anthology of competition winners and honorable mentions from the last three years, 21st Century Ghost Stories: Volume II, received its first big review in a major newspaper, the Boston Globe. Here’s what they said:
October now, and so begins the haunted season of the year. A new anthology of ghost stories, edited by Midcoast Maine writer and editor Paul Guernsey, and including a selection of stories by authors from all over the world, traffics in the uncanny, the strange, the inexplicable. “21st Century Ghost Stories: Volume II” (Wyrd Harvest) is striking for its variety of approaches to the supernatural. [continue reading…]
