Clay
Reynolds Prize
for Best Novella
Guidelines (pdf)
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Winner, 2006 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize A man gains and loses many things on his journey from birth to death. Toward the end of life, it seems a man loses more than he gains. Retired heavy-equipment operator Cole Emerson has lost his wife, is about to lose his only sister, and is estranged from his daughter. He sells his trailer in Oklahoma and moves into his sister Elsie's house on Hardman Lake, a sprawling man-made impoundment in the lush Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri. Elsie is dying. During the day, Cole cooks, cleans, and tries to keep her comfortable, napping when she naps, adapting his needs to her schedule. At night, he escapes into the dark solitude of Hardman Lake to fish for bass and clear his head, until one night in Turnback Creek he sees a mysterious girl who awakens in him a young man's desires and old buried memories. Lonnie Busch has worked as a painter and illustrator, creating artwork for corporations and institutions across the United States, including the 2002 "Greetings from America" stamps and the 2004 "Summer Olympics" stamp for the US Postal Service. His short stories have appeared in such publications as The Minnesota Review, The Baltimore Review, Chicago Quarterly Review,and The Southeast Review. Stories of his have also been finalists in the World's Best Short Short Story Competition in 2004 and the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction in 2005. His most recent projects include the cover for Jimmy Buffett's latest novel, A Salty Piece of Land, as well as a block of forty new stamps for the Postal Service entitled "Wonders of America," which debuted in May of 2006. |
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Winner, 2005 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize "Suzanne Freeman's light-hearted look at the foibles of modern society offers a brittle examination of American consumerism's mad dash toward manufactured solutions to everyday problems. Her all- encompassing survey of middle-class values skewers short-sighted science, corporate greed, and the mania to find both health and happiness in marketed products. Writing in the best tradition of modern satire, Freeman's story evokes shades of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Thomas Berger, and maybe just a dash of Fannie Flagg and Dave Barry. This is a witty work, but with a sobering point about the American way of acceptance."—Clay Reynolds, Final Judge Suzanne Freeman is a writer who lives in the Texas Hill Country. She was born in Ft. Worth in 1951 and received a journalism degree at UT Austin. Her poetry has appeared in publications ranging from Bird Watcher's Digest to Social Anarchism to The Journal of the American Medical Association. Ominbo, which won the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize for 2005, marks her fiction debut. |
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Winner, 2004 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize Growing up in the shadow of the Chrysler Building in the Sixties, George Sabro hungered to enter the world of the rich and famous he watched on television. A series of events in the Seventies led the Times Square bartender to become a paid lover, celebrity photographer, Studio-54 semi-regular, and briefly a millionaire. Now reduced to washing dishes in a coffee shop, George is desperate to get his fifteen minutes of fame before turning fifty. Hanging up his apron, he picks up a cereal box, walks onto Sixth Avenue, and starts taking hostages. "A darkly comic novella about one man's attempt to achieve Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame."—Jeff Magnin Mark Connelly was born in Philadelphia and received an M.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D in literature from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, Vanderbilt Review, Contemporary Atlanta, Mundus Artium, and Milwaukee Magazine. His books include Deadly Closets: The Fiction of Charles Jackson, Orwell and Gissing, The Diminished Self: Orwell and the Loss of Freedom, and several college textbooks |
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Winner, 2003 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize "Rebecca Bailey's novella The Only Road There Is arrives at the perfect moment in this national season of gloom and doom. Narrator Brenda Marlene Simpkins' spoken language is fresh as a cold mountain stream as she tells the story of her road trip from Kentucky to 'out west' with her dear old and frustrating mother. I think this book establishes Rebecca Bailey high on the list of new-century American fiction writers."—Gurney Norman, author of Divine Right's Trip and Kinfolks "The Only Road There Is sparkles with the same rare, creative energy that makes Rebecca Bailey a prize-winning short story writer and poet."—John Engle, author of Tree People, Modern Odyssey,and numerous other poetry collections "This marvelously witty romp through the postmodern American West is a delightful and fresh point of view with a narrative voice that recalls the best of Tom Robbins and Jane Smiley without being imitative or derivative in the least. The heroine/narrator of this finely wrought story of a dysfunctional family that manages to pull it all together when the going gets . . . well, ridiculous . . . is just plain fun. Never a dull word here, just angst revealed in a candid and totally original and utterly fun story that creates an appetite for more. It is a nearly perfect novella."—Clay Reynolds, Series Judge |
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Winner, 2002 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize Stephen March Armadillo ISBN: 1-881515-54-0 paper $12.95 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 pp. 96 “Stephen March takes a difficult theme and setting and makes it work brilliantly. These people come right off the page with a presence so realistic, you can almost smell them! An endearing and brutally honest narrator hosts this ribald romp through the backwoods of the upper South and provides us with as unique and challenging a set of characters ever to crawl out of the backseat of an abandoned Ford Fairlane with a jaw full of snuff and a gut full of cheap wine. The twisting and turning plot never drifts into cliché or offers ever a whiff of predictability. This is just plain fun, but with a serious tone, sometimes even warm and always genuine. There’s a marvelous sense of the ironic informing the whole, and, as is always the case when good triumphs over evil, there’s a grin at the end.”—Clay Reynolds, Series Judge “The characters who populate the taut universe of Armadillo skate on the wobbly edge of the abyss. They are forced to invent salvation for themselves and must achieve it however they can. Stephen March shows us that hope is possible even in an inferno of desolation. His novel is as stark as a desert landscape—and presents the same kind of beauty. It is truthful and wounding. It is pitiless. It is a triumph.”—Fred Chappell March grew up mostly in Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina. His short stories have been published in New Orleans Review, Carolina Quarterly, Tampa Review, Seattle Review, William and Mary Review and Appalachian Heritage, among others. He is currently an English professor at Elizabeth City State University in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. |
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Winner, 2001 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize Charles Wyatt Falling Stones: The Spirit Autobiography of S.M. Jones ISBN: 1-881515-49-4 paper $16.95 5 1/2x8 1/2. pp. 144 Falling Stones is a compelling tale of the quest for spiritual meaning in early nineteenth-century rural America. Sylvester Marion Jones, born in 1836, inhabits a guilt-laden Protestant domain, saturated with ominous signs and wonders. His childhood is marked first by demonic visions and later by his young brother’s mysterious disappearance, for which his father blames him. Grown up, Sylvester is drawn into marriage with a young woman suspected of witchcraft. Still a seeker of light, he finally achieves the purgation of his house—at the savage cost of acknowledging the demon in himself. "With authentic power, Charles Wyatt revisits the uncanny world of an America just a step away from wilderness. In the tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, and of G. G. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, he brings to life one man’s fight against inner and outer chaos."—Judith Grossman "Falling Stones is unlike any other book I know, a true original. I can imagine no one reading it in anything but a single sitting—the suspense is utter, the literary spell beautifully cast. It deals with dark family conflicts and unseen forces and inexplicable menace, and its mysteries remain, still resonating mysteriously even after the story has concluded. This is fiction with a rare and strange poetry in it."—Joan Silber "Wyatt is a magician . . . in his ability to provide a psychological as well as physical explanation for the mysteries found in Falling Stones. However we choose to interpret the story, though, the enchantment remains."—James McConkey Wyatt is the author of Listening to Mozart, winner of the 1995 John Simmons Award from University of Iowa Press. He has taught creative writing at Binghamton University and Denison University, but before this incarnation he spent more than twenty-five years as an orchestral musician: principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony. For fun, he writes poetry and plays chamber music with his wife, Cindy, a harpist who really did play on Elvis’s last album. |