2023 Doro Boehme Fiction & Nonfiction Finalists
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Past Contests

 2021 Doro Böhme Memorial Essay & Short Story Contest Winners

 

Note from Founder & Editor Christine Maul Rice

The first time I met Doro, who passed away in March, 2020, I was struck by her intellect, kindness, and startling beauty. A beloved wife, mother, and friend, Doro was a gifted visual artist and writer, passionate about experimental art forms and the visual arts, especially photography. An excerpt from Doro’s novel, “Teaching Water How to Drown,” appeared in Hypertext Review, Spring 2018. Doro hailed from Stuttgart, Germany and lived and worked in Chicago, taking great pride in curating the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute and educating the public about the Collection. For more about Doro, please visit her site.

We are grateful to authors Michele Morano and Donna Miscolta for judging the Doro Böhme Memorial Essay & Short Story Contest.

ESSAY

The 2021 Doro Böhme Memorial Essay judge was judged by Michele Morano. Michele Morano is the author of the travel memoir Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain and the new essay collection, Like Love, long-listed for the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work appears in many literary journals and anthologies, including Hypertext and Best American Essays. She teaches creative writing and chairs the English Department at DePaul University in Chicago.

SHORT STORY

The 2021 Doro Böhme Memorial Short Story judge was Donna Miscolta. Donna Miscolta’s third book of fiction Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories was published by Jaded Ibis Press in September 2020. It was named to the 2020 Latino Books of the Year list by the Los Camadres and Friends National Latino Book Club. Her story collection Hola and Goodbye, winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and published by Carolina Wren Press (2016), won an Independent Publishers award for Best Regional Fiction and an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction. She’s also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced from Signal 8 Press (2011), which poet Rick Barot called “intricate, tender, and elegantly written – a necessary novel for our times.” Recent essays appear in Los Angeles Review, McSweeney’s, pif, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. She has work forthcoming in Indomitable/Indomables: A multigenre Chicanx/Latinx Women’s Anthology.

 
 

2020 GUEST JUDGES

FICTION: Sahar Mustafah

Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, a richly complex inheritance she explores in her fiction. Her short stories have been awarded the Guild Literary Complex Prize for fiction, a Distinguished Story honor from Best American Short Stories, three Pushcart Prize nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination, among other honors. Her novel, The Beauty of Your Face, will be published by W.W. Norton & Company, April 2020.
Of the top three finalists, Sahar wrote:

“Soft” invites us along an elevated train commute in Chicago as the main character Raymond is faced with an unexpected moral crisis. The story never pulls punches or surrenders to cliche, even through to its masterful ending. The language is lyrical as it depicts Raymond’s unscrupulous actions with delicate poise, while never faltering in preserving his humanity.

The direct, commanding voice in “Tallahassee” at once engages and alienates us. We cannot help but cling to the bleak events unfolding. The writer delivers a purposefully disjointed style that mirrors a family trauma in the most haunting, familiar way.

“Necessary Detour” is precisely controlled and well-paced in its telling of one man’s relationships during the course of a single train ride. Along the journey, we’re offered the jagged shards of a shattered marriage. Still a hope for something new again follows us home after the last stop.

ESSAY: Patricia Ann McNair

Patricia Ann McNair writes fiction and nonfiction. The Temple of Air, stories, won Southern Illinois University Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and was a finalist for Society of Midland Authors Adult Fiction Award. And These Are The Good Times essays, was a Montaigne Medal finalist. McNair’s work has been published widely, including in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Good Men Project, Superstition Review, Solstice Lit Mag, Hypertext and other journals and magazines. She is a contributor to The Rumpus, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. She was named to Chicago’s NewCity Lit50 list, and to Guild Complex’s 30 Writers to Watch. Her work has been featured in creative writing textbooks, and she teaches graduate and undergraduate students at Columbia College Chicago where she directs the undergraduate creative writing programs. McNair is artistic director for Mining the Story, a writers’ retreat in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.
Of the top three finalists, Patricia wrote:
"To Be Touched" was so bold and beautiful. The list form and the fragmentation of the structure did extra duty by using the white space to further show the disconnection the "you" character was feeling. The rage and desire were so finely used, and the writing and language were hauntingly beautiful.
The easy weaving of the present moment of this piece with the lost friendship and the past experience in "Mother's Day" made me aware of the slipperiness of postpartum depression and a certain feeling of ineffectiveness combined with the way it rubs up against motherly love and the need to protect, the overwhelming quality of the lives of new (and sometimes repeat) mothers. I was especially interested in the way the writer moved into the imagined point of view of her friend on the day of the suicide, how she explored this love and despair in the same moment.
In "Three," the slight yet mindful meandering through various moments in the sibling relationships and the broader context of familial love and love in general as told through the continued desire to understand more deeply the writer's autistic brother and the way he takes in the world was lovely and moving. The particular moment that got me was when Daniel recognized Mom in the old photo. The restraint of the writer's accounting of these moments and discoveries worked very well.

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