EKPHRASTIC WRITING CHALLENGE: JOSEPH CORNELL

Pharmacy, by Joseph Cornell (USA). 1942.

Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

Thank you to everyone who participated in our last writing challenge featuring the work of Franz Kline, which ends today at midnight. Accepted responses for the Kline challenge will be published on January 18, 2019.

The prompt this time is Pharmacy, by Joseph Cornell. Deadline is January 25, 2019.

A very special welcome to our guest editor for this week's challenge, Bill Waters.

A message to you from Bill: "Hi! My name is Bill Waters, and I’m in love — with poetry! Many thanks to Lorette for inviting me to be a guest editor. I look forward to reading all of the work that you, dear poets, submit for this ekphrastic writing challenge!"

Bill Waters is a New Jersey-based writer whose poetry is everywhere you look. He is best known for short poetry and compressed prose, drawn to creating haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry as well as tiny free verse and flash. He's a longtime contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, having participated in many of the challenges from the start. Bill also runs the Poetry in Public Places Project, a Facebook / real-world group interested in creating and promoting poetry in public spaces. He lives in Pennington, New Jersey, U.S.A., with his wonderful wife and their two amazing cats. Visit him at https://billwatershaiku.wordpress.com/.

Thank you so much to Bill for being our very first guest challenge editor.

The Rules

1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the painting or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination.

2. Write as many poems and stories as you like.

3. Have fun.

4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.

Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry.

5.Include CORNELL WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line in all caps please. 

6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your poem. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 

7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 

8. Deadline is January 25, 2019.

9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is.

10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline.

​11. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!

NEWS

We are so happy to have Bill Waters with us for this prompt, and excited about other guest editors judging some of the challenges in the year ahead! Alarie Tennille is up next, and in the near future we welcome Devon Balwit and Shirley Glubka.

We're hoping this will inspire us in unexpected ways, add new flavours and perspectives to the journal, foster community, and widen readership. When a challenge has a guest editor, it will be announced in advance as well as in this space the day the prompt is posted. We're excited about this and about having a whole year of challenges, now that we've found an ekphrastic prompt system that is working in terms of consistency and longevity. Many great poems are about to be written!
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