If the recent cold snap left you shivering, Creative Loafing has something that’ll warm your cockles: the winning stories in CL’s Fiction Contest, the theme of which was “Heat.” More than 80 stories were submitted to the contest, with entrants welcome to interpret the theme in any way they liked. The judges — Jeff Parker, head of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Tampa; Catherine Durkin Robinson, award-winning CL columnist and e-novelist; and myself — read and judged all the entries without knowing who wrote them, and selected a top 10, which were published online. From that group, judges and readers chose their favorites.
Neither of the winning stories takes a predictable route in interpreting the theme. In fact, one of the marvels of Rita Ciresi’s “Bag Boy,” which won the $500 judges’ prize, is the way it subverts reader’s expectations. It’s about a lot of things “hot” — sex, cooking, maternal love — but nothing ever feels forced. And because the story is anchored in everyday details (a supermarket excursion, a favorite recipe for meat loaf), its ultimate impact is all the more profound.
Christen Petitt Hailey’s “The Curling Iron,” which won the $250 readers’ prize, is likewise good at catching the reader (and the characters) off guard. With lines like “I want to kick myself in the ass so hard that I walk funny for a month,” Hailey knows how to pull you up short, make you laugh and send you careening along for more.
Ciresi is professor of English and coordinator of creative writing at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She’s published two short story collections and three critically acclaimed novels, and her first e-book, Bring Back My Body to Me, is due out in a few weeks on Nook, Kindle and Sony e-readers.
At the time she submitted “Bag Boy,” she hadn’t written a short story in about five years, preferring to confine herself to novel-writing: “I really love that big long stretch of being with a character two or three years.” But something about the contest theme struck a chord, and she found in writing “Bag Boy” that “it was really liberating to be in a smaller box” for a change.
If Christen Petitt Hailey’s story suggests she knows her way around dive bars, it’s no wonder; in one of her many lives, Hailey tends bar at The Hub, the Best of the Bay-winning dive bar in downtown Tampa. “I get a lot of inspiration at The Hub,” says Hailey. She has written and performed in plays for Jobsite Theater, and was a longtime administrator with the Straz Center before recently joining the staff at freeFall Theater in St. Petersburg.
Mae and Barra, the leading ladies of “Curling Iron,” are about to find a second life on stage. They’re among the characters in Hailey’s play Chapel Perilous, which premieres at Jobsite in July.
Hailey and Ciresi, as well as judges Parker and Robinson, will read from their work on Sun. Jan. 8 at 7:30 p.m. in CL Space, 1911 N. 13th St., just above Spaghetti Warehouse in Ybor Square. We’ll also honor the other writers whose stories made the top 10: Philip Booth (" Death by Bebop”); Christine Farrell ("Teenage Wasteland”); Benjamin Kirby (“Twilight and Brimstone”); Shae Krispinsky (“Volcano Kicking” and “Reap What You Sow, Or Sing”); Patrick Longe (“The Guns and Queens of Rocky Point”); Matt Mahler (“Looking in the Wrong Direction”); and Darrell Nicholson (“Hot Air Cadillac”).
Thanks to all who entered; you made the judges’ job difficult. Enjoyable, inspiring, heartening, yes, but difficult. Keep writing.
