The Contagion of Rhythm and Pacing

by 2016 Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

On Creative Writing and Creative Writers 

Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation of ideas. We know that Updike read Nabokov in the nineteen sixties by the sudden license Updike claims to unsubdue his prose, to make his sentences self-consciously exclamatory, rather than by an onset of chess playing or butterfly collecting." (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, Jan. 16, 2017, p. 84)

Writers imitate other writers: their themes, their literary form, their tone, everything. Much of what is published amounts to bad imitations of bad stories. How does a writer avoid such a misfortune? Read the greatest writers who have ever lived. Read Leo Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor, Gustave Flaubert, Nikolai Gogol, Rebecca West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, many, many others in the grand pantheon of world literature.

About imitation. One thing that's ever so hard to be is original. Good writers present something novel in tone or style; a good writer has his/her own voice. When you find your voice you have begun.

Here's the layman's image of a writer who teaches creative writing in a university:

". . . a dramatic figure striking in appearance, wearing boots and jodhpurs, perhaps, with long white hair like a prophet and bearing a kind of literary ichor, the fluid in the veins of the gods" (James Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 57).

Can that white-haired prophet teach you to write? No, you have to learn yourself, through years and years of intensive practice, while reading only the best creative writers and learning from them. 

On Envy of the Creative Writer

One day a writer of creative literary fiction sits down and writes a masterpiece. Other writers are plunged into sorrowful depression, thinking, "Dang, there are only a limited number of masterpieces to be written, and now this guy has filched another one and run off with it" (paraphrase of Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 50).

I just read the brilliant novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Didn't feel envious of him, just thought, Wonderful, how great to have a young writer writing at that level of creativity.

What do good creative writers do? They "make the shape and rhythm of sentences intensely felt" (Salter, p. 56). Yes! 

Misremembering Chekhov

by Editor in Chief Mary Bast

The nineteen works of creative nonfiction published in Bacopa Literary Review 2016 covered a wide variety of types and forms, including the brilliant hybrid narrative/memoir/essay, "Misremembering Chekhov," by Rebecca Ruth Gould.

Our typical call for submissions invites creative nonfiction with "a moving inner voice" that "holds to the same standards as other literary forms while remaining grounded in fact." Gould's 2016 contribution (pp. 153-157) is a perfect example.

Notice how she begins by weaving personal experience with literary observations:

Chekhov was not my first love. More obviously delectable to a college freshman just returned from her first visit to St. Petersburg and discovering Russian literature for the first time were the thick novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Those "great, baggy monsters" (as Henry James called them) buoyed me up through my first marriage, my frantic conversion to Christianity, and my equally hasty divorce. . . . Dostoevsky's tortured heroines perfectly matched my overstrung mind, and his philosophical dialogues about the existence (or not) of God were the perfect object of reflection for my theologically conflicted soul . . . .
      Tolstoy struck a different chord, but one which was equally resonant. His ability to cut through racism and prejudice . . . Tolstoy did not pull at my heartstrings in quite the same way as Dostoevsky, but he did speak to my social conscience, and to my desire to make a difference in the world . . . .
      I did not have a chance to taste [Chekhov] until my final semester at Berkeley, after a whirlwind tour of the Russian canon. . . . For our first story, my professor had chosen Chekhov's "Lady with a Lapdog" . . . *

Now the author pulls us into her theme:

The most enduring impression I took away from that story . . . was that, to a much greater extent than Tolstoyevsky, Chekhov was a cynic. After depicting the blossoming of love between a younger woman and her elder lover, he showed how love is fated to not last. This is how I interpreted an unforgettable detail in the Yalta hotel room. . . . Anna Sergevevna laments her lost virginity while Gurov begins to feel bored. . . .
      Fast forward seventeen years. The Russian literary pantheon has lost some but by no means all of its glory to my readerly eyes. A long succession of other loves has intervened between me and Chekhov: Arabic, Persian, Georgian, not to mention the more familiar French, German, Italian, and Spanish. All of these literatures I have tried to know in some intimate way. But, in spite of my promiscuous disloyalty to other literature and languages, Russian keeps cropping up in unexpected ways. . . .
      One of the most unexpected ways in which Chekhov crops up is on an online dating profile on the website 'OKCupid.' A Brussels-based scientist lists Dostoevsky among his favourite authors . . . .

They meet in Paris:

Paris is like a dream. We spend our first full day together strolling through the Jardin du Luxembourg, talking non-stop about the books that impacted our lives . . .
      Unlike the way I read in my undergraduate years, we do not linger over the philosophical nuances of Dostoevsky's fictions. We do not ponder the existence (or not) of God. . . .
     You will have guessed, Dear Reader, that this was the beginning of love. And you will not have been wrong. It was indeed the beginning of a certain kind of passion. . . . Our peculiar love had a strangely short duration, and evaporated not long after it was born. Chekhov was the prophet of this evaporation. He foretold the entire story of our love in his "Lady with a Lapdog." 

Ah! Gould takes us to the realization implied in her story's title:

So I thought until I read the story again. . . . I discovered I had misremembered Chekhov's tone. I had taken him for an unadulterated cynic, when in fact "Lady with a Lapdog" depicts the gradual emergence of a love so intense that the world cannot contain it. . . . he was himself a romantic, a believer in the ability of love to overcome social conventions. . . .  My circuitous path towards love was more like the second reading than were the airbrushed tale of playboys and false affections that my undergraduate imagination had remembered . . . .  Chekhov tends to keep the devotion of those who have fallen in love with him for the rest of their writing lives. Perhaps the reason for this lies in his peculiar way of representing the world. Savouring Chekhov's flair for revealing the interstices of memory and forgetfulness makes it difficult to look away ever again.

Dr. Rebecca Ruth Gould is a writer, translator, and scholar whose books include Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and translator of The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central European University Press, 2015). She teaches comparative literature and translation at the University of Bristol in the UK.

________________________________________________________
* Correspondence with Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie, also a Russian scholar, explains why there are various titles describing the dog in Chekhov's famous short story:

Me: "I'm trying to find the exact title for Chekhov's story about the lady with a dog. I've seen 'Lady with a Lapdog,' 'The Lady with a Pet Dog,' 'Lady with a Dog,' and other similar titles. This is the Russian: Дама с собачкой."

U.R, Bowie: "In Russian the sobachka of the title is a diminutive ("little dog"), but you can't get exactly that effect in English. Translators try by using terms like 'lapdog.' Of course, there is no 'correct' translation. To read the definitive Chekhov, you have to read him in Russian!"

And from The Possessed by Elif Batuman, page 20:

"In 'Lady with Lapdog,' Gurov's wife, Anna's husband, Gurov's crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless. No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog."

Fiction: A Compelling Narrative

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

"Much in vogue in recent years," said 2016-2017 Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie, "is domestic literary fiction, "which tells true stories of middle-class people in realistic terms.

In this scene from To The Lighthouse, for example, Virginia Woolf artistically paints with words a "downpouring of immense darkness:"

Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say "This is he" or "This is she."  

Notice how Nabokov, in his New Yorker story "Symbols and Signs" (his original title is "Signs and Symbols") alludes to a suicide attempt without once having to rely on the mundane:

The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor's words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.

And U.R. Bowie's "Sonny and Jeanne," published in Bacopa 2014, shows how to uniquely spin an obituary:

So what's there to say about a man's life? "He was an avid bowler." That's the best they could do in the Greenville News, on the subject of Ivan C. ("Sonny") Gosnell, 57 years of age. Mike told me about the trophies. Said there was one with a bunch of scattered pins and just the ten pin left standing beside the number 299, that being Sonny's highest score and that ten pin being the only thing that kept him from a perfect game. Then imagine one final fling, an old black ball, paint chipped off, three forlorn finger holes never to be filled again, curving slowly down the lane, spinning in with a just-perceptible spin, rolling and rotating slowly on to the last loud crash: KA-WHOOM!

Good, Sometimes Great Writers

by Bacopa Literary Review 2016-17 Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie 

Passages from the Writings of Good, Sometimes Great Writers (continued)

"She felt a single drop of sweat slip from the small of her back, hang for an instant, and then slide into the mellow groove between the flexed jaws of her buttocks" (Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes).

"A vast strand of white fleece, brutally bright, moved south to north in the eastern vault of the heavens, a rush of splendid wool to warm the day" (William Kennedy, Ironweed).

"joyfully gazing out from behind the cobblestone barrier are white crosses and monuments, which hide in the greenery of cherry trees and look from afar like white spots . . . . when the cherry trees bloom these white spots blend with the cherry blossoms to form a broad seascape of white; and when the fruit ripens the white monuments and crosses are bedizened with specks that are blood-scarlet in color" (Anton Chekhov, "The Steppe"). [Chekhov's tone-poem novella, "The Steppe," full of such brilliant nature descriptions, was much influenced by his friend, the wonderful landscape painter Levitan.]

"You know, I have an uncle who's a country priest, and the man is such a believer that when, in time of drought, he goes out into the field to pray for rain, he takes with him an umbrella and leather raincoat, so that on the way back home he won't get soaked" (Chekhov, "The Duel").

"there was something wooden about his walk, something like the walk of toy soldiers, the way he barely bent his knees and tried to make each stride as long as possible" (Chekhov, "The Steppe:). [Chekhov loved describing how people walk. Tolstoy, who loved Chekhov when he met him, marveled at the way Chekhov himself walked. "He has the walk of a little miss of the noble class," said Tolstoy with delight.] 

"in sadness there is some alloy of pleasure. There is some shadow of delicacy and quaintness which smileth and fawneth upon us, even in the lap of melancholy . . . . Painters are of the opinion that the motions and wrinkles in the face which serve to weep serve also to laugh" (Michel de Montaigne, "We Taste Nothing Purely").

[Desdemona, reveling in the stores Othello tells her about his adventurous life] "She swore in faith 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange; 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful. She wished she had not heard it; yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man" (Shakespeare, "Othello").

Bacopa Literary Review contest submissions will open April 1 

A Deeper Look at the Human Experience

By Literary Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

Of the roughly five hundred submissions I read last year, many were declined because -- even in well-crafted stories -- I wasn't finding an original voice. Literary fiction has a distinctive voice that does more than tell a simple story: beautiful writing that offers a deeper look at the human experience, with uniquely individual phrasing, fresh and authentic.

Afia Atakora's work won Bacopa Literary Review 2016's First Prize in Fiction and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize because she has a fine feel for the structure of a story, an original voice, and an artist's touch for the rhythm of sentences.The beginning of "The Crooked Man" will give you a glimpse of Atakora's compelling style:

My mother has time to make me beautiful before we see the crooked man. "I will not," she says, "clean someone else's behind and have my child looking a sight."
     So I sit on the floor and she sits on the couch and she clamps her big powerful mother thighs around my little girl head all the better for the unpicking and the reknitting of my spiralling plaits.
     It's like a hug, if hugs are meant to confine, but there's a certain comfort in the warmth of her knees on my ears and the smell of her legs which is cocoa butter and the smell of her feet which is Bengay and the smell of her toes which is fresh red nail polish. I am almost lulled by the song she hums and sings and hums when the words don't come in the language that is hers but not mine.
     I want to say "Oww ow ow" but by now I know that does no good.
     "You don't," she says, "want to be looking a mess." No I don't want to be a sight or a mess, but I still fidget and wiggle as she wields the afro comb in the landscape of my knotty hair.
     I am not allowed to move, not at all. I only see the floor, the weave of the rough carpet, the piece of candy under the armchair, its sticky coating calling dust. My mother yanks my hair when she needs a different angle. My head in her lap I see the water stains on the ceiling drifted like brown clouds. I miss the morning, when my mother is the most gentle, when the sun is nowhere yet and the sky is as much pink as it is blue and I am burrowed in the sheets of the bed we share.
     "Not yet," she tells me and I borrow the warm of her and wait, "Not morning yet, little girl."
     And when finally she opens her eyes we pray together amongst the untucked sheets, our knees on the mattress, our hands palm up on the pillow and our faces in our hands, "give us this day our daily bread," and we laugh when my stomach gurgles.
     When my hair is perfectly presentable -- four new twists, two on the top like horns, two from the back like white girl pigtails, my scalp all scoured and sore and shining with coconut oil -- she frees me, briefly.
     My mother presents the zip-lock bag, its crude zip mechanisms no longer functional, its clear plastic clouded by hair oil and time. That bag brimming over with my prized collection of hair clips and bows and beads and plastic balls on elastic like gleaming jaw breakers in every conceivable color.
      This is a treat, to be decorated so beautifully, to feel something like a tree come to flowering, a wonderfulness so rare that I know today to be a special sort of day. I know I have to please the crooked man.

Afia Atakora is currently earning her MFA at Columbia University. She lives in Avenel, New Jersey, where she is at work on a novel about a reconstruction-era midwife.

(More about Literary Fiction in The Huffington Post.)

Bacopa Literary Review: "Dark Beyond Darkness"

(Condensed by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast from Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie's full review here)

I'm ten years late getting around to reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but since it has to rank among the most powerful pieces of American fiction written in the past ten years, it remains more than worthy of discussion. McCarthy here tells a tale of nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

We're in the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction -- it could have been a nuclear war -- The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Apparently most animals are extinct, and the few human beings who survive face fellow humans who are, largely, living beastly lives. Here's what the world looks like when it's gone:

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe." 

Oddly enough, it is passages like these, what one critic called this violent grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences, that somehow save the reader from descending into total despair.

You don't have to read far into this book to realize that if something like this conflagration ever descends upon our world, the most fortunate of human beings will be those who die quickly. The world of The Road is a dead world. All the old rules by which people live their lives have been abrogated. A father and son wander through the devastation, on their way somewhere in search of survival. When they share some food with an old man they encounter on the road, he never thanks them. "Thank you" has gone out with the going out of the world. 

"You won't wish us luck either, will you?" says the father.

The old man replies, "I don't know what that would mean. What luck would look like. Who would know such a thing?"

We meet the mother of the boy and wife of the main protagonist only for one brief scene, but that scene is powerfully written, and it rings true. She tells her husband she is about to commit suicide, and she departs with no loving words for him, or for the universe.

"We're not survivors; we're the walking dead in a horror film. . . I didn't bring myself to this. I was brought. And now I'm done. . . My only hope is for eternal nothingness, and I hope it with all my heart."

She goes on to insist that surviving only for oneself is impossible:

"A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love."

The dire tragedy depicted here can also apply to the human condition in general. The wife's words about how, if one wishes to survive one needs someone to live for, are equally true of old men and women in our un-apocalyptic world who lose their spouses late in life. Cobbling together "some passable ghost" is exactly what bereaved spouses do when they spend time talking alone to their dead loved ones.

Then again, even if we never have to see the world end before our eyes, each of us must face the hurts and pains and losses of any life. We also must face the ending of our own personal worlds and, like the wife of the novel, we haven't brought ourselves to any of this -- we were brought.

There is no place left for a God in the crozzled hearts of The Road's characters. At the end, the father finally gives up his struggle to survive, tells his son to go on without him, and dies. Then, abruptly, God is back in the person of a "good guy," with two children and a wonderful wife, who ambles into the book and adopts the boy, saving him from a certain death.

In light of the bleak reality McCarthy has been describing for the first 280 pages of the book, I'm not sure what the author is up to with the unbelievable Deus ex machina ending. Is the appearance of the miraculous family in one of the boy's dreams, or that of his dying father?

McCarthy gives us nothing to suggest the scene is other than reality. With his consummate feel for the artistic integrity of the structure, he could not have believed he could get away with this ending. But since this ending is there, we can only look past the final six pages, and exult in the artistry of this brilliant book.

Bits and Pieces of Good Writing: Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

by Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

With his first publication, a collection of short stories called Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock, native of Knockemstiff, Ohio, has perfected the genre known as “hillbilly sleaze.”

The first story in the collection, “Real Life,” is typical in that it features the kind of characters who populate all the stories. The description of a friend Vernon encounters in the rest room is typical of Knockemstiff denizens in general: “a porky guy with sawdust combed through his greasy black hair. A purple stain shaped like a wedge of pie covered the belly of his dirty shirt.”

The first line: “My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old.”

Full of hard-scrabble rednecks, the stories, as this one, sometimes feature a narrator of sensibility. In “Real Life” this is the boy narrator, nervous Bobby, whose life with his alcoholic father has him in the habit of “chewing the skin off my fingers.”

A typical male representative of the metropolis of Knockemstiff, the father, Vernon, is tough as nails, a man who hates movies and make-believe. As he puts it, “What the hell’s wrong with real life?”

The story describes a scene that Vernon creates in “real life,” when, drunk in the restroom of the drive-in and mouthing obscenities, he is accosted by another man. A big irony is that the men in the rest room enjoy the ensuing fight much more than Godzilla on the big screen outside.

Both men have their sons with them in the rest room. The other man, as large as a giant, doesn’t like Vern swearing in front of his son. After appearing to back down from a confrontation, Vern sucker punches the giant in the head. Then, after the giant is on the floor, he kicks his ribs and punches his face “until a tooth popped through one meaty cheek.” Other men have to pull him off the fallen giant before he kills him.

At this point the giant’s son attacks Bobby, and the old man forces him to fight: “You back down I’ll blister your ass.” As it turns out, Bobby bloodies the nose of the bigger boy and wins the fight.

While others call for an ambulance, Vernon and Bobby jump back in their car with Bobby’s mother and flee the drive-in. For the old man, who constantly complains about his son’s lack of toughness, “This is the best night of my fucking life.” When his wife objects to his drunken shenanigans the old man cracks her in the face with a forearm.

The story ends up being about a way of coming of age in the trailer-trash world of Knockemstiff. The meek Bobby has something of an epiphany in blood. “Real Life” ends with him in bed, contemplating his victory in the fight, which, apparently for the first time ever, has earned him the approval of his father. Interesting developments for Bobby’s future are suggested by the final lines:

“…I lapped the [other boy’s] blood off my knuckles. The dried flakes dissolved in my mouth, turning my spit to syrup. Even after I’d swallowed all the blood, I kept licking my hands. I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more.”

 This tale of a gentle character's baptism in violence reminds me of a story by the great Russian short-story writer, Isaac Babel: "My First Goose."

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Describing a Scene

by Bacopa Literary Review 2016-17 Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie 

Selected Passages from the Writings of Good, and Sometimes Great Writers

[description of a ritual butcher in a Ukrainian shtetl, inspecting the lungs of a cow or sheep he has butchered] "The glossy brownish organs . . . . the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone -- from a mouse to a man -- had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin" (David Bezmozgis, The Free World).

"Her light-brown hair was drawn smoothly back and gathered in a knot low on her neck, but near the right temple a single lock fell loose and curling, not far from the place where an odd little vein branched across one well-marked eyebrow, pale blue and sickly amid all that pure, well-nigh transparent spotlessness. That little blue vein above the eye dominated quite painfully the whole fine oval of the face" (Thomas Mann, "Tristan"). [Mann is great at describing human faces, human bodies.]

[description of a delicatessen] "there were glass showcases where smoked mackerel, lampreys, flounders, and eels were displayed on platters to tempt the appetite. There were dishes of Italian salad, crayfish spreading their claws on blocks of ice, sprats pressed flat and gleaming goldenly from open boxes; choice fruits -- garden strawberries and grapes as beautiful as though they had come from the Promised Land; rows of sardine tins and those fascinating little white earthenware jars of caviar and foie gras . . . " (Thomas Mann, Felix Krull) [Mann is also great at describing a scene by accumulating masses of detail; in this he reminds me of Nikolai Gogol.]

"She'd never met a child with beady eyes. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment, usually in middle age" (Lauren Groff, "For the God of Love, for the Love of God").  

 

Bacopa Literary Review contest submissions will open April 1 

Everything is a Dream

by Bacopa Literary Review Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie 

Where And When You Write And Who Is Helping You Out 

"You don't do all the writing at your desk. You do it elsewhere, carrying the book with you. The book is your companion, you have it in your mind all the time, running through it, alert for links to it. It becomes your chief companion, in the real sense of the word, you can talk to it quietly. It becomes your sole companion" (James Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 76).

Salter hints here that, unbenownst to you, the book is writing itself in your mind all the time. The deepest neurons of your brain work on the writing day and night. As recent studies in brain science have revealed, on a conscious level we have no idea about the decisions those independent neurons are making. 

Romantic writers used to think of themselves as the amanuenses of the gods, who guided their pens and sent down original ideas. But more likely writers are the amanuenses of their own creative neurons. When your favorite character suddenly does something totally unexpected on the page, it's not because God so decided. The neurons decided -- and they very well may have made that decision at three a.m., when you were fast asleep.

"There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real" (Salter, p. 77).

Bacopa Literary Review contest submissions will open April 1

Important and Unimportant

by Bacopa Literary Review Literary Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

We Write Ourselves

"In a copy of a book that Colum McCann signed for an auction of first editions, beside the disclaimer that is always printed proclaiming that the book is a work of fiction, the names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, or are used fictitiously, and that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, beside this McCann wrote simply, 'Bullshit'" (James Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 38).

Then again, you don't want to be sued, do you?

Important Books and Unimportant Books

"Books that are deemed important weren't written to be important, generally. They became such. I can't think that The Catcher in the Rye was written as an important, life-altering or significant book. I believe it was simply heartfelt. To Kill a Mockingbird doesn't bear marks of an intended importance although I don't know what Harper Lee actually felt. Fitzgerald thought all of his books were important. The Great Gatsby was a short book, only 214 pages, and he was insistent that the publisher sell it at the same price as his longer ones" (Salter, pp. 42-43).

Speaking of the so-deemed, the above paragraph demonstrates the sometimes dated opinions of James Salter. Read by everyone in the sixties, The Catcher in the Rye is read by practically no one these days. Not only not important, but already moribund, almost dead.  

To Kill a Mockingbird is still widely read, its so-deemed greatness still afloat, but it is "a book for children" (as Flannery O'Connor said).

As for The Great Gatsby, this book has claims to being the Great American Novel; it should be sold at twice the price of any other book.

 

Bacopa Literary Review contest submissions will open April 1