The beautiful pause prize 2024 winning and shortlisted manuscripts

Top Manuscripts

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Note: In our original call for submissions, we asked authors to describe their submitted manuscripts. Here is the excerpt from the original call:

• Please give us some insight into what your manuscript is about, who you're writing for, and why you wrote it. No min or max number of words for this or any other special directions. Use this space how you'd like in describing your manuscript.

SO. Below you’ll find the winning and shortlisted manuscripts, described by their authors. We think it sheds light on the individuality and beauty of art. There is nothing quite like a description of a work of art from the artist who worked to make it.

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Top Three Manuscripts

1. A Handful of Earth, by Jesse Curran

   ($1,000 + publication in January 2025 from Press Pause Press)

   from Jesse’s submission:

   A Handful of Earth is a work of experimental fiction composed of ten chapters. I think of the book as ecolament, a genre that mourns the toxic environment, while also locating purpose and transformation through art, labor, language, and human relationships. Told in the first person, A Handful of Earth harbors the contingencies of lyric subjectivity and expressive language, negotiating how they struggle with and are enlivened by desire. It is the story of a 33-year-old Maine native who is given a terminal cancer diagnosis. In an effort to escape the antiseptic sterility of contemporary medicine, Claire decides to travel to Italy with the intention of taking her life after her brief sojourn. But she has much to accomplish in her last summer, fulfilling and sustaining a series of relationships and encounters with people, forces, and passions. In different chapters, she faces a lover, an old friend, her grief-laden memory, the sea, painting, and the physical labor of farm work. Her (and the work’s) ultimate task is to turn affliction into metaphor, and in doing so, achieve a sense of spiritual rebirth. The work is a love song for Italy, a place that is formative in shaping an environmental aesthetic that heals. This project came from my heart and aims to provide an honest and artful response to the fear that can emerge in the face of our precarious environmental position. It imagines the worst and comes back singing.

   Why we love it: The experience of reading A Handful of Earth is like the literal feeling of fine sand through fingers. Like sitting alone on a beach with only the sound of the waves and wind keeping you company. When you’re in this book, you’re both somewhere beautiful and nowhere at all, floating far away, learning to love the world again. We cannot wait to see it in print and bring it to the beach in the winter.

2. Chrysalides, by Amy Marques

($500 + five shorts forthcoming in Press Pause Volume 10, which drops in November)

from Amy’s submission:
Chrysalides is a collection of quiet stories, not-quite-stories, and fractured stories that shine a little light on the kind of liminal moments that shape us. Little moments. Vulnerable moments. Intimate moments. Moments that aren't always noticed, in real time, as being chrysalides. 

What is the manuscript about? It's about people becoming. About grace and kindness and hope and humor amidst the ubiquitous struggles of life. About the unseen, the quiet, the children, the parents when nobody is watching, the elderly, the sick, the tired, the frightened, the every one.

Who am I writing for and why? Myself first. Isn't that usually the way? I'm writing the quiet stories I love to listen to and read. I'm writing re-envisioned versions of stories spoken into my past. Entrusted. True to the core of the story, if not the facts. For that, I believe, is what fiction does.

You'll find no bombs, no explosions, just the little things that add up to make our lives. I believe that narratives make the unbearable bearable and when we shape life into stories and find the metaphors, we make meanings and, in doing so, we butterfly.

Most of these pieces fall under the category of flash fiction or microfiction. Some expand into short stories, some lean into experimental, ekphrastic, epistolary or prose poetry. Overall it is the tone of gentle hope that I aimed for.

Why we love it: Chrysalides is a collection that reminds us that to be human is to be both lovable and completely despicable. It is a book that forgives its characters for being human and shows them unconditional love but doesn’t let them off the hook. The prose is beautiful, funny, heartwrenching, and honest, giving so much and taking nothing at all. We’re excited to see five of our favorite pieces in Volume 10. So soon!!

3. You're a Ghost in a Meatball on a Rock in a Vast and Empty Universe. Just Fucking Go For It Already, by Matt Bender

(excerpt forthcoming in Press Pause Volume 11)

from Matt’s submission:
Told in four parts, 23 chapters, and 11 interludes, You're a Ghost in a Meatball on a Rock in a Vast and Empty Universe. Just Fucking Go For It Already is a coming-of-age hero's quest about heroes' quests. It's also smart, Queer, Punk, and fun fun fun to read. The best answer to "Why I wrote this" is it's the sort of book I would love to find on a shelf somewhere, preferably while on vacation, and then lose myself in for a day or two, also preferably while on vacation.

Why we love it:
This book is so much fun. It is funny, smart, ambitious, and wild. We’ve never read anything like it. It is the perfect rollercoaster blend of the Classics and the modern-day, full of historical and theological insights, a zing of a character, and hilarious, compassionate prose. We can’t wait to see an excerpt in Volume 11 and we will exclaim “Yes!!” when we someday find the book on a shelf on vacation.

The Shortlist

(Top-Five)

The Parade by Ben Miller

The Parade confronts the poisonous legacy of mob behavior in a Midwestern town. For generations citizens in Upton have marched in a non-stop parade promoting pride in the New Glory flag and its cult of conformity, entertainment, and unbridled consumption. That is, until a child rebels against the oppression of mandatory participation.

A story of the power of a single voice yearning for a home that is truly a home—a place of safety and of justice—the narrative lends the brutal forces at play in present-day America a fresh frame.

The Dream Thief by Stefani Nellen

The Dream Thief is about Jelle Niemantsverdriet, a queer Dutch psychologist whose life comes apart the moment he commits scientific fraud. He's acting under pressure to get tenure, and vows to himself he won't cheat again. But, like the stolen painting in The Goldfinch, his secret consumes his life. He starts to doubt everything: his integrity as a scientist, his role as a second father to his husband's son, the family constellation they established with the boy's mother. Everything feels shaky, less reliable. Like a different kind of fraud. The threat of being exposed forces Jelle to question himself and his decisions, and strip away the lies in order to face the truth.

The reason I wrote this book is that I wanted to explore what it means to be part of a family that is not made up of your blood relations. I wanted to write about someone who, through a mistake of his own, is forced to change his idea of the kind of person he is. And I also wanted to write a book that celebrates a person fighting for what and who he loves.

(Top-Ten)

Ripped-out Pages by Kim Anderson

Ripped-out Pages is the story of a woman who tries to overcome ordinariness by solving a mystery from her deceased grandmother’s past. The grandmother in this story, a wealthy ex-socialite in the midst of a dark decline her starry-eyed granddaughter cannot see, settled in my brain quite a few years ago and demanded to have her story told. Larger than life Bea Madsen is a foil for the narrator/protagonist Katie, a “regular” girl (and then woman) who is desperate to be something more by blood or proximity or imagination. The journey she takes untangling family secrets, writing and rewriting Bea’s past, and never giving up on the idea that she is meant to be someone better is the heart of the story. I think this novel is for anyone who can relate to the anxiety of searching for purpose in life or who has grappled with reexamining their own past or family relationships. Part mystery, part coming of age story, part fairy tale, part love story, it hopefully has a little something for everyone.

Islands and Other Places by Scott Bailey

A few years ago, I wrote a story called "The Sleep of Birds," about a boy named Bela Trbanka, a Serbian refugee who'd been resettled along with his mother in a small town in eastern Colorado in 1976, a place so insignificant that no one had thought to build an onramp to the highway that runs along the edge of the town. The story explores ideas of identity, isolation, friendship, and community. While I worked on Bela's tale, the other characters seemed to demand that I tell their stories as well, and soon enough I had a large cast including a widowed poet, a pair of music teachers, a young man with a traumatic brain injury who may or may not be Jesus Christ, a glam-rock singer, a man returning to his family home, and others who all wanted to have their say. The stories are connected not only by the town, but also by the emotional fallout of a double murder committed the night before the book begins: a young husband has killed his wife and left her lying in a field, and he himself has been stabbed to death in the town's maintenance shed. Everyone in town knew Oliver and Rose, and the dead couple's histories continue to weave through the lives of those left behind. Into this unsettled world comes Agent Crow of the Colorado Bureau of Investigations, a mysterious figure whose investigation leads him back and forth between the mundane and the mythic, his adventures on the prairie by turns quixotic and Homeric as he looks into, with some reluctance, the murders of Oliver and Rose.

I wrote this novel for the same reason I write anything: we are all in need of compassion. As Chekhov said, "Tell my friends that they are living badly and must stop it." I believe that the ultimate power of fiction is to put us into the minds and hearts of people we think of as strangers but who show us, if we look, that their humanity and pain is equal to ours. In order to love our neighbors, we should know something about them, so I am writing for people who see art as a window, not as a mirror. I am writing for people who read Jhumpa Lahiri, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and all the other great empathic novelists. I am writing for people who read Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhael Bulgakov, Susan Sontag, Haruki Murakami, and other writers who see narrative form as a playground, a toybox where we can let our imaginations and spirits have free rein to surprise and delight our readers.

How to End a Story About a Dead Cat by Melvine Sterne

Gertrude Stein once said, "If you want to know if you are a writer, try stopping." I suppose I write for me because I can't stop. I wake up in the middle of the night with a voice in my head and I fire up the computer and sit down and write what it tells me. Over the years, I think my stories have become a little bit less angry and a little more spiritual and redemptive. Life, I suppose, has a way of becoming a little gentler if you let it. This collection is twelve stories, all published individually, all touching on people and moments when they face choices and consequences.

Traffic and Other Stories of Movement and Stasis by Nick Sweeney

As these stories span 20 years or so, they have not been written with any cohesive theme in mind, but some readers have observed that many of my stories involve 'ordinary' people caught in situations that they cannot resist, even if they recognize that the outcome will not be very good for them. I think all creative writing should have some humor in it, so most of the stories could be described as dark comedies.

Drown ‘Em Like Puppies by Maria Wickens

Drown 'Em Like Puppies is a book for people who are inspired by the strength of survivors. It's also a book that explains the misplaced guilt abused girls and women feel and how it undermines their ability to escape. It's also a celebration of less-than-perfect people. Acting bravely isn’t always easy, parents love their children but forget how to show it, and fighting for justice for a friend can sometimes come too late.

I've been writing and rewriting this story for more than 40 years. Like Lane, who has an imaginary friend who whispers down-home common sense to her, I've heard the voices of these characters over that time. Unfortunately, I don't think it is a unique story–there are too many girls trapped by sexual abusers - brothers, uncles, fathers, boyfriends. But I hope it's told through the voice of a unique character who is flawed, funny, and resilient that readers can relate to.

Thank you to everyone who submitted! The Beautiful Pause Prize opens for poetry manuscripts on November 15, 2024. :)

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