N – Five Minutes Contest for Fall 2023. Theme: “Away”

100 words about 5 minutes of your life, on the theme of AWAY. Interpret any way you’d like. Submit up to five entries.

Send us your 100-word piece about five minutes in your life and we’ll consider it for publication. Guidelines:

• Piece should be 100 words, formatted as one paragraph. Not 99. Not 101. Title, which is not part of 100 words, should be 15 characters maximum, including spaces.

• There should be one identifiable moment (approx. five minutes) that’s the crux of the piece.

• We don’t publish:
—retellings of dreams
—retellings of things you imagined
—retellings of things you saw without any reference to you/your response (we want you in the piece!)
—erotic memoir
—pieces containing graphic violence
—pieces from the perspective of abusers
—poetry or fiction, though we are interested in poetic prose and memoir masquerading as fiction
—pieces which overtly promote a theological or political ideology
—pieces in which you tell us someone else’s memory as told to you
—pieces that contain hate speech
—slurs.

• Each piece should be formatted without line breaks;
one block of text, not multiple, short paragraphs.

• -We are receiving many (beautiful) submissions about the last time a writer saw a beloved person, about putting a pet to sleep, and about the quiet moments in the morning before the day starts. Due to the high number of submissions on these themes, these pieces are less likely to receive acceptances. We challenge you to take risks with your voice, your structure, your chronology … anything that might set your piece apart.

A panel of contest readers will read/score pieces. The top ten pieces will be sent to Contest Judge Karen Zey who will choose the winner as well as two runners-up. All top ten pieces will run in Five Minutes.

The winner will receive 2/5 the contest entry fees, or $2 per entry. If 2 people enter, the fees will add up to $10 and the winner will receive $4. If 100 people enter, that amount will be $500 and the winner will receive $200. [Boring explainer: Submittable keeps $.99 per $5 entry. Five Minutes keeps $2.01 per entry. Winner wins $2 per entry.]

Please read Five Minutes’ guidelines for our regular submissions, which apply here, except you MAY submit even if you have pieces upcoming in Five Minutes, and you may submit up to five times. We will return your entry and request a re-format if guidelines haven’t been followed.

The contest runs October 1-31; our regular submissions portal will open again on November 1.