Vocal Curation Team
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Collaborative, conscious, and committed to content. We're rounding up the best that the Vocal network has to offer.
Stories (140/0)
Whispering Woods Challenge Winners
Congratulations to Morgan Christy Rickards for their winning Whispering Woods story, Guardian at the Gate. Morgan has been a Vocal creator since February 2021, and this is their first time placing in Challenge — well done, starting with a win! Guardian at the Gate draws evocatively from Welsh tales of the Cantre'r Gwaelod, a lost sunken kingdom between the forest and the sea. Heledd’s dangerous adventure pulls her towards the water but her spirit is anchored in the woods: Morgan’s writing is atmospheric and exciting.
By Vocal Curation Team24 days ago in Resources
Love Unraveled Challenge Winners
Sometimes the simplest challenges are the deepest and most revealing. For this challenge we asked you to “unravel the mysteries, joys, and challenges of love through the power of personal storytelling” — we all love, we all feel we know what it means to love. Yet this challenge offered a reminder of the infinite shapes of human connection, and what power love has over us, even in the face of struggle and pain.
By Vocal Curation Team2 months ago in Resources
Inverse Challenge Winners
Misplaced keys, biodegradable pots, rainbow jellycats… such “ordinary” objects, images, you might say — but they are what make Teresa Renton’s Lost Things Wait for You to Find Them but Sometimes They Don't inverse poem stand out as our winner. We are drawn into the particular world of this poem by specific visions like that. In this latest challenge, we asked you for a poem that could be read from the top or the bottom, and which takes on a different meaning depending which way you read. Teresa’s poem made me think a little bit of Elizabeth Bishop’s famous villanelle, One Art, in its conflicted engagement with loss and abandonment. A terrific achievement.
By Vocal Curation Team2 months ago in Resources
Snow Micro Challenge Winners
We think of snow as cleansing, purifying — but thinking outside the box is never a bad idea. For our Snow Micro challenge, our Grand Prize winner Dane BH conjures up light flurries in her winning entry, Our Tribe. Dirty gray city snow mounds in piles before melting away, an effective but never forced metaphor for a friendship that has thinned and frayed beyond survival. This is a brief masterclass in effective storytelling.
By Vocal Curation Team2 months ago in Resources
Abecedarian Challenge Winners
How much do we want to be aware of form, in a formal poem — and how much do we want the form to disappear? Philip Larkin was a poet with a gift for writing work that adheres quite tightly to pattern; and yet his skill causes the form almost to disappear, to melt into meaning. In our Abecedarian challenge, a formal structure is right out in front: the letters of the alphabet at the beginning of each line. Some of you landed neatly on each letter, accenting the form itself; other entries — while keeping to our rubric — worked to make the form flow into the poem. One’s no better than the other; it’s just fascinating for us to see the different ways in which you all approached this challenge.
By Vocal Curation Team3 months ago in Resources
#200 Challenge Winners
Congratulations, folks. You made us cry. I’m serious. We found the entries to the #200 Challenge truly moving, and we are so glad to hear what Vocal means to all of you. It hasn’t been easy sometimes, keeping the show on the road — but you are what makes it possible, and you are what makes it worthwhile, and we are so lucky to have a reminder of that in all the entries to this challenge.
By Vocal Curation Team3 months ago in Resources
Whodunit Challenge Winners
I was there… but how reliable is eyewitness testimony, really? That’s the question GK Bird asks in a stylish winning piece with that title. This Down Under writer has placed as a runner-up in our Vocal Challenges, and then moved to second place, and now is finally in the winner’s circle, so big congratulations. “I know exactly what happened!” one character exclaims as the tale opens, but then we are given shifting perspectives on the scene, undercutting our assumptions and building suspense around ‘the incident’. Well done!
By Vocal Curation Team4 months ago in Resources
Villanelle Challenge Winners
The villanelle is a complex and demanding form. As we said in our Challenge prompt, we’re so glad that our creators — another shout out to Mike Singleton - Mikeydred, Lauren Elizabeth, Sonia Heidi Unruh, Dane BH, and J.M. Powell — suggested that we run this one (please do put your own thoughts into the comments on Share Your Ideas to Shape the Future of Vocal Challenges!)
By Vocal Curation Team4 months ago in Resources
Identity Challenge Winners
Sam Eliza Green has been a creator with Vocal since the summer of 2021, and has published 114 pieces — warm congratulations on their first Challenge win. Their free-flowing poem, You, and I, and She takes first place in our Identity Challenge, its short lines a conversation about being and feeling, one which inhabits emotion with exploratory language. We loved the images of a winter “when nothing feels right/ and wrong has carved/ into my skin like/ the sharp snap/ of abandonment.” Image and sensation do a slow dance that draws the reader in.
By Vocal Curation Team5 months ago in Resources
Smooth Challenge Winners
Life is rough, sometimes; we could all do with a little smoothing out. In the entries to our Smooth challenge, there were stones and fur, water and ice, the wind over soft skin. Congratulations to Kate Kastelberg, our winner with ‘New Stones in the River: A Life Insured’, a truly lovely sestina that indicates loss but gathers memory into joy. “The years since the river was born,/ I have sat on its stony shores, passing/ time’s spells: feel roughshod rock turn to velvet as lilies bloom right/ from the water’s surface, slowly at first, earning/ their place in the sun.” Kate’s terrific poem is a reminder that a stricture — like one of our challenge rubrics — can be a gift rather than a constraint, an opportunity to take a concept and make it one’s own.
By Vocal Curation Team5 months ago in Resources
Arid Challenge Winners
An actual desert, or a desert of the mind? This time we gave you the ending of your tale, an evocative line: "Engulfed in the desert's parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind." We couldn’t wait to see where your creativity would take you, and the entries to the Arid challenge did not disappoint.
By Vocal Curation Team5 months ago in Resources
Neolomicro Challenge Winners
Traditional. Worthless. Obscene. Perfectly ordinary — and extremely useful — words, aren’t they? Yet according to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, they hadn’t been a part of the English language until the Bard coined them; there are many others in his remarkable lexicon.
By Vocal Curation Team5 months ago in Resources