The first round of content for our May/June issue is up! Visit our website to subscribe and check it out.
Cover art by @jwoodall
This Saturday, May 5, we’ll be doing a live Q&A session with artist Marnie Galloway at 4pm CST! Keep an eye on our website for updates—even if you’re not a subscriber, you can still check out the questions and answers!
cicadamagazine reblogged
Call for Submissions: Family
CICADA YA/teen lit magazine seeks fiction, poetry, comics, and essays on the theme of Family. We want to see honest works exploring all aspects of family life, whether it be family by relation or a family of choice. What connects a family? What might break it apart? How do we define family? In what ways do our familial connections heal or harm us? We are especially interested in works depicting found families and other nontraditional/nonnuclear families—show us how the family you build can be just as strong as (or stronger than!) the one you are born with.
Submissions due April 13, 2018. Visit our Submittable page for more info.
From “Man of Straw” by Russell Nichols. Read the whole thing in our latest issue.
From “They are Ephemeral” by Mackenzie Cook.
Check out Kristy Anne Cox’s “Elder Daughter” in our latest issue for a sweet poly love story, plus eldritch abominations.
Consult your horoscope and plan your week accordingly.
New issue content today! In this round:
"Man of Straw" by Russell Nichols
"A Lovesong from Frankenstein's Monster" by Ali Trotta
cicadamagazine reblogged
Monster Flash Fiction Competition Winners Announced!
During the 8th century, the Greek poet Homer composed the epic poem the Odyssey, which featured the powerful cyclops Polyphemus. Roughly 1,000 years later in 1818, the world first met Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Now, in 2018, we’re excited to celebrate a fresh crop of monsters! Last month we partnered with Cicada Magazine to bring you our first ever Monster Flash Fiction Competition. Today, the judges over at Cicada are excited to share their favorite pieces. Read on to find out who took home the prizes for Best Entry, Runner Up, and Best Peer Review.
From @cicadamagazine:
BEST ENTRY
We’re fascinated by this piece. It’s a mysterious and otherworldly portrait of mundane urban spaces. What a unique way to build a monster in the mind of the reader—through its invisible and undetectable yet undeniable influence. It’s recognizably the same presence that haunts the Neruda poem referenced in the title. This piece reads like a prose poem, with wonderfully rhythmic language that begs to be read aloud.
RUNNER UP
It’s tough to craft an effective piece in second person, but this piece uses that point of view to create a hilariously paranoid slice-of-life gone wrong. The small descriptions of everyday things are so concise and fantastic—“squeaky pink Styrofoam container” was one of our favorites. Great twist at the end, too. We enjoyed how this piece subscribes to a somewhat Lovecraftian method of not really describing horrifying things; the thing you don’t see clearly is much scarier than the thing you do.
BEST PEER REVIEW
This commenter has a real knack for maintaining an effective ratio of encouragement to critique. They have a good understanding of the need to “boil it down” when writing flash fiction, and focus on the real heart of the story; “this story has good ideas, but too little space to explore them all” was a great way to summarize their commentary.