I’ve just received the short list of finalists. You can find the long list right here.

Again, in no particular order…

Lesley Poling-Kempes – Bone Horses

Julie Johnson – Dulce Et Decorum Est

Emily Stone – In Search of Chocola

Stacy Nguyen – A Girl, A Boy, A Gun

Leanne Tankel – The Adulterer’s Notebook

Jamie Patterson – Lost Edens

Tori Warner Shepard – Spider’s Blood is Blue

Richard Lutman – Iron Butterfly

Mimi Lipson – Food & Beverage

Karima Alavi – In the Shadow of Tombs

Angie Chuang – The Four Words for Home

Sara Burnaby — Bears

John Laue – An Education

Robert Richter – Something Like a Dream

Lance Larsen – Seventeen Ways to Float

Reg Saner – Reaching Keet Seel

AE Baer – Death is a Canary

Jerome Siegel — Bad Shrinks

Phillip Hammes – Memory Songs

Donna M. Vesely – all i loved, i loved alone

Art Schwartz – Survivors of La Revolucion

Saundra Amrhein – Green Card Stories

Claire Cox – Chapin Hall Will Rock You

Okay! Here’s the long list of finalists… We hope to have the short list sometime next week, and then we should be about on target for announcing the winners.

In no particular order…

Lesley Poling-Kempes – Bone Horses

Emily Stone – In Search of Chocola

Stacy Nguyen – A Girl, A Boy, A Gun

Leanne Tankel – The Adulterer’s Notebook

Jamie Patterson – Lost Edens

Tori Warner Shepard – Spider’s Blood is Blue

Richard Lutman – Iron Butterfly

Tony Burnett – American Folk Song

AE Baer – Death is a Canary

Thomas J. Zuzich – When the Mind Plays Tricks

Karima Alavi – In the Shadow of Tombs

John D. Trudel – God’s House

Keith Dahlberg – The Samana Incident

Bernard Chamberlain – Streetlights for Port Cecil

Mathias B. Freese – The i Tetralogy

Angie Chuang – The Four Words for Home

Lance Larsen – Seventeen Ways to Float

Ruth Crocker – The Children’s Room

John Mort – Illegal

Robert Richter – Something Like a Dream

Thomas John Malaskee – Brothers and Grapevines

Jerome Gold – Hard Lives

Michael Milstein – Undisclosed

Gloria Zachgo – The Rocking Horse

Kelly Clancy – Soldiers of God

Becky Hagenston – Midnight, Licorice, Shadow

Bob Ross – The Woman Who Knew Bob Hope

Julie Johnson – Dulce Et Decorum Est

Gary Navoy – The Sparrow of the Bayou

Marie Marley – Come Back Early Today

Richard Hague – A Life in Black and White

Joe Vastano – Experts

Nikhil Modi – Tales from the Himalayas

Scott Kauffman – Last Call at Last Chance

Elaine McGee – Our Home, Our Passion

Joanne Kingsbury – The Supermother Box

Kathryn Rhett – Near Breathing

Alma H. Bond — Camille Claudel

Arnold Gordenstein – A Small, Perfect Place

Nancy Webb – O, Hear the Angel Voices

Leighton Scott – Hardship Pay

Mervyn Kaufman – Slicky Boy

Richard Hague – Earnest Occupations

Mimi Lipson – Food & Beverage

Sara Burnaby — Bears

John Laue – An Education

Reg Saner – Reaching Keet Seel

Jerome Siegel – Bad Shrinks

Phillip Hammes – Memory Songs

Donna M. Vesely – all i loved, i loved alone

Art Schwartz – Survivors of La Revolucion

Saundra Amrhein – Green Card Stories

Claire Cox – Chapin Hall Will Rock You

We have the long list of 2011 Literary Awards Program finalists nearly ready! Look for it sometime tomorrow here on the blog.

I’m getting ready to head out for the holidays and enter the land of Too Much Eggnog. With the 2011 Literary Awards Program concluded, and many irons in the SFWP fire, I thought I might throw out a quick blog post on our “roadmap” for 2012.

A few months ago, Richard Currey was talking to me about Kindle Singles. I’m a Luddite when it comes to ebooks. I don’t own an e-reader, I print out manuscripts to read them, and, generally, I feel like I fell out of a tree from 1890. Of course, every SFWP book is on the Kindle. Despite my technophobia, it’s foolish to leave such stones unturned, if you will. But I’ve been dismissive when it comes to those bells and whistles that can be done with ebooks.

As Richard and I discussed Kindle Singles, though, gears started to spin up in my head. This is what the ebook market should really be about.

For years now, the short form has been the ugly stepchild of publisher’s catalogs. Short stories and essays are hard to sell. They’re generally ignored and often abandoned if they do go to print. How many great writers are out there with allegedly unmarketable short stories holding up their coffee tables? Too many. Both famous and unknown.

The Kindle Singles market changes the way we approach and publish the short form. It’s now reasonable to do so. From 6000 words up to 100 pages, you can download a Single to your Kindle in seconds and rip through it on your commute home.

I engaged in a couple months of back and forth with Amazon, with the help of my distributor, and we eventually worked out a deal to swing open the doors of the somewhat exclusive Singles market. Now I can, as my grandmother used to say, go hog piggy wild.

And hog piggy wild I will go.

The SFWP Kindle Singles will start in early 2012. We’re going to see five or six short entries from Richard Currey, detailing his journey from the source of the Rio Grande to where it spills into the Gulf of Mexico. A writer’s journey and a history of one of the country’s most iconic rivers.

We’ll be pulling together several Singles from Alan Cheuse, starting with three excellent novellas.

We’ll be releasing the 20th Anniversary Edition of Currey’s long out of print collection of short stories, The Wars of Heaven, as five short Singles and a novella.

Moving forward, I’m looking at a way to do justice to Pagan Kennedy’s out of print back catalog, and we’ll be seeing work from James J. Patterson and, eventually, the multitude of SFWP Awards Program folks who have crossed my desk over the last decade. All the info you need (and a newsletter) can be found right here.

In addition to all of this, I’ve been helping Alan Squire Publishing get off the ground. Their third title, A Secret Woman, by Rose Solari, will be hitting the shelves in April, and their fourth title (a wonderful little Christmas story) will be available in November.

I’m very excited that we’ll be warming up the publishing wing of SFWP next year…and everything that we’re putting out is amazing. It’s the new face of publishing, and SFWP is geared up to lead the charge.

For the Literary Awards Program, we’ll get that started again in late 2012, concluding in 2013, and, finally, we’ll be able to offer our winners publication in the Singles market.

As the year goes on, I promise I’ll keep the blog up to date with developments… So stay tuned!

See you all next year!

I’ve just taken down the online application forms, so this concludes the 2011 Literary Awards Program. It was a great year, and I know Alan Cheuse is looking forward to getting his hands on the entries… From what I’ve seen, we have some stellar work in the mix this year. Of course – we always do. Ten years later, and the work that comes through the SFWP Awards Program continues to amaze me. Thank you all for that.

We always ask that our judge takes their time. Unlike other contests, SFWP’s goal is to give each applicant a fair shake. This means it may be a few weeks before we see a winner, or even a list of finalists.

For right now, we’ll wait a week for any wayward postal entries to make their way to our offices. That, of course, gets us right up against Christmas. We probably won’t see too much activity over the holidays, but I expect to have a long list of finalists in hand shortly after the New Year. We’ll then narrow that list down through January, and let’s say early February is the deadline for announcing the winners.

Our offices will be closed between the 23rd and the 1st, so any correspondence sent during that time may not get an answer.

I’m about 30 emails behind. Most of them are folks who are experiencing technical problems with our submission form. Until I can get everyone sorted, the entry form is going to stay up. So get your entries in. I plan to take the form down sometime on the 16th but, right now, it looks like it might be later in the evening.

As long as the form is up, we’ll be accepting entries. Here’s the link.

Good luck to everyone! And, if you sent an email that I haven’t replied to, don’t worry. You’ll be hearing from me soon.

Here we go… December 15th. Today is the last day for the Literary Awards Program. All postal entries must be postmarked with today’s date. For online entries, I’ll be taking down the forms tomorrow… So you’ve got all day, no matter where you are. No worries there.

Any problems or last minute questions – shoot me an email.

Good luck to everyone!

There’s just one month to go for the Literary Awards Program! Get your work in by midnight, December 15th.

If you have any questions or problems with the online application, then give us a shout.

Been doing quite a bit of work with Richard Currey these last few weeks. There’s some exciting news coming up not only about new work from Currey in 2012, but SFWP’s return to publishing. Our last release was the 20th Anniversary edition of Currey’s Fatal Light in 2009, a book recently described by Anthony Swofford as being among the titles “on the top shelf of war fiction.”

Fatal Light’s origins can be found in Currey’s journals while serving in Vietnam. He published his stark, poetic memoir in 1979 under the title Crossing Over. It has been in print ever since.

It’s a slim volume, and, though it is a young man’s voice from the height of the Vietnam War, it, like Fatal Light, has a certain timelessness. I often find myself thinking Of the “prayer” offered up towards the end. A war prayer that has remained unchanged in the 40 years since Currey marched through the jungles.

Take every man, woman, and child this war has killed and bless them as our offerings to ourselves, the never-ending body we spend to engage the terror of our emptiness. Take these dead men, women, children, and bless them, remember them without names, without histories, without songs. This is our entreaty and it is offered in the spirit of Xerox, Coca-Cola, General Electric, General Motors, Weyerhauser, Allied Chemical, in the spirit of Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and My Lai, in the spirit of every drowning ghost and airborne soul. Amen.

A few years ago, Andrew Sneed attempted to put on a stage play based on Crossing Over. It didn’t happen, but this Youtube clip from the reading survives. Richard hates it when I dig it up but, even through the roughness of the video, Crossing Over’s voice shines bright.

As the year comes to a close, a new chapter in the strange and, often, terrifying life of Gifford’s Ice Cream begins. This time, though, it feels more positive than previous changes. It’s been bought by Gifford’s Ice Cream of Maine.

In one of those great moments of synchronicity, two brothers in Maine who are also named Gifford (though not related to me) independently started up their own ice cream company in 1983, after years of selling it on the side.

I first became aware of them in the early 80’s. As my father was systematically embezzling the Gifford’s accounts, and carefully planning his disappearance, life from 1979-1984 was pretty strange. Dad was…not there. Not really. He’d had a complete break from reality. In the final years, my maternal grandfather was at the helm of the company, bravely trying to keep the ship from sinking. An ultimately futile effort that probably increased the scale of the coming family tragedy.

Gifford’s of Maine, however, briefly brought my dad back to Earth. If there’s one thing dad loved, it was cloak and dagger stuff. He was one of those guys who bought all those Loompanics books. Remember those? Counterfeit ID Made Easy, Beating the Check: How to Eat Out Without Paying, Directory of US Mail Drops, How to Do Business Off the Books… There were tons of them, all strange survivalist guides about drugs, sex, weapons, and espionage. The framework, we would later learn, for dad’s successful disappearance between 1984 and 1997. He had a shelf of these in the basement of our spooky old mansion in Kensington, MD. (My favorite, by the way, was Close Shaves: The Complete Book of Razor Fighting. What’s up with that, dad?)

When the Maine Gifford’s started up with much fanfare, my dad snapped into focus and went on the warpath. His first step was to send spies to Maine. Get a feel for the situation. When it appeared that the Maine Gifford’s were producing the same sort of really-very-bad-for-you rich ice cream, dad went ballistic. I think the normal thing to do would have been to sue for national rights to the name or something. Our family had quite a bit of clout and the history to do so. Instead, dad went the Loompanics route. At one point, he attempted to (and who knows if he succeeded) to buy spies within the Maine company. To have people try to steal recipes, and ice cream samples, and report daily on the inner workings of the company.

His mind wandered and his plans moved from simple espionage to sabotage. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened next if dad wasn’t already deep into his own exit plan. If greed hadn’t of won the day. In many ways, dad filling his trunk with a few million dollars and driving off into the unknown was the best thing that could have happened. For everybody.

The Gifford’s of Maine continued to grow in peace, eventually carving out their own very admirable ice cream empire. Then they started to come into conflict with the owners of Gifford’s Ice Cream DC – the weird remnant of my family’s empire that, somehow, continued to struggle on for a quarter of a century under the control of various despicable robber barons. Gifford’s DC had quietly devolved into a money grab – pushing out mass produced ice cream and trading largely on the local history of the name. Then, last summer, the company collapsed in a way that paralleled those horrible final days in 1984. Stores weren’t being supplied, bizarre games with investors were rocking the boat behind the scenes… The company crashed and burned – once again — and Gifford’s of Maine got the name.

After 26 years of watching Gifford’s Ice Cream behave like some sort of immortal monster cursed long ago by a gypsy, I was starting to feel a little bit ashamed. Wexler’s article in the Post sort of exposed me. While cathartic, it did mean (and still does) regular contact from past employees, investors, general lunatics, and co-workers and colleagues who enjoyed learning about the connection. My steadfast avoidance of all things Gifford’s was hard to do as stores opened up and I would have to be faced by my grandfather’s handwriting on a store front during every commute.

There was never a sense of pride, really. I’ve always been ashamed, from the moment I was able to rationally process the world around me. There were no good days. My parents were always at each other’s throats. Grandfather Gifford lost his mind and started running, naked, down Georgia Avenue outside the Silver Spring store demanding that people buy ice cream. He was tormented by small blue faeries to the point where he ignored his wife, who spent a weekend lying on our kitchen floor after electrocuting herself with a refrigerator. He died soon after. She survived, remarkably. A barely functioning vegetable, drooling and snarling from her deathbed for a year.

Looking back, it was pretty clear that my father had planned to destroy the company from the moment he took over in 1978. Sexually and physically abused by his parents, destroying Gifford’s Ice Cream was the obvious revenge. And why not do it for a bit of profit? Slow and steady wins the race, right? The sheriff estimated that dad got away with roughly two to ten million in cash. And he won. He lived till 2007. Off the grid, avoiding taxes, above the law.

It wasn’t just dad, though. Grandfather Gifford started the company in the 1930’s at the expense of his brother, a man he brutally cut out of the picture. Avarice was the motivation from day one. His brother’s family was left by the wayside as Grandfather Gifford plowed forward and built a fiefdom. By the time I was born, that whole branch of the family had been so thoroughly excised from the family record that I didn’t know of their existence until around 2005.

More than seventy years of this. The succession of crooked, greedy owners who bought the name after my dad left were small fries compared to my family, but still embarrassing to watch.

With all that history circling my name, I started to drift into my own escape plan. Get away from the DC area, and the Gifford’s story. No forwarding address, no phone number. Change all my emails. Get off the grid. No more calls from reporters, no more calls from the grandchildren of people who worked for my family for 45 years and lost their pension to my dad’s embezzling, no more calls from jilted investors who lost their shirts in the early 80’s.

That’s about when the Gifford’s of Maine entered the scene. And, you know what, they’re good folks. Their clean and clear victory over Gifford’s DC finally brings a touch of integrity to the name. These guys aren’t lunatics, thieves, liars, tyrants, or deviants. They’re making good ice cream, and running a good business. They scared my father. They scared my maternal grandfather. They were a serious threat in 1983, mainly just because they were doing things right. But also because they were making good ice cream. So, if you remember Gifford’s ice cream from the 70’s and early 80’s (or earlier), then you’re in for a treat when the Maine folks get moving in the area.

I look forward to the new Gifford’s. I look forward to the redemption of my name. Despite all that darkness, the DC-area Gifford’s Ice Cream held a magical sway on local history. For every crazy who contacts me, I hear a story about a childhood influenced by the candy counter, wedding vows taken in the parlor of the Silver Spring store, and a strange sort of innocent nostalgia for days gone by.

With the Maine family on the scene, we can go ahead and say that the scandal has come to a close. The last quarter century was a strange aberration. And all that nasty shit my dad and his father did? Well…they’re dead now. Good riddance. Let’s begin again.