Longshot!

And the bounty goes to…

We are delighted to announce that the Longshot editors have selected Aholaah Arzah, author of Ring Cycle, to receive our $2000 feature fee. As Mat put it, when the three of us read this story together in a Gakwer conference room last weekend, we let out a collective gasp. We love the multi-layered interpretation of “debt” and admire the beautiful use of language. Congratulations, Aholaah!

Since you all may be curious to know a little bit more about Aholaah, here’s a short Q&A…[SPOILER ALERT! If you don’t want us to ruin the ending, go read the story first.]

LS: Tell us a little about yourself…where do you live? What do you do for a living? 

AA: I live as nearly surrounded by water as possible without actually being on an island…Port Townsend is located at the tip of the Quimper Peninsula in the Puget Sound; a beautiful small town with a vibrant arts community…I work with individuals with special needs as an independent living aid.

LS: How long have you been writing?

AA: I have written intermittently along with making visual art and raising children for many years.  I recently completed my MFA in Creative Writing and am focused on writing.

LS: Where have you been published before?

AA: Over the years, I have been published in a number of small literary magazines: Seattle Voice, Poets West, Brussels Sprout, Clay Drum, Chrysanthemum, among others…recently; the Pitkin Review, elimae and upcoming in Short, Fast and Deadly.    

LS: It appears your primary writing vein is poetry. What prompted you to write a piece like this one? 

AA: My “poetry” of the last two years has been “hybrid” or prose-like and most recently I been writing more intentionally in a prose form although I rarely feel a need to distinguish between these forms.

LS: How did you hear about Longshot? 

AA: A fellow Goddardite (graduate of Goddard College) posted a link on facebook.

LS: What was your process for writing the piece? Did the theme trigger the idea or did you already want to write about it and the theme fit? 

AA: The theme triggered a recognition…I had had the idea to write something about the irony of the ring and my relationship with my father and it personified a particular kind of “debt” that was the only debt I really wanted to write about at the moment…

LS: When did you begin writing the piece?

AA: Sometime during the morning before the deadline…

LS: Will you show this story to anyone else in your family?

AA: Yes.

LS: Other than your own, what’s your favorite story in the Debt issue of the magazine?

AA: I haven’t had the chance to read everything yet but “Appraisal” struck a chord…home “ownership” is an interesting delusion…

LS: Did you really pawn the ring? If so did you ever get it back?

AA: Yes, I really pawned the ring and no, I never wanted to see it again.

LS: And finally, are you going to use this money to pay off any debts? 

AA: Oh, yeah…

Longshot // Publish: All

The downside of getting so many great submissions is that it means we don’t get to publish a lot of great work. So before we went to press this time, we decided that we wanted to publish everything everyone submitted. That’s right, everything. 

Longshot is an exercise in creativity. It’s an experiment defined by two constraints: a limited time period, and a theme. We want to get people excited about being creative. We want to give you an excuse to write that story, take that photo, paint that portrait that you’ve been meaning to do for so long. Get it out. Jam. 

And we don’t just want to encourage that spirit on the weekend. And we very much want to encourage you to do something with your work. We want people to see it. 

Last time, we promised that if you posted your work online, we’d link to it from our blog. That seemed to work out well, but not everybody was able to post their stuff online, and it still left quite a bit of awesome work hiding in the darkness of our submission engine, Submishmash, never to be seen again. 

So we came up with a new plan. We’re going to put all of the 672 submissions we received online. Every. Single. One. 

Internally, we’ve been calling this Longshot Raw. And we’re super-excited to have a way to let everyone’s work hit daylight. Well. That is, unless you don’t want us to.

On our submission page for Longshot this time, we noted that “[w]e will make everything submitted available online after the 48 hour period is over.” But after we re-announced that on yesterday’s blog post, we’ve gotten a few emails from people who don’t want their stuff published, and essentially saying, “cut it out.”

Okay! No problem!

In all sincerity, we thought our intentions were clear from the get go. But we also know that it’s easy to skim over a form, or to not quite get what we meant. 

So, to be clear, here’s the plan. We’re going to bundle all the submissions together in an archive file, and release that via a torrent file. But because we know that some of you don’t want your submissions included, we’re going to give you a week to remove them before we do that.

If you don’t want us to include your work in the Longshot Raw file, it’s easy to remove your submission. Here’s how to do it.

1. Log into Submishmash again. (Submishmash remembers your password even if you don’t. They can email it to you if you’ve forgotten.)

2. Go to your My Submissions page.

3. Click on the “withdraw” link next to your work.

That’s it! Done!

If you pull your submissions, we won’t include them in the torrent. Otherwise, we look forward to seeing you next week in Longshot Raw. 

Your Longshot Contributors, Issue Two

Forty-eight hours ago we gave you guys an assignment, twenty-four hours ago you turned in your stories, and today we made a magazine. Despite the fact that we’ve only spent a collective 6 days streamlining this process, it seems to get easier every time. That’s thanks in large part to the amazing turnout of NYC’s media mavens — but even more thanks to all of you. Though it seemed nearly impossible to choose from all the excellent submissions, we’ve assembled a pretty kick-ass issue.

Whether or not your work made it into the edited magazine, we’ll be making every submission available online in torrent form.

But for now, congratulations and thank you to our wonderful contributors! Here’s our Issue Two Table of Contents:

A Parable    
by Chris Baker
 
Cash on Delivery    
by Tim Maly and Emily Horne
 
5 Questions    
by Tony Hightower
 
Name’s Sake    
by Haugen Mendeola
 
Asphalt Default    
by Karen Unland
 
El Cobrador del Frac    
by Kati Krause
 
Items in My Mother’s Basement That She Believes She Is Saving For Family Members   
by Dan Kois
 
Exit Sandman    
by Harper Honan

Vulturing    
by Erin Griffith

One Thing Leads to Another    
by Mary Wiltenburg

There’s a Lot of Waiting, at the End    
by S.E. Smith

Facebank    
by Philip Bump

Changing Faces    
by Adam Rothstein

Circles of Influence    
by Michelle Legro & Maria Popova
Illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton

Zero Sum    
by Martin Connelly

Mousetrapped    
by Anonymous

Coming Clean on Dirty Laundry    
by Rachel Swaby & Tim Leong

Grade AA    
by Kristen Taylor

The Price of Life    
by Timothy Lesle

A Letter to My Student Loan   
by Buck Weiss

I Owe ___ for ____

by Craig Damrauer   

Sex and Balances    
by Anonymous

Re-Wilding    
by Lucas Foglia

Appraisal    
by Paul Ford

Water to Dust    
by Heather Hansman

Sideswiped    
by David Wolman

Financial Theater
by  Pat Walters

What Was Left Behind
by McNair Evans

Ginsberg’s Failure    
by Steve Silberman

Diamonds Aren’t Forever    
by Jonathan Snyder & Angela Watercutter

For Richer or Poorer    
by Jonathan Snyder & Angela Watercutter

Money in the Tank    
by Patrick Di Justo

Home Away from Home    
by Lex Kumar

Ring Cycle    
by Aholaah Arzah

Alternative Currency    
by Anonymous

Record Collectors    
by Michael Barthel

Gifted Children    
by Joanna Pearlstein

Once Found, Now Lost    
by Chris Smith

Smoke on Vine    
by David Harris

Alan Greenspan Fanfic    
by Rob Dubbin

Special Report: Into the Debtpocalypse

by Aaron Britt, Drew Himmelstein, Michelle Legro, Anne-Louise Brittain

Art and Photos by:

McNair Evans, M. Scott Brauer, Jon Snyder, Mark Giglio, Susie Cagle, Wendy MacNaughton, Simon Lutrin, and Patrick Hruby

   
Letters to the Editor