Congratulations to our winners!

It was an exceptionally difficult choice but we’ve finally picked our winners from The Avenues Writing Center micro fiction contest.

After many hours of reading, re-reading, re-re-reading, deliberation, and re-deliberation our panel of experts (hmmm…sort of experts) has chosen winners. We had so much fun reading the creative gems sent into us by these writers and wunderkinds. Believe me when I say that this choice was not easy; we loved all of them.

And now it’s my great pleasure to present our winners and their pieces (from 3 to 1), illustrations by the brilliantly talented students themselves:

3.
Eleanor Davol

Humpty Dumpty was sitting on a wall on Wall Street when suddenly he looked up and saw the World Trade Center. He was so mesmerized by it that he lost his balance and suddenly felt the air rushing up from below him as he fell down.

He fell onto the pavement beneath him and broke into a million pieces. As he was on the ground he heard the sound of hoofbeats on the road coming closer and closer toward him. Five policemen on horses suddenly were towering above him. They tried to put the pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together again but they couldn’t because he fell apart again after each try.

As the police men carried him away he saw the World Trade Center above him. That was the last thing he saw before he got dumped into the Hudson River.

2.
Robert Burns

A soft hissing sound came from the sewer, “Tssst tsssssssst”.

“Whuwhuwhutt??” The homeless girl said in shock, “Whwhwhos there?” she sat up on the dirty curb, sticky with rotten gum. She stood up and peeked into the barred sewer, her parched, blonde dreadlocks covering her face. There was something there, but it was probably something she had never seen nor heard before.

“Hello, friend?… You do not deserve to be in that yucky cage, I will get you out.”

And so the woman dipped one of her extremely long dreads into the mucky, mucky sewer. She felt something, weight on her dry hair. Something was slithering up it, twirling it. It started coming out of the sewer on her single thick dreadlock. It was a creature she’d never seen before, something of a different origin than New York City. A snake. “What are you?” The strange creature swiveled onto the sidewalk, “Your not from here are you? Are you from outer space?…” her forehead wrinkled in amazement. She looked around for a while, she could not believe there was something outside New York City.

1.
Pilar  Galvin

The sirens echoed down the vacant alleys

Pools of sewage glimmered from the lights of the moving shadow box

Drunk dilly dalliers giggle under the lamp posts

A gargantuan structure ascending with silhouettes of the late night shifts

A man on a pile of newspapers, on a worn bench, scratching his eye and holding a clinking cup of coffee

A women clammers around in towering red heels and a tight red dress

The sirens echoed down the vacant alleys

HOOT hosts a Micro Fiction contest for Young Writers at the Avenues Writing Center

To drum up interest in flash fiction among Avenues’ middle school student body, The Avenues Writing Center (in New York) has recently launched a series of flash fiction writing contests for their students. One of these contests will be writing micro-fiction to accompany postcard-sized artwork that the students have created recently.

…Postcard-sized? Microfiction? Sound familiar?

Well, HOOT will be judging this micro-fiction contest! And the winner will be posted right here on our blog, as well as on all of our social media.

Says a teacher at the school of the Avenues’ mission:

Above all, we want Avenues students to celebrate storytelling, as readers and writers, and to cultivate a community in which storytelling is prized.  We want Avenues students to recognize that many of the components that make for a successful story, whether it’s Homer’s The Iliad, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, or Alice Munro’s “The Bear Comes Over the Mountain,” can also be harnessed in shorter form: rendering a pressing conflict, attending to significant and sensory details, deftly selecting the story’s point of view, carefully crafting dialogue, showing and telling, and determining what to omit–when to let silence speak–to name but a few.

We at HOOT are glad and honored to be a part of helping these students towards that mission.

Give the gift of HOOT

The season of giving is upon us! And though we might be biased, everyone at HOOT thinks that our postcard magazine is probably among the best sort of gift to give. Here’s why:

1. It keeps giving! You get a postcard once a month filled with literary dreaminess and a handwritten note from one of our hardworking staff
2. Makes you smarter. Brag to your friends about how you read some quality literature while on the way to work or school. Or help a bookish friend by letting them claim the same when you give it as a gift.
3. You’re helping keep alive the great tradition of mailed post. Getting something other than bills in the mail is good for the soul.
4. You’ll keep HOOT alive.

Giving the gift of HOOT will bring joy to your friends and family, and it will also keep us going for another year of awesomeness.

And if you are shopping…have you checked out our groovy additional HOOT merchandise? Know any owl fans? Think about getting them one of our t-shirts

Let HOOT be a mail version of Santa – give us as a gift and we’ll show up once a month with the gift of words…and we won’t even eat your cookies.

Happy Holiday from HOOT

From all of us birds to you: Happy Thanksgiving. We’re thankful for all of our awesome readers, writers, artists, and fans.

Happy Birthday to us!

And happy anniversary with you, our dear readers!

It seems unbelievable that only two years ago we were a twinkle in the eye of our beloved head editors, Amanda and Dorian, and now we are a fully fledged (bird puns) magazine. And we owe it to all of the people who have been supporting us, reading us, and generally encouraging this wonderful project. Because we like our readers so much we are having a very special deal as a thanks. If you email us (info@hootreview.com) on October 28th (got the date?), we’ll mail a back issue of HOOT to anyone. Just let us know what you want the postcard to say on the back, and we’ll mail it with the message hand written …in real pen! *

Here is to one hundred more years of HOOT!

*Limit 5 addresses per person, back issues chosen at random (you’ll love it regardless!).