Columns

Let's acknowledge that wrapping up a short story is difficult.

We hope you all had a wonderful summer.

I confess that I am a chronic eavesdropper, especially on SEPTA, where you can overhear great personal tragedies in the time it takes you to travel from South Philly to City Hall.

Thanks to member support and a dedicated all-volunteer staff of passionate board members, Philadelphia Stories is happy to announce some exciting new programs for writers:

Be sure to pepper your story with clichés. Don’t limit yourself to just textual clichés (sighing with relief, panting like a dog, running at lightning speed), be sure to have clichéd situations and stock characters (innocent young girl meets handsome football player…but evil drug-addled, Mustang-owning hoodlum thwarts the affair).

Spring is a welcome reprieve after this snowy winter, and Philadelphia Stories is looking forward to another busy season of fun events for writers and readers, including:

It was a voyeur’s dream; this chance to see how other people lived. I kept being shown a certain type of house, what I came to think of as the South Philly Catholic Italian Grandma House.

Philadelphia Stories honored Alison Alsup, winner of the second annual Marguerite McGlinn National Prize for Fiction, at an awards ceremony held on the campus of Rosemont College

Welcome to our second annual awards issue, featuring our 2010 Marguerite McGlinn National Prize for Fiction winning story from Allison Alsup of New Orleans.

In the fiction workshops I lead for Philadelphia Stories, I have one rule for the writer when we’re going over his/her story; you can’t speak during your critique