Announcing our Grant Winner: sparklepony!

The panelists have declared a winner! It was a fascinating and challenging process to make our way through the works of all of our grant applicants and pick one winner, but thanks to a fantastic panel of judges, a Typetrigger winner has been selected as the first recipient of our quarterly grant. 

Our congratulations to sparklepony, a Seattle writer who has been part of the Typetrigger community since our early days. Our panelists were moved by many other pieces of writing, but sparklepony's full development of character and story was outstanding, the variety of writing and feeling compelling. 

We have an incredible, talented, encouraging group of writers here, and we feared it would be hard to award the prize. It was a tough decision for us, especially since we feel like we "know" so many of you through your writing and participation in the community. We are grateful to our panelists for stepping in as outsiders to look at all of this writing with fresh eyes.

Here's a bit of insight on how the decision was made: we looked first all of the applicants and verified that they had met the requirements for consideration (24 pieces of writing before June 1). We then went through and made a short list of writers whose work was outstanding in a variety of ways. We included all genres in our selection, and we tried to select a variety of styles of writing. Several pieces of writing from each of the short-listed writers was then sent to the panelists. We removed the names and tags from the writing so that the pieces stood more or less on their own. From there, it was up to the panelists to decide who to grant the grant to. 

A huge thank you to our fantastic panel:

Zachary Watterson is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose writing appears in The Massachusetts Review, River Styx, USA Today online, and elsewhere.He is the recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a residency from The Jentel Arts Foundation, and a 2011 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. 

Frances McCue is an award winning poet, essayist, teacher, and arts instigator. Her writing has appeared in diverse publications. She published two books in the past year: The Bled, a book of poems, and The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs, a collection of essays on Richard Hugo. 

Greg Lundgren, founder of Vital 5 Productions, is an art maker and curator, whose past projects have included galleries, installations, publications and arts grants. He is also the founder of Seattle gallery/bar The Hideout and the revitalized historical Vito's. 

Urban Waite is the Seattle-based author of the acclaimed The Terror of Living, which was published earlier this year by Little, Brown. His short fiction can be found in The Best of the West Anthology, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, AGNI, West Branch and many other publications.

Typetrigger Grant Program Starting March 1

Good Morning! Or, afternoon. We can't tell because we are still tired from last night's amazing launch party at Sole Repair in Seattle. It was great to meet many of you and to feel the incredible excitement about what is going on with Typetrigger. It was fun to put faces to names and to see people talk who had previously only known one another by their writing.

For our live trigger writing contest, we had guest write trigger suggestions on overhead projectors. Once the winning trigger (world music pants guy) was selected, people wrote trigger responses in 30 words or less and taped them to the wall for a live action mini Typetrigger experience.

The biggest news of the night:

The Typetrigger Grant Program

This June, Typetrigger will award our first $500 grant to a member whose writing inspires and amazes us. This program will be open to all members, writing in all genres. We will begin accepting applications on March 1, 2011.

Here's how it will work:

In order to apply, you will need to throw your hat in the ring. A simple application (no fee) must be submitted by May 1st, 2011. Application details will be posted on March 1st.

To qualify, applicants must participate on Typetrigger for the quarter leading up to the award by writing 3 or more times a week (we might make some small exceptions). This is not a word count requirement, but a post requirement of about 32-40 submissions over a three month period. On June 1st, we will review all applicants and a panel of writers and artists will come together to make the final decision on the winner, which will be announced in mid-June.

The grant is open to writers in all genres. We love that we have fiction writers, memoirists and poets here on Typetrigger, and we love to see when writers experiment with form. There is no penalty in this program for genre jumping. The winner of the first grant will become a panel judge in the next go round, allowing writers to pay it forward. Grants will be awarded again in September and December of 2011, and it March, June, September and December of 2011.

At the end of the year, we plan to publish an anthology of the year's four grant winners, and their work will be featured prominently on Typetrigger throughout the year.

Stay tuned for more details!