Thanks to our Guest Judge:

Literary Agent Amy Elizabeth Bishop

WOW was honored to have guest judge literary agent Amy Elizabeth Bishop choose this season’s top winners. Thank you, Amy, for sharing your time and efforts to make these contestants’ dreams come true!

Amy’s bio:

Amy Elizabeth Bishop joined DG&B in 2015 after interning for them in 2014. At DG&B, she’s cultivating a wide-ranging list in literary and upmarket fiction, expert-driven narrative nonfiction, and select YA, with a special interest in BIPOC voices. Her list includes titles such as The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim (a Reese’s Book Club selection and NYT bestseller), The Red Palace by bestselling author June Hur. Before diving into the world of publishing, she graduated from SUNY Geneseo with a degree in Creative Writing. Though she grew up upstate, she currently resides in Woodside, Queens.

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We want to thank each and every one of you for sharing your wonderful stories with our guest judges this season. We know it takes a lot to hit the send button! While we’d love to give every contestant a prize, just for your writing efforts, that wouldn’t be much of a competition. One of the hardest things we do after a contest ends is to confirm that someone didn’t place in the winners’ circle. But, believe it when we say that every one of you is a true winner.

Every writer has been a gracious participant through the whole process, from the beginning of one season to the next. We’ve written emails to authors, agents, and publicists who have donated books to our contest, and we’ve shared our delight regarding the true sportsmanship among our contestants. It doesn’t matter if it’s one writer who placed or another who tried but didn’t; all writers are courteous, professional, and wonderful extensions of WOW! Women On Writing’s team. Writers’ stories and e-mails fill us with enthusiasm.

Kudos to all writers who entered, whether you won or not, you’re still a winner for participating.

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To recap our current process, we have a roundtable of 12+ judges who blindly score equally formatted submissions based on: Subject, Content, Technical, and Overall Impression (Style). That’s the first step of the process. If a contestant scores well on the first round, they receive an e-mail notification that she passed the initial judging phase. The second round judging averages out scores and narrows down the top 20 entries. From this point, our guest judge helps to determine the First, Second, and Third Place Winners, followed by the Runners Up.

As with any contest, judging so many talented writers is not a simple process. With blind judging, all contestants start from the same point, no matter the skill level, experience, or writing credentials. It’s the writer’s story and voice that shines through, along with the originality, powerful and clear writing, and the writer’s heart.

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We’ve enjoyed reading your stories, each and every one of them. The WOW! Women On Writing judges take time to read them all. We recognize names of previous contestants, writers familiar with our style. We enjoy getting to know you through your writing and e-mailing. Remember that each one of you is a champion in our book. We hope that you continue to enter so we can watch you grow as writers and storytellers, because each season is a rebirth of opportunity.

Myna’s Bio:

 

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Special Recipe: Book Club Dip

By Myna Chang

 

Serves: Two

Ingredient List:

• 1 husband’s car (BMW)
• 1 thong panty, found wedged in the BMW’s seat cushion
• 1 cell phone containing texts from “Luv Bunnie”
• 1 tub of supermarket ranch dip, transferred to a fancy dish so it seems homemade (your mother-in-law’s judgmental wedding gift is a good choice for this recipe)
• 2 sheets of industrial-strength bubble wrap, secured tightly around the dish
• 1 crème brûlée torch
• 1 Cozener Inn coupon for “Free Night After a Week’s Stay!”

Instructions:

1. Drive the BMW to your best friend Diane’s house for neighborhood book club. Arrive at least 15 minutes late, so all your friends (gossips) will be there.
2. Take careful aim at Diane’s candy-apple red convertible. (It will be easy to hit since she always parks the tarty thing right up front, forcing you to tiptoe around it, through her just-watered lawn, getting your shoes all spongy.)
3. Rev the engine and drop it into gear—don’t worry about trashing the transmission. Gather your ache and grief and fury and press it hard into the gas pedal.
4. If the tart-mobile isn’t sufficiently censured, back up and ram it again.
5. Wave the airbag dust out of your face, take remaining recipe items, and charge into Diane’s living room because you have every right to track your betrayal-damp sneakers across the traitress’s carpet.
6. Place the cell phone, with its sophomoric sexts, into the fabric of the thong and twirl it like a scarlet-lettered slingshot. Aim for her perky face, but any superficial surface will do.
   
   NOTE: Do not make snide comments about the size of the garment—it is important to maintain your grace at this time.
7. Make one dramatic declaration. Diane probably won’t hear you, especially if you nail her with the phone—but the other ladies will eat it up, so make it good. After all, they’ll be repeating your statement around the neighborhood for weeks to come.
8. Take the dip out of the bubble wrap and dump it on Diane. Don’t fret if the bowl breaks; in fact, this will provide the most satisfaction you’ve ever received from your mother-in-law’s “bowl of judgment.”
   
   OPTIONAL: Pause to savor this recipe’s complex terroir.
9. Go home. Collect all your cheating husband’s deceiving pants and throw them in the street. Use the crème brûlée torch to caramelize the lying fabric.
10. Once the trouser smoke clears, un-hogtie him and give him the hotel coupon. If he begs convincingly, call him a cab. You can afford to be generous at this point.

Pairs well with: self-respect and an acidic divorce attorney.

 

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What Myna Won:

• $400.00 Cash Prize
• $25 Amazon Gift Card
• Publication of winning story on WOW-WomenOnWriting.com website
• Interview on WOW!’s blog The Muffin

Heather’s Bio:

Heather Bourbeau’s work has appeared in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. She floats between fiction and poetry, and lives among the sage and fog. Her most recent collection is a poetry conversation with Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey, Some Days The Bird (Beltway Editions, 2022).

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Among the Sharks

By Heather Bourbeau

 

When I awoke that morning, I did not know my childhood would end. I only knew I was cold, the fog was thick, and the rain would bring the sharks closer to shore. “The requins will fish with us today,” I remember my mother whispering in her thick accent that refused as much as she did to assimilate. We stepped outside our camper quietly, holding our breaths as we closed the door behind us, hoping my father would be able to sleep a bit more.

It was dark and my hair, the reliable barometer, kinked and curled in the mist. I carried the poles, both taller than I was, but I was stubborn, wanted to prove my strength, my usefulness. Useful. That was what we prized back then. Before.

Guided by habit, we walked onto the obscured pier, found a spot between the rocks and the eelgrass, and dropped our lines. We stayed mostly silent, waiting, reeling in, tossing into the bucket, retying, repeating. After about an hour, my mind began to wander. I knew I should have been paying more attention to my line, but I was dreaming of the cafés au lait we would return to and the embrace of my freshly woken father whose skin would still have the smell of sleeping bag and body heat. This was the division of labor—in the mornings we fished and he cooked breakfast. During the day, he went to work, I went to school, and Maman was Maman. I did not think about what she did with her days when I was not there. Such is the narcissism of children.

When a big pull came, I was slow to respond, letting whatever was on my line get a head start, the momentum of its escape dragging my barely 60 pounds with it. My mother could not see because of the fog, she only knew something was wrong when she heard my scream before I fell over the wooden railing. In the shock of the Bay’s cold, I swallowed water and gripped the pole tighter, as if it might float me or ground me. Neither instinct would make my mother proud, and somewhere inside my sinking self, I still managed to feel shame. I do not know how long it was before I came out of the shock enough to try to find the water’s surface. I do know that I was tangled in someone’s net, among the eelgrass, quickly descending into hypothermia. A sevengill shark circled nearby, lured by a gash on my leg.

I learned later that two men on a boat, the men who had dropped the net I was tangled in, rushed to help. One dove in, while the other stayed with Maman, whose anger or pain or fear made her incapable of looking either of them in the eye. It was only when I was safe in her arms, feeling the warmth of her chest and breath, that she lifted her head. She saw their faces, and I felt her body stiffen, her breath become shallow. “Stay calm, my love,” she said as her eyes darted between the men, their stacked green bricks, and me. “Reste calme.” I remember not being able to stand properly, my legs still shaking and numb, so she carry-dragged me, insisting to my rescuers that we were fine, that we needed to get home. The men were laughing at her—this I remember clearly, being confused about what was so funny. With me over her left shoulder, she grabbed her pole, leaving behind the bass, our breakfast.

By the time she could see our van, my mother began wailing, guttural and terrifying. She threw our gear down, held me with both arms so she could run faster, but it was no use. We were too late. Our camper was wrecked. My father was on the other side of the parking lot, his body broken and bloodied. Maman did her best to shield me from the horror. One of the men who had rescued me came up, leaned into us, and said, “We warned you, Bette. We run this pier.”

She collapsed, and I fell with her. I remember she refused to call the police, refused to answer my questions, but when I saw her gun, I began to understand—what she did all day, how her lies and greed nearly killed my father, and how quickly love could turn to hate.

 

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What Heather Won:

• $300.00 Cash Prize
• $25 Amazon Gift Card
• Publication of winning story on WOW-WomenOnWriting.com website
• Interview on WOW!’s blog The Muffin

Michelle’s Bio:

RUNNERS UP (In no particular order):