Scissortail Submission Guidelines

12th Annual Scissortail Festival, April 6-8, 2017

Approximately 60 authors will be selected for the program. Competition for a place on the program is keen. Obviously there is a limited amount of time and space available, and unfortunately, not all submissions can be accepted. Selections (and rejections) are determined by members of the ECU English faculty. Selections to the program are accepted on the basis of:

Quality, Published Work (peer-reviewed journals, for example)
Freshness of Material (reading some new stuff)
Appropriateness for Time Restraints and Subject Matter
Meeting the Submission Deadline

Unaccepted submissions often do not reflect quality of writing. All applicants (those accepted and those not accepted for the program) are cordially invited to attend the festival to enjoy the benefits of interacting with fellow authors (the festival hotel rate is available for all guests of the festival).

Even if you have been on the program in the past, please review the following guidelines before submitting. To fit the schedule, some authors will have 15 minutes and some will have 20 minutes to present their material. Fiction and creative nonfiction writers are encouraged to excerpt their submission to fit into the time restraints (The appeal of a narrative may in fact be heightened by presenting a carefully selected excerpt).

Guidelines: Please read closely and follow exactly. Please look at your calendar before submitting! Due to the increasing number of festival participants, it is very difficult to accommodate special scheduling requests. Please do not ask. Please understand that Ada, Oklahoma is a small town with very limited public transportation and has a limited number of hotel rooms. Ada is a two-hour drive from the Oklahoma City airport, three hours from DFW (in good traffic) and two and half hours from Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Scissortail Festival is unable to provide shuttle service to and from these airports, so please consider these factors before submitting.

Also:

Scissortail is a reading festival. No workshops, how-to, propaganda or pre-arranged panels are acceptable. Reading sessions feature a mixture of authors and genre.

Sessions usually consist of 3 or 4 readers per session. Authors should plan for either 15 or 20 minutes total time at the mic (including prose) depending on how the session is scheduled. In other words, some readers will get 15 minutes, and some will get 20 minutes. Please respect your audience and fellow readers by diligently adhering to time restraints.

Email submissions are preferred. Submit: 1) complete contact information 2) the title of your program and the work to be considered – please consider the time restraints per reader 3) a paragraph-length biographical narrative summarizing publications and significant accomplishments (please write bios in 3rd person).

Deadline for submission is December 30, 2016. The schedule will be announced (hopefully in January) and certainly by early February.

Send email submissions to: scissortailfestival@gmail.com. Identify “Scissortail Submission” in the subject line. (Please copy your submission to khada@ecok.edu.)

Please check your calendar before submitting. Participants are not charged registration fees, nor are authors compensated. Please subscribe by providing your email at http://www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com in order to receive notice of information regarding the festival and related events. Updates are posted at that site.

2017 Scissortail: Press Release

The 12th annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival will draw many creative writers and fans alike to East Central University in Ada, Okla., April 6-8, 2017.

Authors Patricia Hampl and Leif Enger will be featured in addition to more than 60 author presentations from Oklahoma and beyond. All sessions are free and open to the public.Patricia Hampl’s most recent books, The Florist’s Daughter and Blue Arabesque, were both among the New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year.” She is the author of four other prose works and two collections of poetry. Her essays, poems, short fiction, travel pieces and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays and others. Her new book, The Art of the Wasted Day, will be published by Viking Penguin in 2017.

Hampl is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (in poetry and in prose). She is a MacArthur Fellow, and is Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Writing Program. Hampl is also a Visiting Professor at Kingston University-London where she works on writing related to human rights.

Leif Enger has written two prizewinning novels, Peace Like a River and So Brave, Young and Handsome. He graduated from Moorhead State University and spent 16 years reporting and producing for Minnesota Public Radio. In the 1990s he co-authored a series of Pocket Books mysteries – the Gun Pedersen novels – with his brother Lin Enger. He reads widely, plays electric bass on Sunday mornings, flies kites and sails on Lake Superior. He and his wife Robin live on a small farm in northern Minnesota.

The Scissortail Creative Writing Festival runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, and from 8 a.m. to 2pm. on Saturday. Each day is broken into several sessions. For a complete schedule of readers, visit www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com

In addition to the program of authors, two creative writing contests are also recognized during the festival. Prize recipients for the 13th consecutive year of the Darryl Fisher High School Creative Writing Contest and the 2nd annual contest for undergraduate creative writers will also be awarded during the festival. The Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is sponsored in part by the Oklahoma Arts Council. For more information, contact Dr. Ken Hada at 580-559-5557 or visit www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com.

Collegiate Creative Writing Contest

Congrats to the winners of our Collegiate Creative Writing Contest (from left to right): Kayla Esther Ciardi, Lyndsey Key, and Ashley Loper.

It's On!

As of 9:30 this morning, the Eleventh Annual the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is under way. If you're not here yet, come soon! We'll be here through Saturday afternoon.

From the Director: 2016

On behalf of our sponsors and the many volunteers who help make the 11^th annual Scissortail Festival possible, I welcome you to East Central University and to Ada, Oklahoma. This year we welcome 18 new voices to the program. One of my great delights is to see writers from across the country meet each other and become friends, fellow voices continuing the call for common sense and courageous virtue through the media of fiction and poetry. We also will award 8 collegiate writers from Texas and Oklahoma at the after party on Friday night. Hope you can attend. As usual, on Saturday we will award 26 high school students from over 600 entries from across the state. We salute all the teachers who make this happen!

Some things are changing at ECU. Two of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Scissortail Festival are moving on to other places. Phyllis Danley, Executive Director of the ECU Foundation, and Dr. Mark Hollingsworth, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, are leaving ECU. All of us associated with the Department of English and the festival offer a great big thank you to both of you for your wonderful support of the festival! You both will be missed.

There is much trouble in our world today. You hear, as I do, about the bombing in Belgium. And we hear about the subtle, and not-so-subtle attacks on our public school systems across the nation, the aggressive assault on general education, budget cutbacks and other misgivings about our relationship with each other in our democracy. Now, more than ever, I think we need the voices of artists reminding us to be, first of all, human, first of all, humane. I look forward to meeting each of you, hearing your presentations. I hope the artists and all the visitors have a truly fulfilling experience these three days.

I leave you with the lovely, haunting words of Jonas Zdanys, part of his poem “The White Bend of the River” from his book The Thin Light of Winter:

Time drifts past.

Only stones desire nothing.

The air is filled

with the sound of birds

murmuring of love

And despair.

See you soon!

Ken Hada

Scissortail after Dark

Scissortail after Dark

Jazz Standards by

The Moonlighters Combo

&

Awarding Winners of the Undergraduate

Creative Writing Contest

8:30 pm, Friday, April 1, 2016

(following Naomi Shihab Nye’s Evening Session on campus)

Cosponsored by Sigma Tau Delta & Literati

Directions to Ada Arts & Heritage Center, located on the corner of 14^th St. and Rennie St.

            1) From ECU campus, get on Mississippi St., turn left heading south. (Mississippi St. is immediately west of the University).

            2) Get in the right lane proceeding south to 14^th St.

            3) Turn right (west) on 14^th St., Proceed west (about 4 blocks), arrive at Rennie St.

            4) Ada Arts & Heritage Center is on the left corner of 14^th & Rennie.

            5) Parking across the street, and in the church lot adjacent to the Center.

Scissortail 2016: The Poster

Winners of the 12th Annual R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest

Poetry Winners
First Place: Sydney Campbell, "The Siren," Norman North. Teacher: Lezlie Christian
Second Place: Hayden Burleigh, "Ever," Bixby. Teacher: Mrs. Fisher
Third Place: Augusta Emmerson, "Who," Norman. Teacher: Sara Doolittle

Honorable Mention
Caitlynn Land, "A House," Purcell. Teacher: Ms. Liz Leonard
Savanah McDaniel, "Burn," Bixby. Teacher: Betty Fisher
Fabianna Chaparro, "Where Are You From (I Don't Know)?" Edmond North. Teacher: Ms. Abigail Guinn
Cheyenne Fulks, "Life," Purcell. Teacher: Ms. Leonard
Jesee Riley, "Rose," Antlers. Teacher: Ronda McCarter
Emalee Hicks, "Melodious Beauty," Vinita. Teacher: Ms. Dianna Just
Camille Hemry, "Resistance to Running," Norman. Teacher: Sara Doolittle
Sarah Turner, "Memories of Dust," Lawton. Teacher: Doc Freeman
Alyssa McLinden, "Not My Last Chance," Lawton. Teacher: Doc Freeman
Stephanie Penate, "Midnight," Norman. Teacher: Sara Doolittle

Fiction Winners
1st Place: Sadie Sieck, “Swim Time,” Norman North. Teacher: Lezlie Christian
2nd Place: Peter Biles, “The Antarctic Dream,” Latta. Teacher: Melinda Isaacs
3rd Place: Taylor Austin, “Family Tree,” Deer Creek. Teacher: Jason Stephenson

Honorable Mention
Sydney Campbell, “Lucid,” Norman North. Teacher: Lezlie Christian
Hayley Jumper, “Empty, Carbonated Silence," Claremore. Teacher: Teresa Smith
Megan Vander Bloomer, “Ode to Viceroy,” Moore. Teacher: Eileen Worthington
Brigette Drabek, “One Last Time,” Moore. Teacher: Eileen Worthington
Mary Davis, “A Cloak of Ashes,” Norman North. Teacher: Lezlie Christian
Grasyn Fuller, “Dear Miss Ruston,” Norman North. Teacher: Lezlie Christian
Willow Kirkpatrick, “The Visit,” Norman. Teacher: Sara Doolittle
Christopher Butcher, “The Selfless Quisling,” Yukon. Teacher: Cheryl Corlee
Brooke Fellows, “Vluerona,” Glenpool. Teacher: Phillip Harriman
Doris Zhou, “A Perspective on Siblinghood,” Norman. Teacher: Sara Doolittle

2016 Scissortail: Schedule of Readings

11^th Annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival

Thursday, March 31

I. 9:30 – 10: 45 Estep Auditorium

Michael Howarth – Missouri Southern University

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

Dorothy Alexander- Santa Fe, Oklahoma

Coming & Going: Departures & Homecomings

Paul Austin – Norman, Oklahoma

Monk, and other poems

II. 11:00 – 12: 15 Estep Auditorium

Andrew Geyer – University of South Carolina - Aiken

Pink Elephants

Jenny Yang Cropp – Cameron University

String Theory

Shaun Perkins – Locust Grove, Oklahoma

Poem Life

III. 11:00 -12:15 North Lounge

Steven Schroeder – Chicago, Illinois

The Moon, not the Finger, Pointing

Kerri Vinson Snell – McPherson College

Topography of the Light-Filled

Nathan Brown – Wimberly, Texas

To Sing Hallucinated: First Thoughts on Last Word Words

*** Lunch ***

IV. 2:00 – 3: 15 North Lounge

Charlotte Renk – Athens, Texas

This Great Turtle Heart: The Tao of Turtlism

John Morris – Cameron University

One of the Things You Wouldn’t Think a Man Would Remember

William Peter Grasso – Tulsa, Oklahoma

Operation Fishwrapper

V. 2:00 – 3:15 Estep Auditorium

Sally Rhoades – Albany, New York

Where Light Falls

Clarence Wolfshohl – Fulton, Missouri

Three-Corner Catch

Yvonne Carpenter – Clinton, Oklahoma

From an Oklahoma Farm

VI. 3:30 – 4:45 Estep Auditorium

Brent Newsom – Oklahoma Baptist University

You a Good Man

Mary Anna Evans – University of Oklahoma

A Nice Atheist Boy

Tom Murphy – Texas A & M – Corpus Christi

American History

VII. 3:30 – 4:45 North Lounge

Joey Brown – Missouri Southern State University

Tyler

Rayshell Clapper – Seminole State College

Not a Bad Girl

Charles Etheridge – TX A &M – Corpus Christi

The Brenner Pass

VIII. 7:00 – Estep Auditorium

                       

(Musical Prelude: OPUS 1, begins at 6:30)

Larry D. Thomas – Alpine, Texas

As If Light Actually Matters

Rilla Askew – University of Oklahoma

Home Territory

Paul Bowers – Northern Oklahoma College

The Lone, Cautious, Animal Life

(Authors’ Reception follows at Vintage 22)

Friday, April 1

IX. 9:00 – 9:50 Estep Auditorium

Alan Gann – Dallas, Texas

Literary Springboards

Jason Poudrier – Cameron University

What about Fitch?

Jennifer Long – Eufaula, Oklahoma

I Swim Upstream

X. 9:00 – 9:50 North Lounge

Hank Jones –Tarleton State University

More Life to Lead, More Books to Read

Sarah Webb – Burnet, Texas

Rock and Friends

Robert Broyles – Oklahoma City, OK

Love Lost

XI. 10:00 – 10:50 Estep Auditorium

Bayard Godsave – Cameron University

The Clay Eaters

Jennifer Kidney – Norman, Oklahoma

Tempus Fugit

A.W. Marshall – Tulsa, Oklahoma

Simple Pleasures

XII. 10:00 -10:50 North Lounge

Ann Howells – Carrolton, Texas

Under a Lone Star

John Yozzo – Tulsa, Oklahoma

Broaching Wife & Epithalamia Over Time

Chera Hammons – Amarillo, Texas

The Poetry of Bomb City

XIII. 11:00 – 11:50 Estep Auditorium

Michael Dooley – Tarleton State University

The Cowboy and the Hippy Chick

Terri Cummings – Oklahoma City, OK

A New Season

Todd Fuller – University of Oklahoma

Binaries at the End of Nostalgia

XIV. 11:00 -11:50 North Lounge

George McCormick – Cameron University

Inland Empire

Michelle Hartman – Ft. Worth, Texas

My Inheritance & other poems

JC “Catfish” Mahan– Edmond, OK

Autumn on Costa Brava

*** Lunch ***

XV. 2:00 – 3:15 North Lounge

Rebecca Hatcher Travis – Sulphur, Oklahoma

Constant Fires

Haesong Kwon – Little Priest Tribal College

Independence Fighter

Gary Worth Moody – Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Burnings

XVI. 2:00 -3:15 Estep Auditorium

Walter Bargen – Ashland, Missouri

Did You Say That! – Persona Prose Poems

Brady Peterson – Belton, Texas

He Writes Poetry and Makes Soup

Maryann Hurtt – Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin

Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices

XVII. 3:30 – 4:45 Estep Auditorium

Chris Ellery – Angelo State University

Sunday of Divine Mercy

Chip Dameron – Brownsville, Texas

Drinking from the River

Robin Carstensen – TX A & M-Corpus Christi

Ode to Before We Were Dance and Form

XVIII. 3:30 – 4:45 North Lounge

Hardy Jones – Cameron University

Praying Hands

Lucie Smoker – Enid, Oklahoma

Make More With Your Short Sticks

Debbi Brody – Santa Fe, New Mexico

2nd Generation American: Ancestor Influences

XIX. 7:00 Estep Auditorium

                       

Featuring Naomi Shihab Nye

                       

(Music by Rowdy Folk begins at 6:30 pm)

followed by Moonlighter’s Combo

& Awarding Collegiate Writers’ Contest

at the Ada Arts & Heritage Center

(the corner of 14^th & Rennie Streets)

Saturday, April 2

XX. 9:15– 10:15 Estep Auditorium

karla k. morton – Fort Worth, Texas
For the Love of the Horse

Ron Wallace – Southeastern State University

A Song for Lesser Gods

Julie Chappell – Tarleton State University

Mad Habits of a Life

XXI. 10:30 -12:00 Estep Auditorium

Elizabeth Raby – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Dodging Ice

Terry Dalrymple – Angelo State University

Dead Dogs

Jessica Isaacs – Seminole State College

Dumplins & other poems

Alan Berecka – Del Mar College

Post Modern Nostalgia

XXII. 12:15– 1:15pm Estep Auditorium

Grand Finale: Featuring Ben Myers

                       

& Awarding the Dr. Darryl Fisher

State High School Contest Winners