Mini Flash Essay Contest: Tell Us About an Act of Love
We'd like to hear your story, whether someone hired a blimp to tell the whole world they loved you, or surprised you with your a lizard (your dream pet) despite their fear of reptiles.
Lately, I have been devouring pieces on craft — I just can’t get enough. Currently on my bedside table, threatening to tip over the already stacked-too-high pile of memoirs and such, are To Show and to Tell by Phillip Lopate, Crafting the Personal Essay by Dinty W. Moore, and Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola. My computer, too, boasts way too many open tabs full of writing advice to share with my students in which an author perfectly articulates something that can be hard to explain.
One such post that I recently shared with my Personal Essay Incubator class comes from Marion Roach Smith: “Have I Got a Definition of Show, Don’t Tell? You Bet I Do.” In it, she shows us — by sharing a very detailed act of love she was the proud recipient of — the difference between the two. Her post got me thinking about acts of love in my own life — the everyday ones, like all the times my partner takes my car to the store so he can fill it up with gas on the way home, to the bigger ones, like when my mom took a second job as a teaching mentor my senior year of high school to help with my college tuition. What about you? What was an act of love someone did for you, big or small, that has stayed with you?
Submit a piece on this topic of up to 300 words for the chance to have it published on our sister site, Narratively, and to receive a free year-long subscription to both Narratively and Narratively Academy. Submissions are due Tuesday, June 16, and you can expect to hear back from us soon after with the results. We can’t wait to read what you’ve got!
Need essay inspiration?
Check out the winners of our past flash essay contests here.
PLUS: Don’t miss our brand-new short essay series, Stories from the Ground Up, which just went live on Narratively.com!
