Vocal Curation Team
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Collaborative, conscious, and committed to content. We're rounding up the best that the Vocal network has to offer.
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Represented Challenge Winners
Representation matters. Whether it’s in a movie, a song, or a book, seeing yourself reflected in the media can be life-changing. When someone finally sees their identity reflected on screen or in print, it can feel like coming home. For LGBTQ+ folks especially, these glimpses of representation can validate years of questioning and struggle. And for allies, these stories open windows into experiences different from their own, starting to build bridges of understanding.
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
Sensational II Challenge Winners
‘We wore that summer as perfume’ runs the final line of Ava Mack’s winning poem for our Sensational II Challenge, ‘Fifteen’. One of the toughest aspects of any kind of writing is ‘sticking the landing’, to borrow a term from gymnastics, and Mack’s lovely little poem does just that, keeping to our rubric but adding the flourish of a perfect closing image.
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
Unreliable Challenge Winners
A little while ago, we gave you an update on our thoughts regarding the use of AI content when it came to entering challenges. Spoiler alert, we don’t approve. But when it comes to using the idea of AI to create a really original and thoughtful story for one of our challenges? Bingo, we’ve got a winner. Congratulations to Matthew Fromm for How May I Assist You Today? — a story which channels the essential unreliability of a chatbot and in doing so gets to a father’s lonely heart. And — as it happens, Matthew’s work as a Vocal creator has just been noted by Vocal Social Society! We’re delighted to note this conjunction, and you can read Heather Hubler’s excellent interview with him on Vocal.
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
Unfiltered Challenge Winners
Mesh Toraskar from London takes first place in our Unfiltered challenge, with their poem city of fog. This was a fascinating challenge to judge, because our prompt allowed… well, almost anything, so we trusted our instincts as you trusted yours. We loved the images here, ‘everything that fell through/ and how gorgeous/ that nothing here belongs to no one else.’ It had the sense of pouring, relentless forward motion of thought that spoke to the challenge and offered a mournful beauty.
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
Small Kindness Challenge Winners
J. Otis Haas, a Vocal stalwart, has his first Grand Prize challenge win with Portrait of a Finder of Lost Things, which takes our prompt and runs with it. Here is not one specific action, but an imagined sequence of actions that create a character, and therefore an idea of what the world might be like with such a person in it. From the detail of the Rolex to the twenty dollar bill dropped at an ATM, there’s something haunting in the narrator’s voice here. Well done.
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
Moment of Silence Challenge Winners
Shhh! Just a pause when the world stops and we can listen. Silence, just seven letters, so not too much to play with for an acrostic poem but we had some lovely entries. Congratulations to our winner, Zivah Avraham, for Folly — a swift but searing perspective on those ‘cast out’. And, while it never influences our choice, unless it’s in the rubric — a terrific choice of illustration too.
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
Epic Beginnings Challenge Winners
Congratulations to first-time winner Gerard DiLeo for Capitano Neutrino — we do like it when a challenge entry makes us laugh. Here the laws of physics, combined with a passion for durum flour, produce Italy’s first superhero, “Capitano Neutrino (née Colino Semicolini), who can seize criminals on a whim, subdue them, and render them inert in wheat semolina bondage.” Spaghettifiction forever, we say!
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
Overboard Challenge Winners
Congratulations to a new Vocal creator, Tattoos & Tarot, for their evocative winning story Tiburón — which conjures the sea, familial love and conflict, in language plain and compelling. ‘My body yearns for the tight hug and crackle in my ears from the weight of water,’ the narrator says as he prepares to dive, recalling in words all he has lost. Bravo, and welcome to Vocal!
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
L*pogram Challenge Winners
Top marks to Joyce Sherry for How Helen Katasko Lost Her Job, our winner of the L*pogram Challenge which gives a nod to Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, at least that’s what it felt like to us. We enjoyed the cleverness of the language that turned constraint into virtue. “Up the creek sans paddle,” Helen says, the lack of the letter ‘i’ telling you something about her character. A nicely propulsive plot and a sense of the briny sea brought added enjoyment.
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
Summer Solstice Challenge Winners
‘Safety Net’, by Meredith Harmon, begins in a confiding tone. ‘What town?’ the tale asks. ‘We're an enclave. We're farmers. We till the soil like our forefathers, and our children's children's children will till it, till the end of time.’ There is a folkloric sensibility here, suited to the prompt, but also something contemporary and practical. This winning story of a community trying to protect and preserve itself has echoes of Shirley Jackson’s famous tale ‘The Lottery’, Meredith is a strong Vocal Creator with 225 stories to her name; and this is her second first place win of a challenge; huge congratulations.
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
Let's Talk About AI and Vocal Challenges
We might as well cut to the chase. Yes, we run every challenge entry through our AI detector; if we find an entry has been generated, it’s disqualified. As Justin Maury, Founder/CEO of Vocal has written, we use these detection systems because we know our readers enjoy authentic content; we also ask you to disclose when you’ve posted on the platform using AI assistance. But a different issue comes into play when we’re thinking about Challenges, and we believe it’s an important one.
By Vocal Curation Teamabout a year ago in Resources
