Resources
From tips and tricks to product updates and inspiration, explore our resources to learn how to grow as a Vocal creator.
Challenges
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
Dialogue Poetry Challenge Winners
Hannah Moore is a first-time grand prize winner with her dialogue poem, On Receipt of Bad News. This was a poem that genuinely engaged both with the exchange of our prompt, but also focussed on the way poetic rhythms of language could support the writer's conceit. It felt very truthful, too, the way one speaker wishes to ignore the news and focus on practicalities; there was a quiet heartbreak, here. Well done.
By Vocal Curation Team2 years ago in Resources
3:00 AM Challenge Winners
B. A. Durham’s False Memories blends dream and reality in a seamless mix. As his father, afflicted by Alzheimer’s, fades away, the narrator is haunted by a dream that may be a memory, returning to him insistently. The piece is full of wonderful detail (the father touching his lip where once there was a mustache, “but now he is clean-shaven—he has been for years” — and moving in revealing the complexities of a family’s life. A worthy winner which shows the power of dreams to influence us.
By Vocal Curation Team2 years ago in Resources
Travel Snaps Challenge Winners
Travel changes us — if we let its lessons in. It’s possible to wander the world, even to take pictures, with our eyes as good as closed, never opening to the new self that a new place might make of us. So many of the entries to our Travel Snaps challenge were by creators who really wanted to look at the world, and themselves, anew. They were all inspiring to read — and to see, because photography was an important part of this competition. To us, the ‘quality’ of the photographs wasn’t the point; it was that these images were yours. It was a reminder of how much more that can mean — certainly when it comes to personal essays — than widely available or AI images. We really loved seeing these snaps.
By Vocal Curation Team2 years ago in Resources
