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.

In second place comes Zachary Atticus — new to Vocal, so welcome! — with Old Habits Die Young, a conjuring of urban Chicago in which the narrator is “cursed to be trapped in a maze of familiarity” and the boundary between what is real and what is imagined is horrifyingly slippery. If the thought of gentrification alarms you, this is the story for you.

And we’ve got some great runners-up as ever. Rachel Robbins in This Is Not My Room tells a story that spools backwards, allowing us to enter a mind that at first seems frightening but later moves us… and reminds us of the allure of Gregory Peck, no less. Caroline Jane in The Loudening tells a tale of art and identity, conjuring haunting works with striking language: “I can feel the essence of the painting loudening and boldening, then tingling and quieting in broad-breaking tides.” And Bethany Larson’s To Catastrophize uses the beauty and terror of the cicadas’ life-cycle to tell a very human tale.

From Lolita to Gone Girl, from the work of Sarah Waters or Haruki Murakami, the voice of an unreliable narrator pulls us in, puzzling, tormenting, entrancing. Thanks to our Vocal creators for adding to the chorus of these fine voices.

You can check out the full list of winners HERE and learn about our current challenges below: