Dear Everyone

The annual holiday newsletter is a genre that’s too often overlooked in literature, as far as I’m concerned. Marriages, births, deaths, family vacations and wacky anectdotes about the time the ferret ruined the Tupperware party or the latest updates on Aunt Shirley’s corns … these are things that contemporary fiction is just not delivering. Sure, if you’re in the Sedaris family or on Dan Brown’s mailing list, it is probably something you look forward to every year, but imagine the family of Leo Tolstoy (or Joyce Carol Oates, for that matter) seeing the mailman arrive with that thick envelope straining with hundreds of pages outlining in excruciating detail every minute of the last year. But I digress…

Our fine friends at Minnesota Public Radio tipped us off to a fun contest that begins today — it might be just the thing to work around that writer’s block … and best of all, there’s a great prize for the winner. See below for the details and I hope to see a LitKicks face bring home the victory.

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It is the time of year when we send or receive those end-of-year newsletters filled with funny family news: details about successes, delicate references to life’s setbacks, and sometimes dramatically honest sentences that you have to re-read to believe.


This year Minnesota Public Radio invites you to test your wit and way with words by participating in Dear Everyone, A Holiday Newsletter Contest. No need to submit your own family letter, exercise your writing skills by picking someone else’s perspective!

Write on behalf of:

Mother Nature
The Statue of Liberty
Ole and Lena

Or identify another familiar person, place, or thing. Use your imagination and a healthy dose of humor, as selected submissions will be posted on the Web site and excerpts may be read on air. All eligible entries will be entered in a free drawing where you could win up to $100 worth of merchandise from Public Radio BookSource! See the Official Rules for more details.

One Response

  1. Looks InterestingThe contest
    Looks Interesting

    The contest on Minnesota Public Radio looks interesting. I wonder if the public radio down here in Tennessee has a contest, too. At this point, I don’t know if it does. I know that Chattanooga Writers Guild occasionally has contests.

    I checked it out and couldn’t find the contest you listed. However, “The Lofts Literary Center”, in Twin Cities, has a “Speakeasy Contest for Poetry and Prose” going on. The deadline for entering is April 28, 2006. See guidelines on site. It has an entry fee.

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Litkicks turned 30 years old in the summer of 2024! We can’t believe it ourselves. We don’t run as many blog posts about books and writers as we used to, but founder Marc Eliot Stein aka Levi Asher is busy running two podcasts. Please check out our latest work!