PEN Shorts Every few weeks we’ll post a quote, a bit of dialogue, a postcard, an image, or some other random object or text. Your job is to take it and create a short narrative no longer than 300 words. Send us your responses in the form of a short story, a poem, a haiku, a set piece, a vignette, or any other form you can think of. We’ll post our favorite submission and reveal the story behind the prompt. Winners will be published on PEN.org and receive a sweet prize in the form of one of the following: a free one-year PEN Associate Membership; free access to Grants & Awards; a subscription to our award-winning literary journal, PEN America; free books; tickets to events; invitations to literary receptions; or some as-yet-to-be-determined item or privilege that will make you swoon.

The prompt: Take the title, plot, structure, or any memorable line from a work of literature and turn it into a graph. Will it be a Venn Diagram, bar graph, or pie chart? You decide.

The winner: Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

The source: Desmond writes:

This Venn Diagram is a response to a quote by Steinbeck, from his book Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (a quick, easy read over summer): “Boileau said that kings, gods, and heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren’t very inspiring, the gods are on vacation.… But the poor are still in the open. When they make a struggle, it is a heroic struggle with starvation, death or imprisonment, the penalty if they lose. And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now.”

The prompt: Take this this tabloid story and retell it in the style of Ernest Hemingway.

The winner: Otis Haschemeyer

People passing looked at them. Children argued. A mouse waved. He held her closer as they cut in line to the Golden Zypher.

Sometimes being someplace with someone was the best feeling in the world, though sometimes it was not. [More]

The source: Exclusive: Renee Zellweger, John Stamos Visit Disneyland Together from Us Weekly

The prompt:

The winner: Patrick Gaughan

My kin drew in disappearing ink. Now anthropologists pore over clues. The distant past, its bramble of red herrings, litany of suspects, keeps them awake under bed lamps pawing Agatha Christies. [More]

The source: The tablet shown above is an ancient land sale document from the early Dynastic III period (circa 2600 B.C.) in Iraq, possibly Isin. The photo is from the University of Chicago Oriental Institute exhibition.

The prompt: “Suddenly grocery sellers become poets, suddenly a taxi driver becomes a political commentator, suddenly somebody cleaning the streets becomes a chronicler of what is happening in the streets.”

The winner: Sue Cronmiller

we ran long distances
volunteered with dogs
found our cars in towing yards
across town from our apartments
waited in vestibules
of county jails for daughters [More]

The source: The quote comes from Abdelkader Benali, a panelist at the Revolutionaries in the Arab World event which took place at the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival.

The prompt: 

The winner: C Wallace Walker

She looks like that girl I used to know
My sister Sylvie
Who could fold found news
Into boats that floated [More]

The source: The image comes from the photographic collection “The Disappearing Sicily” (photo by Giacomo Pirozzi, 1989)
 

The prompt:

The winner: Evan Perriello

You would not 
believe the ache of my lungs
the way my head swims in cotton candy twirls. [More]

The runner-up: Rodger Jacobs

“It’s the damndest case of Bluebeard Syndrome I’ve ever seen.” [More]

The source: The image comes from our Public Lives/Private Lives: Photo Voyeurism project, part of the 2008 PEN World Voices Festival. The photo was submitted by author Chuck Palahniuk, who filled his basement with sex dolls during a book tour for his novel Snuff. The dog’s name is Chick.

The prompt: “I suffer from heightism. I’m sure you’re familiar with that.”

The winner: Maria Benson

Make this one choice, side with freedom. Use this one time to see the world through the eyes on the ground. [More]

The source: The line “I suffer from heightism. I’m sure you’re familiar with that” was uttered by Margaret Atwood as a rebuff to then–PEN President Norman Mailer at the 1986 PEN International Congress in New York City. A group of women at the Congress, led by poet Grace Paley, protested that women were underrepresented on the panels and in the slate of readings. Atwood, wasting no time, minted the term “heightism” in response to the vertically-challenged Mailer’s sexism.