Lately, I’ve seen a fair number of interviews with decommissioned bond traders and architects who say they are going to take this time off to work on a novel. Hope it’s for love and not money, since the opportunities for writers to make a living get slimmer by the day. Just in: The Parthenon Prize, which was awarded to local novelist Scott Muskin in 2007, will go unawarded this year, due to the economy.

But here’s a new chance to find an audience: mnartists.org’s two fine literary series, the What Light poetry contest and miniStories, are calling writers of poetry and fiction to enter a new contest. The winners will provide original content for mnLIT, a year-long showcase of local literary talent. It’ll be great exposure. As for the money? Well...

"We’re not looking to give away money to writers exactly; we’re looking to give emerging writers a meaningful opportunity to publish their work professionally, to break into a difficult market, and most importantly, to have their work read by a wide audience of folks," says mnartists.org editor Susannah Schouweiler. (Disclosure: Schouweiler writes about visual arts for MinnPost.)

The grand-prize winners will receive modest $125-$200 fees for commissioned works; everyone else will get a bit of nice exposure.

The contest will be judged by established local poets, writers and booksellers, and will yield 46 pieces of work to be published online weekly over the next 10 months: 20 poems, 20 pieces of flash fiction, in addition to three new poems commissioned from the grand-prize-winning What Light winners and three commissioned stories by the miniStories grand prize authors.

"Mnartists.org’s literary series tend to get writing from a variety of artists, in addition to work from the usual literary folks — performers, playwrights, painters, improv comedians, sculptors, you name it," says Schouweiler. "Plenty of these folks are established writers, but many of the winners in each cycle have been complete unknowns. It’s like Christmas morning when the jurors make their picks; the caliber of writing in the winners’ stories has knocked my socks off every last time."

Here’s the link. The deadline is April 30, so write now.

RELATED CONTENT: What Light: the most populist poetry contest in town, by Amy Goetzman, Feb. 6, 2008