Kate McCahill judges 2022 SANTA FE REPORTER Fiction Contest

Read the winning entries, here.

November 23, 2022 at 12:00 am MST

As editor-in-chief and faculty adviser of the Santa Fe Literary Review, Kate McCahill is accustomed to sorting through thousands of pieces of writing to choose a collection for readers. While she usually has a team of five interns and a board of genre editors to help call the shots for the annual publication at Santa Fe Community College, she took on the challenge of judging the fiction entries in the SFR Writing Contest on her own.

McCahill is a tough critic, yet she viewed the entrants with tenderness and intrigue in their responses to the 2022 theme, “Secrets and Lies” and the three required words: yogini, affidavit and corn.

“It really brought a bunch of diverse submissions. It’s not like I was seeing one topic or one specific focus,” she says. “You could tell who wrote a piece with those words in mind and generated something new, which I think is so cool and bold and brave to do, and then you could tell there were other folks who could incorporate those words into what they already had, and people did it in such clever ways…I think [the three words] did steer people’s work in interesting ways. That was one of the things I was considering as I was evaluating each piece: How seamlessly did they embed those terms and incorporate the theme and, did it feel forced, or did it feel so natural that I barely even noticed?”

Watch for the nonfiction winners next week! The SFR Spring Poetry Search entry period opens in February. (Julie Ann Grimm)