DaguerreoTyped #30: September Photo Prompt Writing Challenge

Monthly Historical Writing Contest

Listen to this photo prompt via text-to-speech for the visually impaired.

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Each month, The Coil presents an ekphrastic contest for writers and lovers of history. Here is this month’s historical photo prompt. Winner receives $25.

Every month, The Coil presents a historical ekphrastic challenge (photo prompt) that features a different public-domain historical photograph or illustration, and we ask writers to respond to it. There is no wrong answer, and no set style guidelines. Poetry, prose, hybrid, fiction, nonfiction, experimental  —  anything goes that has a history bent. The best response(s) will be published on The Coil after the challenge ends.

You can read all past challenges and responses here.

We present to you: DaguerreoTyped #30! Go write!

Submission Guidelines:

1. Write a piece about or evoked by the image above.
2. The piece can be any style or genre. Poetry, hybrid, and all sorts of prose are welcome, including flash, short stories, essays, or creative nonfiction. Soft word limit of 2,000 words.
3. The piece should have a history bent to it. Use the historical nature, setting, and atmosphere of the photo to evoke the sense of history in your piece. If we can’t find anything historical about it, we won’t accept it. But that doesn’t mean it has to be stodgy. Surprise us. Wow us. Make us laugh. Make us cry. Make an alternative history. Be bold. Be clever. Think outside the box. Make history vivid. Take risks.
4. There is a $3.50 fee that we have to charge to use the Submittable platform, but you may submit as many pieces as you’d like in one file under one submission. The fee helps us with needed administration and journal costs, and we pay our readers for their time and effort, but it’s not meant to be too inhibitive. If you are unable to pay, please email us for an alternative submission method.
5. If we like your piece, it will be printed on The Coil alongside the photo. The winning piece will receive $25, paid out via PayPal after publication.
6. We reserve the right not to pick any winner and not to print any pieces if there aren’t any that grab us; likewise, we may also choose more than one.
7. Being familiar with what we publish increases your chances of winning and being considered for print. You can read past DaguerreoTyped responses here, you can read finalists and winners of the Charter Oak Award for Best Historical here, or you can support our press by purchasing print or ebook copies of our current history journals, Footnote #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5. We promise you will not be disappointed.
8. If you love this monthly prompt and our journal, please share on social media! Word-of-mouth helps us tremendously. Use the hashtags #DaguerreoTyped and #CoilMag. (Make sure you spell DaguerreoTyped correctly, or no one will find it!)
9. Deadline for #30: September 30, 2025.
10. Submit your piece(s) on Submittable here.
11. We acknowledge that we are headquartered on what should be Arapaho land with a warehouse on a street that is instead named for a dead white male president who owned enslaved people and severed Native American Nations apart irrevocably, and an office on a street named after the very People whose land was stolen. To honor the reparations that this entire country needs to make, Black writers and Native American Indigenous (United States and Canada) writers may submit for free to this contest. Please note that if the portal is not open, then we have reached our free-submission monthly cap until the beginning of the next month.

For the visually impaired or those using TTS reading aids: this is the end of the guidelines.

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