Decameron Redux

Week Seven (Tuesday, 3/2/2021 – Monday, 3/8/2021)

Though the winter’s wearing out, the modest treasures we guard for you still remain. Four randomly selected submissions will receive a $25 gift card from The Seminary Co-op, Bookshop.org, Build Coffee, or Plein Air Café (your choice).

The Decameron is a compendium of 100 stories and more. The “101st story” of the collection hides in the introduction to the fourth day of storytelling, where the outspoken Boccaccio gets carried away explaining his motives for writing down the scores of stories in question. Any good copy of the Decameron will also offer you the hundreds of stories behind the historical figures, cultural practices, and premedieval literary texts Boccaccio deploys to populate his fictionalized world. And though the ten narrators of the Decameron’s 100 stories perform their storytelling duties from a dreamy, immaculate garden, their shared vacation from the plague becomes a story of its own as they navigate their tricky social predicament in a world whose strict social scripts the plague may not have fully destroyed.

For this week’s challenge, write a story within a story within a story. Write the story of someone telling a story. Write a non-story about a story or a story about the absence of a story. Write the opposite of a story. Make a story appear without writing a single word.

Remember: this site is dedicated to storytelling, but you needn’t limit yourself to the traditional prose narrative. We welcome photo series, videos, music and other audio work, visual stories, poetry, and anything else in standard shareable formats. The target length for a narrative submission is 200-1000 words. For other formats, consider what it means to present a bite-sized portion of your art, something that takes only a few minutes of your audience’s precious time. Head over to the Submit page when you’re ready to upload your contribution.