Craft Over Catharsis Challenge Winners

Craft Over Catharsis? What the hell does that even mean?

The phrase came out of a curation meeting as a genuine question. We had been noticing that many challenge entries, across prompts, naturally gravitate toward trauma, grief, and personal reckoning. That makes sense. Writing is often cathartic. It's one of the ways we process what we've lived through.

Even in this challenge, some of the strongest entries still circle grief and loss. That didn't disappear, nor should it.

Instead of steering writers toward something artificially cheerful, like puppies or rainbows or uncomplicated joy, we decided to try a different experiment. What happens if we shift the emphasis? What if structure, constraint, and formal design take the lead? What if emotional release is not the engine?

We weren't entirely sure how it would go.

What we received were stories that looped, dissected, compressed and catalogued themselves as the point. Emotion is still there, but it arrives through repetition and control rather than release.

In other words: craft first. Catharsis, maybe.

🏆 Winners

First Lines... by Kendall Defoe

Kendall Defoe strings together a relentless sequence of borrowed openings, letting familiarity warp into something new. The piece commits fully to the collage, finding motion in repetition instead of story.

Evelyn Felix Gets a Prescription Filled by Polite Adjacent

Polite Adjacent turns a simple prescription run into a running checklist, the list revising itself as the awkward encounters pile on. The structure keeps things brisk and funny, even when Evelyn’s composure cracks.

Wake Up by Bride of Sound

Bride of Sound replays the same night in tightening loops, shaving off detail until only fragments remain. The compression becomes the point, each version thinner and starker than the last.

On and on: The Static Object by Sam Spinelli

Sam confines the piece to a series of wake-ups, refusing us anything but the return to consciousness. The structure traps both character and reader in the same static loop.

From the Desk of the Literary Coroner by Paul Stewart

Paul answered the challenge by putting his own story on the slab, dissecting its use of Latin, genre shifts, and emotional distance in real time.

*Curation team note: if you haven't read The Five Stages of Damnation — Quinque Gradūs Damnatiōnis yet, check it out before reading From the Desk of the Literary Coroner.

🎖️ Runners-up

• Jars by Harper Lewis
• INDEX by Nicky Frankly
• The Light Turns by John R. Godwin
• The Ghost Telegrams by C. Rommial Butler
• Citizenship Application for The Red States of America by J. Otis Haas
• Thoughts on Plot and Structure by Canute Limarider
• The 12-Minute Interview by Alexandria Hypatia
• The Truman Reunion Steamboat Intrusion by Amos Glade
• Malleus Maleficarum. The Hammer of the Witches. by Novel Allen
• Palindrome by A. S. Lawrence
• Romeo, Juliet, and the Rules of Verona by Reiley
• His Dance Into Her Past by Jide Okonjo
• Nine Dreams of Anguish by Moon Desert
• Marshall's Observations by Andrea Corwin
• What is Kept by Rebecca A Hyde Gonzales

🏅 Honorable Mentions

• Myrmidian Murmurs by Meredith Harmon
• The Defender Of The Faith by Matthew J. Fromm
• The Paris Bed Diary by Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA
• The Fifth Element -2 Potential by Lana V Lynx
• Stepping Out by Aaron Morrison
• The Willing by D. J. Reddall
• Someone Else’s Memories by Tim Carmichael
• Craft Over Catharsis by Cristal S.
• what keeps the light by John Cox
• Why I'm Glad My Twin Sister Died by Raistlin Allen

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