Week 5: "Saint Burma" by Nikki HoSang - a podcast by Oregon Public Broadcasting

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers.

“Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced."

To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner.

State of Wonder then recorded the weekly winners reading their stories and remixed them with music, as well as called up the grand prize winner to spill the beans, for your aural pleasure.

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