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#300 Once Upon a Place with Sarah Jaffe

This week, we're running a takeover in collaboration with Reedsy freelancer Sarah Jaffe! The winner of this contest will not only be awarded $250 — they’ll also receive a special bonus prize: personal feedback from Sarah herself. For your chance to get insight from one of Reedsy’s very own professionals, read on! Here's Sarah:

Hi writers! I'm Sarah Jaffe — a writer, editor, visual artist, and audiobook producer with fifteen years of experience at Penguin Random House. I love helping writers uncover the heart of their work and make it shine with both meticulous line edits and — my favorite — big-picture developmental feedback.

This spring, I've been thinking a lot about borders and place, and how where we are (and where we've been) impacts who we are. A former writing teacher once told me there are only two kinds of stories: a person takes a trip, or a stranger comes to town.

So, for this takeover, I want to read your best stories about place. Give me immersive, well-rendered settings where things happen that couldn't happen anywhere else, with people who are products of their environment — for better or worse. Show me forests, deserts, mountains, metropolises, distant islands. Invite me into a particular room in a particular house full of memories. Introduce me to the people who make the place come alive.

I can't wait to see where you take me!

Special Update: The Results

Sarah's top pick for her takeover was "The Big Deep" by Orwell King. Here's what she had to say about the winning story: "This story's voice and immersive setting sucked me right in. I admire the way the author uses sensory details to conjure the world of the story vividly for readers, and the tone, style, and diction all serve to further deepen the sense of place. The best writing allows readers to live many lives simultaneously, and in this piece I felt transported to an Australian miner's world, both internal and external."

Congratulations to contest winner Orwell King and the runners-up, Jacob SanSoucie and Kristina Schildknecht!

🥇 Winner

The Big Deep

Orwell King

Winner of Contest #300 🏆

I’m a miner. I dig holes for a living. ‘Dig’ is a generous word, really. I blow things up so we can go deeper. Drill, charge, blast then bog it out. Then repeat. It’s loud, dirty, and dangerous. But it’s honest work, and there’s a rhythm to it, one that makes sense. Until the day it didn’t The mine is called Kalgara Deep, carved beneath the sun-blasted hills of Western Australia, three hours from the nearest servo, and six from anything you could call a town. It’s not on any tourist map. Just a dot behind a red dirt road lined with scrub and...

48 likes

⭐️ Shortlisted

Chaltier's Well

Jacob SanSoucie

Shortlisted for Contest #300 ⭐️

Chaltier's Well had stood for three centuries at the fringe of Western settlement, neither prospering enough to expand beyond its original boundaries nor failing enough to join the ranks of ghost towns that dotted the region like abandoned chess pieces. The town maintained precisely 1,876 souls – the same count reported in the census of 1876, and every census since.People didn't leave Chaltier's Well. Not permanently. Those who tried found themselves circling back within months, drawn by what locals called "the tug" – a homesickness so profo...

26 likes

Sunlight and the Bones of the City

Kristina Warlen

Shortlisted for Contest #300 ⭐️

Every solstice, the city forgets itself—then remembers.It’s built on ruins: layers of failed empires, lost languages, ancient tech, and stubborn hope. And every year, when the sun crests the old spires and the veil thins, the past returns—hungry and bright. People come from across the continent for the ancestor festival. But for my family, the day is everything.In this city where time frays at the edges, where buildings hum with the echoes of rituals once sung in a dozen forgotten tongues, we hold onto what we can: the scent of citrus and sp...

18 likes

This week's prompts

Write a story about someone who sets off in one direction and ends up somewhere else.

Short Story – 51 stories

Set your story in your favorite (or least favorite!) place in the world.

Short Story – 35 stories

Write a story about a place that no longer exists.

Short Story – 66 stories

Start or end your story with someone arriving somewhere for the first or last time.

Short Story – 97 stories

Write a story about a place that hides something beneath the surface.

Short Story – 84 stories

Stories

The Big Deep

Orwell King

Winner of Contest #300 🏆

I’m a miner. I dig holes for a living. ‘Dig’ is a generous word, really. I blow things up so we can go deeper. Drill, charge, blast then bog it out. Then repeat. It’s loud, dirty, and dangerous. But it’s honest work, and there’s a rhythm to it, one that makes sense. Until the day it didn’t The mine is called Kalgara Deep, carved beneath the sun-blasted hills of Western Australia, three hours from the nearest servo, and six from anything you could call a town. It’s not on any tourist map. Just a dot behind a red dirt road lined with scrub and...

48 likes

Welcome to the Town of Else

Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #300

No one drives to Else on purpose; it's the kind of town you end up in when your GPS dies and your secrets get too heavy.Martin Halperin had been driving for seventeen hours straight. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the cracked Arizona highway, distorting saguaro cacti into accusatory fingers. His phone buzzed again—a text from his sister. Third one today. He silenced it without looking."Rerouting," announced his GPS. "In one-quarter mile, turn right."Martin ignored it. Right meant east. East meant facing what he'd done.The dashboa...

41 likes

The Fire Inside

Submitted to Contest #300

My Beloved Lucius,You have always seen the fire inside me, a smouldering beacon rising to the heavens that not even the gods could quench. I will never forget that, you know.Many leering eyes have beheld mine, each one a piece of rope tying me down to the columns of the temple of expectation. Yours, azure like a summer sky, lift me to Jupiter’s throne room, there where time bends to the will of his thunderbolts. Whilst the city views me as but a mere glass doll, — delicate, decorative, hollow — you cut through my silken tunics and find a hea...

35 likes

Echoes of Dvaraka (Part 1)

Submitted to Contest #300

The year was 12491 AD.Humanity’s descendants, part-organic, part-synthetic, no longer called Earth home. Their bloodlines flowered among the stars — from fragile colonies on ice moons to sprawling cities orbiting crimson suns.The proudest cradle was K2-18b, a wet, green world beneath a cool red star, hundreds of light-years away. It was there the children of Earth learned to breathe new air, to speak new tongues, and to forget.Yet for all their advancements, memory tugged like a gravity that could not be escaped.And so they returned, a handf...

35 likes

Ancient Creatures of the Black Ponds on the World Voyages of the Destiny's Dreams

Kristi Gott

Submitted to Contest #300

A gigantic bone stuck up from the black goo like something beckoning from beneath the surface.It was the 1800s. Anya, the Storyteller of the Blue Lantern, stopped breathing and her heart pounded.Her thoughts raced. “The legends are true. It is them. Underneath. How many are there? What are they like?”The stories carrying ancient wisdom awakened deep inside of Anya. They bubbled up from somewhere beyond time.She could almost hear sounds coming from beneath the shiny dark surface of the seepage. It was neither liquid nor solid. The dark slime ...

34 likes

Playland

Liz Klein

Submitted to Contest #300

Once, there was a kingdom made of plastic and wonder.It rose defiantly at the edge of a sprawling parking lot, wedged between a grocery store, a dry cleaner, and a four-lane road that never stopped humming. From the outside, it looked almost otherworldly — part spaceship, part candy factory — with its bold colors and bulbous windows that glinted in the sun like the eyes of some cheerful robot god.We called it many things — The Maze, The Tower, The Fort—but never by its true name. That was too dull, too adult. To us, it was just the place. Th...

33 likes

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

Submitted to Contest #300

"Who left their shoes!? Seriously man! You have no shoes! Come on, somebody, anybody!"Darren Doorful was having a bad day. No one mentioned his twenty-fifth anniversary with the TSA. He knew the young-ens wouldn't, but his uppers should have.Clueless faces turned towards Darren without saying a word. No one came forward to claim the abandoned bucket."These shoes didn't just walk in here by themselves. They got to belong to somebody!" He scanned the travelers like an eagle for prey.They scattered, adverting their eyes, desperately trying to a...

29 likes

Sunshine Beams

Mary Bendickson

Submitted to Contest #300

The Marcy wagon train headed west to California from Independence, Missouri right on schedule. During the five days it took to reach Topeka, Kansas, Ford Marcy, the trail master would often visit the newly joined Potter three-wagon party mostly talking to the seventeen-year-old person in charge, Kendra. He became enchanted with her. She always looked forward to his drop-in visits no matter how brief they might be.Tragedy had struck Kendra's family and she had given up on her Pappy's dream of going to California. Trying to help her choose a n...

26 likes

Chaltier's Well

Jacob SanSoucie

Shortlisted for Contest #300 ⭐️

Chaltier's Well had stood for three centuries at the fringe of Western settlement, neither prospering enough to expand beyond its original boundaries nor failing enough to join the ranks of ghost towns that dotted the region like abandoned chess pieces. The town maintained precisely 1,876 souls – the same count reported in the census of 1876, and every census since.People didn't leave Chaltier's Well. Not permanently. Those who tried found themselves circling back within months, drawn by what locals called "the tug" – a homesickness so profo...

26 likes

The Final Journey of Thomas Hodgkin

Raz Shacham

Submitted to Contest #300

Jaffa, 1866Dr. Thomas Hodgkin was sixty-seven years old when he returned to the Holy Land.This was his second journey—and he knew, with quiet certainty, that it would likely be his last. The damp air of London had grown heavy on his lungs, and he no longer had the strength to pursue all the hopes that had once stirred his heart. Yet when Sir Moses Montefiore, his friend of more than forty years, invited him to accompany him on one final philanthropic mission to Palestine, Hodgkin did not hesitate.Sunlit waves glistened as the steamship ancho...

24 likes

These Streets Know My Name

Sophie Goldstein

Submitted to Contest #300

Theo didn’t want to go home.“Let’s get another drink,” he said to Mark, a co-worker and friend of almost twenty years.“I think if you have another drink, you might fall over,” Mark replied laughing.Theo shook his head, even though he knew that Mark was probably right.Theo stared over the railing of the rooftop bar and looked out across the skyline of skyscrapers, and city lights that sparkled, and cars driving to their destinations, and couples laughing and walking and talking and arguing on the streets below.He breathed deeply the smell of ...

23 likes

The Gamble

Submitted to Contest #300

“What if I fall through?” She clicked her pincers together three times, like a quick knock at the door. “You doubt me so?” Her voice was teasing, nearly kind. The silken web beneath my feet quivered slightly as her spindly legs stepped around me. “If you fall through,” her eyes bore into me, prickling my skin, “you’ll die.” I swallowed. Dew stuck to the threads ahead, bouncing lightly with the breeze. The web itself connected across three trees, hundreds of feet above the forest floor. All I could see of the ground was a light blanket of mi...

22 likes

Elves vs Vampires

Keba Ghardt

Submitted to Contest #300

Christmas Eve at the North Pole. Jingle bells in the air. Gingerbread in the oven. An improbable architecture overwhelmingly inspired by peppermint. Santa's sleigh has just departed, and the elves are wrapping up production before the end of a successful year.CC, the elf in charge of candy cane development, said, "Merry Christmas," and put his pants back on.Noelle, a lollipop parked between her teeth, squeezed back into her stripey tights. "You're not allowed to pay me in candy anymore.""What?" CC hissed. "Of all the bureaucratic...I mean, I...

22 likes

Flowers for Maribel

J.A. Roggie

Submitted to Contest #300

Flowers for MaribelBy J.A. RoggieContent Warning: This story touches on themes of mental health (grief, aging, and emotional struggles) and substance abuse (mention of drug addiction). It also explores the loss of loved ones and the emotional toll of memory loss. Reader discretion is advised.Delph stood at the edge of the overgrown path, staring up at the wall of trees that loomed ahead like ancient sentinels. Their trunks were thick and gnarled, bark furrowed like old skin, each one soaked in the deep browns and soft greens of a forest that...

20 likes

The Haven

Submitted to Contest #300

This would be Clara's fifth visit to The Haven, and so it would be her last. No one ever returned for a sixth.A visit to The Haven was the one thing that they all had to look forward to as they stumbled through their workaday lives at The Commune, those who were over 35 years old anyway. It was a temporary respite from the dull and dreary confines of their daily existence; the constant struggle to work hard enough to stay ahead in the race against starvation and poverty and disease, the constant vigilance against all manner of physical threa...

20 likes

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Contest #301

This contest has ended. Thank you for your submissions.

$250

Prize money

333

Entries

134

Stories

Ended on 23:59 - May 02, 2025 EST

Won by Orwell King 🏆

Title: The Big Deep

Submissions must be between 1,000 - 3,000 words and will be approved and published on Reedsy Prompts within 7 days of the contest closing.

Read the full terms & conditions or check out the FAQ if you have any questions!

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