Capsule Stories is proud to announce our nominations for the 2023 Best of the Net anthology.
The Best of the Net is an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional publishing. This space has been created to bring greater respect to the continually expanding world of exceptional digital publishing.
The Best of the Net anthology was created in 2006 by Sundress Publications to gather communities of online literary magazines, journals, and individuals that do the work of creating our digital literary landscape. Editors of journals, chapbooks, and online presses and authors can nominate six poems, two stories, two works of creative nonfiction, and three works of art published between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022, for the Best of the Net anthology.
Capsule Stories Nominations for 2023 Best of the Net Anthology
Capsule Stories nominated the following two works of creative nonfiction for the 2023 Best of the Net anthology.
“For the Birds: Listening to Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights Amid the Chickens” by Zoe Grace Marquedant
In “For the Birds: Listening to Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights Amid the Chickens,” Zoe Grace Marquedant reflects on reading Helen Macdonald’s essay collection Vesper Flights while working on a farm in the UK and explores the similarities in working a job “that existed at the periphery between odd and necessary.”
Zoe Grace Marquedant (she/her/hers) is a queer writer. She earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been featured in Olney Magazine, cool rock repository, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. She is also a columnist and contributor for Talk Vomit. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @zoenoumlaut.
“Reading for Fun and Other Antidotes to Grief: Picking Up People We Meet on Vacation” by Miun Gleeson
In “Reading for Fun and Other Antidotes to Grief: Picking Up People We Meet on Vacation,” Miun Gleeson explores how grief and anxiety led her to reading exclusively nonfiction—more specifically, books on death, dying, suffering, and tragedy. When she picks up the novel People We Meet on Vacation, she discovers reading for fun for the first time in a long time.
Miun Gleeson is a writer and essayist whose bylines have appeared in Motherwell, TODAY Parents, INSIGHT into Diversity, POPSUGAR, Her View From Home, and more. She is also an educator who has taught undergraduate courses in composition, rhetoric, and literature for the past decade.
Thank you to each and every one of our blog contributors for sending us your work. We are so grateful to publish it! You can read more of the wonderful essays we’ve published on our blog here.