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<\/a>The new release of Gwen Thompson\u2019s prizewinning novella Men Beware Women <\/em>brings to light a very three-dimensional sense of our magazine. Across 28 years, so many gifted writers and artists with incredible talent have been drawn here to work with us so they can distinguish themselves by reaching you.<\/p>\nFirst an intern with us in 1994 after graduating from Bowdoin, where she won the Nathaniel Hawthorne Short Story Prize, Thompson deepened her sense of audience through a starry string of feature writing assignments here, even as she earned her a master\u2019s degree in Creative Writing from Boston University, winning both the Lawrence H. Blackmon Book Collecting Prize and Florence Engel Randall Short Story Award.<\/p>\n
As she prepares for her launch party in New York this month, she writes, \u201cAll the research and interviews I did to write Men Beware Women<\/em> reminded me how writing for Portland Magazine <\/em>was the best possible training for writing fiction. I don\u2019t know how long it would have taken me otherwise to recover from the writer\u2019s block I got writing a senior thesis. What a relief to realize that my purpose in writing was no longer to prove something to somebody, but simply to inform and entertain\u2013an equally good rule of thumb for fiction writers. What a thrill to discover, through PM<\/em>\u2019s coverage of absolutely everything to do with Maine, that any subject becomes interesting when approached with an open and inquiring mind. And what a salubrious ban on flowery dialogue tags!\u201d<\/p>\n So\u2026who out there thinks she or he can be the next Gwen Thompson? While you\u2019re deciding, treat yourself to her literary romance, a story that jumps the Pond between Oxford and Manhattan as Emma beguiles Malcolm. As Ralph Lombreglia, author of Men Under Water <\/em>and Make Me Work<\/em>, has written, \u201cGwen Thompson portrays Oxford dons, Upper East Side executives, and working-class English girls with the same breezy mastery, while reveling in the minutiae of Elizabethan drama, pub crawling, competitive rowing, and getting your heart broken. A thoroughly charming performance from a very talented young writer.\u201d Men Beware Women<\/em> is the winner of the 2012 Miami University Press Novella Contest.<\/p>\n