Neotropica announces the Jorge Luis Borges/
Gabriel Garcia Márquez Magical Realism
Write-alike contest:
Publication prizes for winners in the International Encyclopedia of Tlön.
Tlön and the Garden of Forking Paths
Tlön is an imaginary world dreamed up by a "conspiracy of intellectuals." The Garden of Forking Paths is a Borgesian metaphor for our non-linear experiences of time and space. Macondo is the ficional town setting of several works of Garcia Márquez.
A call for submissions of short encyclopedia entries of 250 words each on various aspects of life, environment, culture, and daily affairs in the imagined world of Tlön. As Borges envisioned, the collective, imagination-based construction of Tlön will be a world-wide conspiracy of intellectuals writing, and thus creating, Tlön.
The idea comes from the fictional encyclopedia of Tlön, which was the subject of a 1940 short story of Borges .
Entries should be in the "irreal, surreal, or magically-real" styles of Borges and/or Gabriel Garcia Márquez. You are encouraged to read some of the works of Garcia Márquez and Borges to understand their approach and how to mimic their style.
From the entries submitted, the judges will select winners whose entries will be assembled and published as an online encyclopedia eBook. Winners will be receive a free copy of the Encyclopedia with full acknowledgement and credit for their submissions, and receive a certificate attesting to their winning entries.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez 
From an interview:
Fiction has helped my journalism because it has given it literary value. Journalism has helped my fiction because it has kept me in a close relationship with reality.
Still, there is a specific technique that journalism has given Márquez that has been powerful in the creation of his magical realism -- that of rendering minute detail:
That's a journalistic trick that you can also apply to literature. For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of thing. That's exactly the technique my grandmother used. I remember particularly the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies. When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies. But when I was writing this, I discovered that if I didn't say the butterflies were yellow, people would not believe it. When I was writing the episode of Remedios the Beauty going to heaven, it took me a long time to make it credible. One day I went out to the garden and saw a woman who used to come to the house to do the wash and she was putting out the sheets to dry and there was a lot of wind. She was arguing with the wind not to blow the sheets away. I discovered that if I used the sheets for Remedios the Beauty, she would ascend. That's how I did it, make it credible. The problem for every writer is credibility. Anybody can write anything so long as it's believed.
Read Márquez Nobel Acceptance Speech
Entries should be sent to Stephen Duplantier, Editor of Neotropica (stephen.duplantier@gmail.com).
Deadline is October 1, 2010.
All enties become the property of Neotropica.
Jorge Luis Borges
Borges Description of the Book of Tlön:
"The book was written in English and contained 1001 pages. On the yellow leather back I read these curious words which were repeated on the title page: A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr. There was no indication of date or place. On the first page and on a leaf of silk paper that covered on of the color plates there was stamped a blue oval with this inscription: Orbis Tertius. Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody."
Read the short story by Borges.