Have you ever dreamed of being one of those brilliant, tortured writers who drifts across the country and captures the American experience with nothing but an old typewriter and an unhealthy amount of whiskey, but you also really don’t like being outside and never want to be too far from a Hot Topic? If so, Minnesota’s Mall Of America has the perfect job for a weird person like you.
As announced on the mall’s website, it’s holding a contest to find a “Writer-In-Residence” who can spend five days “deeply immersed” in the mall “while writing on-the-fly impressions” of the whole experience. The winner will also get four nights in a hotel, a $400 gift card for food and drinks, and they’ll “collect a generous honorarium for the sweat and tears they’ll put into their prose.”
The contest is open to everyone from “seasoned journalists to aspiring poets,” and to enter you just have to go to this link and pitch what your Mall Of America writer-in-residence story would be. The rules sound pretty open-ended, so if you really want to put together a harrowing exploration of a man struggling with his loss of faith and coming to terms with his own mortality while walking through an absurdly gigantic shopping mall, go right ahead.