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How Books Win Awards: Advice from C. Hope Clark
C. Hope Clark is the author of the Carolina Slade mystery series from Bell Bridge Books, and the editor of the FundsForWriters newsletter and website. In this guest post at author Glenda C. Beall's blog, Clark describes what judges look for in contests for small press and self-published books. Also included are her tips for spotting scams and protecting your rights.
How Novelty Ruined the Novel
In this 2017 essay from Current Affairs, Brianna Rennix takes a skeptical look at popular experimental devices in contemporary literary novels. She argues that these tricks have become cliché, interfering with the genre's unique potential to entertain and provoke empathy. For fun, test your MFA syllabus or this week's New York Times Book Review against the Postmodern Novel Bingo card: "Entire chapter is just a list of ironic brand names"; "Tepid marriage ruined by unsatisfying infidelity"; "A lumbering comedic setpiece is suddenly interrupted by horrific violence"; and more.
How the Boy Might See It
By Charlie Bondhus. Finding one's identity is just the beginning of the struggle, in this updated and expanded version of an award-winning gay poet's debut collection. With lyricism and an empathetic imagination, Bondhus claims a place for himself within multiple traditions, daring to juxtapose a comic tryst with a resurrected Walt Whitman, a disciple's erotic memories of Jesus, and the lament of a post-Edenic Adam. New work in this edition includes the poem suite "Diane Rehm Hosts Jesus Christ on NPR", narrated by a very human messiah who "would speak about what God shares with humanity...I mean loneliness".
How to Be a Good Beta Reader
In this article from the self-publishing and marketing service BookBaby, science writer Dawn Field shares eight tips for giving useful feedback on a manuscript.
How to Build an Author Website
Author websites have become an essential marketing tool. In this 2020 update of her 2015 article, publishing expert Jane Friedman shows you how to get started designing a professional-looking site with the key information about you and your books.
How to Do a Killer Reading from Your Work
This guest column at Lit Mag News by Lambda Award winning novelist Lev Raphael offers tips for giving an engaging and polished performance of your work, online or in person.
How To Do It Frugally
Website of Carolyn Howard-Johnson, award-winning author of 'The Frugal Book Promoter' and 'The Frugal Editor', contains a wealth of advice for writers and publishers on how to generate publicity for their titles on a limited budget.
How to Find the Poetry Contest that is Best for You
Targeting the right publisher for your kind of work is the key to improving your poetry contest odds and advancing your career as a writer. If you were looking for a job, you wouldn't mass-mail your resume to every listing in the classifieds, yet too many beginning writers will pick up a contest directory and do just that. Fortunately, it's possible to bring some rationality to this confusing process by following a few simple guidelines.
First, you need to read widely and perceptively enough to understand where your work fits into the diverse landscape of contemporary poetry. Decide what's most important to you about winning a contest—prize money, prestige, wide readership, editorial feedback, or making connections with other writers. Competition is a two-way street; the hundreds of contests out there are also contending for a share of your entry-fee budget. Learn to recognize the signs of a contest that's unreliable or doesn't offer good value for your money and effort.
Understand your style and experience level
Poetry is so idiosyncratic, and its practitioners so opinionated, that I hesitate to divide writers into only a few "schools" or "movements". However, for purposes of this article, I'd like to mention three broad categories of writing, which I'll call traditional/formal, narrative free verse, and experimental. It's rare to find a contest that's equally open to all three.
The best way to explain these distinctions is by example. Here are three quite different poems on spiritual themes.
Traditional/formal
In the traditional category, Judith Goldhaber's "Mea Culpa: A Crown of Sonnets" won the 2005 "In the Beginning Was the Word" Literary Arts Contest from the Lake Oswego United Church of Christ. Goldhaber writes sonnets with the ease of contemporary speech, using images from the world we live in today, not only the Shakespearean and Romantic vocabulary to which the form often tempts us. In my mind, this makes her quite an original writer, but she wouldn't be considered "experimental" because she adheres strictly to the form. Her sonnet sequence straightforwardly takes on the age-old problem of evil and free will:
...I spread my wings and fell into the sky,
beating those wings and rising towards the sun
in ecstasy. It's true, I am the one
who did this thing, and I cannot deny
I gave no thought to who might live or die.
To tell the truth, when all is said and done
I'd do it all again, and yield to none
my right to live my life as butterfly.
So, mea culpa! Guilty after all!
"I am become death, destroyer of the world,"
said Oppenheimer, as the dark cloud swirled
above the swiftly rising fireball
at Alamogordo, when he lit the fuse:
you've seen the headlines and you've heard the news.
Free verse
Nigerian poet Chris Abani's "The New Religion" represents the best of narrative free verse. Lesser examples of this form can resemble prose chopped into short lines, without any poetic techniques like metaphor or non-realist imagery. Understandable on first reading, yet rich with questions that linger, Abani's earthy phrases awaken us to smell, feel, and savor the meaning of the Incarnation:
...The body is a savage, I said.
For years I said that, the body is a savage.
As if this safety of the mind were virtue
not cowardice. For years I have snubbed
the dark rub of it, said, I am better, lord,
I am better, but sometimes, in an unguarded
moment of sun I remember the cow-dung-scent
of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat
and the screaming grass.
But this distance I keep is not divine
for what was Christ if not God's desire
to smell his own armpit?
Experimental
At the experimental end of the spectrum, we have Christian Hawkey's "Night Without Thieves", an excerpt from his collection The Book of Funnels (Wave Books), which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. This poem doesn't have a narrative line that one could summarize, instead using more subtle tactics to hint at gospel concerns—the offbeat use of Biblical rhetoric ("yea unto those..."), and the promise of liberation from our fears and our narrowly rational ways of thinking:
The day is going to come—it will come—put on your nightgown,
put on your fur. And yea unto those who go unclothed,
unshod, without fear, fingering the corners
of bright countertops
and calmly, absentmindedly, toeing the edges of clouds
drifting in a puddle. Put on your deep-sea gear,
your flippers, and walk to the end
of the driveway.
It will come. Be not afraid to chase large animals.
Who publishes what
The most prestigious and lucrative contests are typically run by university-affiliated literary journals and presses. These publishers want to see that entrants are familiar with developments in contemporary poetry, and that their work has a modern feel to it. Ambiguity, irony and restraint are favored over Romantic sentiment and epic pomposity, and innovation may command higher marks than accessibility. For amateur writers whose poetic education ended with the classics in high school, this will require some catching up.
Outside the culture of academia, some small presses have a more populist flavor, seeking work that is complex enough to be satisfying, yet speaks in the voices of ordinary people. Standouts here include Perugia Press, Pearl Editions, Main Street Rag, and Steel Toe Books. My impression is that British contests are less "academic" in their tastes than American ones.
Traditional formal poetry tends to be segregated in journals specifically devoted to that aesthetic. Some publishers that appreciate classic verse include Waywiser Press, The New Criterion, Measure, and The Lyric. Contests run by local and amateur writers' groups may also be more open to old-fashioned styles and themes.
Researching the tastes of different literary journals has never been easier, thanks to the Internet. I do encourage people to support their favorite journals by buying a subscription, but I recognize that it's not practical to buy every magazine where you might submit your work. Subscribe to poem-a-day websites like Poetry Daily or Verse Daily, which reprint samples from the best independent and university-run small presses.
Know your priorities
Why do you want to win a poetry contest? (If the answer is "To become rich and famous," you're working in the wrong genre.) Different contests have different strengths. Here are some examples of the tradeoffs you might consider.
Let's say you're shopping around a poetry book manuscript. Wherever you're published, you'll have to do most of the marketing yourself. If you're a professor who can assign the book to your class, or you're hooked in to the local poetry community and could easily set up readings at cafes, libraries and bookstores in your area, you might not mind a smaller cash prize in exchange for more free copies of your winning book. Twenty copies is average, 50+ is above-average. Two well-regarded, long-running contests offering 50+ copies include Main Street Rag's Annual Poetry Book Award and the Gerald Cable Book Award.
On the other hand, if hand-selling your books is more of a challenge, you'd be better off entering a contest with a larger prize that you can spend on marketing efforts, such as postcard mailings and online advertising. Some major literary publishers, such as Tupelo Press and Kore Press, offer above-average publicity for their writers through their email newsletters, but keep in mind that they're extremely competitive.
Many contests for single poems will publish other entrants besides the top winner. This can be quite a perk if the contest is sponsored by a prestigious journal. New Millennium Writings and Atlanta Review are among the top-tier literary periodicals that publish a good number of finalists from their contests.
Web publication and other benefits
Web publication may not have quite as much cachet as an appearance in an established print journal, but I believe that the gap will close in the next few years as economics force more periodicals to go virtual. Online publication also offers the potential to reach a larger audience. Whereas most printed poetry journals report a circulation of a few thousand at most, an online poem can be distributed more widely, for free, with a link in your email newsletter, website, blog, or Facebook page. (Serious authors should have at least one of the above.)
Some contests invite winners and runners-up to read at an award ceremony. These can be wonderful opportunities for networking and book sales, not to mention the thrill of connecting with a live audience. Writing can be a lonely vocation. Coming face-to-face with appreciative readers is one way to recharge your creativity. Look for contests sponsored by writers' groups in your area, where you could make useful long-term contacts. Here, the tradeoff is sometimes lower prize money and prestige, in exchange for a more solid local fan base.
The Academy of American Poets provides state-by-state listings of events, literary journals, writing programs, poetry organizations, and more. The National Federation of State Poetry Societies also has a links directory, though it may not be as up-to-date. Visit the "Literary Societies and Associations" page in the Resources section at Winning Writers to find more specialized groups.
Avoid low-quality contests
Once your poem is published, it's ineligible for most contests. Only send your work to publications where you'd be proud to have it appear.
A contest's prize structure can clue you in about the sponsor's level of professionalism. I generally advise writers not to enter a contest whose fee is more than 10% of the top prize. I'm also not a fan of contests where the prize is a percentage of fees received. Without a guaranteed minimum prize, you're bearing too much of the risk that the sponsor won't adequately publicize the contest. I've seen some good small presses get in trouble because they relied on next year's fees to fund last year's obligations, instead of putting aside the prize money at the start.
Consider the look and feel of the contest's website. Avoid sites with multiple typos, grammatical errors, and cheesy clip art. Are the names of past winners hard to find? Don't let someone publish your book if they're going to let it fall into obscurity. A site with a lot of outdated information might indicate that the publisher doesn't devote a lot of attention to their business; lacks the technical skill to promote your work effectively online; or would be hard to reach once you had a contract with them. This is especially a problem for poetry book and chapbook contests. A technically savvy, responsive publisher is worth much more than a prestigious but elusive one.
Don't be dejected if rejected
Finally, let me say that I have mixed feelings about contests as validation for one's writing abilities. I remember how ecstatic I was to win my very first poetry award (an Honorable Mention from Cricket Magazine, at age 12)—I don't think any subsequent prize has given me a greater rush! Some of our poetry contest winners at Winning Writers, whose work has never appeared in print before, tell us that now they feel like a "real writer." So I wouldn't want to minimize the joy of debut publication, or the ego boost that can help an emerging poet make a serious commitment to her writing.
However, you're going to get a lot more rejection than validation, and internalizing others' opinions of your worth will lead to writers' block or fearful, unoriginal writing. Don't be "tossed about by every wind of doctrine" (Eph 4:14). Become a good enough reader of your own work to know when it's successful on your terms, and remember that even Shakespeare and Dickens don't suit every taste. The more innovative you are, the more passionate your critics and your fans will be.
Keep these guidelines in mind and you're sure to spend your time and entry fees more wisely!
Copyright 2009 by Jendi Reiter. Reprinted with permission from Utmost Christian Writers. This article first appeared in their "Poet's Classroom" series for June 2009.
How to Find the Right Agent for Your Book
This 2023 article by Emily Harstone at the writing resource site AuthorsPublish gives an overview of the process of finding the right agents to query. The article includes links to scam-busting sites and online forums where you can find agents seeking work in your genre.
How to Help Prisoners Get Books
In this article at Electric Lit, NYC Books Through Bars explains how to support prison books projects or start your own. Book donations help prisoners with rehabilitation and maintaining community ties, but mailing rules vary widely from one facility to the next, so it's always a good idea to check with established prisoner-support organizations to see what materials are needed and allowed.
How to Make a Living as a Poet
Successful slam poet offers creative ways to support a career as a full-time writer. Also includes advice about how to give good readings, write effective press releases, and other practical skills.
How to Make a Zine
Zines are self-published, limited-edition miniature magazines, often illustrated or multimedia. They have long been popular with independent authors, fandom communities, and grassroots political movements. This article from My Modern Met, a creativity and lifestyles website, demonstrates the materials, layout, and binding options for an attractive and easy-to-make zine.
How to Paint a Dead Man
By Harry Bauld. With mordant wit and erudition, the poems in this chapbook dissect artistic masterpieces from Rembrandt to Basquiat, to analyze the nature of fame, genius, and mortality. Several pieces are from the perspective of cogs in the commercial art machine—docents, consumers, or anonymous assistants to the famous painter (who are actually doing most of the work). Others remix words from news stories, textbooks, and artists' monographs, as if to warn that no body of work is immune to being decomposed.
How to Read to Children
In this excerpt from his book The Art of Teaching Children (Avid Reader Press), elementary teacher and education expert Phillip Done gives tips for making story hour as engaging as possible. He encourages reading aloud to children in upper grades as well, since it keeps students engaged with literature and allows them to experience what good writing feels like.
How to Respond to Criticism of Your Poetry
This month, in a special edition of Critique Corner, we deviate from our usual format to address a topic close to our hearts: how to accept and use criticism.
Dear reader, I feel I must insist: There is only one way to do it, only one way to respond to criticism of your poetry: "Thank you for your time and interest. You have given me food for thought."
I offer these words in quotation, as a model; I offer them for your safety. I mean that—those are our poems out there. Just as you need to stop and look before you turn right on a red light, for your own sake and that of others, this is a rule of the road. You never know who's hurtling at you down the Avenue of Communication.
Of this much I am certain, as a strategy it will not fail you. Honor the risk required to offer comment; retain your autonomy as author. However you convey it, your reply will come off upbeat and brave.
It sounds simple. It's not. It can be one of the hardest things that, we, as poets, must master. Must, because, if we don't, we will never grow and learn. And if we stop doing that, we eventually stop writing.
Why does this work? Because writers are talkers, but to use critical feedback, we have to listen. Let me show you how a reply like, "I really appreciate your thoughts; they will be with me when I revise," can help you switch the talker off, so that you can benefit from the time and attention people have taken to consider your work.
Your Wish is My Command
"If this were my poem, I would cut the last stanza," and so you do.
"I went to a lecture by a famous poet and I am sure he would tell you to cut the first stanza." With that, stanza two? History.
"I don't see how the middle stanza is working for you?" So much for your triolet!
Poets are often eager to please. Poets are often impressionable. But poems are not the work of committees. If you're taking every comment, you may be losing the you in your poem. Not every comment every person makes is going to serve the poem or your vision of it. So, lift your finger off that delete key; you know what to do: "Lots of really great input! I thank you so much for your time and attention." Then set the notes aside to return to another time.
You know you have heard an idea worth heeding when the same comment, or a comment about the same phrase or quality, arises again and again. You know you have heard an idea worth heeding when it refers to the very line or image you were uncertain of yourself. Sometimes a little "aha!" will sound within you when someone offers an idea you wish you'd had yourself. Wonderful!
The Defense Rests
Someone has just commented on your poem. They're wrong, of course. Obviously. More than that, they're insane, boorish, and wouldn't know a good poem if it took off the top of their head. Of course, you're too refined to say so (or at least you know that if you do, you might not be asked to return to the group, class, or forum you are working with). So you sigh, patiently gather your words, and present your case—or worse, you interrupt—"You're not seeing my point..." you say. No one contradicts you. Clearly you have persuaded them.
Well, the last sentence is true anyway. Everyone is now convinced that it's not worthwhile to offer you honest opinions. Ask yourself: what would they have to gain by arguing with you about your piece? They will either stop offering you feedback altogether, or, if it's a situation where comment is required, proffer vague blandishments.
This can become a dangerous cycle. Your defensive posture makes it uncomfortable for anyone to give you anything but praise; you receive nothing but praise and believe there is nothing to improve.
How to avoid this? "Such smart and interesting replies! I can see you gave this some time and I want to thank you for that." One thing that helps, if you are working with other people in a room, is to take verbatim notes. You may be head-down, biting the inside of your cheek the whole time, but your hands will be scribbling away. You won't have time to formulate push-back. If you are working online, massage the input somehow. For example, make a separate document and turn the notes into some sort of outline. This way you can process them without actively responding.
In both cases, set the notes aside to return to another time.
Straight from the Horse's Mouth
If a horse made a comment on one of my poems, I'd like to think I would listen. But what if it came from a jackass? Using criticism is no different from reading an op-ed page: you have to consider the source. I regret I must add, dear reader, though once again, for your own good: be sure to ask yourself if the source stands to make any money from your continued allegiance.
This is actually more important than whether you like the source's poetry. A better question is whether you think his or her comments on other people's poems improve those poems? Do they reflect your sensibility? Sometimes wonderful poets, even famous ones, have no talent for helping someone else achieve the poem they'd intended.
Which is not to say that they have nothing to say. Everyone has something to say, even—maybe especially—non-poets. We write for the response of readers. Be grateful for it. Honor every comment as you would have your own met: "Dear Online Poetry Editor, I know you receive a lot of mail, and I thank you for the time you've taken on my work. You've given me new ways to see this piece." Then set the notes aside.
Sometimes poets, perhaps from an impulse to focus, censure: "Thanks, but I'm only looking for comments about my title." Beware. For one thing, you never know what comments will resonate or spark inspiration in later pieces. Besides, you might happen to be seated next to a large animal veterinarian with a specialty in dentistry: someone with just the right instrument for the job.
Love is Blind
You wake up from a feverish dream and grab your pen. Your very words flush with bright vitality. Mama was right; you are brilliant. Just wait until you show it to the gang tonight. You leave the poem you'd prepared standing at the altar as you take your new love in hand. But ah, will you still respect her in the morning?
To benefit from criticism requires distance. Fresh work, the kind that still reverberates in our inner ears, is not yet seasoned for outside influence. Hear me now, you know I care: when possible show your penultimate poem, if not something even older. But should your crush prove too irresistible and you find yourself wounded to the core, summon your courage, you can do it: "I see. Thank you. A lot to think about. I'm sure I will." Okay, that might not be the best response, but, hey, you did it! And the notes will be there when you're ready.
The Twelfth of Never
We have been setting an awful lot of notes aside. Now what? A big bonfire?
The time to take up a revision of a poem is, of course, any time the mood strikes you. Reading newsletters like this one, full of opportunities and deadlines, can provide inspiration, as can a class. If you have some sort of regular exchange with other poets, set aside some of them each year for revisions.
New perspectives are especially fruitful. If you admire someone else's poetry, ask yourself why, then revisit your old work. Reading critical essays or attending live intensives and craft lectures can also re-open poems in a useful way.
This essay appeared in the December 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
How to Survive a Summer
By Nick White. In this contemporary Southern Gothic novel, a disaffected young man must confront his memories of an "ex-gay conversion" camp he was forced to attend as a teen, when another former camper makes a horror movie based on a death that occurred there. The book parallels the structure of traumatic memory recovery, converging on the pivotal time period with scenes set before and after the protagonist's fateful summer. His Christian family members are drawn with depth and compassion, and the surprising redemptive ending feels earned.
How to Write a Killer Fairy Tale Retelling
In this article from the Fairy Tale News blog, Tahlia Merrill, editor of Timeless Tales Magazine, shares six tips for ensuring that your remixed fairy tale adds something fresh and interesting to the original. For example, she suggests reading multiple versions of the fable to pick out intriguing details, or considering a different setting or point-of-view character.
How to Write a Memoir
William Zinsser (1922-2015) was a widely published journalist who wrote for periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Herald Tribune. His seven books on the craft of writing include On Writing Well. In this article from The American Scholar, where he was a regular columnist, Zinsser gives sound practical advice about how to structure your memoir, and stresses the importance of recording your family story, whether or not you seek publication.
How to Write Attention-Grabbing Promo Copy for Books
In this guest post on the book marketing website BookBub, M.J. Rose, founder of the ad agency AuthorBuzz, gives detailed advice about writing your ad copy and targeting it to different audiences.
How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons
In this essay from The Atlantic's 2010 fiction issue, novelist Richard Bausch argues that writers' manuals are a poor substitute for honing one's aesthetic sense through immersion in great literature. "One doesn't write out of some intellectual plan or strategy; one writes from a kind of beautiful necessity born of the reading of thousands of good stories poems plays… One is deeply involved in literature, and thinks more of writing than of being a writer. It is not a stance."
How to Write Your First Comic Book
Cultural essayist and journalist Jude Ellison S. Doyle (Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers) describes how they taught themselves the conventions of writing their first comic book, the feminist horror comic MAW (Boom! Studios, 2021), as well as tips on working with illustrators and editors.
Huffington Post: Beyond the Battlefield
This 10-part series from online newspaper The Huffington Post features real-life stories of the physical and emotional challenges, victories and setbacks that catastrophically wounded soldiers encounter after returning home.
Hum
Winner of the 2012 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, this electric debut collection embodies the vitality and struggle of becoming a man. The word "elegy" is not entirely right for such energetic, muscular poems, but there is mourning here for May's native Detroit and the men of his family who were scarred by addiction, war, and racism. The speaker of these poems fights back with beauty, noticing the shine of the handcuffs while enduring police harassment, or the inspiring message on the plastic bag that holds his relative's ashes "in a Chinese takeout box". In the age of e-readers, AJB's elegant book design makes a case for the pleasures of print. Poems titled after various phobias are interspersed through the book on black paper with white type, creating moments of visual "hush" amid the "hum" of text.
Humor Writing Websites Directory at Point in Case
Humor website Points in Case has compiled a list of 50+ humor writing sites, with brief descriptions of their specialties. The list can be sorted and searched by genre (general humor, niche humor, or news satire), frequency of publication, keywords and more.
Hunger
By Kym Cunningham
You said I was unfit
for human consumption
that promises had spoiled me
saturating my skin with
lies neither of us could keep
I don't want to be our escaped goat
bucking at the slaughter
I don't want you to
disembowel me like tree fruit
letting my seeds dehisce your mouth
I never said I could be selfless
I never said I had the answers
I never said I'd give you my life
let you churn me up, skim me alive
spread me on soured dough
Now you've left me out and
the butter's curdled, the jam's attracting flies
you've begun to mold
one of us must clarify
we can't trick the starving into eating us anymore
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
By Roxane Gay. In this starkly honest and courageous memoir, the bestselling fiction writer and feminist commentator shares her complex and ongoing story of childhood trauma, eating disorders, and navigating prejudice against fat bodies. After being gang-raped at age 12, Gay self-medicated her emotional pain with food and became obese as armor against the world. She offers no easy answers or tales of miracle diets, but rather something more valuable: a role model for learning to cherish and nourish yourself in a genuine way despite society's cruelty toward "unruly" bodies.
I Am a Rothko Painting
By Kevin Hinkle
Canvas stretched across a frame, rough and dry.
I'm a Rothko painting—deep red,
brown, and orange. I'm February brooding,
suffocation from a lack of sun.
My therapist tells me to appreciate
my moods, to talk back and walk on. I nod...
but I'm Rothko painting.
I can't bear mirrors and self-contemplation.
I'm a Rothko painting, and it's difficult
to accept beauty’s nuclear age.
I remind myself that sunlight varies by season,
meaning depends on context.
Rothko painted me layer on layer;
now let me hang and dry.
I Am Still a Child
By Mahnaz Badihian
As if years and days were asleep
I'm still that little child
that loves her lacy shoes,
and her errant hair
that hardly reaches her shoulders.
As if years and days were asleep
and my hands still are
those of a child,
demanding another hand
to jump over a creek,
and my childish heart
gets confused by the
first encounter with love.
What happened to all those years,
have I lost the experience of
living in this strange world.
I'm still a child in my mother’s eyes,
who never left this house.
Come and see this child.
She has tamed the years,
and the moon engulfed
in her childish palms.
I Forgot, Like You, to Die: 12 Palestinian Writers Respond to the Ongoing Nakba
This 2018 post at LitHub offers a sampling of protest literature by Palestinian writers on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the destruction of hundreds of villages and displacement of 750,000 Palestinians when the state of Israel was founded in 1948.
I Had Buckets
By Howard Faerstein
There were arctic ice dams & bent busted eaves
in that ramshackle house in the woods—
ceiling falling, plaster peeling,
lath exposed—& I had buckets,
though of different colors,
strategically placed so the five cats,
exiles also, could lap water
at any time in any room.
That was when my nails began breaking,
then bleeding, my first term
as a professor, age fifty, having left the city
to teach argument to college freshmen.
The Chair provided advice,
just remember you're smarter than they are.
& the students questioned why
I wore bandages on every finger
& I confessed my envy of them
& lectured them on rhetorical formulas
when composing essays on controversial issues;
for instance, capital punishment:
how my father had killed two men,
in self-defense he'd said;
environmental sustainability:
how Mao's Four Pests campaign
eradicated sparrows, leading to the Great Famine
when twenty million perished & the locusts grew fat;
& we spent a class on Stalin's Night of the Murdered Poets
when we took up censorship,
also how Alan Freed's rock & roll show
was banned in Boston & later in the semester
I spoke of the silence between brothers,
of young men in India dialing wrong numbers
hoping for love, on the rising mortality rate
among white, midlife Americans,
& how I've always wanted
in the soft wallow of time
to witness snow falling over an ocean.
Then I told them about my ex-wife's abortion,
never mentioning the father.
I Think I Should Give Up Exercise
By Elizabeth Marchitti
I think I have given up exercise
unless you count the trip from the living room
where I sit, feet up, reading, to the kitchen
where my new washer/dryer hums
doing its job with grace
Silence tells me the dryer has stopped
It's time to fold the laundry.
I stand to do that, make a neat pile
of towels and t-shirts, return
to my lounge chair and my novel, feet up
I think I have given up exercise
unless you count trips
to J.C. Penney's, Barnes & Noble,
or the Totowa Public Library,
unless you count the long walk
down the aisle at the Paper Mill Playhouse.
Or the short walk, after John has parked the car,
to the Montclair Public Library
or the Hamilton Club in Paterson,
to attend poetry readings.
I think I have given up exercise,
unless you count how happily I jump up
and walk to the podium
to read at various Open Mikes.
Soon I will swim
in the heated indoor pool
at the Bird-In-Hand Family Inn
in Amish Country, Pennsylvania
This is so easy, so much fun.
Can it be called exercise?
In June I will swim
in the outdoor heated pool
at the Beachcomber Resort
In Avalon, Three Mile Island.
This is too easy
to be called exercise.
I will exercise my brain
by reading Murakami,
Alice Hoffman
and the poems of those
poets I love.
It's time to slow down,
Relax, to grow old
Disgracefully.
I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams
By Jessica Young, illustrated by Rafael López. This tender story, illustrated in rich, soothing colors, follows a brown-skinned mother and son as he grows up, has a child of his own, and feels her presence among the stars after she has become an ancestor.
i’m alive / it hurts / i love it
By Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. This poet's first full-length book transforms the raw material of emotions into visionary language without losing their sincerity and immediacy. The untitled short poems can be read as sections of a single long work, as journal entries, or as miniature worlds in their own right, composed of clouds and hormones and rain on the freeway and blood and mirrors. Each represents the daily choice to feel everything, though pain coexists with joy. Espinoza writes with honesty and wit about her life as a transgender woman who manages anxiety and depression.
IBPA Hybrid Publisher Criteria
The Independent Book Publishers Association released these guidelines in 2018 to help small presses adhere to best practices, and to assist authors in distinguishing a legitimate author-publisher cost-sharing model from a vanity press. IBPA's Hybrid Publisher Criteria require that hybrid publishers behave just like traditional publishers in all respects, except when it comes to business model. Hybrid publishers use an author-subsidized business model, as opposed to financing all costs themselves, and in exchange return a higher-than-industry-standard share of sales proceeds to the author. In other words, although hybrid publishing companies are author-subsidized, they are different from other author-subsidized models in that they adhere to professional publishing standards. IBPA's standards include a competitive editorial selection process, high-quality book design, distribution services, and respectable sales figures.
IBPA’s Best Practices for Hybrid Publishers
In 2022 the Independent Book Publishers Association proposed these best-practices guidelines for hybrid publishers, in response to reports that indie authors were losing money on poor book design and misleading promises of royalties. Among their criteria: hybrid publishers should be selective, publish under their own imprint with a clearly defined mission and aesthetic for the press, provide distribution services, and have a track record of sales comparable to other presses in their genre.
Icebreakers Lit
Icebreakers Lit is an online journal that publishes collaborative writing (two or more authors) in the genres of poetry, short fiction, personal essays, flash prose, and hybrid text. If you don't have a collaborator in mind, ask them to match you with another interested author. Previously published work is eligible. See website for themed submission calls. Editors say, "We like 80s and 90s nostalgia, nods to pop culture, and vulnerability. We like good writing that doesn't take itself too seriously. We also like being surprised and things that don't quite follow the rules."
Idiots’ Books
Idiots' Books is a Maryland-based indie press that publishes offbeat, satirical illustrated books featuring the work of writer Matthew Swanson and illustrator Robbi Behr. Books are distributed through a subscription service. Titles include 'Dawn of the Fats', billed as "the oft-neglected examination of that special place where funnel cakes and zombiism collide"; 'Ten Thousand Stories', a book whose split pages can be recombined into 10,000 absurd but still grammatical narratives; and 'After Everafter', which gives ten classic fairy tales the same (mis)treatment.
Idiots’ Books
Idiots' Books is a Maryland-based indie press that publishes offbeat, satirical illustrated books featuring the work of writer Matthew Swanson and illustrator Robbi Behr. Books are distributed through a subscription service. Titles include 'Dawn of the Fats', billed as "the oft-neglected examination of that special place where funnel cakes and zombiism collide"; 'Ten Thousand Stories', a book whose split pages can be recombined into 10,000 absurd but still grammatical narratives; and 'After Everafter', which gives ten classic fairy tales the same (mis)treatment.
If a Tree Falls: A Family’s Quest to Hear and Be Heard
When her first daughter was born deaf, memories of feeling unheard by her own mother led Rosner to trace the history of deafness in her family and imagine how love might bridge the communications gap between parents and children. This beautifully constructed memoir from Feminist Press touches on themes of assimilation, identity formation, and healing. Interwoven with Rosner's tender and humorous memories of her children's early years are vivid fictionalized scenes of her Jewish immigrant ancestors, whom she imagines wrestling with the same challenges in a very different cultural setting. The technology and politics of deafness may keep changing, this book suggests, but the need to connect with the ones we love is universal.
Illypsis Poetry: Amina Jordan-Mendez
Amina Jordan-Mendez is a poet, spoken-word performer, and activist in Western Massachusetts. She was the 2019-20 Straw Dog Writers Guild Emerging Writer Fellow. She says, "Much of the intellectual property of Afro people has always been storytelling, poetry, song. I write for my soul. I teach for my heart. In my curriculum I strive to invite young people of color into poetry, wellness, spiritual health, advocacy, radical accountability."
Image: Art, Faith, Mystery
Beautifully designed, thought-provoking quarterly journal of the arts and religion. Free email newsletter profiles contemporary artists, writers and musicians whose work engages with spiritual themes in profound ways.
Immigrant
By Gary Beck
I carry the delivery bag
and no one looks at me.
They ignore the delivery boy
and I can't tell them
I’m a man, not a boy.
I hate my boss
who talks down to me,
because I'm an immigrant.
I hate the people who tip me
as much as those who don't.
They are all the same,
despising me.
I try not to think of the old days
when I walked with Shining Path,
carried an AK-47...
No one laughed at me then.
Now I am a delivery boy
and must eat my pride.
In a Kept World
By Carmine Dandrea. This noteworthy chapbook from Finishing Line Press is a unified 17-poem cycle voiced by a solitary older man inside a house in Michigan in deep winter. As the "prime suspect" of his own examinations, he reflects on mortality and time wasted. Women from his past reappear as nameless sirens and ghosts, arousing both desire and regret that he did not value their intimacy enough. Despite the assaults of unforgiving weather and the temptation to succumb to darkness, he also finds moments of sensual joy and radiance in the ordinary furnishings of his monastic cell. The recurring image of the garden comes to represent not only the literal promise of spring but the "seeds of love" and "sureness of life" that he wants another chance to cultivate in his soul.
In Break Formation
The indications used to come
like movie fighter planes in break
formation, one by one, the perfect
plummet, down and out. This time they're
slower. But after supper, when I hear
her in the kitchen hum again, hum
higher, higher, till my ears are
numb, I remember how it was
the last time: how she hummed
to Aramaic peaks, flung
supper plates across the kitchen
till I brought her by the shoulders
humming to the chair.
I remember how the final days
her eyelids, operating on their own,
rose and fell, how she strolled
among the children, winding tractors,
hugging dolls, how finally
I phoned and had them come again,
how I walked behind them
as they took her by the shoulders,
house dress in the breeze, slowly
down the walk and to the curbing,
watched them bend her in the back
seat of the squad again,
how I watched them pull away
and heard again the parliament
of neighbors talking.
Copyright 2008 by Donal Mahoney
Originally published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Winter 1968-69
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Donal Mahoney's "In Break Formation" for this month's critique because it illustrates how understatement and the careful withholding of information can enhance the power and freshness of a poem about a traumatic subject. Families affected by mental illness are often marked by secrecy, shame and confusion. Their members may feel like powerless spectators to the events of their own lives. Mahoney captures the dream-like numbness of this family's surrender, first to the momentum of the mother's madness, then to the authorities who take her away. The contrast between his flat reportage of details and the strangeness of those details sets up a dramatic tension that resembles the "humming" of an incoming bomb.
As we learn from the first stanza, the title was inspired by images of war planes being shot down and separated from their aerial formation. So, too, the woman in this poem is pulled away from her family, her unpredictable course determined by her broken internal compass. "Break formation" in this context also suggests the building-up of forces prior to a psychotic break.
The narrator, who I assumed was her husband and the father of the children in the fourth stanza, tries to steer her "humming to the chair" but his piloting skills are overwhelmed. That phrase gave me a mental image of an electric chair on death row, humming with energy as it is prepared for the next prisoner. Perhaps electroshock treatment, as well? Domestic, military and medical scenarios seamlessly shade into one another, prompting reflections on how dysfunction in one of these systems might impact the others.
The political analogies in this poem are never strained by over-explanation. Items that suggest a wider canvas than the domestic—fighter planes, Aramaic peaks, parliaments—are simply included in his catalog of details, as natural or unnatural as a woman throwing plates. Indeed, what does it mean to be sane in a world of violent conflict? Paranoia is never a purely private aberration. Like Ophelia, or a flower child, the woman could be said to possess a certain gentle beauty in her madness, "how she strolled/among the children, winding tractors,/hugging dolls"—an innocence that offsets the heartless intrigues of rational men.
However, the opening scenes of the poem imply that these moments of trance-like calm portend an abusive outburst. Overwhelmed, "I phoned and had them come again," the narrator says ominously, as if we all know who "they" are. He lets the authorities handle the woman like an inanimate object, or a criminal: "I walked behind them/as they took her by the shoulders.../watched them bend her in the back/seat of the squad again..." Has he betrayed her or saved her? The little word "again" drops a weight of despair on this scene as we realize that this rescue operation has happened before, apparently to no effect.
The last stanza relates the personal tragedy back to structural oppression with the image of the "parliament of neighbors". A parliament should be able to exercise power on behalf of the disadvantaged, but here it is depicted as adding to the shame and helplessness of the victims of this "bombing". Perhaps these neighbors are not so different, after all, from the madwoman cocooned in her dangerous visions, unable to break out of her solipsism and see the suffering of those caught in the crossfire. A lesser poem would spell out the moral, but Mahoney wisely refuses to do the work of self-awareness for us. It is sufficient for him to bear witness to discomforting facts, letting us draw our own analogies to the world we live in.
Where could a poem like "In Break Formation" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Lucille Medwick Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22
Free contest offers $500 for poems on a humanitarian theme; entrants must be Poetry Society of America members (we highly recommend joining)
Fellows' Poetry Prize Competition
Entries must be received by December 31
Award of 500 pounds from UK-based literary society The English Association is open to British writers aged 16+
Strokestown International Poetry Competitions
Postmark Deadline: January 22
Irish literary festival offers prizes up to 4,000 euros for unpublished poems in English, Irish or Scottish Gaelic languages
New Millennium Writings Awards
Postmark Deadline: January 31
Prestigious twice-yearly award offers large prizes for poetry, fiction and nonfiction, plus publication in handsomely produced literary journal; editors appreciate work with social-justice themes
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
In My Father’s House: A Memoir of Polygamy
This insightful, compassionate memoir tells of growing up within a breakaway fundamentalist Mormon sect that considered plural marriage a holy obligation. A theology of eternal family bonds, combined with the need to hide from persecution, drew her father's many wives and children closer together but also stifled their self-development. Amid the upheaval of social roles in the 1960s and '70s, the author strives to discover her own connection to God without rejecting her people. Personal narrative is well-balanced with historical background. First written in 1984, this book was reissued in 2009 by Texas Tech University Press.
In Our Write Minds
Kim Kautzer's blog offers lessons and resources for teaching writing to young people. Useful for schoolteachers and homeschooling parents.
In Sonnino
By Helen Bar-Lev
Signora Italia
sits on her terrace
on the top of steep steps
She is so old, so white,
so wrinkled, so immobile,
she seems to be rooted
in the planters like the flowers around her
She stares at us as we pass up the alley
and is there still when we return
many photographs and espressos later
Signora Italia does not say bongiorno,
does not wave, has not moved at all
and I envy this woman
planted in the soil of her country
While I am the intruder,
stuttering in her language
faltering in her alleyways
humbled before her history
As much as I read,
as much as I see
I shall never know how it is
to be rooted here
This poem and accompanying painting will be included in an exhibit at the Chagall Artists House in Haifa, Israel, opening September 17, 2016.
In the Collage of Life
Artistically designed limited-edition chapbook pairs poetic reflections with intricate abstract pen-and-ink drawings and collages suggesting forms from nature. Schulman keeps alive the tradition of books as art objects, creating an "illuminated manuscript" with a decisively modern feel.
In the Ghost-House Acquainted
Prizewinning first collection of poetry depicts the farming life unsentimentally yet with wonder at the mysteries of birth, death and transcendence. The language of these poems can be as stark and rugged as a Massachusetts winter, then blossom forth with the joy and terror of encountering the sacred in the cycles of nature. This book won the 2004 New England/New York Award from Alice James Books and the 2005 L.L. Winship award from PEN/New England.
In the Street Without My Glasses
By Harry Bauld
Blur sips at the blue bowl
of morning. The heart,
old mole, noses forward
to sense something of steel, maybe
of stone—without a lens the filth
is gone. Unrefracted men and women
regress toward a trembling Monet mean,
trees and marquees go dumb
in the warble of sky,
and even nameless cars
dodging their promised manslaughters
gleam like starlings
under bus faces smeared
to leaf and petal. Someone crosses
the street, a tremolo
of arm, a shudder of color
smoothed to one age, race and sex
as light as that shadow
shimmering off the asphalt
like distant desert heat, the true flicker
we may be. The world
before the uncorrected eye
brims, marbles, quivers
over its boundaries, wells.
