Saturday, January 03, 2009

Poets and Writers

It's been a lot of years since I picked up a writing magazine. I used to write some fiction back in the mid-1990s. It was lots of fun. The stories just came from no where and I was always surprised by the outcome. I'd write the first line, and the rest came. Then they stopped. First line and all.

Yesterday at the library sale I picked up for a quarter the Nov/Dec 2008 Poets and Writers. Do you think writing--fiction, non-fiction, biography, poetry, mystery, romance, sci-fi--is better today than the days before all the prizes and contests, degrees and workshops? Are the people on the best-seller list the best? Did they get there by entering contests? Or are contests just useful for paying off the organizers and their staff. Look at these
    Fence Books awarded Elizabeth Marie Young of Berkeley the 2008 Motherwell Prize for her poety--$3,000 and publication of her book.

    University of Evansville awarded David Stephenson of Detroit the 2007 Richard Wilbur Award for his poetry collection--$1,000 and publicantion of his book.

    Frederick Reiken won the Fiction Open, $2,000, and his story will be published in the Winter 2009 issue of Glimmer Train Stories.
And so it goes. But look how much money these organizations bring in with their contests:
    University of Evansville Wilbur Award competitors need to submit $25 per manuscript--what if 1,000 people send something? Yes, it takes some staff and handling, and someone has to read the submissions, but usually you know after the first paragraph whether it's worth it, and you've got that $25 check in hand.

    Glimmer Train which is sold on newstands and certainly isn't cheap, collects $20 per entry for the opportunity to win that $2,000 prize. That journal is very well known and marketed, and I'm assuming gets thousands of hopefuls.

    That Fence Books Motherwell prize will cost each entrant $25, and since it is for a first or second book of poetry by a woman, it probably gets thousands writing about baby spit up or lost loves. Here's one of mine based on the Suze Orman TV show. It's timely, got name recognition, pathos, and a snappy ending.

    Girlfriend, Suze said,
    while you imagined love
    there's a slight chance
    you missed the bounced checks,
    school loans, credit cards,
    child support and gambling debts,
    a mortgage about to reset,
    a house that hasn't flipped,
    and his mother who has.

If you want to write for money, you might be better off putting ads on your blog page.

Flipping through this issue, I do see a few that have no entry fee, like National Council of Teachers of English and Nebraska Arts Council, but they are outnumbered by the for-fee contests/prizes/awards.

There's a photo on p. 18 of a party in 1963 for the founding of Filmwrights International, sort of a union. Most noticeable, given today's casual culture, is that all the men are in suits, and none of the women are identified. But the famous authors in the photo, none of whom had probably won an award to launch their careers or attended a writing workshop in Iowa or Arizona, are George Plimpton, William Styron, Ralph Ellison, Peter Mathiessen, H.L. Humes, Truman Capote, and Mario Puzo.

Call me crazy, but I think if you're good, someone is going to find out without your sending $25 to 100 contests to win $500.

4 comments:

Paula said...

I don't know if the contests help good writers get discovered more efficiently than not, but I simply don't want to spend money entering them. I think I did maybe twice in my life, and that got me nowhere. Right now, I'm okay with being nowhere and enjoying the fact that I'm writing what I want, when I want. Fretting about contests and getting published takes my energy away from actual writing, so I avoid it as much as I can.

Anonymous said...

Small presses get by on shoe-string budgets supported by meager book sales, two or three ads in an issue of a magazine, and these contests. Entrance in the Motherwell Contest also entitles the submitter a free year's subscription or a copy of the winning book, worth $17 or $15. What industry would you rather have your readers support?

Norma said...

I'd rather they put out a quality product, find the advertisers, the subscribers, and the best writers. Or, maybe, they don't need to exist at all. This seems to be another form of self-publishing, but when you add up all the costs to the poet/writer and all the profits for the publisher/editor/judges, the little press probably makes much more than the much maligned vanity presses.

Don said...

I understand this can keep a small house afloat, but I react to poetry like I react to cooked broccoli so I'm not much concerned. If I wrote something I thought was worth a $25 gamble, I'd probably just step to the next level where they don't expect front money.

Either way, I don't recall ever submitting, so it remains academic.