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The Literary LotterySeptember 25, 2005 I've been following "The Great Contest Debate" in Poets & Writers, a bimonthly magazine for (you probably figured this out already) poets and writers. Contributors to the discussion have included people who administer contests, judge contests, and enter contests. Among the points made (and made often): academic judges pick their students and friends, subjectivity is inevitable, integrity is crucial, preliminary screeners eliminate all the good stuff, entry fees are too high, not picking a winner is a cop-out, and "buyer beware." Every issue of Poets & Writers includes entry information for dozens of contests: contests for poetry, nonfiction, and fiction; contests for single works, collections, and whole novels; contests aimed at particular groups, e.g., women, people of color, writers from a certain region of the country or ethnic background. The prize usually comprises money and publication. Most contests only have one winner; some have runners-up or honorable mentions. Nearly all charge an entry fee. There's no easy way to determine how many writers enter these contests, but judging by the interest in the issue I suspect the number is large. Why? Why do writers enter contests? If you've ever judged a contest -- if you've ever judged anything, or if you've ever edited a magazine or anthology -- you know that even strictly on-the-level competitions are highly subjective. Any contest that doesn't involve quantifiable results -- how fast you ran, how high you jumped -- is subjective. Deep down most contest entrants must know this, and have no quarrel with it: what they most desire is that the judge, Eminent Writer or Eminent Poet, will choose their work and elevate it above all others; will recognize its worth, and by implication their own; will confirm and testify to all the world, or at least the literary world, that they are writers. Marge Piercy wrote in "For the Young Who Want To":
Ditto the imprimatur of a contest judge. Entering contests won't even teach techniques, typing instructions, or mannerisms, but compared to MFA programs and "workshops with fancy names" the entry fees are cheap. Well, not always: On the Poets & Writers website (www.pw.org) there's an ad for the Virginia Kirkus competition for unpublished first novels. The prize includes a publishing contract with Little, Brown. The entry fee is $150, a figure I'd expect to see on tickets for an upscale charity raffle. I think I'll pass. I don't do contests -- my work isn't flashy, my style isn't MFA/literary, and I have little faith in the willingness of mainstream judges to give a fair reading to work with feminist or lesbian/gay content, or to anything about off-season Martha's Vineyard -- but in the last Poets & Writers I dogeared three possibilities for further investigation, one for "My Terrorist Eye" and two for The Mud of the Place. The entry fees are $15, $10, and $0, respectively. In all three cases the publication part of the prize looks pretty good; for me that is the most important thing. When I wrote poetry, I spent plenty of time submitting poems to various publications. Maybe a third to a half of them were eventually published. What I learned before long was that having a poem published in a journal that neither I nor anyone I knew read or (in several cases) had even heard of didn't mean much. Being published wasn't enough: what I wanted was to be read, and heard, and responded to. Which brings me around, finally, to what this blog was supposed to be about: audience. As usual the prologue got away from me. More later. You can see a sampling of the letters about contests received by Poets & Writers on the P&W website at http://www.pw.org/mag/letters2.htm.
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