on writing contests
& opportunities, resources, quotations, etc.
Happy Humpday, folks.
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
On writing contests
Opportunities
Resources
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
More opportunities/resources for paying subscribers
Housekeeping:
You can snag five books for $30 right here. Please help me part with my beloved books. Please pay me enough to buy new ones. (Spoiler alert: my taste in books is *chef’s kiss* & you will be very happy with them.)
On writing contests, etc.:
I always tell my students that—for me—I don’t pay to enter any contest I don’t think I’ll win. For that reason, and given what little disposable income I have, I rarely enter contests that require fees upfront.
In Becky Tuch’s newest newsletter, she cites Epiphany Editor Chris Leslie-Hynan in No Return: Some Thoughts on the Writing Contest:
A poker player thinks in Expected Value, and when I look at writing contests through that cold lens, at the amount of money moving from the writers to the magazine, in fees, and then at the amount of money moving back to the writers at the end, in prizes, it is suddenly very hard not to conclude that these contests are sometimes all about the money—for the magazine. Like big-ticket summer writing workshops and unfunded MFAs, these contests can be cash cows in an industry of scrawny pastures.
In my e-book, I talk a lot about submission fees. There, I suggest you might want to ask yourself some questions before deciding to submit to a journal that requires reading fees—and these may apply to contests, too:
Do you have a disposable income?
What’s the potential payoff? If the journal charges $3 for submissions but only pays $10 per acceptance, it might not be worth it—while a journal charging $3 but paying $300 might be more worthwhile.
Do you share the journal’s values?
Do you like the writing the journal publishes? Do you see your work easily fitting in with the editorial vision?
Will an acceptance into this journal help with your career goals?
Anyways, you can buy the e-book for $5 thru Friday with code SUBSTACK.
Opportunities:
Listen. I don’t like the idea of unpaid labor but—in case you’re in college and can earn some sort of ~internship~ credit—here you are.
Cider Press Review is seeking a Managing Editor and an Editorial Intern. “The Managing Editor’s responsibilities include contacting and following up with authors, proofreading manuscripts, and helping to curate Cider Press Review reviewers. The Editorial Intern‘s responsibilities include reading poetry submissions and assisting with social media marketing.”
The Capilano Review is seeking a Literary Editor. “The ideal candidate will possess a strong background in writing, editing, and publishing; deep relationships with the Canadian literary community; and a demonstrated ability to work creatively and equitably in a collaborative environment.”
Porcupine Literary, a “journal by and for teachers” is seeking editors and readers.
Midst, “a new literary journal that shows readers how poems are written: blank page to final draft, and every edit in between,” is also hiring. (Paying, I think)
Resources:
What I’m reading:
The Power of Design as a Dream of Autonomy, J. Dakota Brown
To read:
Quotations:
I am trying to reshape my relationship to my the knowledge I find and share. I’ve been quiet because I’m rethinking what modes of storytelling I want to perpetuate. How to tell a story that doesn’t focus only on pain and what caused it but what comes after, what came before, what has always existed in spite of pain, and will remain when it has left us.
What does love and curiosity look like after grief? What can critique mean beyond policing?
Identity is not a neat armor to protect you from complicated conversations about how you may be a marginalized person—say, an Asian woman entrepreneur—and still perpetuate harm.
Try to put off imagining publishing and exhibiting the work. Publishing and exhibiting are administrative tasks. Making the work is a studio task. I find it helps to separate them.
As queer artists, we are conscripted into a multi-generational conflict with interests that seek to censor deviant cultural production. Forces governmental, social, religious, educational, and simply snobbish move at all times to squeeze gay and erotic art out from the visible realm of Art and into the musty, beaded-curtain dim of Pornography.
I actually think it is our obligation as queer artists to make real our most out-there ideas. This kind of art has enemies who would like to see it dead.
Every time we write queer texts, produce queer images, do queer actions, we confirm the new world coming.
I’d come out of this trans literature orbit. I thought, “Oh man, everything I write is going to get read through this category and it’s going to be worse than just being about my categories. It’s going to be read as though it’s about me.” I don’t want to write something that is going to be like the trans woman novel, the trans woman of color novel. I don’t speak for anybody. I really think I’m both non-representative and specifically, probably a bad representative of many of the groups that I’m a member of. I don’t ever want to be a voice of a group.
I really wanted to write outside of a slightly valorized political identity, because that’s something that felt very uncomfortable for me to wear. I walk poorly in heels and balance poorly on pedestals. Just let me wobble on this way.
There has been a sense that it’s hard to sell a trans book that isn’t about the act of transition, the hardship of transition, a cocoon becoming a butterfly and possibly getting its wings scuffed up. But what about our entire lives we live afterward? What about the relationships that trans people have to each other? What does it mean to write so much supplication and self-justification?
I’m answering “what else am I passionate about?” with “where am I actually directing my passion, or where do I imagine that I will?” Keeping the ones I love in mullein and yarrow tea through the winter. Holding far-flung friends close. Keeping steam on the kitchen windows. Trying to understand my mother. Seeing that the laundry gets folded. Making it to art shows, and readings, and memorials. Safe- guarding my needs and wants. Making sure the dog is warm. Balancing my brain chemistry. Memorizing Frank O’Hara poems. Curing my acne. Doing the work of being in love. Wearing more blue.
The long march through the institutions [means] working against the established institutions while working within them.
-Herbert Marcuse
The long march includes the concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions.
-Herbert Marcuse
Tweets:
Resources for paying subscribers:
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