Winning a poetry contest is a great way to get your name in lights–and possibly get a major publication credit. Of course, it’s sometimes hard to find contests that aren’t outright scams. Let’s start with the wastes of time, shall we?

Who to avoid

• Any of the Watermark Press imprints: poetry.com and International Library of Poetry, mainly, but there are several others. Here’s the simple fact about the “contests” they run, in case you don’t know: they are simply trying to sell you books. That’s why everyone who enters is declared a semi-finalist. The more people they can fit into their anthologies, the more anthologies they can sell to the poets. Remember Who’s Who Among American High School Students back in your school days? Yeah, same concept. Secondly, if you list poetry.com as a writing credit, editors will laugh at you. Seriously. Getting “published” on poetry.com is like tying your shoes or making a Ted Kennedy joke. Anyone can do it. According to a Jacksonville Sun article from a few years back, this was one of the winning poems:
  -
  Multiple sclerosis, will there ever be a cure?
  We really don’t know for sure.
  The medicines aren’t working,
  so she stays within her home lurking.
  Nothing can make the pain stop,
  she can’t even take her girls to the mall to shop! -
  Now, I’m not mocking the author or making light or her suffering, but that is just a bad poem. And it was declared a winner by poetry.com.

-

• Be wary of any contest that is not open about its judging procedures or allows a judges’ former students to enter. It’s not unheard of for judges to use a major contest to push an agenda or to favor his friends, students and lovers. For example, W.H. Auden was judging the Yale Younger Poets Series, one of the most important contests of the 20th century. However, he blatantly refused to pick anyone other than his friend, John Ashbery (author of the influential Some Trees).

-

• Avoid contests that don’t spell out all the rules and prizes beforehand. This is just common sense. You shouldn’t play the game if you don’t know the rules.

Some of the good guys

• Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers — Backed by the Kenyon Review, this contest is open for high school sophomores and seniors. The top three winners receive publication in the Kenyon Review, while the first prize winer also receives a scholarship to the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. No entry fee.

-

• Mississippi Review Prize — The Prize seeks any writers in the English language, has a $1000 prize pool, and publishes all winners and finalists in the winter print edition. Entry fee is $15.

-

• Slipstream Press — This contest has $1000 prize for first place, and publishes your chapbook. Although they do have only one prize (first place or bust), they do allow simultaneous submissions and reprints. Entry fee is $15.

-

• Women of Words Award and Poetry Chapbook Contest — Sponsored by the journal Southern Hum, the winner receives $250, chapbook publication and 25 copies of their chapbook. Entry fee is $10.

-

• Gerald Cable Book Award — Sponsored by Silverfish Review Press, this contests seeks to publish a full-length poetry collection by a deserving author. Winner receives $1000, publication, and 100 copies of the collection. Entry fee is $20.

-

• Green Rose Prize in Poetry — Seeks to publish unpublished full-length collections of poetry. Prize is $2000 and publication. $20 entry fee.

-

• Indiana Review Poetry Prize — Seeks individual poems, maximum 3 per entry. Prize is $1000 and publication. Entry fee is $15, which includes a one-year subscription to the Indiana Review.

These are just some of the quality contests available to poets. If you know of others, please comment on this post.

Publishers Group West, which owns distributes such varied imprints as Darkhorse, Gallup, and Soft Skull Press, has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A full list of imprints is available on their website.

Twist endings, the bane of my reading experience. Ever since I read The Gift of the Magi as a child, I have hated the twist ending. It’s one of the reasons I could never get into the Twilight Zone, or enjoy so much 19th-century literature.
Of course, professional curmudgeon Nick Mamatas weighs in:

The problem with twist ending stories tends to be threefold: either the twist is too transparent (repetition of a 19th century story) too contrived (…and the haunted house was a giant tongue the whole time!) or simply too loud (They’ll never know how transparent this is if I shout!). Despite the three problems, there is generally one solution that would make these sorts of stories better: put the twist in the middle.
…
If the twist is in the middle, we have a renewed chance to engage with the characters. So the monster in the woods was really a lost little boy. Then what? The “then what” is the interesting part.

The twist in the middle was frequently used in The X-Files, to great effect. If you ever get to watch the episode “War of the Coprophages,” you’ll actually witness multiple mid-plot twists.

From 101 Reasons to Stop Writing:

Every sex scene is gratuitous.

For every sexual sequence in a novel that imparts some insight into the characters, let alone the human condition, there are thousands which exist solely because the author got to page 180 and realised the main characters hadn’t fscked yet. Almost all of them could be edited down to “And then they did it,” without losing anything original.

I’m all for sex in novels, and on novels. I’m being prudent here, not prudish. If I wanted to get an erection on the bus ride to work, I’d bring my PSP and a 1 gig memory card loaded with eroticism of a more visual nature.

Even though his latest book is being heavily criticized, Thomas Pynchon still commands interest. From the London Telegraph:

“It seems a fitting conclusion to a game of hide-and-seek played by a man whose work is obsessed with the dangers of living in a world where rampant technological progress threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone. His novels imagine all sorts of strange scientific marvels that the world must learn to live with, but even Thomas Pynchon’s fertile brain couldn’t have predicted that one day he would be unmasked by something bearing the wonderfully weird title of YouTube.”

In elementary school, high school, and even a freshman college English course, I diagrammed sentences. It was a logical, almost mathematical approach to sentence structure and grammar, and it was one of the few useful exercises thrust upon unwitting students by the public school system. Unfortunately, the sentence diagram is going the way of cursive writing classes and phonics.

Lucky for us dinosaurs, there’s a new book out about the dying practice. Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences written by Kitty Burns Florey, explores the world of diagramming with a nostalgic eye. NPR reviews.

If you haven’t yet checked out some of our online friends, you should.

Quantum Muse — Our goal is to provide the discriminating reader with the best fantasy and science fiction literature and art we can obtain without spending most of our beer money.

Cherry Bleeds — Get your twisted fiction and poetry fix.

There’s a whole list of sites on the AntiMuse link page.

Tell me, why does Mitch Albom have the best-selling book according to BookSense, which only tracks INDEPENDENT BOOK STORES?

I doubt City Lights is stocking Mitch Albom.

Author William Styron died a week or so ago. From the New York Times obit:

Mr. Styron’s early work, including “Lie Down in Darkness,” won him wide recognition as a distinctive voice of the South and an heir to William Faulkner. In subsequent fiction, like “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and “Sophie’s Choice,” he transcended his own immediate world and moved across historical and cultural lines.

Critics and readers alike ranked him among the best of the generation that succeeded Hemingway and Faulkner. His peers included James Jones, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

“I think for years to come his work will be seen for its unique power,” Mr. Mailer said of Mr. Styron in a telephone interview a few years ago. “No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac.”

Faithful reader(s) may have noticed my lack of attention toward National Novel Writing Month, a gimmicky movement whose members pledge to write 50,000 words in November. I tried it last year, but quickly abandoned the task after realizing the sad truth behind it: these 50,000 words will suck.

Yes, I know the entire purpose is to silence the internal editor, but why not spend November trying to write something worth reading? I’d rather have a decent essay than an unsalvageable novel.