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An Interview with Mina Manchester, Judge of the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest

Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest judge Mina Manchester is a working writer, an editor, and a mom. In this interview, we talk about her approach as a contest judge, what makes a great short prose entry, and how judging the contest has influenced her own writing. Watch the entire interview with Mina on YouTube or read the transcript below.

ANNIE: Hello, and welcome. I'm Annie Mydla, managing editor of Winning Writers, and I'm joined today by Mina Manchester, final judge of our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. Mina holds an MFA and is a working writer, as well as an editorial assistant at independent publisher Great Place Books. She's currently working on a short story collection as well as her debut novel. Mina, welcome.

MINA: Thank you so much, Annie, for having me. It's a pleasure.

In your eyes as the judge, the head judge of Tom Howard/John H. Reid, what makes a great story or essay?

That's my favorite question, because that's why I sit down at my desk every day: to discover that. A story that resonates with me emotionally is always going to rise to the top, whether I laugh or cry, and I love stories that have a real concise tightness to them—some of the basics, like I can see a beginning, middle, and end.

But I also love stories that are like life—stories that have dimension, conflict, and contrast. A story that just hits the same piano key over and over is not going to be as interesting to a reader as one that has highs and lows. So I think that's really important for people submitting to take into consideration with the work that they're submitting: we are looking for that texture and dimensionality, and that tightness of the overall story. Nothing extraneous. I also love stories where it really feels like the author knows what this story is about, and I'm just ready to go on that journey.

One of the things that I talked about with Lauren in her interview is that, at least for the Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest, it's clear that some of the poets submitting are writing the poems more to process things from their personal lives than with the actual reader in mind, and the reader's experience of the words on the page. Do you find that at all in the Tom Howard/John H. Reid entries?

This is a question that I think is central to being an artist and a creator, and it's something that I've struggled with for many years: are you writing for yourself, or are you writing for an audience? I've toggled back and forth, and I think—here's my real thing, okay?—this is what I've come to after many years: it's both.

As you mature as an artist in your craft, and you learn more, you are able, through muscle memory and your craft abilities, to make the work ready for the reader. So, I personally believe that the work should always be for you.

The best writing advice I ever got was from my first writing teacher, who said, "Write where it's hot." My best work is always something that I'm trying to work out or deal with, or it's really hot, whether I feel good or bad about it. And I think that hotness comes through in the material. And then, I think, it's just a matter of, to what degree are you executing on the craft abilities that make it appealing for your reader?

Are there any patterns that you see appearing in the Tom Howard/John H. Reid entries?

As I've done [judging] for more years, I see that different writers are at different places in their writing journey. There are some commonalities with writers who are more early on in developing their material, where there is sort of a looseness or a bagginess with the story, or the transitions don't really work, or the characters aren't totally, fully fleshed out. Or sometimes the material is a little cliché, or it's not really a hot take.

I really feel empathetic to creators who are working on that, because that's part of the journey. You don't always know when you're writing something that a lot of other people are writing about. A great example was during the pandemic and the lockdown. We just saw tons of stories about that from everybody's different take. And just as someone who's reading literally thousands of those stories, it does get a little repetitive.

So, I just think in terms of advice for submitters: we've seen a lot of different thematic material that does get repetitive. I think one thing Annie and I were talking about earlier is that we've seen a lot of Boomers writing about aging and dying and sick parents. And I expect that we're going to see another wave of that with the Millennials, and even Gen Z, talking about how their familial relations are.

And so that's great, and we love those stories—I think it's just trying to figure out, how is your story in your unique voice? And what makes your set of circumstances really different?

I think the way to do that is to read a lot. Even in my own life—I write about, sometimes, parenting or motherhood, and it feels really hot and fresh to me, because I'm experiencing it. Then I'll read more and I'll be like, "Oh yeah, this is pretty universal." And that's not to say that universal is bad, because honestly, appealing to the universal is the goal. Like, full stop. But how do you do that in a way that's really engaging and interesting? For me, it's through specifics, through details.

I imagine that a lot of writers are also writing about things that they feel in the cultural zeitgeist, for example, identity politics and so-called "political correctness". How do you see those topics as factoring into the Tom Howard/John H. Reid entry pool?

I think it goes to a question of authenticity. For me, I'm Scandinavian-American, I'm a woman, I'm white, I'm cisgender, I'm straight—mostly!—I'm a wife, I'm a mother, a daughter, a friend. And when I'm reading entries, I really try to be aware of [my] possible biases, of blind spots. So anything that touches on those topics, I try (even though it's all read blind, of course) to have an extra degree of scrutiny to counteract familiarity with material or themes.

I try to also be extra gentle with things that might be more outside of my purview, and I work closely with Jendi to get sensitivity readers or educate myself more if it's something that's not as much in my wheelhouse.

I do think it's really important to elevate other voices, like trans voices and LGBTQ voices, people of color, and disability voices. I've dealt with chronic illness in my life and my kids' lives, and trans identity in my family, and so those are just really important, and we don't see enough of those stories.

And then I will also say as a caveat to all of that as an artist. I think that our society is trying to figure out the role that identity plays in everything in our lives, and where should we be sensitive. I think, as an artist, it's important to also just totally disregard it and write what you're going to write, right? Everyone has the right to write anything, and that's the freedom of being an artist. That's also the sacrifice that we take on when we become artists: that people aren't necessarily going to like it.

I think it's really brave, and it's important. So really, don't self-edit yourself. Be brave with what you're going to write and let the chips fall. And of course, another caveat—we don't want to see violence or disturbing material that is difficult for a number of reasons.

Something that I think it's also important to mention as a judge, reading so many of these submissions year after year, is that a lot of it is about the author's worst day, or something really traumatic that happened to them. And that makes sense. That's why we're writing—we're trying to understand human suffering and these experiences. That's just also a lot to absorb as a judge, and I have to protect my mental health.

I'd like to see more stories that are about the happiest day of someone's life, or just about a normal day of someone's life, and have that sort of dimensionality. Bad things happen too, and I'm not saying write light or fluffy material, but I'm just saying, maybe get into it from a different lens that is a bit more like life.

And don't worry—I do have like a lot of strategies to take care of myself so that I don't feel too sad all the time. I take breaks, and I have a lot of support.

I really admire the authenticity of the pieces that you choose as winners and honorable mentions for the contest.

I try to just read for what is the best, without thought of duplicates [entries that take on similar topics in similar ways] or anything like that. Then, when I go back through, sometimes hard decisions at the very end are when two stories of pretty equal merit are sort of on the same topic or theme. That's the heartbreak for me, because I do like to have diversity in theme and subject matter.

I think sometimes that's also sort of necessarily why those pieces are winning, because they do lean into their specific experiences. Like this year, we have a veteran or an active military member, and we have a nurse from the past, someone who is adopted, someone who's working with the Deaf community. I think the more specificity about your particular experiences that are in the story, the better.

There tends to be a focus on unanswerable questions in your picks, I've noticed. For example, from this year, there's this unbridgeable gap in understanding between a veteran, their community, and basically themselves, in [2024's] fiction winner, "Cryptozoology". And then in the essay winner, "Memory in Tibet", there's this unsolvable problem of grueling child labor and what it does to children in these villages versus, community survival. What is it about these unanswerable questions that makes them so attractive in short fiction and short nonfiction?

I love this question. I feel like for me, even the work I gravitated toward as a small child—I think life is pretty unanswerable, and circumstances, and the fates, seem random. I also think human life is very complex, and we have these beautiful big brains, and we're just a mass of contradictions. I love work that captures that messiness and that explores all of it.

The work that I don't [tend to] like is too simplistic, and that doesn't feel realistic to my life experience. I feel like life is really hard for most people, and we're all just trying to do our best. I like to learn from the choices that people make, or how they're trying to be better.

Like, god, I love a character who's flawed and just trying their best, because I feel like that's me! I relate to that. I'm not perfect, I'm so deeply flawed, and am I trying my best every day? Probably not, but I do try, and I really relate to that.

You are also a working author, you make a lot of submissions, and you do a lot of writing. I'm wondering if the judging has influenced your own work, and if your own work has influenced your judging.

Oh yes, definitely, yes. And yes, I love coming back to judge this contest every year. It comes at a certain time for me in the summer, and it really helps me to dig back into it, because it's just always such a good reminder of what stories need to be. All of the good material inspires me.

I want to say, especially for submitters, one thing that really warms my heart is when a piece I've seen has been submitted or even longlisted in the past, and then the author has gone back for the last year and revised it and reworked it, and maybe worked with other editors or writing groups, and workshopped it, and made it better, and then resubmitted it. There's a great example from a piece that did win in the past, a nonfiction piece, "Manny" by Elizabeth Becker. I had seen that piece before, liked it, and longlisted it. Then she went back and worked on it, and it won. To me, that is the work of a writer. This is a long game.

And yeah, it does help me with my own work. I am a judge, but I'm also judged in everything that I submit. So it helps me to see what is good and what doesn't work, and then I take that back to my own work and try to make my own work better. So really, this is a gift to me. I feel very, like—"I'll take it!" Because writing is very lonely and isolating, and when I submit to things with my own work, sometimes months, or even a year, will go by, and I will hear nothing.

I think for me, even hearing a rejection, or just getting a few sentences, a few words, of feedback, whether good or bad, is better than just the deafening silence. Wherever we can help each other as writers to get feedback [is valuable]. Work with friends, or work with other writers on your work. I think it just really helps you move forward and can help deal with that loneliness and isolation and get more eyes on what you're doing.

It's worthy. It's okay to be vulnerable. Do it! Just do it. Just let me encourage you to do it.

Can you talk a little bit about the things that you're working on right now?

Yes, I'm excited! I'm working on a story collection which was my thesis at my MFA program—shout out to Sewanee School of Letters!—and it was a finalist for the Santa Fe Writers Prize this spring. And the judges, bless their hearts, sent me some feedback, and so I'm working on that right now and revising it and submitting it around.

And then I have a novel that I wrote, also at Sewanee, and I've been revising for the last couple of years, so that has been sort of out on submission to a couple of different agents and editors. I'm getting some feedback on that and hoping that someone will want to take it out for me, which would be really exciting.

I graduated with my MFA just thinking, "Oh, I'm ready. I'm going to get a job in publishing, and I'm get my novel out there." And the reality is, years go by. I always need to reset my own perspective with, "This takes a really long time," and slow myself down, and just be like, "The material is going to take the time that it takes."

Now, because I'm so invested, I'm so far down the rabbit hole. I'm like, "Take the time!" Because I want it to be the best it can be. I want the book to be all it can be for readers, and for what I can do. That, to me, is the most exciting challenge right now.

It's worth taking time, because the book will live on. The book is not mortal like we are.

You're an editorial assistant at Great Place Books, the independent publisher and I just wanted to ask you a little bit about that work and any overlap that it may have with being a judge for Tom Howard/John H. Reid.

I'm so glad that you're asking, because this is definitely my soap box I think as an emerging writer—and I feel like all of us at some point spend a lot of time as an emerging writer—I think most of the submitters to this contest are kind of in the trenches with me on this! In the last ten years, we've seen just such a constriction of publishing options for ourselves. We have five publishers, which do have multiple imprints, but it's really hard to get in. And there's also just a proliferation of writers because we had time during the pandemic, we have digital tools, we're able to self-publish. Amazon has changed the landscape.

So what I'm excited by, that I'm seeing now, is the rise of some new indies. And, as a writer who maybe tends toward the more artistic or literary or eccentric, I think it's really important to have more submission opportunities, and I think the indies are leading the way.

Great Place Books is certainly one of them. We're new, we're small, we're scrappy. We take three titles a year, so it's not a volume game for us. One prose book, one book in translation, one book of poetry. Send your stuff! We promise we'll read it. Go to our website. You can submit.

I read submissions there, and then help, once we do have our chosen titles, with some copy editing and getting them out there. And we really support our writers. We want to support you!

As a writer who's trying to publish my own work, I just think indies are doing really great work. I would die to be published by an indie. They give such careful attention, consideration, and thoughtfulness to work, and I think most of us have spent literally almost decades, or more, of our lives on this work, so that's really, really important and necessary and beautiful.

I'm wondering if the evaluation activity differs. Do you have to have slightly different mindsets when you are working at these two different places?

Oh, yes. I love that we're talking about this right now, and all these different platforms and audiences, because it is all different.

For example, just as an individual in my life, I do developmental and copy editing for different writers privately. I work one-on-one with people. Right now, I have a client that's writing a memoir, and I'm helping with developmental edits and trying to get to a first draft. This writer has published before with big presses, and that's just the stage this particular project is at.

With the [Tom Howard/John H. Reid] contest, it is a lot more about what's already on the page, because we don't have the ability or the setup to go back and forth with the author to change anything. When I was a fiction editor at Five South, we did. I could choose pieces, and I could email the author, and famously did with E. P. Tuazon—an amazing Filipino American writer. We made a couple substantial tweaks to his story, and that became the title story of his collection, A Professional Lola, which won the Red Hen AWP Prize two years ago. I feel really proud of that editorial shepherding. I guess in that case, he was very open to it, and I think we both felt together that that story had found its true home, like it was already leaning there, and we just sort of helped guide it.

I think that's one of my editorial signposts or lighthouse, or whatever you want to say, where I really feel like the work is trying to tell you what it wants to be, and you have to be quiet and still, and listen, and try to see what's there, talk with the author, try to figure out where it's going, what it wants to be. Sometimes that process can be difficult, and sometimes it's hampered by where the craft abilities are for that particular artist.

But yeah, with Great Place Books, that's more like the [Tom Howard/John H. Reid] contest in the sense that [the book] has to be totally ready. I feel bad about it, actually. What it means is there's so much good stuff that is so, so close that I have to turn down, and that makes me feel bad, because I know what it's like to be on the other side of the table and have a novel that's getting these close rejections.

We do give feedback if it's a project that's so, so close like that. The co-founders of the press, Alex Higley and Emily Adrien, will give feedback, which is really amazing of them, because they're taking their own time for free to do that, and they're self-funding this whole company, which is incredible. They have a lot of experience in the indie world as well, and teaching, and they're just wonderful souls.

It is hard [for writers], because as a writer, when you submit, people just don't really have the time in the current publishing economy to edit or make changes. You have to really pay for that. So you're spending thousands of dollars to work with people you trust, and who have the tools to help you get what you want, just to get that finished, polished manuscript ready to go.

I get the sense that a lot of writers who are just starting out don't understand how extensive the editing and revision process truly is for a successful piece, and I know that you must see that in the story and essay contest. So I want to ask you as someone who's also an editor and who works with people to develop their writing all the time: do you ever feel conflicted when you see a contestant that has opportunities for improvement? And what is that like emotionally—as a judge, but also as an editor?

Oh yeah, it's just heartbreak all around. Sometimes it's, frustration, too, honestly, because sometimes it's like, "Oh, why did this person submit it? It's too early"!" if it's not formatted correctly, or if they haven't read the guidelines, or listened to [the guidelines]. And honestly, the person that that's hurting the most is the writer and the person who submitted it. If they had taken more time, like we were talking about earlier, it would have gotten there.

But then there's another part of me that's like, "This is just the process!" You've got to start submitting early on, and get used to it, and build up your thick skin, and get better. And it's okay. I think we've all been there, and it's no shame, no big deal.

One thing that really helps me as a submitter is having a pretty good, I guess you would say, "group text" of other writers who support me and who cheerlead for me. I can screenshot my rejections to them, and they're like, "Oh, you'll get it next time!" And I do the same for them. That support is really crucial, because it also helps you learn things. If somebody in my circle gets into Bread Loaf, I'm like, "Send me your app! I want to read it! Like, what did you do?" because I want to learn from that and see what was successful.

And even though my envy rears its ugly head if a friend wins a big prize or contest, or gets a publishing contract—there was a friend from Sewanee for whom I edited the very first draft of her book, and now it's coming out, which is really exciting. I want to see what has been done there, and where the book did get edited, and where it's changed, because that's useful for me to learn as well.

Annie, you were mentioning earlier that through your work, what you're so interested in is the middle: the pieces that aren't super early/just kind of first effort, and they're not on the other end, honorable mentions or finalists, or super polished, or even longlisted, but the stuff that's more in the middle. I would just say for me personally, that was just a really hard decade in my own work! I was workshopping a lot. I would write something that day and email it that day to three people, because that's just a period where you have to make a lot of growth.

I will say this like advice, I guess: Go get an MFA! Go sign up for every workshop or class you can, and just have that accountability, and read a lot in a structured way, where you're workshopping other people's stuff and getting your stuff workshopped. I think that's how you [get out of the phase] of, like, "Here I am sitting at my desk just hitting my head on the wall every day." If you're with other people, you can slingshot into the future.

We all have commitments outside of this work. We have paying jobs, right? We have full-time commitments. We have families. We have stuff we have to do. And so fitting in the creative work outside of that is very difficult. If you have a class or a residency or workshop, that can be a way to prioritize your work.

It's so wonderful that as an editor, a reader, and a writer, you can bring all these experiences to bear as a judge, and to have this really comprehensive, humane approach to judging.

That's what I really like about working with Winning Writers in general. It's a community where we're sort of similar-minded about that, and it is about being gentle. There's a lot of stuff in art that isn't gentle, and so I think I sort of gravitate toward that. I guess it is a personal value, personal philosophy. Why be mean when you can be kind?

I also really like the way that you're talking about different things that authors can do to cope with the pressures of writing in their own daily lives.

Just in case it is difficult for anyone else, I think I'm definitely a poster child for trying to take care of yourself, because it's such a long game. How do you really stay in it for the long game and protect yourself? Because at least for me, it's not something I'm going to do once, or in my twenties, and then abandon.

So now, as a mom, as a parent, as someone who has to pay the mortgage and taxes, I do have to really be careful about how I think about my life, and how I have this practice that's so important to me. How do I fit it in in a way that's meaningful and lasting, and that isn't going to burn me out, and that I can do until I'm hopefully a hundred?

I was just wondering if you have any parting insights for writers who might be in the process of preparing their entries for Tom Howard/John H. Reid right now.

Do your research. Find someone whose work you love, where you think that their work can help your work. Do the work, get the draft, and then have your trusted readers that won't lie to you read it. And depending on what they come back with, you may need to go back to a drawing board again.

Before we go, your publisher, Great Place Books, is open for submissions, right?

We are, we are, yes. Go to greatplacebooks.com. Check out our website. You can submit. I can't promise that we'll take it, since we take very few titles per year, and we're also looking into the future now, but we will definitely read it.

Thank you so much. And the link for Great Place Books is going to be in the video description. Mina, it's been such a pleasure and so enriching to talk to you. I really appreciate the time that you took.

Thank you for having me.

What makes a winning humor poem? An interview with Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest judge Lauren Singer

As assistant judge of the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, poet Lauren Singer reads thousands of humor poems a year. I asked her what she finds funny and learned that tacos can lead to healing, grief can lead to humor, and if we want to make Lauren laugh, it helps to take one step further into the muck of our own lives.

Watch the entire interview with Lauren on YouTube or read the transcript below.

ANNIE: Hello, and welcome to my blog. Today we have a very special guest, Lauren Singer, the assistant judge of our Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. Lauren is also a judge of our North Street Book Prize and she's a past judge of our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. She's had work published in many magazines and journals, she's a former Honorable Mention winner of our Wergle Flomp contest in 2011, and her book-length poetry manuscript, Raised Ranch, will be published by Game Over Books in August of 2025. Lauren, thank you so much for being here. Welcome.

LAUREN: Thank you for having me.

First of all, a lot of us are curious about just the experience of being a humor poetry contest judge. I mean, poetry contest is unique enough, but a humor poetry contest? You must see a lot of interesting things.

You know, what makes some something funny has to be about the voice of the writer, because anything can be funny. I mean, you can write about the most serious components of your life and turn them into funny, and I think that the way we do that is by zooming in on the specific and making that relatable.

I think for me, funny is a humanistic quality, because there's so much darkness in our world, and, laughter being medicine, which I believe is a real thing, we have to find ways to relate to each other. For me, that's making something really absurd, really dark, really grievous. Something that we can laugh at, because it is a connector. It's like connective tissue.

There are obviously some entries, several hundred per year, that really are delightful and that you end up choosing. So which really delight you, and how do you know when you're really delighted by a poem?

It's slice-of-life stuff that really gets me. It's like zooming in on something that is mundane, or that we encounter on an everyday basis, and making it ours. You know, like sharing it in this way that is personal, and ridiculous, and touching. The poems that I find the funniest are also the ones that like, pull on my heartstrings a little bit, and that's sort of like a magic-potion-sort-of equation for me.

Two of my favorites this year were actually about the very specific experience of pulling over to the side of the road having to pee, and being caught in the act of that by someone, in one case I think the police. And then in another, having to do it in front of your family because there's no other option. I think it was from the perspective of someone very like poised and curt. And it's those sorts of things, the things that we encounter on an everyday basis, that all of us can relate to, and most of us don't think to write a poem about. Those are the things that I think really stick out to me.

There are a couple of those this year on the winning entries page, like "I'd Like to Donate It to the Library," about a woman who's just donating a lot of random stuff to the library. I definitely recommend that people read that. There's a poem in the Honorable Mentions called "I'm Living Laughing and Loving."

Oh my god, there was one this year, I think it was about having a really harsh internal critic, and this writer made a reference to the Nicholas Cage remake of Wicker Man, and then just wrote in there somewhere, "Not the bees." And I laughed so hard because it's those little Easter eggs that I love. It's like the poet is saying, "You have to dig deep into the thing that I'm referencing here, and you also have to know that it's funny without me telling you." That's another big trope, that people are constantly submitting poems about why they're funny, and telling us, and trying to convince us that they're funny, when someone else is subtly just speaking to their own life experience, or speaking to something observational.

I also really love observational narrative poems. That always gets me, where we don't have to do any work of being convinced, we're just sharing in an observation with someone, and that's all.

A really good humor poet kind of knows what their audience is going to find funny, and also knows whether the audience has the references or not and is able to just go directly into that super specific territory, just like two friends who are saying this goofy line together that they've been saying for the past twenty years that doesn't make sense to anybody else. It's that sense of intimacy and trust. It's automatic.

Absolutely. I think there is. And that's what I love about poems like that, is that there is an implicit sense of trust that is not there with those other poems that are like, "Hey, I need you to know that what you're about to read is going to be really funny! In fact, this whole poem is about why I am!" Versus this very sort of niche trope that is in the internal fabric of this chaotic world that we're all weaving together.

And one thing I want to say about that specifically is that I'm—as much as we try to not be biased, I'm a person in the world and I have my own biases. I think I was twenty-three when I submitted to Wergle Flomp, and I started judging when I was in my mid-twenties. And the poems that were my favorites back then have certainly changed over the course of a decade. I think I would veer towards poems about online dating, which there's always tons of, or being really broke and not being able to afford your rent, which like, I can still relate to, but it's a little different these days.

And then the ones that I'm relating to more now are [different.] I used to just completely glaze over any "my body is changing because I'm aging" kind of poems. I still don't love those, because there's a lot of, I want to say, like, harshness and ugliness in those poems, but the poems that really embrace aging, embrace, like coming to terms with the seasons of your life, those I tend to love.

One of my favorites this year, I forget what it was called, but it was something similar to that book, A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, but it was a mid-to-late-thirties guide to bird watching. It was about this new experience of being in your mid-to-late-thirties and really appreciating birds in a way that you never had before, and you're like, "Ah, like suddenly, I can suddenly hear their call and know who's speaking to me! And I really want a crow to leave me a shiny bauble!" I'm like, I feel that so hard.

It's like those sort of, yeah, those inside jokes that I think I'm going to relate to in a different way a much younger reader is going to relate to, or Jendi might relate to, being a bit older than me. So it's subjective, also, the experience of judging.

Yes, and this is why we have the poetry archives on Winning Writers. Not just the poetry archives, but all the winning entries from all of our past contests are still published and visible on winningwriters.com. And we have bios of the judges, we're very transparent about who the judges are and what they do. Contestants can read all the entries that you guys have selected in the past, but they can also go and read your stuff if they want, to know what you're into, the kind of stuff that really makes you laugh or cry.

I always say this in every interview with everybody, but a message to the potential entrants is, just do your research. [Entering a literary contest doesn't have to be] a shot in the dark. You really have an opportunity to kind of know the judges, and get specific with the judges, and have those inside joke moments, even if you've never met. So think about who you're writing for. And I hope this interview also will help people to just get a better sense of that.

I'm always like, "Butter me up! Appeal to me!" Like send me some X-Files poetry or whatever! If you can find an encounter with everyday life, and make that funny, that's going to strike me every time.

A lot of people who submit poems are probably talking about a lot of the same things. Do you find that to be true?

Yes, yes. The zeitgeist is very much about what's going on in the world, and that thematically enters in every single year. So election cycles tend to give us an overpowering amount of political poems. Covid was a dark landscape of people on all sides of the spectrum, of their thoughts and beliefs about Covid.

It was about Covid, but it was also about people tending to write about the same stuff that we also tend to see everywhere in social media. Like toilet paper, for example, was a huge subject.

Toilet paper, the bodily functions in the lower half of the body.

Well, I mean, we like a good fart, we like diarrhea in Wergle Flomp. We're not against those things, but in the Covid context it got a bit repetitive.

And I tire of the coprophilic poems after a while, where I'm just like, how much more can I read about someone's gastric issues? I lose steam.

Yeah, if there's no original angle, it's a bit difficult. Or with the political stuff, the two candidates that people have been focusing on—the age, the orangeness of one of the candidates, you see that all the time [in the entries].

So I actually included that in my Wergle notes that I wrote this year. I banned any more poems that included "rhymes with orange," and so much of that was in reference to one of these candidates. Also the word "orange" in poems at this point, unless we're talking like, the actual, like peeling of an orange.

To your very good list I would also add social media tropes, just the stuff that's hot on social media, the different hashtags and stuff. That stuff can be current, but if it's too in the public eye, it kind of loses the novelty.

The political horizon is a huge one, like major news events. Oh, and so much AI this year. So much AI, so much ChatGPT came into the poems. I think people write a lot about aging, and marriage, and child-rearing and raising. And thematically I think we get thousands of poems about things people hate about their bodies, things people want to change about their spouses. Those tend to kind of blur together because they're so en masse.

There are a lot of entries about coffee. There are a lot of entries that start out as a love poem, and the person rhapsodizes on a subject, and then at the end it gets revealed that it's coffee, or "my car," or "my dog," or something like that.

At this point I completely just glaze over certain kinds of parodies. There are so many, "It was the night before something," and the same is true for the parodies of Robert Frost, and "with apologies to…" etc., etc. You have to really win me over for me to give that a second glance.

I think a lot of entrants also confuse humor with other good feelings, so there are a lot of poems we get, for example, love poetry, and some of it's ambiguous whether it's a humor poem or not. People are enumerating the things they like about another person and how they make them feel, and it's definitely light-hearted, it's definitely kind and nice and pleasant, but is it humor poetry? What do you think about when you see entries like that?

It's funny, because I think that we get a lot of parodies of that poem "What I'm made of," like the recipe for "what makes me, me," basically, and I never know if those are intentionally supposed to be funny. Sometimes there's a punchline and it's very obvious that they are; other times it's like you said, it's just this sort of description of love and joy, and I want to be like, "That's really great, I love that you love these things. Now tell me how I can relate to that in a way that is going to make me laugh."

In some ways I think people just want to kind of share the abundance of the things that they love, and I think that there is light-heartedness. I never get mad at those poems…but it loses the plot a little bit when there isn't an invitation to poke fun. The ones that work are these really zoomed in niche descriptions of something that you love really deeply that someone else might not.

This is a silly one, but there were like lots of like odes to… what are those robo vacuums called?

Roomba!

Right. Every so often I would encounter one that really made me laugh, because [the robot] was personified by these characteristics that someone might want in a partner or pet. It's this description of something that's like super helpful and everyday basic and still inviting us in, to be like, "Have you ever fallen in love with a vacuum? Even just a little bit?" And it's like, yeah, I have. That's the part where I want to relate to that, and be like, yes, that's awkward.

Like you say, it's all about the context. Maybe a person is describing themselves in this poem like "What am I made of," and maybe to them it's hysterical because it's the opposite of who they actually are, so they're writing it laughing, like, "Haha, you know, this is really ironic" or something. But there's no way for you as a judge to know that, because it's not written down on the page.

So I would add for people, along with "Do the research on the judges" also remember, all they can see of you is the words that you put on the page. So if you're writing a poem about spiritual enlightenment or you're writing a poem just describing something you really like, and you are thinking to yourself, oh this is great, this is so funny, remember: If it depends on context that's still inside your head or heart to be funny, Lauren and Jendi can't see it, and they don't know. So remember to leave that context on the page.

I would say the same is true when you're inciting all of this joy into your poem, the same is also true for like really disturbing commentary. You know, every so often we get a poem that's clearly supposed to be funny, but it's describing like a murder or something really, really gruesome. And there have been some amazing poems about end of life and chronic illness and cancer, and things like that, and that is not what I mean here. I mean very specifically like a violent scenario that is supposed to be hilarious. That's never going to get me. Like, that's never—I'm never going to find that funny. There's just no world in which you describing murdering your ex is going to make me laugh, just across the board.

I was going to bring up that exact topic, because we do get a certain number of poems each year that are violent. Revenge fantasies, abuse fantasies, like doing like any kind of abuse, physical abuse, on other people. You were kind of getting in this direction earlier, when you were talking about the body image poems, because there can be these very ugly things creeping into these poems, like this self-hatred. And desire for revenge—you know, not a desire for revenge as in, "Oh, the person who wants revenge is so ridiculous" kind of idea, it's really this hate-driven desire for revenge that this person wants to enact on the page.

My assistants and I, we go through a lot of these, and we write an email to every single person who submits a humor poem to the contest when we think this is a serious poem and not a humor poem. And you would be shocked at the number of times that we get emails back when we've contacted someone who's written a very, very serious or disturbing poem, and they say, "This is funny! How could you not think this is funny?" and I never know how to take that. How does it make you feel that people across the world are entering a humor poetry contest with some very, very dark and serious stuff?

I'm of two minds about this. My one thought that I used to think was true across the board, was that because we are an international contest and because we are a free contest, that sometimes people just miss the mark and they don't read the instructions, and they're like, "Oh, free contest! It's so rare that we have a free contest! I'm just going to submit." And you know, either "I don't know that this is supposed to be a humor contest," or "I don't care and I'm banking on the fact that this is good and should be shared, and I want to just put it somewhere."

I think that there are certainly hundreds of people who do that, right, they just don't read the instructions. And I also think that there are probably lots and lots of people who know that their poem is going to be read regardless, and just need to share with someone.

Jendi and I have talked about this [and wondered whether there might be a way] to reach out and say, like, "Hey," especially for the ones that were really poignant and good, and say, "There's a reader for this somewhere. It's not this contest, but we want you to keep doing this." There were so many times that I wanted to reach out with support, and be like, "This isn't the place to put this, but there is a place to put this." And also, there are certainly the ones that are super dark and painful, but also have overt humor, and those tend to be some of my favorites.

Yes, It's such a fine line, because it is all about the specificity. And one of the reasons that humans invented humor in the first place, everyone knows, is because we need to escape from these really crazy and dark situations that we find ourselves in our lives. Humor is in reaction to pain and grief and loss and horror. Humor bubbles up in the human spirit. But when only the dark parts of the situation are getting in [to the poem], it's maybe not quite to that point where humor can be found in that situation, in the poem.

You're a poet and a lot of your poetry is also informed by grief and loss and some very, very dark and very, very human things. But whenever I read your poetry, like on your Instagram account, I have noticed that they also have a lot of humor in them. I always find myself with these really complex and rewarding emotions when I read your work, because as a poet you do the leg work to find all these different angles of the situation and bring them together in very specific and immersive language. So how do you do that, and, in your opinion as a poet and a judge, how can sadness and humor coexist in poetry?

It's such a good question, and it's a two-part question, so I'll start with the personal and then I'll relate it to judging in the second half. I feel grateful that as a trauma survivor of a diverse spectrum, I have always had writing as an outlet. There has never been a time in my life that I didn't have a notebook and access to this sort of imagined world that I could just jump right into and make mine. So I feel like that has been such a precious gift and necessity of my life for survival.

And then as I got a little bit older, encountering things like having a chronically sick parent, and then divorce, and a sister who passed away, there was so much meat. And I was like, "I can't keep writing about all of this darkness and not accessing the humor in it."

As a little kid, I realized that if I'm going to be more palatable, I need to be pleasing. And the easiest access to that when you're like a traumatized little kid is to be funny. And so that sort of came naturally. I was like, "If I just talk about how bummed out I am all the time, and how, you know, sad my life is, no one's gonna want to hang out with me." But if I'm like, "You know, hey, I'm really bummed out, and also aren't we all kind of bummed out, and don't we all need to relate to that in some capacity?" That is how I have sort of fused my connection to people, and also how I have become a writer.

I had a mentor in my late teens/early twenties, a sociologist named Philip Mabry, who was one of my professors and my adviser in school. He really kind of recognized that in me, and he introduced me to the comedy of Margaret Cho in my late teens. He said, "This is someone who has learned how to make the abject upright." The really wonderful comedians in our world are the ones who are not necessarily poking fun at everyone else, they're reaching into their own trauma and their own sadness and their own gifts, and then they're just pulling them out, and being like, "Here they are, do you see them? All right, now I want you to laugh at them."

It's inviting, it's like an invitation to be like, "Here is all of the muck and the mess of who I am, and this is why it's okay to laugh at it," as opposed to someone, you know, singling you out and directing all of their anger at you without the invitation, which we all know, you know, is something that can be true.

In my own writing of my recent past, it's a lot of reflections after the loss of my son in 2021. That was such a tremendous loss for me that I was like, "Oh, this is it, this is the end of being funny. There's no more humor left in my world, it's over." And of course, I think anyone would think about that being true for them after they went through something really significant.

But I had this sort of an aha moment one day, I think maybe six months after my loss. I was going to a drive-up, a Taco Bell, and I was ordering like five soft tacos for myself. I realized that like five soft tacos is like too many tacos for one person on a normal basis, and I panicked. This was not a funny moment. I want to just say, this was a sad time where I was like, "I'm just gonna like eat tacos and cry and not think about my life." But in that moment I like, picked up the phone and pretended that I was on the phone with someone that I wasn't. There was no one on the phone. And meanwhile, like, my child just died, I'm newly divorced, all of these things are happening, and I'm just like, "Hi honey, oh yeah, I got—I ordered you your—you want the chicken to go, right? Yeah, okay, I'll see you later."

Then I'm leaving the parking lot and I'm just like, "That's hilarious." That encounter with the deepest darkest well of my grief and the fact that I just pretended to be ordering tacos for a partner that does not exist in this moment because I was too embarrassed to let the person on the other side of the drive-through speaker know that I'm going to go home and binge eat tacos and cry in my beans—I was like, okay, I can write funny poems again, I can infuse those two things. And that became a poem in the upcoming book called "Taco Tuesday."

If I don't find a way to remedy some of those dark edges with some humor then there's like nothing left. So it took some time to be funny again, but I think that there is humor in the darkest, darkest things, and that is survival, I think, for me, and, I think, for a lot of people who write or make art of any kind.

So it sounds like for you there's an intrinsic relationship between sadness and humor. But I also am hearing something that is very important, I think, for a lot of our entrants to know, which is that part when you were talking about from an early age you realized that you had to be palatable. Of course, as a trauma survivor or anybody in any kind of minority or minoritized situation, being palatable can be a very loaded and also traumatized thing, but in the comment that you made I just feel this very poet-esque regard for the reader. And for you even at that young age the reader was already there. You realized it's not just about you and your experiences in your art.

In life we all are living through our experiences and our experience is just for us, more than anybody else. But when you take the step to write poetry or any kind of art and show it to other people, it's always including that other person. When we see a lot of these entries that are about those other positive experiences, like you know, love, or spiritual enlightenment, or seeking, or when we see those really, really serious poems, I get a sense that a lot of these poems are written to help people process their own experiences, but they're not necessarily written with that other person in mind, that other person on the end, whether it be the judge or another intended reader.

Absolutely, and I think there's a difference between your journal and the poem that you want read. My journal is very, very different than the poetry that I share on social media or I try to submit for publication. I think there's a question that you have to ask yourself between, and that's like, "Do I want this to be read or not? Do I want people to share in this experience?" And I think that's where the sort of palatability comes from, because I think even as a little kid I was like, "I want, you know, people at school to like me," right, so like my persona at school is going to be different than the introspective little kid at home who's writing in their diary right trying to be Harriet the Spy.

I don't think that we owe it to anyone to be palatable in our subjective experiences, that is entirely ours. But when we're making art to be shared, I think we have to ask ourselves, like, "How do we want to hit our reader or our observer?" And you know, contextually, that could be in a multitude of ways, and being palatable can mean many different things, but I think in a humor poetry contest it's that fusion of human subjective experience and poignancy with that objective experience of like, "Other people can observe this and relate to it and laugh at it with me."

Again, it's an invitation into this inner world that I want to share with you, not that you're walking in on and I have to explain myself. That doesn't strike chords, generally. That tends to feel like, "Oh, sorry, sorry that I walked in on that," versus "Oh my God, me too! I've also been caught in that place!"

Going back to the theme of your poetry for a second, you're a Wergle veteran, because you had this hilarious poem called "Regarding Eggplant" in 2011. I urge all the viewers to read that poem, and I'm going to link to it in the description of this video so you'll be able to read it. But I also just want to ask, like, as kind of a case study of a successful Wergle Flomp poem: Where did you get your inspiration? What was your process writing that?

Again, it came from a dark place. I had just been broken up with. I was twenty-three when I wrote that poem, so I was really young, and I was also freshly out of a job. There was just so much happening in my life that was very synonymous with being, like, a twenty-three-year-old person in the world and fending for themselves for the first time, really.

That poem didn't just sort of appear out of nowhere, it came from a lot of different things. It came from, you know, going to the grocery store and feeling like, "Okay, well, I'm, you know, I'm single, and I have no job, and I have nothing to do with myself, like, I should treat myself to something really nice," and then like looking at the produce, and like feeling more sad, being like, "I don't know how to cook, I don't know how to, like, I don't know to take care of myself, like, what am I supposed to do here?"

That sort of evolved because a friend came to visit me and he brought me eggplants from his garden, and one of the eggplants had a nose. Like, it had like, you know, the top of the eggplant, which like looked like a little hat, and it had this growth defect which looked like a nose. And I was like, "I'm never gonna to be able to cut this eggplant, I'm never gonna be able to cook it, it's just gonna like, have to rot on my counter, because I like, I've named him, and I love him, and there's no world in which I can imagine, you know burning him alive."

So it evolved from that place, dumped, jobless, eggplant, like being completely out of my mind with what it means to be a grown-up and take care of myself. It's like my coming of age. I think it happened all in that poem.

I just love the story, I love the poem, and I hope that everybody will go read it.

If you read that poem, read the book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, because that's where I was in my life, and I never knew that book existed until I wrote that poem and people started giving it to me. It was such a perfect compliment.

We have to be wrapping up, but before we do, do you have any advice for the entrants who are now preparing poetry for the contest this year?

I think that there is something to be said about appealing to the zeitgeist and what's going on in the world. We all experience the objectivity of being a person in the world that's consumed by social media and things being pummeled at us from all angles, and so many of the poems that we get are about that. But they're not about the version of us in those moments. There are a lot of generalizations. If you just take that one step further and write about how that impacted you, or how something in your life changed, I think there's a lot of richness.

Just as an example, algorithms. A lot of people wrote very generally about algorithms, and it inspired me, reading all of these poems, to write about algorithms, but the very specific things that the internet was trying to appeal to me. So I got tons of advertisements for Bog Witch t-shirts and like, a bog witch, being like, this like lowly spinster in her garden making potions. And I'm just like, "Oh the internet knows my name!" I got all of these Fleetwood Mac advertisements. Clearly, the internet thinks that I am a spinster witch alone in my house. Like, it's not wrong, right?

I didn't see a lot of those deeply personalized poems about, like, "What like is the internet advertising to you personally," as opposed to, "I'm so tired of going online and all the algorithms." We all go through that, so what is it about your life that resonates with that experience? And why are you frustrated? Because if you go one step deeper into that swamp, we're all gonna laugh at it with you. Take one step further into the muck of your own life and find something that resonates, that is very specific to you, but something that all of us can relate to. And that is true of formal poetry, of rhyming poetry, of limericks, you know, like, we get them all, and there's room for all of it.

Viewers take note: Take one step further into the muck of your life! Well, thank you so much, Lauren. It's been an absolute pleasure to be talking with you. I'm so happy that we have all these amazing concrete pieces of advice from the reader who really, really matters—that is, the judge of the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest.

Thank you so much for having me! It's a pleasure to see you and to talk to our Werglers, because we don't get an opportunity to do that enough.

“That’s Not How I Remember It”: Creative Nonfiction and the Art of Dealing with Doubters

In this essay at The Review Review, creative nonfiction writer Megan Galbraith discusses the unavoidably subjective and emotional nature of memory, and the delicate balance between preserving family ties and telling your truth.

Advice from Arthur Powers, Judge of the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest

As a past judge of the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest, I've been asked to provide some advice for contestants. I'm half-reluctant to do so as I don't really want to influence anyone's short story. Your story is your story, and you should write it the way you feel called to write it.

However, it's fair that you should know something about the way I think, so here goes:

Fiction

I love short stories. Writing them and reading them. I believe the short story allows a writer's craft to be honed in a special way, and I enjoy seeing the different ways that different writers approach their stories.

All the rules you have ever learned about writing are important. You should know them, master them, then work around them. People will tell you it is important to show, not tell; they are right—yet sometimes you should tell, not show. People will discuss whether to write in first or third person, from a specific or more omniscient viewpoint—all this is interesting but, in my experience, it is the story that tells the writer what viewpoint to write from, not the writer who tells the story. People (including me) will tell you never to write in the second person—yet I once wrote an entire novella in the second person and it worked (won an award and was published).

In his wonderful novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok says much the same thing about painting: "This is a tradition...Only one who has mastered a tradition has the right to add to it or to rebel against it."

I tell my students that character is the most important element in fiction. You should know and love your characters. Plot is what happens when characters interact with one another or situations. This is true not only of psychological and literary stories, but of science fiction, thrillers, westerns, even mysteries (where the temptation to distort characters to fit the plot is particularly strong).

Atmosphere may also be important to a story—the way a place, a situation, and the story itself feel. Texture may be created through a few key phrases, through the words you choose.

Walter Pater said that all art strives toward music, and there is a great deal of truth in that. The rhythm of a story—pacing, timing, speed—is very important. I find it sometimes helps to think of my stories in terms of musical composition.

Avoid cliches—not only in words, but in thoughts. Try not to be too self-absorbed—take your craft seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously.

Essays

I do not want to overly influence any writer—it is the individuality of your work that makes it interesting. But here are qualities I am looking for in essays:

Have something to say.
Say it in a way that makes readers see differently or understand differently—that provides a new angle or a new insight, without necessarily doing acrobatics to try to be different.
Say it with style—a style that has texture, that readers can savor.
Make it memorable—words, phrases, thoughts, images that will stay in readers' minds for days—perhaps years—that will give them something to ponder.
Develop it beautifully (whether the subject is beautiful or not)—with a quality that carries readers along with you, whether elegantly or on a bumpy (but meaningful) road.

May you break any of these guidelines? Of course. Surprises are always welcome. Write what you feel called to write the best you can. Enjoy writing—I'll enjoy reading it. Good fortune!

Advice from the Judge of the War Poetry Contest

Jendi Reiter judged the War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers from 2002-2011 (the contest is currently inactive). She shares her advice on reading thousands of war poems.

American Life in Poetry

Weekly column by former US poet laureate Ted Kooser presents contemporary American poems and a short discussion of the techniques that make them effective. This series is designed to be reprinted for free by newspapers and online periodicals (with attribution), in order to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. You may also sign up for free weekly emails. Sponsored by The Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress.

Amorak Huey on Writing Funny

In this essay on the blog of Sundress Publications, an innovative small press, poet and writing teacher Amorak Huey surveys the work of some contemporary poets who use humor effectively, and reflects on the overlap between these genres. "Humor and poetry both rely on verbal surprise, the pairing of the unexpected. Humor in poetry works best when it's juxtaposed against some other mode: anger, insight, sadness, tenderness. Poetry happens when a poet presses up against the limits of language when it comes to capturing the human condition. Poetry is utterance, is act, is disruption, is the reaching for that which is understood but previously unarticulated. Humor is these things as well...Humor, like poetry, is how we cope with the fact of our aloneness in this world."

An ABC of Translating Poetry, an essay by Willis Barnstone

Master poet Willis Barnstone explores the act of translation, "a friendship between poets...a mystical union between them based on love and art. As in ordinary religious mysticism, the problem of ineffability exists: how do you find words to say the unsayable?" Barnstone singles out for praise the translations of Mary Herbert, Hölderlin, Pasternak, Rilke, Valéry, Lowell, Moore, Pound, Quasimodo, and Bishop.

An Honest Answer by Ginger Andrews, reviewed by Dr. Joseph S. Salemi

Poet and classical scholar Joseph Salemi (see bio and poems) probes the limitations of contemporary free- verse confessional poetry.

Anatomy of a Poetry Contest

See how a judge weighs poems in this essay by Virgil Suarez. Mr. Suarez, an accomplished poet in his own right, has judged over a dozen contests. "It keeps me in touch with the poetry that is being written at the moment.... Nothing better to keep the blood pumping."

Art Has an Effect (Make Sure It’s the Effect You Want)

In this blog post from 2018, May Peterson (a/k/a M.A. Peterson), a romance and fantasy novelist and fiction editor, explains that an important goal of "sensitivity reader" edits is to remove inadvertently offensive details that don't advance the vision of the story. All character description is selective, so authors should be glad to prune away careless errors that could dilute readers' connection with the book.

Austin Kleon’s Writing Newsletter

Writer and illustrator Austin Kleon is the bestselling author of the creativity guide Steal Like an Artist and other books. His free weekly e-newsletter (archived on his website) features 10 links to writing, art, and other media that he finds worthwhile and relevant to the moment. An example of Kleon's playful, down-to-earth writing advice: "When I am beginning a new project, I often ask myself, 'What's something you despise in the culture that you wish were otherwise?' and I go from there."

Autistic Representation and Real-Life Consequences

Disability in Kidlit is a multi-author blog that reviews portrayals of disability in books for children and young adults. In this 2015 essay, speculative fiction author Elizabeth Bartmess surveys common stereotypes and limiting depictions of autistic children in fiction, and how they contribute to mistreatment in the real world. This piece is a must-read for fiction writers in all genres who are developing a neurodiverse cast of characters.

Bad Poets, a short essay by Randall Jarrell

Mr. Jarrell (1914-1965) was a leading American poet and critic. These are his blunt yet compassionate reflections on judging badly written poetry.

Book Review Directory

Launched in 2015, the Book Review Directory is a growing list of bloggers who review books in various fiction and nonfiction genres. The site has three goals: to match authors with reviewers, to raise the profile of book review blogs, and to help readers find new books in their areas of interest.

Boston Comment

Hard-hitting essays on the state of contemporary poetry, by poet and critic Joan Houlihan. Among her targets: incoherent experimental poetry, free verse that sounds like prose, and famous names who are past their prime. She is also founding director of the Concord Poetry Center which offers conferences and workshops in Massachusetts.

Can Poetry Matter? an essay by Dana Gioia

Poetry is imprisoned in the cozy cells of academia and specialty publishers. Most people are oblivious to it. "The traditional machinery of transmission - the reliable reviewing, honest criticism, and selective anthologies - has broken down." It's time to unleash great poems again on the public. Here's how. Reprinted from The Atlantic Monthly.

Classism in Literature

Managing Editor Annie Mydla consults North Street Book Prize judge Ellen LaFleche on classist tropes we commonly see in contest entries, why they're harmful, and what to do about it.

Interested in social justice in writing? See also the previous post on Exploitation Versus Representation.

When it comes to troubled representation in literature, classism is a top offender—and can be among the hardest to self-edit for. Class-discriminatory ideas are entrenched in our society and in our writing. Consider the following real-life examples from entries we've received:

The introduction of a book written during the COVID-19 pandemic takes for granted that "we were all stuck at home", disregarding the experience of millions of lower-income people with front-line jobs who didn't have the luxury of working remotely.

A book about a modern-day, early-career college professor depicts him owning a home outright and having the income and job security to take a lengthy trip around the world without a second thought, counter to the precariousness of academic work today.

The speaker of a poetry collection is a wealthy, middle-class man who quits his prestigious job to live in a mountain hut. The poems depict the speaker's decision as morally superior, but do not mention or explore the class dimension: the speaker is able to do this thanks to his wealth.

In all three cases, the problem lay not with the story or characters themselves, but with the unspoken assumptions about class that collapsed our sense of the book's authority. Each of these books would have been significantly stronger had class been brought into the open as an underlying condition, and its implications explored wherever they touched the plot and themes.

North Street Book Prize judge Ellen LaFleche has long been outspoken against classism in her book evaluations. In preparation for this blog post, I asked for her thoughts. Here are some of the classist assumptions Ellen has noticed most frequently in North Street entries, together with her commentary.

A low-income character can't bootstrap their way out of poverty, and the narrative shows that it's because they're too "stupid" or "lazy"

"It's really important to talk about/ask about an aspect of classism that is rarely acknowledged: the myth that someone is a failure or lazy or stupid if they can't bootstrap their way out of the working class. No matter how hard people try to bootstrap, the country still needs people to work at numerous low-paying jobs: short-order cooks, farmers, housecleaners, meatpackers, school bus drivers, etc. Meatpackers were among the hardest hit early in the COVID epidemic, but I haven't seen analysis of this very important story that includes a discussion of classism."

Education is depicted as an automatic solution for a character's poverty

"It's assumed that education is crucial to bootstrapping, but working-class people face huge obstacles with fewer educational resources. As a personal example, I worked full time while going to high school. Literally full time. 40+ hours per week. I had little time to study or do homework. I was always exhausted at school. I got home around 10:30 every night, and had to decide whether to sleep, do homework, or take a shower to wash off the restaurant smells that permeated my hair. I got by on 'coffee and anxiety'. The anxiety persists to this day and has led to serious health problems.

"The elite colleges are priced out of range for the working class. Predatory student loans have held back Gen X and Millennials, even those from middle-class backgrounds. Many Millennials have been priced out of owning a house, yet they get lambasted for buying a Starbucks coffee. And while Biden has been working to relieve these predatory loans, his efforts have been met with huge amounts of anger and controversy.

"Add in racism, sexism, ageism, and so on. All of which make bootstrapping that much harder."

Class mobility is as possible now as it was in mid-1900s America

"It's getting progressively harder to bootstrap in America. Think soaring rents, single parents working two jobs, and so on. The richer neighborhoods/states often have better schools, better health care, better nutrition, etc. Not to mention: access to generational wealth through inheritance. For many poor people, the death of a parent means spending money (cremation services, etc.) rather than inheriting it."

The protagonist encounters characters low-income characters and considers that their class status is their fault

"Working-class people suffer from the myth that the oppression they face is their own darn fault. I've been thinking about how my late husband worked most of his 40-year career as a gerontologist. Ageism is everywhere, and it's ferocious, but nobody ever walked up to an old person and blamed them for being 78. Who can help when they were born? Yet, working-class people are blamed and shamed: they didn't try hard enough, they weren't smart enough, they took drugs, etc.

"This blame is so deeply entrenched in all of us that it's often hard to see classism in a book even if I'm looking for it. One trope that is obvious is portraying working-class people with no teeth, living in trailer parks, and drinking beer on the stoop."

As Ellen's comments show, it can be hard to identify classism in books due to its cultural prevalence. But the benefits of resisting these tropes are significant. Authority, narrative depth, and relatability all blossom when stereotypes are challenged. So what can we do to identify and resist classism in our own work?

1. Keep an eye out for classism in other authors' work. Ellen shares her experience with J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: "I was eager to read the book because of its focus on Appalachian poverty. I bought a copy at a secondhand bookstore. After reading about 50 pages, I had a strong urge to toss it in a dumpster. All the classist tropes are there. I was astonished but not surprised when he became the Republican nominee for Vice President. If you want to brush up on your skills at spotting classism in a book, Hillbilly Elegy is the perfect 'textbook' to do so. Hint: look for generational poverty being blamed on laziness and drug addiction—as if wealthy people are never lazy or high on drugs!"

2. Become familiar with the tropes. Tvtropes.com has extensive indexes of tropes relating to poverty, wealth, occupations, and class relations. Googling "class tropes" leads to many hits, too. You might be surprised how fun it can be to learn about tropes. Since I learned about tvtropes.com, "trope-scrolling" has become one of my top sources of edutainment.

3. For fantasy and sci-fi writers: Double-check your worldbuilding. Imaginary realms can sometimes be an outlet for classist assumptions that would be more easily identifiable in realistic settings. This article from Mythcreants has useful examples from popular entertainment: Five Signs Your Story Is Classist.

4. Ask how your character would feel if they read your work. If part of your plot or character depiction focuses on class or income, imagine yourself in their shoes. What assumptions did the text make? What could it be saying instead?

5. For older authors: Investigate your own assumptions about what life is like in the year of your story, especially if it's set in the present day. Some older authors grew up in environments that were more economically stable and might not have fully taken on board how times have changed (this turned out to be the case in the example about the college professor, above). If you're an older author writing about the world of the 2020s, it might be a good idea to do some research to find out whether the economic conditions you're giving your characters are realistic.

6. Look for intersections with other forms of literary exploitation. Classism often goes hand-in-hand with racism, sexism, ableism, and body-shaming. Examples from past contest entries include mocking working-class women for wearing cheap clothing and bold cosmetics; or depicting a character eating fast food as shorthand for being unrefined and uneducated.

If you find an exploitative trope, sniff around and you might find classism lurking close by.

Comstock Review: The Poet’s Handbook

Detailed guidance for poets from the Comstock Writers' Group. Make your poetry submissions look professional. See poetry as an editor sees it. All poets should read this before actively submitting to contests and journals.

Craft Capsule: The End

In this installment in the Craft Capsules essay series at Poets & Writers, Cameron Awkward-Rich, a Lambda Literary Award poetry finalist and professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, talks about his revision process. Any elements of the poem that he can re-create from memory are essential, he has found. "What I like about using memorization as a diagnostic is that it says nothing about the “quality” of a poem, so it discourages thinking about revision as 'fixing.' Instead, what determines whether a poem is finished is the relationship between us, the poem and I."

Cultural Appropriation for the Worried Writer

Jeannette Ng is a medieval studies scholar and author of the British Fantasy Award winning novel Under the Pendulum Sun. In this article for Medium, she discusses how to write responsibly outside your demographic. Some tips: stop looking for fail-safe rules, think critically about your motives and sources, and compensate the people who are teaching you about other cultures.

Daily s-Press

Dorothee Lang, editor of BluePrintReview, an English-language online literary journal based in Germany, began this blog in March 2010 to review new books of poetry and prose from small independent presses. The site looks beyond the usual university press prizewinners to showcase innovative writers and publishers.

David Biespiel: Follow Your Strengths, Manage Your Weaknesses

In this essay for the online journal The Rumpus, widely published poet and teacher David Biespiel makes a good case for playing to one's strengths as a writer and spending less time fixing weaknesses. The troubleshooting emphasis of most writing workshops, he says, leaves writers feeling demoralized, and takes energy away from turning their good skills into great ones. Instead, try to become more of what you already are, and work on what you enjoy.

Dead Darlings

Dead Darlings is a novel-writing advice blog by alumni of GrubStreet Boston's Novel Incubator. Brief, personable essays cover a variety of topics from inspiration to revision, publication, and marketing. There are also interviews with authors of notable new books.

Death to the Death of Poetry, an essay by Donald Hall

Poetry has been dying all its life. Newsweek just added its nail to the coffin ("Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Care?" 5/5/03). The doomsayers are dead wrong, writes Don Hall, but "no one wants to believe me."

Dispoet

Insightful blog about poetry and disability includes brief reviews and discussions of contemporary poets writing about the subject (Floyd Skloot, Jim Ferris and others), plus contests and resources.

Djelloul Marbrook

Award-winning poet and journalist's weblog features essays on contemporary poets, contextualized with reflections on politics and culture.

Does Poetry Matter? an essay by William Waltz

Prizewinning poet William Waltz investigates why there are more writers than readers of poetry. Today's highbrow poets, he ventures, should plumb their playful side. "Despite the messy state of affairs today, the poetry world is primed for (and maybe on the verge of) a roaring comeback. And, although many poets seem content to write poems that only connoisseurs and mothers could love, a growing populist movement seems bent on dragging poetry back into the mainstream."

Don’t Make Violence and Abuse Just Another Plot Device in Your Novel

Rene Denfeld is the bestselling author of the novels The Child Finder and The Enchanted, as well as a journalist, nonfiction author, and death penalty investigator. In this 2017 essay at LitHub, she discusses how to depict sexual violence and trauma responsibly, from a perspective that humanizes victims and restores their agency, rather than exploiting and objectifying them.

Essay Daily

Curated by DIAGRAM editor Ander Monson, Essay Daily is a space for ongoing conversation about essays and essayists of note, contemporary and otherwise. They mostly publish critical/creative engagements with interesting essays (text and other), Q&As with essays or essayists, and reviews of essays, essay collections or book length essays, or literary journals that publish essays. Query before submitting.

Exploitation Versus Representation

Exploitative content can even creep into the work of progressive writers. Here's a primer on how to identify potential exploitation in your writing and what to do about it.

Annie Mydla, Managing Editor

Trigger warning: Racism, sexism, ableism, stereotypes, suicide, abuse

When we think of book critiques, we often think about narrative features like structure, character, plot, and theme. But as a contest judge and critique writer, I am also concerned with identifying exploitative depictions of disadvantaged and marginalized groups.

"Exploitation" can sound like a scary, moralistic word. It can spark arguments about who is "allowed" to imagine their way into characters different from themselves. In the Winning Writers North Street Book Prize, we're looking at how these depictions function within the story itself. And as a developmental critiquer, I also consider how exploitative scenarios might appear to agents, publishers, and a book's intended audience.

Exploitation means that a character from a marginalized group is given a narrative function that does not benefit people from that group, but instead benefits members of a more privileged group.

A quarter of the manuscripts I receive from authors—yes, even progressive authors—contain exploitative premises and themes. Such manuscripts are significantly weaker in three areas:

Ethical—The manuscript is reinforcing assumptions that have no basis in reality and harm the kinds of people it is claiming to represent.

Literary—The vitality and immersivity of the work is harmed through the use of tired tropes and dated concepts. The true potential of the work is missed.

Commercial—Agents and publishers are looking for work that engages with the world we live in today. The use of stereotypes makes a book feel inherently dated, less relevant, and alienating to readers of modern commercial fiction.

Some examples from past manuscripts include:

Native American culture being used as a backdrop for a white character to find themselves or have an adventure.

Man Friday English being used to show that a character is speaking English as a foreign language without any consideration for the realities of the cultural and linguistic conditions.

A character's disability being used primarily to create humor, pity, or disgust in the reader rather than functioning in a deeper role touching characterization, plot, or theme.

Who are these exploitative authors?

Exploitation in one in four manuscripts sounds like a lot. Who are the authors using these exploitative elements?

Believe it or not, nearly all of the authors whose work includes this kind of issue self-identify as progressive. Occasionally, the author I'm working with has included an exploitative element in their work with a genuinely exploitative goal, but it's extremely rare. Only twice in the nearly 400 manuscripts I've evaluated did that turn out to be the case. The other examples were all by authors who were already progressive.

So how can this happen? How do sincerely progressive writers end up including exploitative material in their writing?

Representation, then and now

We live in a time when ideas have been able to change very quickly due to increased connectivity. One of the better ways in which society is changing is that marginalized voices have more reach. Thankfully, it's more possible than ever before to find, and to produce, "own voices" narratives that describe marginalized lives from the inside.

As a result, the way publishing sees "representation" has also changed for the better within the past 10-20 years. "Inclusion" is no longer a sufficient condition to be considered "representation". When marginalized characters appear in a story, other important questions are being asked by agents, publishers, and readers:

Who benefits from the way this character or situation is being portrayed?
What is the real structural function of this character or situation?
Does the portrayal of this character or situation have deeper connections to underlying themes or world-building elements? If not, why is it there?

If the answers to these questions show that the marginalized character is there only to benefit those who are already privileged, it might be time to reexamine whether the characterization is exploitative.

Examples of exploitative content from real-life manuscripts

Below are 16 examples of exploitative scenarios I've encountered in books and manuscripts. Again—in nearly every case, the author didn't realize that they were using a trope, or that the trope was exploitative.

A marginalized character is placed in the narrative only to help the more privileged character realize their goal.

An older black woman who is a nurse is only seen in the story when she is providing folksy wisdom and encouragement to a younger, white nurse. The older nurse has no problems or needs of her own.

A white boy and girl find a magical Native American arrowhead, and its powers bring a feeling of mystery, seriousness, and significance to their romance arc. There are no living Native American characters or discussion of why Native Americans no longer live on that land.

A wealthy white woman travels to a Pacific island where she sleeps with a native of the island. His "primitive" wisdom and love give her a new perspective on life and she goes home again renewed and empowered. The Black male character has no interiority and the book provides no context about the power dynamics in the relationship.

A female supporting character is included in the story exclusively to help the male protagonist become the man he was meant to be. The female character is physically beautiful and has no interiority or life of her own. She may be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

A stereotype is used as shorthand in the book without any deeper relation to the content or structure.

The villains in the book are portrayed with Cold-War-era Slavic stereotypes, not because it has anything to do with the universe or plot (it's a fantasy novel), but because it's the book's shorthand for greed, criminality, and brutality.

A character is depicted as fat, not because it has any bearing on the way they experience the world of the story or on the story's themes, but as shorthand for greed, corruption, slovenliness, or bossiness.

An Algerian character speaks with Man Friday English, not because that's a realistic depiction of an Algerian speaking English as a Foreign Language, but because it's the book's shorthand for "foreigner".

A character has schizophrenia, not because schizophrenia relates to the deeper themes of the book, but because the character's function in the book is to be "weird", "funny", "unpredictable", or "mentally sick".

A non-Western setting is used as shorthand for "exotic", "inspiring", or "dangerous" and includes no other context to provide depth.

A memoir about Saigon in the 1980s portrays Vietnam as the "Wild East"—a lawless and wild place where the white main character can truly find himself. No context is given about the colonialism or other conditions that led to the Saigon that existed at the time of the story.

A white middle-class character is shown as wanting to go to Benin because it is dangerous and he wants to test himself. (But an internet search by the critiquer reveals that the crime statistics in Benin are similar to Ontario, Canada.)

The suffering of a disadvantaged or marginalized group is used for the sake of entertainment (also known as trauma porn).

The abuse and subsequent suicide attempt of a teenage girl is described in great physical detail, despite the book being mostly about the main character, a teenage boy. No interiority or POV writing is provided for the teenage girl character.

A book opens with the slaughter of a tribe of indigenous people. No member of the tribe is a character beyond that first scene. The structural function is to grab the attention of the middle-class, white American readership and to give the white main characters an inciting incident.

A gay man is tortured and killed, and these passages go into detail about the violence and suffering. The context within the book reinforces the idea that gay people are outsiders and that their lot is tragic whether they are killed or not. There is no further discussion of gayness and no other gay characters.

A female character is raped, not because rape is related to the story's essential themes, but to create a sense of peril and titillation.

The antagonist in a book is depicted as having become a crazed villain due to past trauma. The presentation implies that their extreme reaction to trauma was the result of not having enough fortitude (moral, psychological) to stand up to it.

Trauma being used as a device in "origin stories" for villains and heroes.

The protagonist in a book is depicted as having undergone trauma, but completely bounced back from it (e.g., a female hero is raped but has no PTSD). The presentation implies that their resiliance is due to higher-than-normal fortitude (moral, psychological) to bounce back.

In both the villain and the hero examples, the real experience of traumatized peoples is distorted. Trauma often leaves lasting effects with no relation whatsoever to the sufferer's "fortitude", and without turning those who undergo trauma into either heroes or villains.

What should I do if my book contains exploitation without me meaning it to?

If you're reading this with a sinking feeling that your manuscript might include exploitative elements, take heart. There's plenty of time to reconsider, rework, and move on from exploitative narrative strategies. Following the ideas below will make your work more marketable and give the stories you tell new depth.

Try to find another angle.

I remember reading a well-written manuscript about a transwoman transitioning not only into a woman but into a vampire at the same time. It seemed like a good idea in itself, but unfortunately, the execution of the story at that time tended to equate transness with monstrousness (disgust, horror, ugliness), which wasn't the intention of the author.

My critique outlined the dynamic and suggested different ways to come at the scenario. For example, what if the plot focused on comparing and contrasting the two transition processes, with a more sympathetic interiority for the main character? That way, people in that marginalized group (transwomen) might benefit by increased discussion about, and artistic expression of, the nature of trans experience.

Reconsider if you need to be writing about that particular subject or character.

I once worked with a white poet who had included a Magical POC stereotype in one of his poems. I asked him what the structural and thematic function was, and after consideration, he found that there was no constructive function. He ended up removing the character and diving more deeply into the themes that really were at the heart of his poem.

Reconsider your premise.

Rarely, I'll come across a draft where the exploitation is woven into the very premise. One manuscript I read was about a young white Canadian man who on a whim decided to travel to Benin to find a Black man whose name he had discovered by accident. The goal of the young Canadian was to test himself on this "dangerous" journey, a "hunt" for the Beninese character.

My critique pointed out the power imbalance of a white, relatively wealthy Canadian man seeking out and potentially disrupting the life of a stranger halfway across the planet, and how strange and uncomfortable the situation might feel from the Beninese character's point of view. The author's use of the word "hunt" also seemed threatening, especially in the white-Black context given the histories of colonialism and slavery. The author had not considered these factors and decided to drastically revise their premise.

Do your research.

I've found that in many cases where exploitative characterizations are being used, it's because the author relied on their existing memories of older books, films, and social contexts as their main source of information. If you suspect your book may be venturing into the exploitative, the best course of action might be to do some research into the characters and subjects you are writing about in order to bring more realism into the depiction.

As Winning Writers editor Jendi Reiter pointed out to me recently, "Writers do research on all kinds of things. Cars, the moon, animals, philosophies, anything. Why not research the people you're writing about?"

Get a sensitivity read.

Generally, if you are going to include minority characters whose identities are not the same as yours, it's a good idea to hire one or more sensitivity readers who share those identities with the characters. Firefly Creative Writing, Writing Diversely, and the Editors of Color database are excellent places to find sensitivity readers of diverse genders, ethnicities, disabilities, and cultural, class, and religious backgrounds.

Address your own privilege.

I often mention the word "privilege" to authors and it occasionally raises hackles. But when a writer gets real about the role of privilege in their writing process and how they handle their content, their work tends to become more timely, realistic, relatable, and immersive: all qualities that are highly attractive to agents and readers alike.

Below are some articles about privilege and writing. Some of them discuss the idea of privilege as an "invisible knapsack" that contains tools that help us complete what we'd think of as very basic tasks during the day. The less privilege a person has, the fewer tools they have, until these "basic" tasks (for example, interacting with the electric company, shopping for groceries) become much more difficult or simply not possible.

Negotiating Social Privilege as a Writer

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

Equity360: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity—What's in Your Knapsack?

Writing Diversely: Don't Forget Privilege

Become familiar with dead horse tropes and avoid them in the future.

One of the best ways to avoid exploitative and plumb-tired-out tropes is to learn what they are. TVTropes.org is a fantastic directory for tropes in all genres of art, not just television. Wikipedia is also a good place to find information about tropes.

Some of the tropes I encounter in manuscripts most often are:

Disability tropes

Mental Handicap, Moral Deficiency
Tragically Disabled or Magically Disabled
Hollywood Autism
Obsessively Organized and Neat Freak (OCD stereotypes)
Funny Schizophrenia

Black/POC tropes

Black Dude Dies First
Magical Black Person
"Mammy" Figure
Closer to Earth

Indigenous tropes

The Noble Savage
The Nubile Savage and The Chief's Daughter
"Good" Indigenous vs. "Bad" Indigenous
Man Friday English and Tonto Talk

More racial tropes

Acceptable Ethnic Targets
Tokenism
Africa Is a Country
Dirty Communists (evil Slavs)
Husky Russkie (Slavic thugs)
The Evil Brit
Magical Romani
Inscrutable Oriental

White savior tropes

Mighty Whitey
Raised by Natives

Sexuality and gender tropes

Bury Your Gays
Trans Tribulations
Dead Lesbian Syndrome

Tropes about women

Defiled Forever
Disposable Woman
Not Like the Other Girls
"She Just Needs to Smile!"
My Girl is Not a Slut
Makeup is Evil
Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Tropes about men

Nice Guy Syndrome

Writing as a process of breaking down barriers

The activity of writing is defined by constant exploration and breaking through personal barriers—especially emotional barriers. One could argue that a writer is a person who provides value to readers by doing grueling emotional, psychological, and intellectual legwork.

This process can be terribly uncomfortable for the writer. But the more processing the writer can do, and the more they can work through that discomfort, the better the writing will be—and the more the readers will keep coming back.

Facing up to assumptions, stereotypes, and exploitative scenarios in writing is an essential part of that fundamental process of exploration and breaking through barriers. Any writer who ignores that part of composition is avoiding an opportunity for significant growth in their craft.

Meanwhile, the authors who do address problematic assumptions through their writing stand out head and shoulders above their competition in the eyes of agents, publishers, contest judges, and readers.

As a critiquer, contest judge, reader, and human being, I stand up and cheer for all writers who pledge themselves to breaking down barriers like those described in this post.

Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer

Poet and memoirist Mary Karr muses on the resemblance between poetry and prayer as "sacred speech" that eases the soul's isolation. Karr also describes her recent conversion to Catholicism from a secular upbringing that made a religion out of art and literature. "People usually (always?) come to church as they do to prayer and poetry—through suffering and terror."

False Witnesses: On Writing About War

In this 2022 critical essay from The Point magazine, Phil Klay examines the moral and aesthetic conundrums of bearing witness to war through poetry. Klay is a fiction writer, essayist, and US Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War.

Find Editors Who Like You

In this 2023 column for Lit Mag News, poet and freelance journalist Noah Berlatsky advises cultivating long-term relationships with sympathetic journals and presses. Traditional career advice tells you to treat lesser-known venues as mere stepping-stones to more prestigious publications, but if the latter opportunities don't materialize, perhaps you're just depriving yourself of satisfaction in the career you actually have.

Finding Communion in Disability Poetics

In this essay from the blog of the literary journal Ploughshares, poet Lizz Schumer surveys foundational works of the disability poetics movement, and what they meant to her self-concept and aesthetic development. Authors cited include Vassar Miller, Kenny Fries, Jim Ferris, Karrie Higgins, and Sheila Black.

FlashFiction.net

Updated daily, this site features short craft essays on writing and marketing your flash fiction.

Four Hidden Dangers of Writing Groups

Jane Friedman's blog features expert advice about today's publishing industry. This guest post by Jennie Nash, the chief creative officer of Author Accelerator, challenges the conventional wisdom that group feedback is always helpful for learning to write. Among other issues, she observes that peers may lack expertise, and that the fear of failure in a social setting may hold writers back from taking necessary risks.

From Page to Pixels: The Evolution of Online Journals

In this article from the May/June 2009 Poets & Writers Magazine, award-winning poet Sandra Beasley discusses the growing prestige of online publication and the advantages it offers for disseminating your work. Recommended journals include Blackbird, Coconut, and Drunken Boat.

George Saunders on Storytelling

In this artistically produced video from The Atlantic magazine, acclaimed short story writer George Saunders shares his advice for writing a story that is compassionate, surprising, and open to fresh meanings. "Revision is a form of active love; it's love in progress," he says, touting the benefits of listening to your characters rather than controlling them. Saunders is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker whose collections include Tenth of December and Pastoralia.

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 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 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 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.

Industry Interview: Talking Book Cover Design with Laura Duffy of Laura Duffy Design

In this industry interview, I speak with book cover designer, former Random House art director, and North Street Book Prize co-sponsor Laura Duffy about designing covers for indie authors. What can authors expect when working with a book cover designer for the first time? What is some important vocab for indie authors to know when working with their designer? And how can authors navigate the expectations during the design process?

Watch the entire interview for Laura's full insights. Some highlights include:

Laura Duffy on helping the author transition into the self-publishing industry (1:36):

Most of the people who come to me have never published before. So I give them kind of a heads up; okay, so you're going to focus on the cover, and then down the line we're going to be publishing it. So there's the back, and the flaps, and making all these decisions about trim, and formats, and stuff like that… if an author can start thinking about doing those things early on, it's best.

People come away appreciating that I've given them kind of a bird's eye view of what to expect. It's not just focusing on the cover, it's focusing on as much of the publishing process as I can tell them… I've been working with Indie authors for a few years now, and I was starting to hear the needs, the questions, all of the pain points, and I thought, you know what, I'm just going to do a deep dive into this world and really offer what I've learned along the way. And now that's what I do.

On working with an author's existing knowledge of design (6:59):

When we're first talking about the cover, I don't expect the author to really know exactly what they want, and that's where I come in—you know, reading the book and coming up with my own ideas, and then having a conversation… Either I've nailed it the first time and you're happy, which, you know, which does happen, or then we start to say, "Okay is it too dark? Is it the colors? Is it, you know..." then that's where the education starts to take place.

On prioritizing marketing needs as a cover designer (7:43):

I'm not just doing a cover to make somebody happy, I'm putting a cover together that's going to sell, that's going to attract readers. That's the goal.

Industry Interview: Talking Book Structure with Jendi Reiter, Editor of Winning Writers and Author of Origin Story

In this industry interview, I discuss book structure with Jendi Reiter, editor of Winning Writers, North Street Book Prize judge, and author of Origin Story, a literary novel about a gay man who recovers his traumatic memories by writing a superhero comic book in the 1990s.

I ask Jendi, what makes good book structure? What kinds of book structure do they typically notice in the North Street Book Prize, both effective and not-so-effective? How can self-publishers improve their book covers? How has Jendi's book structure been influenced by their North Street reading, and what words of advice do they have for North Street entrants?

Watch the entire interview on YouTube for all of Jendi's insights. Some highlights include:

Jendi on common difficulties with memoir structure (2:30):

It seems like we get a lot of memoirs that just go straight chronologically. You know, this is my childhood, this is my adulthood. And it takes a lot to make that retain interest… What I really like in a memoir, if it is going to be more straightforward/chronological, is to have a shorter span of time. You might start with a dramatic incident and then lead up to how you got there. Like, "I was at my father's funeral, and I did not expect him to die at forty-two. And I look back at what led to that". Then you go back. So you know what the payoff is going to be and why we are investing in this person's life story.

On poetry collection structure (4:48):

I feel like people don't structure their collections, and they should. I often get a batch of poems from someone, and maybe they're all good, but does one lead to the other? Poetry, I think, has to either have a narrative arc or a thematic weaving of two, or three, four, or five, themes and image sets that you're going to start with and develop. Like a fugue, like a motif that is being developed and recurring, intertwining with other, with other motifs. And to me, that's a collection that's really been thought through.

On art book structure (6:03):

With art books, there can be so many repetitive images, or images that don't seem to be presented in any particular order, and they might be really good images, but it becomes boring to read a whole book of it, where you don't really feel like it's building to anything. There has to be a sense that this is developed, it isn't just a collection.

On children's picture book structure (8:12):

With a picture book, sometimes people just try to put too many twists into a 32-page book, you know, or they make it much longer than a 32-page book, which for a picture book is, you know, a risky choice. So, you know, focus on one issue, one problem that's age appropriate, and then have the narrative resolve that problem.

On fostering a sense of unity in a book's structure (11:33):

[While writing, I've sometimes wondered], does this all make sense? Like, does this all belong in the same book, just because it belongs in my head? I think after a while, with a lot of practice, one can really lean into one's particular grab bag of weirdnesses and realize that you're the unifying factor. And if you're obsessed with certain things, somehow there's something they have in common, but you still have to find a way to sell that to the reader. And a lot of that has to do with just not lingering too long on things that don't serve the main reveal of the plot.

On using multiple genres to portray trauma recovery in Origin Story (26:37):

Trauma recovery is a lifelong process, and it's one that takes different forms the further you go along, but at different levels, hopefully higher levels, the more you go into that basement, and, you know, either slay the monster, or at least get rid of the monster, or make peace with the monster… Writing this book, and writing Peter's comic book scripts, where this character of the Poison Cure is either killing or curing people through his sexual contact, Peter's expressing the contamination that one feels as a sexual abuse survivor without knowing why. So his metaphors are telling him the truth before he knows the truth literally, and writing those scenes was so cool, to write a comic book script. I'm now working on a fantasy novel, which is very hard, and I learned a lot from trying out different genres within Origin Story.

On book cover design (34:24):

When I look at the book entries, often a couple of mistakes that people make with cover design is the cover doesn't fit the mood of the book, the cover is hard to read. I've seen books that had no title or author name anywhere on the book. Don't do that!

Contemporary book covers, unless they're biographies or history books, rarely have actual photos on them anymore. If you're using a stock photo on a book cover, it looks self-published in a way that isn't really to your advantage. A nice matte book cover with a good illustration will usually do you better for a literary book… Some of the memoirs have nice photo covers, but they have a kind of a sepia tone, or they've been manipulated in some way, where they look a little bit more soft focus, or they're inset with some other design elements… Readability is another issue. You want your design elements not to clash with your text elements. Both of those should be easy to read.

(For more insights about book cover design, see my conversation with our North Street co-sponsor and book design expert, Laura Duffy.)

On the importance of sensitivity readers (48:32):

In the literary world, there's a lot of over-sensitivity and weird, kind of ideological policing and asking for proofs of identity, which I think can be really unhelpful, but I think sensitivity reads as a practice are great. And if you want to call it something else, because sensitivity sounds like a weird word to you, that's fine, but just consider it research… If you were going to write an action movie, you'd research guns and airplanes and history and whatever it is. If you're going to write a medical thriller, you talk to a doctor about whether this is a plausible treatment for this illness, and are these the right symptoms. So if you're going to write about a certain culture or demographic, don't take it personally, as though you have to get permission from a group to write about a certain kind of character. Just think of it as, you want your book to be realistic and believable.

And a message of appreciation for North Street writers and poets (50:09):

Thank you for engaging with Winning Writers. We're really proud of you for having written a book, finished a book, designed a book, published a book, and had the guts to send it in to us! If we don't like it, somebody will. Just love yourself and write your books.

Learn more about our North Street Book Prize here: winningwriters.com/north

People, resources, and North Street winners mentioned in the video:

Ellen LaFleche, co-judge of the North Street Book Prize
Tracy Koretsky, poet and literary critiquer
Denne Michele Norris, writer and editor of Electric Lit
Critique Corner poetry critiques from Jendi Reiter and Tracy Koretsky
The Editors of Color Diversity Databases, for sensitivity reads, developmental editing, and more
Two Natures by Jendi Reiter
An Incomplete List of My Wishes by Jendi Reiter
Her Widow by Joan Alden
The Art of Symeon Shimin by Tonia Shimin
My Pants by Nicole Kohr
The Cricket Cries, the Year Changes by Cynthia Harris-Allen
Waking the Bones by Elizabeth Kirschner
Endemic by Robert Chazz Chute

Ingrid Wendt: “The Unknown Good in Our Enemies”

This essay honoring the poet William Stafford reflects on how literature can foster mutual understanding and empathy in order to break the cycle of violence. This article appeared in the April 2011 newsletter of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The link below will open a PDF.

Interviews with Practicing Writers by Erika Dreifus

Fiction writer Erika Dreifus publishes the Practicing Writer e-newsletter, a monthly roundup of markets, contests, and writing advice, in which these interviews first appeared. Featured authors include Kimiko Hahn, Tayari Jones, Ellen Meeropol, and Dinty W. Moore.

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