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What makes a winning humor poem? An interview with Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest judge Lauren Singer
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.
The Novelry
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Literary Journals That Publish Poetry That Rhymes
Rhyming poetry can be hard to place in modern magazines. This 2024 feature from Authors Publish recommends eight reputable journals that regularly publish rhyming poetry and other traditional forms.
Milk Candy Review
Milk Candy Review is an online journal of "beautifully weird, lyrical" flash fiction up to 750 words. They publish new work weekly, and include a two-question author interview with each selected piece. Send one unpublished story by email as a Word document or pasted into the message. Contributors have included Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar, Thomas Kearnes, Kathryn Kulpa, and Margaret Roach.
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.
Rain Taxi
Rain Taxi is a well-regarded print and online literary journal that "provides a forum for the sharing of ideas about books, particularly those that may be overlooked by mainstream review media or marginalized for presumed strangeness, difficulty, or other othering." They publish book reviews, interviews, and critical essays.
East Jasmine Review
East Jasmine Review is an online literary journal whose mission is to publish writers from diverse and under-represented populations, such as "LGBTQIA, ethnic minorities, women, lower socio-economic status, those who are older or younger, religious minorities, and non-American persons." They accept poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews, and articles on the craft of writing.
Los Angeles Review of Books
The Los Angeles Review of Books publishes original poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and literary and arts criticism. Their nonprofit foundation also offers publishing workshops, author events, and a book club. Use the online form on their Contact page to pitch an article.
Stunning Design Examples to Inspire Your Book Advertising
This 2024 article from the e-book bargains site BookBub showcases 25 well-designed advertisements for books in various genres and explains what makes them so effective.
Icebreakers Lit
Icebreakers Lit is an online journal that publishes collaborative writing (two or more authors) in the genres of poetry, short fiction, personal essays, flash prose, and hybrid text. If you don't have a collaborator in mind, ask them to match you with another interested author. Previously published work is eligible. See website for themed submission calls. Editors say, "We like 80s and 90s nostalgia, nods to pop culture, and vulnerability. We like good writing that doesn't take itself too seriously. We also like being surprised and things that don't quite follow the rules."
Poets and Patrons
Founded in 1954 in Chicago, Poets and Patrons sponsors national and international contests such as the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, along with in-person and online writing workshops.
How to Write Attention-Grabbing Promo Copy for Books
In this guest post on the book marketing website BookBub, M.J. Rose, founder of the ad agency AuthorBuzz, gives detailed advice about writing your ad copy and targeting it to different audiences.
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
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.
Sibylline Press
Sibylline Press is a small press with a marketing co-operative that is dedicated to publishing novels and memoirs by women over 50. They are LGBTQ-friendly and trans-inclusive. One could consider them a hybrid publisher in that they require the author's financial investment in the marketing budget. Their website is modern and their book covers look professional.
The United States of Queer Bookstores
This 2024 blog post from Red Hen Press, a prestigious publisher of literary prose and poetry, recommends 50 independent bookstores—one in every state—that are owned by LGBTQ folks or active allies to the LGBTQ community.
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?
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 SchizophreniaBlack/POC tropes
Black Dude Dies First
Magical Black Person
"Mammy" Figure
Closer to EarthIndigenous tropes
The Noble Savage
The Nubile Savage and The Chief's Daughter
"Good" Indigenous vs. "Bad" Indigenous
Man Friday English and Tonto TalkMore racial tropes
Acceptable Ethnic Targets
Tokenism
Africa Is a Country
Dirty Communists (evil Slavs)
Husky Russkie (Slavic thugs)
The Evil Brit
Magical Romani
Inscrutable OrientalWhite savior tropes
Mighty Whitey
Raised by NativesSexuality and gender tropes
Bury Your Gays
Trans Tribulations
Dead Lesbian SyndromeTropes 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 GirlTropes about men
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.
LGBTQ Publishers and Paying Journals
Erica Verrillo's writing resource blog features news of submission calls, agents seeking clients, and other publishing opportunities. This post, last updated in April 2024, lists 35 small presses and 30 paying journals that accept un-agented submissions of LGBTQ fiction and nonfiction. While the recommendations include many reputable presses such as Bold Strokes Books, Bywater Books, Chelsea Station Editions, and Riverdale/Magnus, it's important to do your own research: the gay romance publisher Dreamspinner Press, included here, was the subject of a big scandal several years ago for not paying their authors.
Not Akhmatova
By Noah Berlatsky. Playful and musical, yet weighty with paradox, this collection pairs freewheeling translations of Russian-Jewish poet Anna Akhmatova and original poems that respond to the fraught question of Jewish loyalties in the diaspora. Berlatsky shows that one doesn't have to believe in God to argue with Him. In these pages, Akhmatova is both present and absent, a figure who epitomizes her people's persecuted dead. The shape of that absence has sometimes seemed to bend Jewish identity around it like a black hole. Berlatsky recognizes that gravitational pull even as he resists it. This serious project is leavened by wry aphorisms about the ephemeral nature of poetry, and indeed life itself—a pessimistic, wisecracking sense of humor that situates Berlatsky firmly within the Judaism with which he wrestles.
Expedition
By William Huhn
The friends I lost would not
have made it to the top anyway,
scattered on the mountainside
in night, like uncharted stars.
Though they'd sworn loyalty, at
the first remembrance of their
padded lives even the truest
of them became liabilities.
Well below where the air grows thin,
and the insanity thick as the loss
of breath, their spirits broken,
a voice silent as the vulture's
seemed to soothe them to death.
They returned to the safety in
numberless faces, eyes already
sinking like grave markers.
I saw the Lamb of God in the shadow
of the scavenger's wing they fled,
and I led my expedition of one far
above those who wouldn't risk perishing
in the blinding snows at the summit,
where I kissed the place of rebirth.
Cartoonists for Palestine
Cartoonists for Palestine was launched after the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack and Israel's violent retaliation in Gaza. The site invites creators of graphic narratives to submit comics bearing witness and protesting "the genocide of the Palestinian people". A print anthology is planned in 2024. Contributors currently include Jennifer Camper, Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer), Ben Passmore, and Ethan Heitner.
Older Writers and Finding Success
What to say when older writers ask me, "Am I wasting my time?"
—Annie Mydla, Managing Editor
Despair is a common theme in many writers’ lives, but that despair is usually linked to fears of growing older and losing one’s mojo, or losing the interest of agents and publishers, or the ability to generate a living from writing.
- Writing Into Your Seventies and Beyond, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett for Gotham Writers
Earlier in the year, I completed a critique for a well-written memoir by a writer in his mid-sixties. After reading my comments, which were largely positive, the author wrote back that the critique was too generous. He told me that I had failed to answer his only question: "Am I wasting my time?"
While this is a question that nearly all writers face, it can carry a special urgency for writers over retirement age. There's often a sense that time might be running out for the hit, the blockbuster, the artistic and social triumph that will justify years of hard experience. There's a lot riding on the manuscript. It can mean more than just itself.
Maybe that's why some of the most dissatisfied critique feedback I've gotten has been from older writers who seem disappointed that I didn't tell them to put down the pen. Is it their fate to slog on alone, racking up pages that no one will read? Maybe a scathing critique would provide some kind of release.
Doling out scathing critiques is not the role of a developmental critiquer, though. My job is to read a manuscript and tell the author the strengths and growth points. Often, this includes expressing genuine admiration for what the writer has accomplished.
When a positive critique receives the follow-up question, "Am I wasting my time?" my response is most often, "Of course not!" But I have the uncomfortable awareness that to the author asking the question, my response might be inadequate.
"Am I wasting my time?" I wonder if there are other questions hidden underneath it: "Does anyone care about my writing?" "Will I find commercial success?" "Does anyone care about me?" "Am I worthwhile?" "Do my thoughts matter?" "Am I creative, or just a fake?" "Have I accomplished anything in life?"
If I read your manuscript and thought it was good, then my critique will make that clear. And yet—something about these situations makes me feel like to the writer, I'm a surrogate for the wider world. It's as though my affirmation as a single reader and critiquer can't replace what the writer feels like they need, but can't get, from the reading public.
I think a lot about the experience of the older writers among us. And, fortunately, other people do, too. I recently had the pleasure of reading an article by Denise Beck-Clark, The Elderly Unsuccessful Creative: On My Deathbed, I Will Still Want to Write. In the article, Beck-Clark writes,
Ultimately, there's the question, "Have I lived a meaningful life?" Or, given all the time I spent writing, not to mention learning, thinking, and talking about writing—identifying as a writer—has it all been one big, sad waste of time and effort?
For me, the pain of this question is its underlying contradiction of the personal versus the interpersonal. On one hand, it's a question that virtually every writer will ask. On the other, it's a question that virtually no one else can answer. I would venture to say that no mere reader, critiquer, agent, publisher, or horde of fans would be able to respond to any writer's satisfaction. Some of the most successful writers have also been the most unhappy. The problem of self-worth, self-expression, and public recognition remains incredibly thorny.
But that's no reason for a writer to give up—let alone ask someone else to tell them to give up.
Finding Success Outside the Manuscript
One thing I have noticed as a critiquer is that many older authors who ask, "Am I wasting my time?" do so in the context of their first or second manuscript. At that stage of the career, a manuscript can feel monumental, a milestone, a monolith. So much has gone into creating it—a lifetime of emotional processing, for starters. Traditional publishing might seem like the only way to do this monolith justice.
Moreover, the writer may have been told their entire life, "You know, you could write a book!" Completing the manuscript and getting it traditionally published could seem like the fulfillment of a social vote of confidence. If the writer doesn't get the book traditionally published, it might feel like failing the people who believed in them.
In the context of modern publishing, though, this "all or nothing" attitude might be putting more pressure on the older writer to succeed with the book manuscript, and nothing but the book manuscript. That's a tough bind to be in. Selling an agent or publisher on an entire manuscript is inherently difficult, because it's such a big investment for everyone involved.
Meanwhile, there are so many smaller, less-investment-heavy, and just-as-professional publishing opportunities besides full-length book publication. If you are an older writer looking for ways to get your work in front of readers, take a look at the four methods below.
1. Try flash nonfiction
Have you been wrestling with a book-length memoir manuscript? Chances are, your document contains an abundance of passages that could stand alone as flash nonfiction (creative nonfiction, memoir, fictionalized memoir). These very short stand-alone pieces range from 100-1,000 words. With just a few strokes of a mouse, you could paste likely-looking passages into a new document, tie off the beginnings and endings, and send them to journals.
It might be worthwhile doing some research on flash nonfiction to get a feel for the genre. The publishing cycle is more rapid than with full-length books, so there are more opportunities, and feedback typically comes more quickly. Some places to start with your research might be:
Writers on the Move: What is Flash Memoir?
Writing Women's Lives Academy: The Benefits of Writing Flash Memoir
If you read about flash memoir and like what you learn, you might want to experiment with submitting excerpts from your existing work to flash nonfiction journals such as the ones listed on these sites:
Erika Dreyfus: Where to Publish Flash Nonfiction & Micro-Essays
Submittable Discover: Flash Nonfiction Markets
Writer's Digest: 5 Flash Fiction and Nonfiction Markets
Brevity: Flash Creative Nonfiction Markets (link opens a PDF)
Flash memoir thrives on momentary impressions without larger context, so it's likely that little, if any, additional editing would be needed before submitting each excerpt to a journal. I'd encourage you to send each of the excerpts you select to at least ten journals and see what happens. You might get a better result than you expect.
2. Seek out publications that are looking for older writers
"Writers 40+" is a thriving market all its own, with many publishers and a solid reader base to keep it lively. Agents, publishers, and journals are actively looking for writers in middle age and beyond.
Opportunities for all genders:
Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magaine
The Speculative Literature Foundation's Older Writers Grant
Lambda Literary's J. Michael Samuel Prize for Emerging Writers Over 50
McKitterick Prize: For a first novel by an author over 40
The Next Chapter Award for emerging writers over 40
Opportunities for women:
Shirley Holden Helberg Grants for Mature Women
Hosking Houses Trust writers' residencies
Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize for women over 50
3. Make writing social
Face-to-face interactions allow writers to cut through the abstractions of "finding their audience" and witness their work's impact directly on readers and listeners.
Joining a writers' group or class locally or online is a great way to get work in front of others. Older writers are welcome to participate in groups for writers of all ages. This article from Artful Editor has great ideas on making writing social: How to Connect with Other Writers.
There are also groups specifically for older writers to meet and enjoy each others' company and experience. Both local, in-person groups like SWit'CH, and online venues, like the Senior Planet Writers' Studio, are great ways to connect one-on-one about writing.
Going to author talks and readings, open mics, book clubs, and writers' conferences can also be a great way to meet and network with other writers.
If you're looking for ways to get involved with other writers face-to-face, it might be a good idea to get into the habit of checking local listings on a regular basis. Lists of upcoming writing gatherings and workshops (both for all-ages and for older writers specifically) are often available at libraries, community and senior centers, and meetup.com.
4. Get involved with anti-ageist activism in the arts
When I asked our head editor, Jendi Reiter, what they thought about the topic of older writers and success, they immediately wrote back:
My first thought is that you should check out the Twitter account @noentry_arts which highlights unnecessary age restrictions in literary and arts applications. They've been successful at pressuring some sponsors to be more inclusive of older writers, amplifying opportunities for older writers, and spreading the word about articles and opinion pieces touching issues of ageism in writing and the arts.
It can be wonderfully heartening to see how we can fight back against artificial limitations against older writers. Getting involved with anti-ageist activism can be an affirming way to assert one's own right to creativity, as well as to meet and support fellow creatives. Read @noentry_arts's posts here: https://twitter.com/noentry_arts
Have any thoughts on finding, or not finding, success and satisfaction as an older writer? Write to Annie at annie@winningwriters.com to share your thoughts.
A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest
By Charlie J. Stephens. This exquisite coming-of-age story depicts a queer youth struggling to survive in the rural Oregon of the 1980s. In the human world, the narrator's life is defined by poverty, instability, and abuse from their mother's boyfriends. But to Smokey, a nonbinary child with a shamanic connection to animals, the human world is not the only or most important one. The adults are tossed around by delusion and impulse, even Smokey's mother, who is genuinely devoted but succumbs to her addiction to dangerous men. The child's view of reality is clear, compassionate, and attuned to beauty. This makes the book hopeful in a strange way, despite the tragedies that pile up.
The Prophets
By Robert Jones Jr. Set on a Mississippi plantation, this devastating yet life-affirming novel centers on the forbidden love of two young Black enslaved men. Multiple perspectives reveal how sexual violation and erotic entanglement give the lie to the brutally maintained separation of Black and white, as well as the complex uses of Christianity to comfort the oppressed while muting their rebellion. Interspersed with the deadly despair of the plantation scenes are hopeful visions of pre-colonizer African cultures that respected queer identities, a legacy that finds expression in the main characters' pure bond.
The Rebis
The Rebis is a print journal celebrating the connections among Tarot, art, and creative writing. Each issue so far has had a theme based on one of the Major Arcana cards. Check website for submission periods. Editors say, "The Rebis commits to amplifying and centering underrepresented voices, paying artists and writers fairly for their work, and redistributing profits to social justice causes."
Children’s Book Publishers Open to Direct Submissions
This list posted in 2024 at the writers' resource site Authors Publish profiles 55 presses that accept un-agented submissions of picture books, middle-grade, and/or young adult literature.
Translation Shop
Translation Shop is an online clearinghouse for finding certified translators for your official documents, business communications, or academic papers. Their site representative explains, "We are ATA certified, which offers objective evidence that a translator possesses the knowledge and skills necessary to provide a quality translation."
Datasets and Dictionaries for Crosswords
George Ho, a cryptic crossword creator and machine-learning specialist, has compiled this list (current as of 2022) of useful online dictionaries, word lists, and databases of notable historical figures. Not just of interest to puzzle fans, these resources can also help writers find synonyms, rhymes, pronunciations, and quotations. Notable links include the Expanded Crossword Name Database, which aims at increasing representation of women, nonbinary people, and other under-represented groups in crossword trivia clues.
There must be a way to listen
By Laurie Klein
like a small body of water,
reflective face, upturned: benign,
an entity of acceptance.
Water embraces the sunken. The near-dying
as well as the thriving stir, like plants
practicing grace as they lean on the current.
Let me be a haven, where shared sediments
settle. Where buoyancy reasserts itself.
Where you will beckon the weathered vessel,
and I will coax the reluctant toe.
We'll soften the chipped margins of shells,
castoffs, the chronically stony. Encompassed,
eased, the survivor rises
the way a trout breaks from silence, to surface,
old hooks and lines ingrown, jaws half-trussed—
wounds revealed, by one seeking a witness.
What was it the risen one said? Hark.
Flow and do likewise.
Algorithmic Justice League
AJL's mission is to "fight for consent, compensation, control, and credit" regarding how artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT use writers' intellectual property and replace writers' jobs with computer-generated content. Check out their website to sign petitions for legal regulation of AI and share your stories about how AI threatens your livelihood.
The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
By Stephen Dobyns. Poet and noir mystery novelist Dobyns branches out into philosophical farce in this ensemble-cast comedy set in early 1990s New York City, where wrestling matches re-enact early Christian disputes about the nature of evil, and anyone's life might unwittingly mimic a Grimm's fairy tale. What holds this capacious story together is the idea that truth is only manifested through artifical personae and constructed narratives—what wrestlers call their Gimmicks—and if there is free will, it consists of noticing your Gimmick and maybe choosing a different one.
Rhyheim
By Vikram Kolmannskog. Subtitled "A porn poem," this lyrical and erotic chapbook is a meditation on scenes from Black gay adult performer Rhyheim Shabazz's videos. Slow-motion, stream-of-consciousness descriptions of sexual encounters transform into moments of spiritual oneness with concepts from Hindu mysticism. As a queer man of color in predominantly white Norway, Kolmannskog finds inspiration and self-acceptance in Rhyheim's multi-racial intimate couplings. Publisher Broken Sleep Books is a small press in Wales with a working-class orientation and an interest in social justice.
WordDB Rhyming Dictionary
WordDB is a free reference site that includes crossword puzzle clues, thesaurus, antonyms, and a Scrabble wordfinder. Their main product is the Rhyming Dictionary, with hundreds of rhymes for over 350,000 words and phrases. Think there's no rhyme for "orange"? Check out their suggestions, based on a variety of accents and syllable pronunciation speeds.
Best Podcasts About the English Language
Educator and translator Heddwen Newton, author of the Substack newsletter English in Progress, curated this list of 55 best podcasts about the history, development, and politics of the English language.
Websites and Blogs About the English Language
At her blog English in Progress, educator and translator Heddwen Newton maintains this list of her favorite websites for word nerds. Links include style blogs, etymology resources, and news sites covering linguistic trends.
English in Progress
Written by educator and translator Heddwen Newton, English in Progress is a monthly Substack newsletter that tracks trends in slang, neologisms, and accents in English around the world. Each newsletter links to articles on quirky topics such as the year's most creative use of swear words in media, fake words created by AI, and how to win a spelling bee.
The Kraken Collective
The Kraken Collective is an alliance of indie authors who have pooled resources to publish high-quality fiction while retaining complete creative control over our stories. Editors say, "We aim to provide a wide variety of science fiction and fantasy stories, all starring LGBTQIAP+ characters. Although it begins as a simple cooperative between authors, we aim to grow into an unique publishing model capable of supporting queer indie voices everywhere in SFF. We are committed to building a publishing space that is inclusive, positive, and brings fascinating stories to readers." At the moment, submissions are by invitation only, but they encourage reviewers to sign up to receive free ARCs. Customers can browse their books by genre and queer identity (e.g. polyamorous, asexual, transgender).
Trans Journalists Association Stylebook and Coverage Guide
The Trans Journalists Association has created this free online style guide for editors and journalists who write about transgender people and the stories that affect them. It includes guidance on name and pronoun usage, education about commonly repeated inaccuracies and politically contentious phrasing, and editorial best practices for centering trans voices.
The Center of the Universe
By P.M. Flynn
Behind,
thick stones are colder, deeper than time emptied,
poured into each moment that passes between clouds
that eventually disappear on the horizon.
Shadows on darkness fall from the mountains:
the sacred moving slower than geologists say,
as we turn to the bright autumn air.
(Clouds fall even in darkness.)
Under each rising sun, when there is no darkness; still—
they've always fallen. When there are shadows they fall again:
today; on the ground with less space for the sun or moon.
Before you left falling behind, before you left falling
from them, sounds always fell behind the horizon:
what is lowest behind each forest;
like trees circling the imperfect edges of me,
fallen;
touched.
There, I hear a voice before I was made, before midnight
when the universe of blue spaces between clouds of importance
closed; space you ran to seeking another new moon, or sun;
or sky with horizons closer to the center of the universe.
In seeking the center,
the blue spaces of universe first;
first:
there is no mountain,
then there is;
then there is no mountain.
(I've heard my heartbeat there.)
Then there is.
If there is darkness, you will know. If there is darkness
in the stillness between shadows falling across these mountains
I already know.
Witcraft
Witcraft is an online journal that publishes "brief, humorous and engaging" flash prose and poetry, 200-1,000 words. They are seeking "wit, word play, absurdity and inspired nonsense," and are not interested in political satire or gross bodily humor. Site is updated weekly, and top three submissions each month receive modest cash prizes.
Author’s Republic
Author's Republic is a platform for creating and distributing audiobooks. They support books in a variety of formats, including Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. You can create the book through them, using one of the narrators from their curated roster, or upload your already-created audio files for them to format and distribute to a variety of sales channels.
Chicago Literary Hall of Fame
Founded in 2008 by the Chicago Writers Association, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame maps the city's literary heritage with links to bookstores, journals, and historic places. They also offer competitions for local writers. Their resources are a good place to start planning your publicity outreach for a book launch in the Chicago area.
From a Secret Location
This site is the companion to A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (Granary Books, 1998). It is a history and digital archive of poetry zines and small press ephemera from the "mimeograph revolution" that circulated work by poets in such movements as the Black Mountain poets, Beats, New York School, Fluxus, concrete poetry, Black Arts, deep image, ethnopoetics, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
Zen Patriarch Dōgen Takes a Ride in a Self-Driving Car
By James K. Zimmerman
and Dōgen asks the salesman:
Where was the self
when the car was a thought?
When the thought was a sketch?
When the sketch was design?
Where was the self
on the assembly line
in Alabama? On a truck
from Mexico? A ship
from China?
Is the self in the carbon
and iron of steel?
In the gleam of chrome?
The slick skin of PVC?
Where is the self in the cowhide
of custom bucket seats?
Where do the seats go
when the car is incinerated?
Is the windshield still sand?
Was the sand always glass?
Where is the self that thinks
it can drive itself? In GPS?
Bluetooth? ABS? Cruise control?
Show me the self before
the doors were installed.
Show me the self after
the car is totaled.
After the crusher comes.
Show me the self after
the parts return to earth and sky.
This poem was first published in Fourteen Hills and is reprinted from:
Blacklist Lit
Launched in 2024, Blacklist Lit seeks to be a clearinghouse of information about literary journals and markets that treat writers poorly. Send them your experiences of publishers who are unresponsive to queries, fail to honor publication promises, or misuse personal information.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
By Patricia Olson
Her amber eyes follow me
deep as earth's core,
pure concentration
from beneath blue silk
wrapping her head,
her day's work done
she sits posed,
poised for the painter,
the portrait that hides
secrets, questions, longings.
Who is she?
Who is the painter?
The thread binds them
In breathless silence.
Golden light flows
Through shutters, stretches
like lace across her face,
her breath clouds the room,
the needle burned in flame
pierces her ear, the blood
wiped away, the pearl
dangles, glistening,
an opalescent tear,
his eyes longing,
painting her to eternity
her eyes, a Madonna
or eyes of God's judgment,
staring, following me,
there is no escape.
This poem is reprinted from:
Small Press Economies: A Dialogue
In this 2023 article in Chicago Review, CSU Poetry Center director Hilary Plum and poet Matvei Yankelevich (co-founder of Ugly Duckling Presse) examine the barriers to small press books being carried in bookstores or featured in major review outlets. Among other recommendations, they call on independent bookstores to do better at supporting small press titles.
Chill Subs List of Magazines That Publish Young Writers
Writing resource site Chill Subs posted this list on their Instagram in 2024, with 43 journals that regularly accept work by authors under 18. Some, like Lunch Ticket and Gigantic Sequins, also publish work by adults, while others are youth-only.
Climate Visionaries Artists’ Project
Fiction writer and journalist Lauren Groff partnered with the environmentalist group Greenpeace to curate this selection of creative writing that raises awareness about the climate crisis. Contributors include Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Min Jin Lee, Dorothea Lasky, Karen Russell, and R.O. Kwon.
Passeridae
By Julie Novak-McSweeney
We open our hands and bid the past farewell.
A dead leaf falls. Another leaf grows green
in the oaks where sparrow-weavers dwell.
Now is rooted then—but we can dwell
in other rooms, can play out greening scenes
and open our hands to bid the past farewell.
Trailing dead addresses, moving well
and often, in flight from numb routine,
far from where sparrow-weavers dwell.
What is home, we wondered, hardened shells
Of children that we were, quarantined
From pasts to which we finally bid farewell
And thrive despite, and sing our citadel
of roots into brave being. Unforeseen,
this blessing of a leafy place to dwell.
We broke the chain of violence, passed from hell
on earth to healing. Now the slate is clean.
We open our hands to bid the past farewell
and look to where the sparrow-weavers dwell.
This poem won 2nd Prize for Rhyming Poetry in the 18th Annual Writer's Digest Poetry Awards.
