Pamela Uschuk, Editor-in-Chief of Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Pamela Uschuk, editor-in-chief of Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. Cutthroat, a publication of the Raven's Word Writers Center in Durango, CO, offers two annual literary contests with prizes up to $1,250: the Joy Harjo Poetry Award and the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award, open to submissions July 15-October 10. Past poetry winners include B.J. Buckley, Sue Schwartz, Melissa Kwasny, and Naomi Benaron; fiction winners include Sally Bellerose, Michael Schiavone, and Timothy Rien. Several runners-up are also published each year. Other authors featured in Cutthroat include Wendell Berry, Linda Hogan, Elise Paschen, and Gail Wronsky.
Pamela Uschuk's poetry collections include Scattered Risks (Wings Press, 2005), Without the Comfort of Stars: New and Selected Poems (Sampark Press, New Delhi & London, 2007), and Crazy Love (Wings Press, 2009). Uschuk's work has appeared in over 250 journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Parnassus Review, Agni Review, Pequod, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, Future Cycle, and others. Among Uschuk's literary prizes are the Struga International Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, and the 2001 Literature Award from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, as well as awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, Iris, Ascent, Sandhills Review, and Amnesty International. Her nonfiction has been featured in such journals as Parabola, Terrain and Inside/Outside. Her work has been translated into ten languages, including French, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Czech, Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Korean and Russian. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and Eco Texts at Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO. Her husband, award-winning poet William Pitt Root, is the poetry editor of Cutthroat. Read his second-prize poem from the 2006 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest here.
Q: Tell me about the history and mission of Cutthroat and the Raven's Word Writers Center. What do their names signify?
A: Shortly after my husband and I moved from the East Coast back to Colorado in 2005, we founded Raven's Word Writers Center and Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. Both of us are wild about animals and wilderness—pun intended—and we had a feeding station for more ravens than our neighbors were often comfortable with at our house in Durango. Ravens are smart, maybe smarter than humans, and a couple of ravens who dined in our front yard learned our names on their own, something that touched us so we named our writers' center "Raven's Word". Raven's Word Writers is the umbrella under which our magazine Cutthroat functions. Concerned with the decimation of indigenous populations worldwide, we decided to name our magazine after Colorado's endangered trout. Any other connotation, we left up to our potential contributors.
Bill wrote the following, which comes as close as anything to a mission statement:
Among clear-running Western streams still carving their way through the Rockies, "Cutthroat" refers to the beautiful and endangered indigenous trout Richard Brautigan has described as "precious intelligent metal," the species technically known as Salmo clarki; among the murkier urban backwaters of our nation, "cutthroat" may refer to unscrupulously greedy angling by any number of fishy types who use techniques ranging from the back alley strong-arm to the foggy bottom false alarm—such species as the large-mouth Lobbyist, the puffer Politician & the wall-eyed CEO. We here at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts mean to keep distinctions sharp by promoting work with excellence and an edge.
Q: Do you take a special interest in literature of the American West and Southwest? What is distinctive about the literature of your region?
A: We like to promote the literature of the West and Southwest, but we are not limited to regional writing. Our focus is not Western writing by any narrow definition. We are eclectic in our tastes and favor the cutting edge, writing that dares to speak truth to power, that gives voice to those who have no voices to speak for themselves, writing that is meaningful, writing that, as the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva said, is a "bullet that goes straight to the heart," but the writing must as be well-crafted. We're not very interested in solipsism or workshop writing or academic writing. We are interested in writing that has compassion, soul, and insight, and that dares to take risks in content and form. We publish writing from all over the world and have featured poems by Maori, Polish, Australian, Tibetan and German writers, translations of a Korean and a Romanian poet, and short stories by Kazakh writer Dana Mazur, as well as many American writers, including Joy Harjo, Wendell Berry, Linda Hogan, Marvin Bell, Dorianne Laux, Fred Chappell, Richard Jackson, Kelly Cherry, Luis Alberto Urrea, Michael Waters, Elise Paschen, Michael Blumenthal and Rick DeMarinis.
Q: Reading your past winners, I see an interest in human rights and anti-war themes, and in the voices of the marginalized. Is that a fair description of Cutthroat? Tell me about the ethical and spiritual dimensions that you look for in submissions to the magazine.
A: Yes, that's fair, but, again, we are not limited to those themes. We do, as I mentioned, look for depth of content in submissions, ethically and spiritually. However, we are not likely to be interested by work imbued with orthodox religious views.
Q: Do you have a preference for particular styles (e.g. realist fiction, narrative free verse)? What styles or themes would be unlikely to appear in Cutthroat?
A: Our choices in fiction have ranged from flash or sudden fiction to magical realism to realist fiction—we want to publish a variety of styles and forms as long as their crafting is of the highest quality. We've been lucky to have serious and discerning fiction editors—Donley Watt, Beth Alvarado and our guest online fiction editor, William Luvaas. These writers are very different writers from one another. In his short stories and novels, Luvaas experiments with twisting reality so that, at times, his prose is magical realism. Donley writes primarily realist prose in his novels and short stories, and Beth Alvarado experiments in mixed genres. In poetry, we tend toward free verse, but we have published many styles, including formal poetry and prose poems. Again, our poetry editor looks for poems displaying fresh ways of expressing both the lyric and the narrative. He looks for strong innovative voices and craft. All of our editors are working writers and are not looking for writers who parrot their work.
Although we are not very interested in concrete or language poetry, we consider every piece that comes in. We do not publish romance, gothic, horror or mystery genre writing, but we try not to dismiss anything out of hand.
Q: Do you see Cutthroat as belonging to a particular "school" or "movement"—literary or otherwise?
A: We subscribe to no school or movement, although we do prefer writing of substance, of meaning, of witness, a sense of humor and irony.
Q: How would you like to see literature make a difference in the world?
A: I would like to see literature make a much bigger impact in our country. Literature has the potential to be a great force for conscience and for good in the world. Readers are more likely to have a higher aptitude for critical thinking than nonreaders. Reading engages the imagination in ways that the passive activities of watching TV, movies or the internet can never do. To be a vital force, American literature needs a much larger audience. Literature competes with the internet, movies and TV, but these mediums also can incorporate or facilitate the spread of literature. It's tricky. Kindle has the potential to make literature available at a low cost to the general public.
Literature historically has made a difference in the world. Shakespeare's plays have taught generations of audiences lessons in generosity, compassion and humility. Look at the way in which poets like Pablo Neruda, Roque Dalton, Nazim Hikmet, Ho Chi Minh and Anna Akhmatova; fiction writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison; and playwrights like Bertold Brecht, Lillian Hellman and August Wilson made a difference in their countries as well as in the world. Hip-hop and rant poets are listened to widely by audiences in our country and around the world—they speak for our youth. Politicians as well as academics need to listen to what they are saying.
Q: How has your own career as a widely published and award-winning author affected your perspective as an editor and contest judge, and vice versa?
A: I hope I have a more compassionate view of writers who are beginning to send out their work. I have a great deal of sympathy for the isolation of the vast majority of unknown writers. We publish many unknown writers alongside known writers in the hopes of making these writers feel that they belong to a greater literary community, that what they say and the unique way they say it is important. This is necessary for the preservation and growth of art in America and around the world. Art remains an antidote to war, injustice, poverty, and oppression around the world.
Artists and writers have always had to mentor one another and publishing and sponsoring contests are ways of doing that, letting people know that someone is listening, that they do have a wider community.
Q: How many submissions do you receive for each contest, how many make it to the final judges, and how many are offered publication?
A: We receive more and more submissions each year. For our contests, we receive between 200-250 stories and about a thousand poems. Twenty finalists in each genre (short story and poetry) are chosen to be sent on to the final judges. All finalists are eligible for publication. We publish all the first and second place winners as well as the honorable mentions.
Q: Who screens the contest entries, and what criteria are they told to apply? Have the final judges ever asked to see entries besides the shortlisted ones that were passed on to them?
A: Our readers are professional writers. They are neither undergraduate students nor interns. For both fiction and poetry, we have a team of readers, some of them editors on our staff, some of them outside professional prose writers who generously donate their time. These readers read pieces on their own, then they get together or conference over the phone to discuss stories and poem submissions, narrowing and narrowing their choices until 20 finalists are selected in each category. We then send on the finalists to our judges. No judge has asked to see entries besides the finalists we send to them.
Q: What should authors look for when researching the judges of a contest they might enter? Is it wrong to assume that judges will pick work that is similar to their own?
A: We choose judges who have reputations for intellectual honesty and impartiality as well as for their work. We choose high-profile writers that our submitters will easily recognize. We believe it is unethical to allow our judges to choose their students or friends to win our contests. As far as judges choosing work that is similar to their own, I do think that sometimes happens but doesn't always happen. Certain themes, certain styles will appeal to certain judges, but so far we've been very happy with the choices of our judges. I think it is always a good policy for authors submitting to any contest to familiarize themselves with the judge's own work to gauge, in part, what might appeal to them.
Q: Which contemporary or classic authors do you particularly admire, and what can prospective entrants learn from them?
A: This is a big question. I admire writers and poets from Sappho forward, way too many to list, but I'll try to condense. Some contemporary writers I admire for their powerful voices as well as for the depth and breadth of their work are Michael Ondaatje, Galway Kinnell, W.S. Merwin, A.S. Byatt, Joy Harjo, Alice Munro, Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Carolyn Forché, Lucille Clifton, Wislawa Szymborska, Nazim Hikmet, J.M. Coetzee, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Richard Jackson, Louise Erdrich, T.C. Boyle, etc. I revere writers Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, Milan Kundera, Gunter Grass, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Nazim Hikmet, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, William Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, Frank O'Hara, Walt Whitman, Feodor Dostoevsky, August Wilson, Anna Akhmatova, and many more.
All of these writers teach us lessons in looking at large universal questions, at having a sense of wonder and humor, at living beyond the claustrophobic borders of self-interest. What is great literature? Great writing makes us think and consider and question our assumptions, dogma and prejudices. Great writing makes us laugh while it flays us.
Summer 2009
