Sarabande In Education - Advice From Our Contest Experience

If you are an aspiring writer wondering how to get your work published, we can offer a few suggestions. These are based on our time spent reviewing countless manuscript submissions for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Below is a selection of materials that we have sent to our contest applicants in past years, including:

Publishing a First Book of Stories or Poems
    Part One: Putting a Book Together
    Part Two: In the Marketplace
    Part Three: What Distinguishes Good Writing and Makes the Best Submission
Editor's Essay from the 2008 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry
Editor's Essay from the 2007 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry
Editor's Essay from the 2006 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

Publishing a First Book of Stories or Poems

Part One: Putting the Book Together

How do you begin if you have some stories or a novel?
- Write freely and generously for years with no book in mind. Don't be in a hurry. Have a large backlog of tested stories and one or two novellas you have reason to be confident in. You are going to do a lot of weeding and trimming. You want to have enough solid work after this process to wind up with more than 150 pages of fiction.
Accept and work toward this basic fact: a book of stories or a novella is more than a random collection.

Most of the rest of us need to muscle a book into shape more rigorously or its effect will be seriously dissipated. We may be free thinkers, but we look for order in our surroundings. So where do you start in creating this order?
1. Begin on the micro level.
  - If you jump in with a "theme," it will most likely dissolve or appear superimposed as you start to place the stories. The theme of a book must originate in the stories themselves and grow out of them organically. Think instead of little groups or constellations of stories that naturally belong together. Are there any echoes? Are there stories that have imagistic connections or geographic links? Are there stories that seem to follow each other, one beginning where another has ended? Look for these and other linkages and build from them.
  - Think, too, of your opening and close, of which four or five stories you want to appear in these two crucial locations. Find something "voicey" and arresting to begin the book. Forget those "introductory," generalized pieces. For a collection of poetry, it is probably best to begin with a short or medium length poem. Your strongest work should be up front; this is the poem that will convince your reader to read on.
  - Many readers will try the first poem/story or two of a manuscript, then skip to the last ones. If these are not your strongest pieces, the reader may lose interest. In addition, psychology has shown that people tend to remember the beginnings and endings of things.
2. Create a narrative.
  - Behind every good book of stories is one larger story. Try to imagine the story of your book—a movement or narrative of some kind. It might be chronological or sequential: childhood to adulthood, for example; innocence to experience; dark to light; personal to universal; city to country; rise to fall. Sometimes these loose headings will organize the book for you.
  - Experiment with your groups, physically moving them around on your floor until you have an arrangement that has both logic—though it may be associative—and surprise.

What do you do once the book is assembled?
- Pass your "final" version of the book around to three of your writer friends before sending it to a publisher. You don't have to take anyone's advice, of course. But we are sometimes far from the best judges of our own work.
- While the book is out with friends, clear your mind. Don't look at the book, at your "idea" for the book and its arrangement, for at least a month. Take another look. With fresh eyes you can see what you've done, and then use this checklist:
  - Are there any tics? Too much of the present tense, or too many stories that begin or end similarly? Are you stuck on four-line stanzas or a block-like structure? Most readers appreciate visual and stylistic variety in their poetry.
  - Have you written several versions of the same poem? Most poets do, but it's a mistake to include the warm-up and the cool-down versions of our obsessive stories. If you're going to have a series, make sure it is the best of its type and that it approaches the subject in a fresh way.
  - Is your subject matter a little too au courant? In the contest we see fads of all sorts—chaos theory stories, birdfeeder stories, stories about anorexia, grandmothers, angels, shuttle disaster stories, and so on. There is nothing wrong with these topics, but be aware that a lot of people are drawn to them, and you'd better have a new slant if you are writing on a similar subject. To find out what people are writing about, read the journals and the published books of stories and poetry. Know your field.
  - Is there variety in tone? Sameness of tone is among our top ten reasons for rejection.
  - Is the book even? Are you sheltering your weaker stories in the middle? If you aren't confident in 90% of the material then you aren't ready to submit your manuscript. Don't pad. A lean, consistently strong collection beats a thick, uneven one any day.
  - Does your arrangement work, especially to the casual outsider?
  - Finally, ask yourself the question we ask ourselves as we read your collection: are you risking something in your writing? Does the book feel essential, as if it had to be written?
  Put together, all of these recommendations may sound like a tall order, but rest assured that Sarabande has never published the "perfect" collection. Every volume has its flaws, including some of the above. But if the book has the strangeness we love—the first-time-ever voice, the urgency of subject matter coupled with original language—and if we can recall seven or eight stories after sifting through a mountain of submissions, there's no doubt that it will be published.

Part Two: In the Marketplace

When is a book ready?
- Don't rush to submit. The window of opportunity is small; the first read at a publisher is your best chance, and a manuscript loses potency each time you submit regardless of revisions. Wait until you are absolutely ready.
- You are not ready to submit a book until you've tested the magazine waters. Generally, it's a good idea to have five stories published in good places. We have published books with no prior history of publications, as have other publishers. But it is the small exception, not the rule.
- The magazine market is slim and competitive, but the book market is far worse. The sheer numbers will impress: in our contests, we publish two books, choosing one out of 1500 poetry manuscripts and one out of 700 fiction manuscripts. Instead of accepting several individual pieces as a magazine might, there is always only one contest winner. However, Sarabande considers all finalists for publication and frequently publishes another one to two collections.
How do you know where to send your book?
- Look up presses in Poets and Writers, The Associated Writing Program Chronicle, Poet's Market, Fiction Market, and Writer's Market.
- Look at the kind of books these places are publishing. Black Sparrow Press, City Lights, and Coffee House Press are one side of the spectrum; Fence, Slope, and Wave Books are on the other. The University of Pittsburgh Press and Story Line Press publish narrative, working class poetry, etc. Find the publisher that will fit your work.
How do you approach a publisher with your book proposal?
1. Approach number one: Query with Sample
  - Find out their policies: when is it appropriate to submit, etc.
  - Make your cover letter professional and to the point. Your plot summary should be one short paragraph. If it's flaky or filled with clichés, the editor will be discouraged from reading on.
  - Enclose an S.A.S.E. (self-addressed stamped envelope) and be patient.
2. Approach number two: The Contest Route
  - Get the guidelines and follow them to a T.
  - Write; do not call at the last minute. Do not submit after the deadline.
  - Enclose a business-sized S.A.S.E.

Part 3: What Distinguishes Good Writing and Makes the Best Submission

What causes us to quickly reject a manuscript?
- Illustrations and unprofessional presentation (how it looks).
- Rotten prose, amateurish and clunky writing, and fitful punctuation. If somebody can't get the easy stuff right, the odds for his or her treatment of difficult issues such as characterization or structure aren't good.
- When it's obvious the writer has never read a work of contemporary fiction or poetry.
- Bad titles, although this is frequently overlooked since it's a fairly common problem even among pros. Nevertheless, titles such as "Dust in the Wind," "From Between My Legs," "It's All Me!" and "Blah, Blah, Blah" were real zingers.
- Authors like to put their most generalized piece first in a book, perhaps as a gentle introduction to their themes. It might be wiser to substitute a short, severe, quixotic, idiosyncratic, muscular poem whose language grabs attention. The same advice applies to the last poem or story in the book.
What made a manuscript distinctive enough to be a semi-finalist?
- Lack of clichés, a clear sense of scene and of fictional momentum, and clarity of detail, dialogue and characterization. A careful arrangement of stories, stories that were well-crafted, stories that didn't fall into established genres.
Why were manuscripts rejected at the semi-finalist stage?
- We rejected the ones that had a sameness of voice, style, or poem length; this is a real problem for even the best of writers. There are some who get away with it, whose excellence turns sameness into obsession and signature, such as Richard Hugo, Louise Glück, and Phil Levine. But more often, it looks like laziness when one reads poem after poem with an identical strategy or line length, which is essentially a reworking of one or two terrific stories into twenty or thirty watered-down ones. Try various forms. Deliberately turn a twenty-word line into a three-word line and see what happens; change locations; turn a poem upside-down; begin with the last line and see what progresses; experiment.
- We also rejected works with a sameness of subject matter, i.e. fad writing.
- Unevenness—mediocre work mixed in with the excellent work—also gets rejections.
- Vague editing. Many books seemed arbitrarily lumped into three or four sections with no clear intention. Progressions make all the difference in the world: imagine the book as a novel that starts here and ends there. Each section should be unique and yet distinctly part of this progression.
- Within the stories interrupting scenes with long exposition, creaky narrative frameworks, or excessive cuteness will count against you.
- Mere competence without idiosyncrasies, personal details, or risk-taking also conveys a negative impression. The work should feel alive.
The vagaries of taste
- We consider each of the finalists that we send on to the final judge to be publishable. Most of them are books that should be published, and many of them will be. At the point where judging takes place, quality is overtaken by taste as the main criteria. If you make it to this stage, rejoice. You have only to find the right editor or judge. With perseverance, you will.

Editor's Essay from the 2008 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

NOT THE LOVE BOAT: READING MANUSCRIPTS 2008

When reading manuscripts for our annual contest we clear away the days and do nothing but read manuscripts. We have good seating, pens and notebooks, and coffee—lots of. And several stacks of manuscripts. We imagine it's something like being on a cruise (we have never been on a cruise), with only the people on the boat for diversion, though there are plenty of people. These people share with us a love of poetry, or some aspects of a love of poetry. At least they love the idea of being a poet. So it is a very unusual cruise. As we open and read each manuscript we meet a new person on the deck, as the sun glints off the waves, etc. Of course the little voice in our head talks with the person, to the poems, though we try very hard to let them have their say first. We are good listeners, and bring that skill, along with as much humility as we can muster, to the task.

But the voice intrudes. We care about poetry more than we care about anything outside of friends and family. Beyond them there is really only poetry, then—the rest of life, stretching out indistinct as everything outside of Manhattan in that iconic Steinberg New Yorker cover. So we sit reading manuscripts, traveling on the ship of poetry, listening and talking to the poets we meet. When we have read far enough in a book to have some feel for the texture and the life in the words we allow ourselves notes—phrases, words, feelings, comparisons—whatever the work evokes, whatever comes.

When we finish each book we generally have written a paragraph. Then, we reflect on the conversation we've just had. We think, and also try to feel—the essence of voice—what it has left us with. And then we give the manuscript a numerical rating. This may be like a cruise, and we may love poetry; but this is not the Love Boat, after all.

Here's a dangerous thing. We're giving you a look at some of the raw notes we took while reading entries for the 2008 Katherine A. Morton Prize. The notes are not connected to any name or specific manuscript—that would be unethical, and horribly rude. Though we have detached the following quotes from their contexts (removing anything too specific), we have not muted or edited the wording in any way.

" . . . unfortunate sameness to the sound . . ."
"An original solution to the rift between emotion and intellect . . . real engagement with ideas"
"The distance from lived life is far; the poems too wise-ass to bridge."
"Reads like an old hippie trying to be hip."
"A lush, figured texture to the language . . . but in the end poems seem powered more by sweaty invention than emotion."
"Beckett, Creeley, Stein—in a Cusinart."
" . . . the tone overall refreshingly brutal, unconstrained by any convention, even those of the current mode"
"Lots of vivid, real life scenarios, many w/bite and surprise . . . but language, though sturdy, seems dated and plain."
"Hmmmm . . . I don't get this at all . . . prolix and lax . . . poet and editor have not been introduced . . ."
"Witty and linguistically alive . . . bristly, obliquely political . . ."
"like a clumsy translation . . . might have been profound in the original . . ."
"I love the best of these—so interior in a naked, shocking way, but quiet . . ."

Can one discern an aesthetic behind these spontaneous comments? Of course. A poet beyond the age of thirty who cannot articulate her aesthetic is either leaving far too much to her unconscious, or protecting her career. But though our prejudices are evident in these reactive snippets—this dialogue with anonymous voices—we hope a willingness to be surprised, to be bowled over by poetry antithetical to our own tastes, is also evident. This is the balance: to have a clear sense of what we like and why, while at the same time maintaining a kind of naïveté, a hopeful innocence.

This year many of the best manuscripts struggled to balance intellect and emotion—poets want once again to bring history and ideas into the work in more explicit ways. We found the result a welcome expansion of what might constitute "material" for poetry.

There is a continued resurgence of lyricism, though it is a neo-lyricism—broken off, fragmented, tempered by irony. There were few love poems, and not many elegies; at least not poems that mourned specific persons. Instead we felt a kind of uniform sorrow, as if the worlds experienced by these poets were colored by the same melancholy shade, no matter where their gaze fell. We wish these poets had found more to praise.

But we may be seeing more than meets the stricter eye. We do find a pervasive fear of untempered emotion, which is in general a good thing. On the other hand, when a poem or manuscript did pack an acute, credible, emotional charge we experienced it as startling. We woke up entirely. What art leaves us with in time is an emotional flavor, a strong feeling. It's rare to fall in love with a poet because we are impressed by his intellect. We expect poets to be intelligent, and expect them to take the fact for granted as we do, and not cudgel us with erudition. There is afoot some anxiety to appear smart, particularly among young poets. It is a bullying trend, on all sides.

Of course, we want the whole package. So there were books that pleased because of the originality of their approach, but did not satisfy on the emotional level. And there were books of lyrical feeling whose language was too smooth, too far from speech, or books of surreal delight with language merely sturdy. There are many points one may wander off the path. We want, when we have the choice (and given the furious whelp of poetry activity out there, we do) to find innovation on the varying levels of syntax, line, theme, tone, etc.—all together.

And we want a coherent originality. For us this means newness that issues from, not personality or tone exactly, but an awareness of single vantage—consciousness confronting its own strange and irrevocable aloneness. Such newness isn't a matter of technical behavior or craft or ideological positioning. It is undemocratic, and begins with the unfairness of talent. But talent isn't enough. Talent must be coupled to restless temperament, congenitally unsatisfied, pushed to helpless honesty out of desperation.

It's out of this combination that we hear a new voice, which often sounds strangely like our own voice—the one we've forgotten. The one we need desperately but keep losing. The one only poetry can find. The cry of a seagull following a ship.

Editor's Essay from the 2007 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

"And Your Very Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem"
—Walt Whitman

When reading manuscripts we're always eager for a person to step through the words and begin speaking to us, so the poetry suddenly permits familiarity and comfort in another's existence. Not comfort in terms of consolation or affirmation (though we don't reject these out of hand), but the comfort of humans aware together of their mortality, of their aloneness in that knowledge among all creatures. With that as our base, real conversation can begin, go anywhere, and take nearly any tone. We like humor because it implies an immediate collapse of pretension. If we lived forever, nothing would be serious, but nothing would be funny either. This is why it's so hard to imagine a convincing heaven. Hell is much easier, probably due to its proximity. Humor is the most economical of the arts; nothing can be wasted on the way to the unexpected, the unpredictable, the turn that gets the laugh. Likewise in poems, when the movement shifts, when the poem pivots without warning, only in minute retrospective do we see why, and with that seeing comes delight and new knowledge.

But not everyone speaks briefly. For some the natural voice is highly figured and prolix. This is especially true now in American poetics, when "plain speech" is rightly suspect (it had its moment) and can easily sound like disingenuous hustle. Most poets are interested in how far the line can be pushed toward incomprehensibility, disjuncture, and a certain overload of rhetorical device—pun, allusion, mix of high and low diction and reference—as if America had become not a melting pot or a multicolored quilt, but a giant Cuisinart, and the resulting poems a riotous patois. When this scheme works, the language is revived and broadened. When it does not, the result reflects a kind of cynical nihilism, a paranoia that meaning has up and gone for good.

We may say that style does not make the poetry good or bad; both good and bad poetry may arrive in a range of dress. Bad poetry may look highly figured and "intelligent" or it may come knocking in aw shucks gingham and dungarees. Reading for a contest, we have found, means looking for the mask that reveals. Does a person emerge from the disguise? Or to say it another way: does the disguise define, sharpen, and vivify the person? Does the style seem like a brilliant invention that allows this consciousness to break free from the page and join us in the room? And, when we see this movement happening in a poem or two, does the thread, the developing texture of voice, carry through each poem and through the book as a whole?

We think of poetry as the body of the poet. We want to feel that sense of urgency and push so that we know the whole enterprise of poetry—the whole enterprise of being alive—really does matter. We don't think the words and the voice of the person can become precisely superimposed into one sharp image without the energy of felt significance. Such visitations are what we look for, and though they are rare we have been lucky to find more than a few. They have made for some fierce and lovely encounters in a silent room, and we are grateful for each and every one.

—The Editors

Editor's Essay from the 2006 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

This year we saw more evidence of the effort many poets are making toward books with a coherent theme, subject, or tone. Many had central organizing metaphors, some of which worked better than others. We admired this ambition, especially when it seemed to issue from deep sources in the poet rather than from forced method. We also saw some welcome infusion of humor, though our poetry, like every other area of our lives, could use still more. Otherwise we noted no other obvious trends or strategies, only a range of texture and voice that is always pleasing to the weary reader.

Here is a note written on one of our final choices: "music of thought and feeling so insistent language is bent by its gravity." In this small comment we find a miniature ars poetica, one that guided our choices and reflects our insufficient response to the undying question "What is poetry?" Every time we choose a poem or poet from a large number we are giving our answer to that question. So we will unpack this apothegm that served as our banner over the reading of this year's entries.

First, music. The sometime identification of formal means with music in poetry is mistaken. The music of poetry can appear in a prose poem and can be entirely absent in a carefully made sonnet or sestina. The "music" of poetry is denotative and connotative; it has a purely aural element and it is bound up with sense. Together these elements make the music of poetry, the sound like nothing else. Countless poets over time have tried to define this music (i.e., Frost's "sound of sense") and many have said valuable things. But there is no final word. The way we hear the music of poetry changes with historical context. The blended elements, we think, do not change. The music of poetry is the liveliness and the surprise that feels like our own soul at its most hopeful. Without music, poetry is an instruction manual.

Thought and feeling. "We think by feeling," Roethke says. Poetry's value as an explorative tool rests in its tendency to conflate and combine independent human modes of knowing: sensory, rational, intuitive, spiritual. In the poems we love there is a synaesthetic inseparability to the way they find what they find: the poem thinks by feeling, it feels by description, it has the taste of a joke, it opens its eyes by falling asleep, it proves a theorem by telling a story, and so on. In a good poem thought and feeling are one activity. The combination of the two gives it a forward push, an energy either one alone cannot provide. Even in the work of Dylan Thomas, a poet of predominant sensation and nostalgia—a poet of feeling—we hear the powerful, astringent hum of thought pulsing through every line like an electrical current. With the poet Zebignew Herbert, whose philosophical erudition informs the texture of every poem, there is often an almost unbearable emotional backbeat and even, sometimes, a childlike delight.

Language bent by gravity. Light is the fastest traveler in the universe and it is pin straight—except when it nears a celestial object of great mass, which bends the light around itself. We are not impressed by programmatic distortions of syntax or grammar; we are not impressed when language is turned into an opaque grotesquerie because it is hip by some political or other exterior measure. Strangely, such maneuvers tend to get praised (usually by non-poets) in successive ages. It is amazing to me that an avant with the same aging face can look young to so many for so long. Is it surgery, or delusion? These products fade, replaced by the next crop of The New (indiscernible from The Old New).

When a poet magnetically possesses a combination of music, thought and feeling (how she comes by this, we don't know), the language may be bent by her gravity, and it may surprise us, knock us out even, by showing us wonders we didn't think language capable of. The strong poet doesn't set out to speak strangely, only to speak directly from where she stands. The result is most often a subtle alteration of conventional utterance, a strangeness that strikes us first as character. It is generally only in the aftermath of our experience of the poem that we notice its exciting digression from prosody as usual. As Elizabeth Bishop said of Sandra McPherson's early work, such language is neither in nor out of fashion but beyond it.

—The Editors