A Case for Contests

In January 2009, I read an article in Poets &Writers titled "A Case for Contests." And Jacob M. Appel's succinct points and optimistic attitude have stuck with me.

In the article Appel makes his stand for literary contests.  Pointing out rightly that contests are a great equalizer.  Any above board contest is reviewed anonymously, and gives "each contestant an assessment of the work by a judge who does not know the author’s identity." No publishing credits? No problem. At Third Coast, a staff member removes all cover letters along with any other identifying information that may arrive with the submission. (I should know; I sorted out several hundred submissions last year while I was Managing Editor.) From there the submission is given a number and sent along to editorial readers. "In the submissions pool at a literary contest," Appel writes, "nobody knows you’re not Alice Munro or Joyce Carol Oates. Contest participants can’t hide behind a laundry list of previous publishing credits, or an MFA from Iowa, or their good fortune in having once escorted one of the journal’s senior editors to the high school prom."

Appel also points out that the pool is smaller in the contest--dropping from competing with several thousand entries to several hundred in the case of a modestly sized magazine--and the best writing quickly rises to the top. "The other significant benefit of entering writing contests, if you are fortunate enough to win or even to rank highly, is that a strong performance often provides far more exposure than publication through the traditional submission channels."

In the full article, Appel lays out some math for when a contest reading fee is reasonable and when it's too much: as long as the fee is 20% of the offered prize or less, then the fee is reasonable. (At least I'm attributing it to Appel though it might have been another P&W article.) What he doesn't say is that many contests offer single issue or year-long subscriptions when you pay the fee. As a writer, these are the only contests I enter because I always know I'll get something for my money. (BTW I make a lousy gambler, I'm never willing to go for the risky bet.)

Appel reasons:

While a single contest fee is not going to drive even the poorest writer into bankruptcy, once one starts sending out ten- and twenty-dollar checks by the handful, the sacrifices entailed may seem prohibitive. Yet I urge my students to submit their fees anyway. Find a way! If they were studying to be physicians or attorneys, I remind them, they would pay far greater sums for multiple years of schooling—banking on a future payoff. To my mind, creative writing is as much a career as medicine or law, even if the odds of meaningful financial payoff are considerably lower (especially if you’re a poet). I also remind my students that many of them have already spent small fortunes in pursuit of graduate education in writing. Now that they are ready to tackle the literary marketplace, contests are not the place to begin nickel-and-diming. If one is willing to expend months or even years polishing a manuscript, one should be willing to spend a reasonable sum to give it a fair shake in the world. (I also point out that it takes only one contest win of five hundred or a thousand dollars to earn back their outlay and then some.)

Appel ends his article with the notion that the contest's greatest appeal is that somebody has to win. As last year's winner of the fiction contest John Matthew Fox told can attest, it only takes one submission: the Third Coast fiction and poetry contest was the the first place he submitted his story "Fatu Ma Futi" to.

Eileen Wiedbrauk is currently Third Coast's creative nonfiction editor. 2010 fiction contest winner "Fatu Ma Futi" by John Matthew Fox and the poetry contest winner "Before Knowing Remembers" by Jake Adam York, can be found in the Fall 2010 issue, out now! Look for an interview with contest winner Fox on the blog in the near future.  Contest guidelines for the 2011 Third Coast Fiction & Poetry Contest can be found here.  Appel's article can be found in the January 2009 print issue of Poets & Writers or online elsewhere.

Extended Deadline for 2011 Fiction and Poetry Contests

We're EXTENDING the deadline for our 2011 Fiction and Poetry Contests. The new deadline is: JANUARY 15, 2011. $1000 prize and publication for the winner in each genre. Visit our Contests page for complete guidelines.

Fiction and Poetry Contest Reminder

Time's running out for the 2011 Third Coast Fiction and Poetry Contests! Don't forget to submit your work. $1000 prize and publication for the winner in each genre. Judges: Brad Watson (Fiction) and Natasha Trethewey (Poetry). Postmark Deadline: Dec. 1, 2010. For complete guidelines, please visit: www.thirdcoastmagazine.com/contests.

Jaimy Gordon Wins National Book Award

Congratulations to WMU Professor Jaimy Gordon
for her National Book Award win!

We're so proud!

Paul Muldoon's Advice to Young Poets

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon delivers his thoughts and advice to young poets and all those who choose to write poetry.

The Fall 2010 issue of Third Coast is now available! The issue includes work by Jake Adam York, John Matthew Fox, David Wagoner, Patty Seyburn, Keith Ratzlaff, Jennifer Fawcett and many others. There's also an interview with Alicia Ostriker AND a Symposium on Writing and the Midwest (with contributions from Eula Biss, Mark Halliday, Patricia Henley, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and our own Bill Olsen, Nancy Eimers and Stuart Dybek, among others). It's a cornucopia of literary delights. Order your copy or subscribe today.

On Titling, Titles, and the Process Whereby We Condemn or Bless Works of Literature to be Forever Branded

by Nathan Norton

The title of a story is more than the act of picking the central image of the work and regurgitating it in front of all the other words you spewed onto the page. That’s just plain lazy. Your title is the first thing about your story the reader reads, people. Have some pride. Or, conversely, have absolutely no pride and then title it. But whatever you do, don’t use adequate amounts of pride while titling.

The title is the awning that stretches across the entirety of your story and casts its shadow on every syllable therein, coloring a reader’s perception of the prose. It’s important.

Perhaps that sounds a bit dramatic. It probably is. But it’s also true.  When a reader consumes the title of a story, then moves on to the meat of the thing, that title is always looming somewhere under the surface, altering how one perceives the tale being spun. If a story is labeled: Vixens, Foxes, and a Couple of Field Mice, a reader is going to be on the lookout for vixens, foxes, and some field mice. This could be literal, metaphorical, analogical, whatever, but even if they aren’t aware they’re doing it, they’ll look for it. This could dramatically alter how someone reads a piece of fiction. Keep this in mind while you construct your titles.

If you’ve never read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, I’m about to ruin it for you. It’s a fantastic satirical essay (here being cited for fiction, since sarcasm is the writer’s tongue of choice here and his approach is from a narrator with entirely fictional ideals from Swift’s own, in the literal sense) about how the impoverished Irish of 1729 could ease their financial troubles by selling children as edible delicacies to rich folk.

While we read, we are on the lookout for this titular proposal. When we realize what exactly it is, we are, for your understatement of the day, surprised. He’s modestly proposing the eating of babies. Like, with a fork and stuff. For a treat. Swift goes as far as to present possible ways to prepare the children as if they’re not small human people, but inanimate delicious blobs of tasty. He argues his point with actual monetary advantages they would be actual good ideas if it wasn’t for the whole cannibalism of small children, send your soul directly to Hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200 thing. The sarcasm and absurdity is so extreme throughout, we realize it was in play even in the title.

A title’s primary job is to subtly temper every element of a story, regardless of length, into a fun-size Halloween pumpkin-shaped bucket bite. It needs to be a whisper of the oratory to follow. Think of it as a Jeopardy-style giving of the answer to the question your story answers before the question is asked.

Consider a story by Donald Barthelme called Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby. Barthelme took this title straight from the first nine words of the story. This method is unique (and, I’ll point out, entirely more appropriate and satisfying than naming the story Colby—don’t name your story after the primary character. Just don’t). It immediately sets tone. Can you feel how the language is constructed to communicate nonchalance and a general disposition to think lightly? There’s an audible shrug in this title that can’t be ignored—a stroke of brilliance

It’s eternally important to remember that titles are not trifles. You’re not labeling a filing cabinet. Don’t just tell us what’s in this story, declare your confidence in your writing and tell us what is the story, but through subtlety and cleverness.

My last blog was about the importance of first lines. Well, a title is the line before the first line. It introduces your story and gives it character before it has characters. It gives voice before a voice is heard, establishes tone before its established, because, sayeth Dickens, it is the keynote. It’s the precursor to everything your work contains.

It’s nearly impossible to teach titling, so I’m not trying to do that. What I’d rather do is showcase some things that good titles are comprised of and a thing or two to keep in mind while trying to do it. Whatever you choose as your title, there’s a single thing that will always leave you with a more satisfying moniker than merely slapping the primary image or theme as a header.

Always enter into character as you write your title. Never write your title as you-the-author—write it in the voice and tone that your story carries throughout. It is your responsibility to enter into character in the title of the piece, to immediately declare your intentions to the reader. Never approach your title as an objective observer. Always have tonal and character-charged biases that shape your perception of the label. How you construct your title will either bless your story with a permanently memorable calling card, or condemn it to be instantly forgettable. Do you really want your story to be remembered as “that one story with the eccentric homeless guy apparently dressing himself with things he finds out of dumpsters in preparation for a party who’s also planning to steal away the woman of his dreams there” or Fresh or Also, Not? If for nobody else’s sake, do it in the name of brevity.

Nathan Norton serves as intern to the Third Coast fiction editors.

New Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin

Today W.S. Merwin takes over the duties of US Poet Laureate.  (Read more about Merwin.)

On July 1, 2010, the Library of Congress announced the appointment of Merwin as the Library's seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. (Read NYTimes article and interview from this summer.)

Merwin was previously interviewed by Anne Moore Odell and Pablo Peschiera for issue seven of Third Coast, Fall 1998. Back copies of the issue are available for $6.  Contact the managing editor for details or click here.

Francine Prose on "Writers as Readers"

Novelist, nonfiction writer, and writing teacher, Francine Prose speaks on what she reads, what writers read and whether or not you should read while working on your own writing.

National Book Award Finalists Announced

Congratulations to Jaimy Gordon, our colleague, friend, and teacher, whose novel--Lord of Misrule--was selected as a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award.

Jaimy Gordon’s previous novel, Bogeywoman, made the Los Angeles Times’ list of the Best Fiction of 2000. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, was an American Library Association Notable Book in 1990. Gordon was born and raised in Baltimore and holds degrees from Antioch College and Brown University. She currently teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

It's Our 15th Anniversary

Mark your calendars! Third Coast Magazine is holding a 15th Anniversary Celebration/Fall Issue Release Party on Saturday, Nov. 6, from 7-9pm, at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center (located in the Park Trades Center, 326 W. Kalamazoo Avenue).

The celebration will include readings, refreshments and live music. It's free and open to the public! (Tell your students! Tell your friends!).

Featured readers include Nancy Eimers, William Olsen, and Monica Berlin, who are part of the Fall 2010 issue's Symposium on Writing and the Midwest. There will also be a performance by Austin Bunn of his one act play "Basement Story," from the Spring 2010 issue.

Live music will be provided by the always wonderful Joe Gross.

More details to follow.... For now, save the date and plan to help celebrate a decade and a half of Third Coast, WMU's own national literary magazine.

What We're Reading

We read all the time. When it comes to submissions to the magazine, we only read certain months of the year (see website), but on a day to day basis, the editors are constantly reading published work. Some of it's new, some of it's classic, some fiction, some theory, some poetry and some of it blogs.

Here's what we're currently reading:

The Name of the Nearest River by Alex Taylor
Stories by Flannery O'Connor
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives by Brad Watson
Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night by Thisbe Nissen
Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link
The Lice by W.S. Merwin
The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass
The Will to Change by Adrienne Rich

Anne Lamott "On Being a 'Tough' Writer"

Known by many writers for her wonderful book on writing, Bird by Bird, author Anne Lamott speaks about what makes a writer tough and how to keep writing until you get there.

Thoughts From The Editors: What's your dream fiction submission?

Brandon says...


My dream submission would be Catch-22/Blood Meridian/Slaughterhouse Five sprinkled with Kate Braverman, Patrick McCabe and Flann O'Brien. This changes daily. Mainly it should be a story, and not just a bunch of words mashed together because they sound good.

Lately I'm seeing way too much unjustified first-person and quirkiness for the sake of quirk. Perhaps it's time for some third person, past tense stories that take advantage of retrospection and happen in a world I believe? There can be quirkiness, weirdness and insanity. Just make sure I believe the narrator.

Brevity is your friend. Taking endless pages to describe pointless interactions that lead to the result hinted at on page one does not help your cause. Get in there and tell me a story. Make it intense and make it matter. This doesn't mean bombs and gun shots in the first sentence. It means tell me a story that compels me to read on. Don't make me search for a reason to care.

Thoughts From The Editors: What's your dream nonfiction submission?

Eileen says...

I love braided narratives, and I'm not seeing a lot of them in the in-box lately.  If you don't know what I mean by braided essay, there's a great article/essay on it called "A Braided heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay," by Brenda Miller, in the book Writing Creative Nonfiction put out by the AWP in 2001.

Even if it's written in a more traditional narrative form than braided sections, my dream submission would weave together the writer's experience with history or statistics related to the subject.  And if you can teach me something in the process, all the better!  It's rare that I can be taught something about childhood by an essay--after all, that's something I've done, something we've all done--so the weirder topics or niche topics tend to fair better.

When I was asked to write this post, I was also asked what I had been seeing a lot of lately.  The answer is sex and dead babies.  Teenage sex, married sex, masturbation, prostitution, production of porn, rape, child molestation and abuse ... the list goes on.  If this is what you're writing about, I'm glad you've come to a point where you can talk (write) about it openly.  But unless you're doing something interesting with the narrative form, sex in literature is old hat.  There was one essay that crossed my desk about rape and the aftermath, and the only reason it stuck out was that the write had experimented with form in a way that was both engaging and fresh.

Then there's the dead babies.  Miscarriages and shaken baby syndrome.  I'm seeing a lot of them lately.  I'm okay with essays on grief; I'm am publishing an essay on grief this spring--and I cried the first two times I read it--but it's not about a dead baby.  As far as essays on grief go, these have the least sense of redemption and a tendency to be written before the author has gained enough distance.

Fiction and Poetry Contest Announced

The 2011 Third Coast Fiction & Poetry Contests are now OPEN for submissions. Postmark Deadline: December 1, 2010. Fiction and Poetry winners will receive $1000 and publication in the Fall 2011 issue. Final judges are Brad Watson (Fiction) and Natasha Trethewey (Poetry).

Please visit our Contests page for complete guidelines.

About the Judges:

Brad Watson won the Sue Kauffman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts & Letters for his first collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men. His first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award. Watson’s most recent collection of stories is Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (2010).

Natasha Trethewey is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book Native Guard. Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia, was named a Notable Book for 2003. Trethewey’s most recent work is a book of creative non-fiction, titled Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf (2010).

Open to Submissions

Third Coast is currently accepting submissions! Our reading period opened August 1, 2010 and will close April 30, 2011. Third Coast only accepts online submissions through our online submissions manager. Please see our submission guidelines.

Closed to Submissions

Third Coast is now closed to submissions until August 1, 2010.

Closing to Submissions

On May 1, Third Coast will be closed to new submissions until August 1. So get those manuscripts in now!

If you've previously submitted to Third Coast and have not heard back, our editors will continue to reply over the summer. All manuscripts submitted before April 30, 2010 will hopefully have received a response by Labor Day of this year. If you have not received a response by that date, feel free to query the Managing Editor at editors@thirdcoastmagazine.com.

Note Bene: only submissions received through our online submission manager will be considered for publication. Any manuscripts received by snail mail, as email attachments, or in the body of an email, will be rejected without being read.

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