Fw: Results: Tom Howard Prose Contest

--- On Wed, 15/9/10, Tom Howard Contest News from John Reid <rastar7@bigpond.com> wrote: From: Tom Howard Contest News from John Reid <rastar7@bigpond.com> Subject: Results: Tom Howard Prose Contest To: simschimeko@yahoo.co.uk Date: Wednesday, 15 September, 2010, 7:40 Tom Howard Poetry Contest WILL CLOSE SEPTEMBER 30, 2010    Tom Howard Short Story, Essay & Prose Contest IS NOW OPEN You'll find full details at http://shortstorycontest.0catch.com or http://www.winningwriters.com  Here are a few tips for winning writing competitions generally from my book, "Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS". Take a look at some of the entries that have won prizes in past years. Genre and style are two things to check. For instance, it's no use submitting a story or a poem written in a flowery or what might be described as an "old-fashioned" style, if that style is not evident in any entries in that particular contest that have won prizes or commendations in the past.  You're also almost certainly throwing money away if your language is Elizabethan and all the previous winning and commended entries could have been published yesterday in "The New York Times".  You'll note that on the other hand, Tom Howard winners are written in every style imaginable! As for genre, ask yourself if any of the previous winning and commended entries relate to your planned genre. For example if no science-fiction or mystery thrillers have captured prize money or at least made the commended list in the past, they're not going to succeed this year either!   On the other hand, Tom Howard winners have used genres right across the board!   Amazon have reduced the price of the new, expanded edition of my "Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS". The book has been completely revised, re-written and re-set. Despite all this, and an additional 20 pages of helpful text, the price has been lowered to only $12.50 officially, but Amazon at present have the book on sale for only $11.25! Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS: How To Join the Winners' Circle for Prose and Poetry Awards, NEW EXPANDED EDITION This book is also available in a Kindle edition. Please use this link: Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS As for our anthologies of previous Winning and Highly Commended prose entries, please try WATCHING TIME: Anthology of Prizewinning Essays & Short Stories and also Mr Christian and the Bag Lady: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Stories and Keep Watching the Skies! An Anthology of Prize-Winning Short Stories. Even the title stories themselves sound mighty intriguing.  I'd also recommend my own books, such as A Packet of Dreams or Micaela Morris in Jo's Heaven and Other Stories or A Mountain of Many Treasures: Prose Pieces by John Howard Reid.  One of the advantages my own books hold is that they are also available in Kindle editions at these locations: Micaela Morris in Jo's Heaven and A Mountain of Many Treasures and also A Packet of Dreams . On the other hand, the anthologies of previous winning Tom Howard Contest entries will, alas, NEVER be available at Kindle because of copyright restrictions. For Poetry, please try SAILING IN THE MIST OF TIME: 100 Award-Winning Poems or TRAVELING: An Anthology of Award-Winning Poetry My own anthologies are ANYONE FOR LOVE? and Escape to Paradise and Other Poetic Fancies. The first is also available in a Kindle edition at Anyone for Love? (Poetry) for only $4.99 (including Amazon's $2 wireless delivery fee). Also in the Kindle store at the same price, I recommend A Salute to Spanish Poetry 100 Masterpieces from Spain and Latin America rendered into English verse  As mentioned above, all subjects and genres are welcome for both our Prose and Poetry Contests. For the Prose Contest, for example, you may submit comic and humorous stories and essays, mystery, science fiction, romance and other genres. Even newspaper and magazine articles and interviews. And even one-act plays. The only restriction is that entries must not exceed 5,000 words. The Tom Howard Poetry Contest is one of the very, very few poetry contests that impose NO RESTRICTIONS ON THE LENGTH OF YOUR POEMS. And you may also submit as many entries as you like! The Tom Howard Poetry Contest is now open, BUT IT WILL CLOSE ON SEPTEMBER 30!    TOM HOWARD SHORT STORY, ESSAY AND PROSE CONTEST 2009 RESULTS   The judges wish to congratulate all the entrants named below on their splendid achievements. We wish we had space to name all the Commended entries as well, but space has forced us to limit ourselves to those entries that were judged Highly Commended and/or prizeworthy.   CASH PRIZES:   The judges added an extra $150 Most Highly Commended Award, plus a special $100 Encouragement Award, which increased the prize pool by $250, making a grand total of prize money awarded for this particular contest: $5,800.   1. Paper Daughter by Emily Jiang 2. The Brave One by M.T. Gabrick 3. Hall of Fame by Arlene Lidbergh-Jasper 4. The Balcon by Mari Grana 5. It Happened in Monaco by Linda Zabolski 6. The Train to Harare by Lance Mason 7. Challenge the Wind by Judy Willman 8. Indian Train Journey by Annie Eagleton 9. The Swan Goose by Mary Lou Simms 10. 8 Missed Birthdays by Arielle Kaden 11. Black Saturday by Fern Langmead    Special Encouragement Award $100:   Penny, the Police and Professionals by Suzanne Covich     VERY HIGHLY COMMENDED ENTRIES: Halcyon Afternoon by Amber Herrick In Search of Spike by Mello White Ellie by Wendy Dartnall Winter Sun by Lou O. Madison A Little Bird Shall Lead them by Diana Thurbon Jesse's Great Escape by Beverley Lessard Two Birds by Amanda Stein Death in Foul Ground by Ted Walker A Christmas Tree for God by Elizabeth MacDonald Burrows 'Happily Ever After' Left With Daddy by Debra Gundy One Seashell, Two Seashell, Flap, Flap, Flap by Erik X. Raj The Red Trunk by Stephanie Burster An Ecclesiastical History by Fred McGavran The Oak Tree by Victoria Gouldthorp Strangers on a Train by Danielle Bennett Nature's Sweetness by Noelle Bickle As It Was in the Beginning: Holy Week Seville by Mari Grana What You Made of Me by N. B. Bourne The State San by Debbie Fox   HIGHLY COMMENDED ENTRIES:   After the Banquet Is Thrown by Sheila Strulowitz Nobody's Child by Sherrie Collins Hurricane Season in Texas PLUS Ms. Brown by Laura Donnell The First Day by John Freda The Russian Officer by Elaine Slater Killing the Bull Thistle by Rodney Nelsestuen Breath by Lisa Morris Take a Leaf from the Tree PLUS After All PLUS Lost by Martin Steele A Complete Romantic by Julia Kaverzine Beachcomber by Tim Porter Cemetery of the Innocent by James Weis Til Then by Joy Zito Dovel The Rejection by Vivien K. Harris Lost Time by Craig Petree Who Am I by Jason McClearen Miriam's Miracle by Steve Roberts "Happily Ever After" Left with Daddy by Debra Gundy My Mind Is Slowly Going by Shirley Dilley Magic Fish Potion Number Five by Mark Smith Fading from View by Simon Luckhurst Grif by Glynn Leyshon The Gift by June Hubatsek Memorial Day by John T. Hitchner A Time to Keep by James Facos Legacy by James D. Young The Boatman by John Corvese Overalls by John Rehfuss Searchin' Out Spike by James D. Young A Place of Peace by W.D. West You've No Idea What I've Found by Alice R. Marks The Bell Ringer by Robert Kritkausky Loving Sam by David McFarland Live! From Mongolia by Patricia Sexton Fleeing Callignee by Rebekah Jennings Chameleon by Rebekah Jennings Scar the Glowing Haze by Danielle Bryant Keepsake by Jillian Healand Sending a Voice – Native Americans in the Movies by Daniel A. Brown Uncertainty at the Water's Edge by David Jackson Legend of the White Wolf by Brad Cook The Corn Field by Robert Yearick Roses by Jeffe Aronson The Stock Broker by John Hancock An Inconvenient Cow by Alana Bregin 40 Degrees by Matthew Lange Words by Bernie Dowling It Was the Strangest Thing by Terry Hopper Orange Sky by Ryan Surace Before Sweetness Stings by Mary Lee Costa Withered Garlands by Darlene Marlow Malabar by Mark Wagstaff White Butterfly by Dick Sheffield Tesseract by Anjuli Adler Home from Taos by Elayne Bentley Tale of The by Sean W. Murphy Great Circle by Joseph Rizzo Beyond the Blue Yonder by Karen Patterson One Less Counted by Kim Jordana Robinson Southside Saturday by Leilani Allen More Than Paper by Emily Dickson Compline by Alisa Weis Cecelia by Laura Loomis Life Is Not a Dream by George Keithley Night and Fog by George Keithley The Wolf by George Keithley Mingus Today by George Keithley White Snow Blackout by Joseph A. Byrne Music or Medicine? by Sherwin Kaufman Shadows Over Yanoun by Michael J. Cooper You Don't Have To Be an Einstein by Michael J. Cooper A Real No-Talent Guy by Donald Fitzpatrick A Bump in the Road to the Moon by Billy J. Adams The Friend I Never Met by J. Graham Ducker An American Address by Austin Kenny Strangers at the Station by Terry Hopper Travelling Companions by Peter Jones A New Outlook by Peter Jones The Beckoning Heart by John C. Maxfield The Kiss of God by Natasha Jennings The Great Pharaoh by Vetella A. Camper Given Time by David Jones A Canada Goose: Beyond the Deformity by Mary Lou Simms The Last Henderson Girl by Dennis R. Rader Feline Meanderings by Jack Carbee Making the Call by Kevin P. McCabe Abracadabra Magic by Charlene Wexler The Mystical Forest by Brian Ellis The Young and the Swift by Morgan Smith Arnold's Gift by William Hanson Bear Legged by Curran Dobbs The Fortune Cookie by Tom Walters Who's Thomas Evergreen by Shannon Brown Lotto by Ellen Portal Earth-vibrating Laughter by Evans Simubali The Stupormundi Effect by Alan Ecob Lazarus, Come Forth! by Brighten Cambridge Sudden Death by Gillian Lin Olympic Champion Charlie Greene's Long Run to Faith by Robert B. Robeson Gone Forever On Christmas Night by Tirrea Billings The Best and the Brightest by Laura T. Jensen The Be's and the Bain'ts by Benson Hewitt A February Parade by Jerry Ezell The Way of the Rooster by Jerry Ezell   Change email address / Leave mailing list Powered by YMLP

Fw: Importance of Opening Lines in Prose and Poetry Contests!

--- On Mon, 1/2/10, Tom Howard Contest News from John Reid <rastar7@bigpond.com> wrote: From: Tom Howard Contest News from John Reid <rastar7@bigpond.com> Subject: Importance of Opening Lines in Prose and Poetry Contests! To: simschimeko@yahoo.co.uk Date: Monday, 1 February, 2010, 4:15 We are on schedule to announce the winning and commended entries for the 2009 Tom Howard Poetry Contest on February 15. The cash winners will be announced in this Newsletter and a full list of winners will be posted on http://writeway.exactpages.com and http://writing-events.blogspot.com The Annual $5,550 Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse is open! The annual $5,550 Tom Howard Short Story, Essay and Prose Contest is also now open for entries, but will close on March 31, so now is the time to lodge your story or essay before the judges are swamped by the last-month rush! And also open of course is the current $5,550 Tom Howard Poetry Contest for Verse in All Styles and Genres. As you know, these Newsletters are issued only twice a month (usually on the first and fifteenth days). Sometimes it's necessary to get information across more quickly, so I've started a blog, http://writing-events.blogspot.com One of its purposes is to provide news of my own poetic endeavors (currently "A Salute to Spanish Verse"), but it will also be used to provide Contest help and information. For example, in my last Newsletter, I mentioned the importance of an eye-catching title to rivet the judges' attention to your entry right from the start, and I listed some of the titles from the Tom Howard collection , Escape to Paradise and Other Poetic Fancies. But almost equally important are your first lines and your first stanza. On the current blog, http://writing-events.blogspot.com, I've provided some good examples from the above book. The website for the Tom Howard Poetry Contest is http://tomhowardpoetry.bravepages.com The latest Margaret Reid anthology is Love & City Dreaming: Poems by Margaret Havill Reid. Margaret's range and versatility in this book provide an excellent guide to the verse we are seeking for the Margaret Reid Prize. You'll also find plenty of rousing titles and attention-getting opening lines in our previous anthologies of winning entries such as SAILING IN THE MIST OF TIME: Award-Winning Poems in which 108 award-winning and commended poems are gathered together in a large-format, 196-page book! For more information, I recommend my Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS: How To Join the Winners' Circle for Prose and Poetry Awards, If you've been wasting your time and money sending great stories or magnificent poems to Contests that immediately place them in the reject basket, here's a book to set you on the right path. This year, the prize pool for our prose and poetry contests has been increased to $5,550 (including a First Prize of $3,000). Entry fees have not been raised. The entry fee for the prose contest remains at $15 for each short story or essay up to 5,000 words in length. There are ten cash prizes in all, but the judges do reserve the right to award extra cash prizes if they so desire. For the last prose contest, the judges awarded no less than $500 in additional prizes, bringing the total prize pool up to $5,850 instead of the advertised $5,350! To enter your poems in our current poetry contests, you will find full information at http://margaretreid.exactpages.com OR http://poetrycontests.exactpages.com. You will note that although the prize-money has been increased, entry fees do remain at $7 for every 25 lines. Unlike almost all other poetry contests, we impose no limits on the number of lines or number of poems you may submit. You can also visit the home page of http://www.winningwriters.com and click on the contests at the top left of the screen. As stated above, the Tom Howard Short Story, Essay & Prose Contest is open. Entries will close on March 31, 2010. Again, let me make it clear at once that we are seeking entries in ALL categories, including "literary" fiction, but most particularly we would like to award prizes to popular, everyday, mainstream stories, essays and prose, as even a casual glance at our anthologies of winning and commended entries such as Keep Watching the Skies! An Anthology of Prize-Winning Short Stories will soon make plain. You'll find full details at http://shortstorycontest.0catch.com One of the key recommendations in my Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS is that you take a look at some of the entries that have won prizes in previous contests. This will give you some idea of the types and varieties of stories and prose pieces that have won prizes in the past. The books I recommend here are the two "Watching" books: "Watching the Skies" above, and WATCHING TIME: Anthology of Prizewinning Essays & Short Stories. And finally I notice Amazon are still selling the new, expanded edition of "Write Ways..." for only $11.25 (which is considerably less than the original edition, even though the new edition has more pages and lots more valuable information): Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS: How To Join the Winners' Circle for Prose and Poetry Awards, NEW EXPANDED EDITION Keep writing on! All my very best wishes! John Change email address / Leave mailing list Powered by YourMailingListProvider

Fw: Interview with Judith Goldhaber, Grand Prizewinner, Margaret Reid Poetry

--- On Fri, 1/1/10, Tom Howard Contest News from John Reid <rastar7@bigpond.com> wrote: From: Tom Howard Contest News from John Reid <rastar7@bigpond.com> Subject: Interview with Judith Goldhaber, Grand Prizewinner, Margaret Reid Poetry To: simschimeko@yahoo.co.uk Date: Friday, 1 January, 2010, 7:28 The Annual $5,550 Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse is open! The annual $5,550 Tom Howard Short Story, Essay and Prose Contest is also open for entries! And also open is the annual $5,550 Tom Howard Poetry Contest for Verse in All Styles and Genres. To celebrate this occasion, a new anthology of 98 poems by Tom Howard (including 75 previously unpublished) is now on sale at Amazon and other book stores. Please click this link for details: Escape to Paradise and Other Poetic Fancies. The website for the Tom Howard Poetry Contest is http://tomhowardpoetry.bravepages.com Our previous anthologies of winning entries include SAILING IN THE MIST OF TIME: Award-Winning Poems. 108 award-winning and commended poems in a large-format, 196-page book! The latest Margaret Reid title is Love & City Dreaming: Poems by Margaret Havill Reid. Margaret's range and versatility in this book provide an excellent guide to the verse we are seeking for the Margaret Reid Prize. Margaret was a great champion of humorous verse, for example, illustrated in this book by delightful parodies like "The Wiz of Wizzinzee" and "Muzzacoffalox". She wrote serious poetry too, like "Face of the City", romantic verse such as "Loving You", spiritual verse ("His Light") , descriptive ("Nodding Among Geraniums"), political ("Myopia"), philosophical ("Was There a Silver Sea?"), reflective ("Time"), satirical ("Blinking into Day"), children's ("Mida, the Spider"), playful ("Superstar'), serious ("Raging Planet"), you-name-it ("The Hall of Mirrors"). Another book I recommend of course is my Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS: How To Join the Winners' Circle for Prose and Poetry Awards, If you've been wasting your time and money sending great stories or magnificent poems to Contests that immediately place them in the reject basket, here's a book to set you on the right path. This year, the prize pool for our prose and poetry contests have been increased to $5,550 (including a First Prize of $3,000). Entry fees will not be increased. The entry fee for the prose contest will remain at $15 for each short story or essay up to 5,000 words in length. There are ten cash prizes in all, but the judges do reserve the right to award extra cash prizes if they so desire. For the last prose contest, the judges awarded no less than $500 in additional prizes, bringing the total prize pool up to $5,850 instead of the advertised $5,350! To enter your poems in our current poetry contests, you will find full information at http://margaretreid.exactpages.com OR http://poetrycontests.exactpages.com. You will note that although the prize-money has been increased, entry fees remain at $7 for every 25 lines. Unlike almost all other contests, we impose no limits on the number of lines or number of poems you may submit. You can also visit the home page of http://www.winningwriters.com and click on the contests at the top left of the screen. As stated above, the Tom Howard Short Story, Essay & Prose Contest is open. Entries will close on March 31, 2010. Again, let me make it clear at once that we are seeking entries in ALL categories, including "literary" fiction, but most particularly we would like to award prizes to popular, everyday, mainstream stories, essays and prose, as even a casual glance at our anthologies of winning and commended entries such as Keep Watching the Skies! An Anthology of Prize-Winning Short Stories will soon make plain. You'll find full details at http://shortstorycontest.0catch.com One of the key recommendations in my Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS is that you take a look at some of the entries that have won prizes in previous contests. This will give you some idea of the types and varieties of stories and prose pieces that have won prizes in the past. The book I recommend here is WATCHING TIME: Anthology of Prizewinning Essays & Short Stories. Amazon also stock two of our previous collections of winning prose, namely Keep Watching the Skies! An Anthology of Prize-Winning Short Stories as mentioned above, and Mr Christian and the Bag Lady: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Stories And finally I notice Amazon are still selling the new, expanded edition of "Write Ways..." for only $11.25 (which is considerably less than the original edition, even though the new edition has more pages and lots more valuable information): Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS: How To Join the Winners' Circle for Prose and Poetry Awards, NEW EXPANDED EDITION AN INTERVIEW WITH JUDITH GOLDHABER, AUTHOR OF "THE BEWICK'S WREN", OUR GRAND PRIZEWINNING POEM How did you happen upon such a novel and engaging subject as the wrens' building their nest in a doll's house?  The simple answer is that the story of the wrens and the doll house actually happened, pretty much the way I describe it in the poem. The more complicated answer is that this poem is one of many I've written in the past few years that draw from a deep well of feeling about the empty nest – my daughters growing up, leaving home, and making their way in the world.  I have never been fond of the confessional style of poetry, either to read or to write.  The word "I" seldom appears in my poems, unless it is spoken by some animate or inanimate stand-in for myself -- a spider or a raven or a butterfly or a duck (or, in one case, the planet). But I pack a lot of personal emotion into these poems.  I am a believer in Robert Frost's words: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." Did the subject seem to instantly lend itself to a traditional rhyming form or did you experiment with other formats as well? I almost never experiment with other formats.  I am hopelessly addicted to the sonnet (for lyric expression) and to the sonnet sequence (for storytelling).  To me, the familiar rhythm of iambic pentameter (so close to ordinary English speech, yet "elevated"), the ear-pleasing chiming of  recurring rhymes, the orderly progression of ideas from octet to sestet,  and the final jolt of the twist at the end make the sonnet the perfect form for expressing a powerful idea or emotion.  And a series of sonnets, bound together by form, is perfect for telling a long story.  Long narrative poems are hard to read, but a sonnet sequence or cycle keeps the reader going because he/she expects, and gets, a small payoff at the end of each link.    Approximately how much time did you spend writing and polishing this poem? Since my poems usually involve some kind of animate or inanimate stand-in for myself, I spend quite a bit of time researching the subject -- reading, Googling, etc.  For example, when I  had the idea of writing about the birds in the doll house, I didn't even know what kind of birds they were.  Once I had identified them as Bewick's wrens, I read everything I could about their habits, and this material provided the inspiration for the detail in the poem.  I even emailed the head of ornithology at the Smithsonian Institution to find out the preferred pronunciation of "Bewick." (Buick? or Bee-wick?)  He responded promptly  -- Buick!  (Everyone likes to help a poet.)  In actual writing time, I  usually write and polish one sonnet, or one link in a sequence, in two working days.  I take a long walk in the morning and wait for an idea and a few lines to come to me, then rush back to my computer and turn them into a poem.    You also won a Most Highly Commended Award for another entry, "The Garden Spider". In your own estimation, do you prefer one poem to the other, or would you rank them equally? It's hard for me to judge "The Garden Spider" objectively, because it has a very special meaning to me.  It was the first poem I wrote after a dry period that had lasted for almost 40 years.  And the first line of the poem, "The first step is a drop into the void" is a metaphor for what I was trying to do – reclaim my vocation as a poet.  I had been a precocious, prize-winning poet as a teenager and college student, but the muse had deserted me for 40 years of adult life, marriage, motherhood, and a career as a science journalist.  A poet friend visiting from London, Claire Barnham, dragged me to some poetry readings (which I had been avoiding for many years), and the muse began to stir.  It was October, 2002, and my garden was full of hard-working specimens of Araneus diadematus and their beautiful webs. Always the curious science writer, I wondered how the web was made, and looked it up.  The field guide's description of the spider's web-making began "The first step is a drop into the void", a path I followed.  How long have you been writing poetry and have you enjoyed any previous successes? I was born into a family of writers and journalists and poets. I wrote my first poems at the age of 12 or 13.  By high school I was winning state-wide prizes, and by college I was writing sonnets virtually indistinguishable from the ones I write now.  (So really I have not matured at all as a poet – I don't know if that's good or bad.)  My greatest influences as a poet were: a) growing up in the midst of nature, in an ancient farmhouse without electricity or indoor plumbing; and b) reading great poetry early in life, and unconsciously committing countless pages of it to memory.  I carry around in my head an enormous anthology of the poetry that I read in my youth – Yeats, Shakespeare, Frost, Jeffers, Eliot, Millay, Wordsworth.  I never took a college course in poetry, never joined any kind of poetry group, never even considered trying to make a living as a poet or academic.  I did, however, go into "the family business" as a science journalist, specializing in physics and astronomy.  Before long, my kind of poetry went out of style. (Poetry without either rhyme or formal meter never interested me, and still doesn't).  Both the academic world of modern poetry and the vibrant  poetry-slam scene seemed closed to an outsider. The muse deserted me, and though the desertion made me sad, I accepted it and moved on. In 1988, as a journalist, I had occasion to meet Stephen Hawking, the great British astrophysicist who is paralyzed by ALS.   This encounter obviously touched something very deep in my (paralyzed?)  creative self, for quite unexpectedly, a poem, "Hawking," emerged.  Over the next few years, I wrote the book and lyrics for "Falling Through a Hole in the Air," a musical fantasy  about Hawking, which (with composer-collaborator Carl Pennypacker), was produced at San Francisco City College a few years later.  Another musical, about Albert Einstein's "lost" daughter Lieserl, followed, but has not yet found a producer.  I found it easy and liberating to write song lyrics, but it took another decade for poetry to re-emerge.  When it did, it came in a great rush.  Beginning with "The Garden Spider" in 2002, I have written over 300 sonnets –including one unpublished book-length collection of long sonnet sequences, The Coming Earthquake  (which includes "The Bewick's Wren") and two self-published books, Sonnets from Aesop (100 of Aesop's fables rewritten as sonnets), and Sarah Laughed (tales from Genesis rewritten as sonnet sequences), both illustrated by my husband, Gerson Goldhaber.  Virtually every one of the twelve long sonnet sequences in The Coming Earthquake has won some kind of a major national prize, including the Annie Finch Award of the National Poetry Review, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience; the Dancing Galliard Sonnet Contest; the "In the Beginning Was the Word" Poetry Contest (twice); the Winning Writers' War Poetry contest, and, now, the Margaret Reid Prize.  Yet only one of  these sonnet sequences  has been published!  They are too long for the journals, and book publishers don't seem to be interested in poets who don't have the usual academic credentials and contacts (for blurbs and reviews).  It's very frustrating.  Cash awards are great, but one also wants to have readers.  Any words of encouragement that you'd like to share would also be much appreciated.  Words of encouragement . . . Hmmm.   I would say that despite missing the recognition that comes with being a conventionally successful published poet,  I have derived deep satisfaction from finding my own poetic voice very early and sticking with it for a lifetime.  Some might say that this shows nothing but a lack of nerve.  Perhaps if I had attended some workshops and sleep-away camps for writers back in the seventies and eighties, I might have learned to love (and write) the kind of poetry that others were writing, poems more acceptable to the taste of the times, and I might have avoided the 40-year dry spell.  But I doubt it.  To me, poetry is pure magic; I don't know where it comes from; all I can do is say "welcome" when the muse decides to visit.  A word about self-publishing. It can work in certain cases.  After numerous vain attempts to interest a publisher, my husband and I established Ribbonweed Press to publish our book Sonnets from Aesop. (We had quickly realized the futility of trying to find a publisher for a book containing 100 sonnets illustrated by 100 full-color, full-page paintings.. The cost of dealing with the pictures would be prohibitive for any publisher, and the book would have had to sell for upwards of $50 to cover expenses.)  By doing a lot of the setup ourselves, and printing in China, we are able to sell Sonnets from Aesop for $14.95.  It was published in 2005 and won an Independent Publisher's Award (IPPY) as outstanding independently-published book of the year.   Sonnets from Aesop (and its later companion, Sarah Laughed: Sonnets from Genesis) has sold well in local bookstores and on Amazon for several years.. Both books are still available (and selling) on Amazon: Sonnets from Aesop. The combination of classical theme (Aesop and Genesis), full-color illustrations, and low price has made these popular gift books, for adults and children.  But I doubt if this approach would work for a simple volume of poetry.  I have not tried it for The Coming Earthquake.   Change email address / Leave mailing list Powered by YourMailingListProvider

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