Call for Submissions: Prose Writers

18th Annual Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers
$2,500 PRIZE

The Writers’ Union of Canada is pleased to announce that submissions are being accepted until November 10, 2010 for the 18TH ANNUAL SHORT PROSE COMPETITION FOR DEVELOPING WRITERS. The winning entry will be the best Canadian work of 2,500 words in the English language, fiction or nonfiction, written by an unpublished author.

PRIZE
$2,500 for the winning entry and the entries of the winner and finalists will be submitted to three Canadian magazines.

JURY
Writers Tarek Fatah, K.V. Johansen, and Sharon Pollock will serve as the jury.

ELIGIBILITY
This competition is open to all Canadian citizens and landed immigrants who have not had a book published by a commercial or university press in any genre and who do not currently have a contract with a book publisher. Original and unpublished (English language) fiction or nonfiction.

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRIES:
•    Entries should be typed, double-spaced, in a clear twelve point font, and the pages numbered on 8.5 x 11 paper, not stapled.
•    Submissions will be accepted by hardcopy only.
•    Include a separate cover letter with title of story, full name, address, phone number, e-mail address, word count, and number of pages of entry.
•    Please type the name of entrant and the title of entry on each numbered page. This is not a blind competition.
•    Make cheque or money order payable to The Writers’ Union of Canada. Multiple entries can be submitted together and fees can be added and paid with one cheque or money order, $25 per submission.
•    Entries must be postmarked by November 10, 2010 to be eligible. Results will be announced in February 2011.

• Mail entries to:
WFC Competition,
The Writers’ Union of Canada
90 Richmond Street East, Suite 200
Toronto, ON
M5C 1P1

Results will be posted at www.writersunion.ca. Manuscripts will not be returned.

[Photo: Visentico / Sento]

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On the pleasure, pain and panic of working with archival materials

I’ve been working with archival materials for more than a decade now.

While writing my dissertation, I sat in archives comparing drafts of novels, tracking authors’ corrections and studying the process of composition and revision. More recently, I’ve been working on diaries and letters, telling the story of a life on the basis of private papers. Archival work can be slow and painful: you have to read some twenty or fifty letters before you find one that grips you, speaks to you, or tells you something new.

Piecing together a narrative from a million seemingly inconsequential details is the hardest literary thing I’ve done yet. You can’t know what will be important, so you have to copy everything, read everything, and take copious notes. The result is a lot of paper, loads of post-its, a stack of storage boxes as tall as me, and a chaotic office. Only after thousands of hours of reading and reflection will a thread start to emerge.

Waiting for the thread takes faith and patience.

Still, there’s little that thrills an archival researcher more than making a connection  or accidentally finding a key piece of evidence: these moments of pleasure that make the pain worthwhile.

So here’s where I’m at: after years of work, of mastering my subject’s writings, and having finally completed my manuscript, it dawns on me that I don’t own this material. While writing my book, I had put the issue out of mind, but now that I’ve finished, it’s time to face facts.

And the fact is that it’s not mine to publish. Not yet.

The issue is copyright.

In order to cite from unpublished archival materials, international copyright law requires permission of the author’s next-of-kin. In the absence of an heir, you must  prove that you have made a good-faith effort to find one.

To be fair, I have a long-standing and good relationship with the nephew of my main biographical subject who controls the copyright of ninety per cent of the material that is important to my book. But permission for the other ten per cent now needs to be secured. I waited to finish the manuscript before starting the permissions process, because only now do I know what’s important to my story

For the past two days, I’ve been writing emails and making cold calls to Eastern Europe in my good-faith effort to locate the heirs of the authors of additional archival documents I cite.

And although it’s going well, the realization that I’d written a book that I might not be able to publish kept me up all last night.

This is the panic of archival work.

May the heirs be kind and generous.

Fingers crossed.

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What is “Creative” or “Literary” Nonfiction?

A friend recently asked me what creative nonfiction was. I must admit that I find the term a bit clunky. I might prefer “literary nonfiction,” though only just marginally. Both seem a bit affected, and protest too much. In any case, this does seem to be the genre which has chosen me, whether I like its current appellation or not.

So, I’ve been mulling my friend’s question over, and here’s what I’ve come up with: creative non-fiction tells facts, but uses techniques of fiction (character building, dialogue, atmosphere) to do so. It’s concerned not only with the content and truth of what it communicates (as is often the case with journalistic writing) or with the argument it puts forth (as in academic writing), but with how it is crafted. Form, rhythm, flow: these too are the life-blood of a writer of creative nonfiction.

The best elucidation of creative nonfiction comes from Lee Gutkind, which should come as no surprise, since he publishes a journal called Creative Nonfiction and works seriously in the genre. Here’s how he sums what it is best at:

Perhaps creative nonfiction’s greatest asset: It offers flexibility and freedom while adhering to the basic tenets of reportage. In creative nonfiction, writers can be poetic and journalistic simultaneously. Creative nonfiction writers are encouraged to utilize literary and even cinematic techniques, from scene to dialogue to description to point of view, to write about themselves and others, capturing real people and real life in ways that can and have changed the world. What is most important and enjoyable about creative nonfiction is that it not only allows but also encourages the writer to become a part of the story or essay being written. The personal involvement creates a special magic that alleviates the suffering and anxiety of the writing experience; it provides many outlets for satisfaction and self-discovery, flexibility and freedom.

Our kind of writing has been called the essay or New Journalism in the past, but both are somehow wrong too. Too narrow for what we’re talking about.

I, for one,  used to think of creative non-fiction as “real” writing (juxtaposed in my mind to academic writing, where I always felt like I was in costume, faking it).

In any case, whatever we call it it, this genre of prose sits comfortably with me and feels like home.

What is real writing to you?

NB: Click here for a follow-up posting called “Take Two: What is Creative Nonfiction?”

[Photo: Sudhamshu]

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The Missing Paragraph

On the second morning of last weekend’s writers’ retreat, I woke up thinking about A.’s missing paragraph. The one that got lost before it was written into the poem she read on Saturday.

How had she known it was supposed to be there in the first place, I wondered.

A. has a kind of serenity about her that is so palpable, so present that it seems to walk beside her. “I gotta get me some of that,” I whispered, watching her.

You don’t have to be around A. for long to understand that she sits atop a mountain of knowledge: for example, she cycles easily through Sanskrit terms, playing with them in her free writes.

Who was she, I wanted to know. So, after she alluded to her relationship to “radical feminism” for the second time, I asked simply: what do you mean? The oral history of mothers and foremothers that poured out of her in response should have come as no surprise. Still, it was impressive.

It was the story of mentorship, sketched out hastily, as if she feared boring or alienating her audience. Then she told of strife and division, of women uniting into Utopian communities, then dividing and falling apart. I’m surprised to hear among these comers and goers the names of women whose work I love or whose writings now form part of a feminist canon.

To me these women are history, to A. they are her personal past and, in some cases, her personal pain.

What happened? How did it come to that?

I think about her missing paragraph.

Would those absent words have provided a bridge? Or somehow prevented the fragmentation that A. told of? Or would it simply provide an explanation, changing nothing, merely a headstone of sorts, a burial site marker? Could it have been otherwise?

I don’t know. I haven’t known how to start to know, so when she speaks her history, my ears open wide.

I think about the missing paragraph.

[Photo: cavale]

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New essay on writing and mothering: Pregnant Pause

A while ago I wrote a post on failure and returning to the first-person voice. I told how I’d worked on an essay that got rejected countless times before it found its form and its home.

That essay has now appeared in the journal Feminist Formations, in an issue about the body.

Called “Pregnant Pause: On Ona Šimaitė, Research, Writing, and Motherhood,” my essay explores the riddle of being a writer and a mother. It’s a love story between a writer, her new baby and her biographical subject (a Holocaust rescuer and librarian).

You can read the essay here. 

If you don’t have access to Project Muse and would like a copy of the essay, feel free to send me a note via my Contact page, and I’ll get a PDF version off to you.

[Photo: Shutter Daddy]

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