Honesty and Low Cunning

I was recently reading in the September issue of The Writer’s Chronicle an interview with the redoubtable John Casey (Spartina, Compass Rose).  The whole exchange is worth a close reading, but two moments really rose as necessary, but not easy, revelations.

One, which comes later in the interview, is his response to a question about whether teaching interferes with writing.  Casey is emphatic on this point: he writes two hundred pages a year, and he adds, “A little teaching wouldn’t interfere with anyone’s productivity.”  There you have it, and I agree, though no doubt there’s room for dispute about how much is “a little” and how much too much, as well as whether certain kinds of courses require more than a little work and emotional time.  This is a long-debated topic; may the jousts continue.

The other comment that rang my bell, perhaps “oft thought but ne’er so well expressed,” is that “Honesty by itself won’t get you very far.”  He recommends, alongside that honesty, “low vaudeville cunning.”  He follows that radiant phrase with only “timing, and certain kinds of polish.”  I suspect most teachers of fiction writing know what he means.  Honesty of intent, yes, but not complete openness or candor.  Selection, juxtaposition, calculation for effect.  You want to say and imply some things that will pass like a gust of wind but reappear in the memory when triggered by other details.  You want your rhythms and  the dynamic of specific and general, scene and summary to be canny and orchestrated in concert with the story’s intended tensions and revelations.  And there’s an element of play involved.  Even behind Vermeer, isn’t there a little of Pollock?

Casey says that these two facets of storytelling can’t quite be taught, though the willing and quick student can be provided with insight about timing and polish.  But the interview is far better than any summary, so I’ll just recommend it and hush.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Workshop Blues

With my usual trepidation, I’m reading manuscripts, sharpening my perceptions, concocting exercises to prepare myself to lead another brief poetry writing workshop.  I’ve been a participant from time to time in the kind of leaderless, round robin cabal that often springs up when writers know each other, live close by and like to talk about both the age-old issues (like “who do you perceive as your audience?” and “why rhyme?”) and the immediate ones (like “wouldn’t an iambic verb carry the melody better here?” or “will this metaphor bear so much repetition?”).  The conversations usually helped me for a while, then sputtered out and began to seem like a task.  However, it’s been two decades since I was a participant.  Confession here: I’ve never actually been a student in the kind of semester-long for-credit college workshop (which might have saved me plenty of time), but I’ve taught some forty of those and been the leader of another thirty or so short-term, no-credit, for-the-art-of-it workshops.  What I’m headed for this weekend should be familiar territory.

Despite the fact that I’m a seasoned workshop leader, I’m always concerned that I’ll seem too ruthless, no matter how gently I try to break the news that a particular phrase is a cliche or that the whole sentimental content of a poem is bringing long-dead fish to the party.  There’s a delicate balance between being admirably honest and being harsh, and in a brief workshop, it’s hard to know how much criticism a particular participant can take.  Truth is, there’s a point for each of us when quantity trumps intent, and too much of even the most gentle criticism can begin to seem cruel.  What’s a body to do?  Seek the middle ground, straddle the fence, try to tell as much truth as the situation will bear.

My usual plan is to let the participants do the obvious work, while I walk behind, wiggling the switch, letting it crack now and then, even giving myself a touch or two.  It’s always a comfort to remember that this usually works; the stronger or more artful or more teacherly students will take to my mild guidance and do most of the talking, and when it’s time for me to sum up, I’m less the muleskinner than the mediator.  Of course, I can’t let my attention stray or fail to hear the nuances.  “Vigilance” is the watchword.  Sometimes someone will throw a live grenade into the action, and I have the job of getting the pin back in.

Happily, I have been supplied in advance with poems by the participants, and I’ve had time to peruse them, and as I did, I began to remember so many of the ingredients of the witches’ broth that makes a poem.  My rememberer rouses, and I start thinking, “I know how to do this.”

But it’s not a foolproof plan.  Three times my taking the backseat hasn’t really worked, and in all three cases the workshops were not as productive or provocative as I’d hoped for.  In one small workshop, the more skillful and erudite students simply tuned out when we came to the work of the weaker students.  Even when I called on them by name, they had little to offer.  Most of them had been in workshops together before, and the better students were simply tired of repeating basic advice.  So the buck stopped with me.  In another case, some of the students thought my comments were too demanding, so they became more a support network than a critical community.  They came to like everything their peers wrote.  I like to see a balance between these two, but I really don’t like to be the sole provocateur: it can result in an adversarial dynamic.  Two of the students in that second group made it a point to tell me that this workshop was usually taught by X, who was much more encouraging and thought the poems before the group were generally very good.  (If you notice that all this sounds generic — no descriptions of site, no atmospherics or humorous asides — it’s because I don’t want to punish any cats by letting them out of the bag.  I’ve tried to put most of the details behind me.)

Those two are far in the past, but about half a dozen years ago I went to a private retreat and directed a small workshop whose four core members (in a class of 7) had been in previous workshops together and were pals.  One of them was often paid to be the teacher, but in this case she had enrolled as a student because, as she said, she “respected my work so much.”  By the second day, that respect had turned to scorn.  This usual mentor for the group was certain that I was not only prejudiced against the content of her work but that I was part of a conspiracy to deny publication to the writers of the area they all hailed from.  When she wasn’t scolding, she was sulking, especially when I admired the work of other members.  When I praised hers, she still didn’t seem satisfied.  The great misfortune was that most of the other members were afraid of Ms. X, who’d been published a bit in the region, was clearly aggressive and would surely be their teacher again, probably soon.  Another, who didn’t seem to be afraid, told me she was embarrassed for Ms. X and felt sorry for her.  I remember we did a lot of exercises in the second half of the workshop, and I left feeling I could not claim success on this occasion.

But why am I telling you this?  I have some time to plot and design, learn and scribble, and I should get to it, make my notes, muster my resources, steel my nerves and still my soul.  After all, “Whose woods these are, I think I know,” as I like to begin a workshop, and I’m now confidently remembering how that poem can lay a foundation almost no one can crack.

However, if anyone out there is listening amid this dog days’ haze of a week, let me know what workshop tactics or approaches have proved to be the most or least valuable to you.  It’s not to late for me to alter my course, though the destination remains the same.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Vampires and Slave Holders

When I first saw Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter,” I was fascinated and horrified by the Russian roulette scenes, in which captured G.I. during the Viet Nam War are forced to spin the cylinder and take their chances.  It seemed an apt metaphor for the political and military situation of the time, but when I learned that it was pretty much a construct for the purposes of the film, a compressed but artificial expression of the randomness of violence, my enthusiasm cooled.  Like many of my friends, I wondered if the grafting of a fictional practice (which the film suggests is widespread in wartime Nam) onto the actual atrocities doesn’t somehow interfere with our moral intelligence, dimming the legitimate response to actual crimes and horrors.

I was drawn to read Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by the blurbs and reviews that praised its historical detail and the excellence of the research behind it.  In that respect, I was disappointed, as a high school history text and a few good Britannica articles will supply all the historical review a reasonably well-educated person would need to create the era as G-S has done.  What did, however, make a strong impression on me — and sent me back to the roulette question — was the author’s decision to conflate the fictional/mythic spooky gore of vampires with the actual horrors of the American slave system.  Slave traders and their sympathizers, the reader learns, are usually vampires, as are many plantation owners, whose cash crop is actually the population of slaves, whom other vampires purchase and feed on.

I know the horror genre is just one of many word games, but I can’t help wondering if G-S’s league of evil doesn’t somehow obscure the fact that the kind of metaphorical vampirism involved in slaveholding and trading is — because it was (is) real and because it can’t be defeated in one fell swoop — a greater horror.  Another case of the invented obscuring the actual.  I admit that it’s not likely that many adult readers will be confused about the threshold between the fantastic and the factual, but it seems a topic that might merit some serious discussion.  Perhaps you know of some reviewer who took on this issue when the hardback was published?  Certainly it will be interesting to see how the film  (with trailers that present the story it as all martial arts/horror splatter and snicker) manages this question and how viewers and reviewers respond.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Not So Ravenous for “The Raven”

I would have gotten more pleasure out of the quaint and curious new film The Raven if the writers had not promised something much more serious and informed than they delivered.  The movie opens by reminding us of the mysterious circumstances surrounding Poe’s delirium and death in Baltimore during October of 1849 and promising us a sequence of possibilities that might explain Edgar Allan Poe’s last days, which many attribute to heavy alcohol consumption while “cooped,” or wagoned-up and hauled from poll to poll to vote often and fraudulently in local elections.  The whirligig which the film offers up instead I won’t expose, but the filmmakers keep throwing the implausible at their audience, refusing any credible paths.  One most puzzling miscalculation (which I suppose is meant to be an inside joke) is that a murder victim

early in the story is identified as Rufus W. Griswold, a critic who had a running ink feud with Poe.  If there’s any other mystery in Poe’s life story equal to that concerning the cause of his death, it’s why he named Griswold (who outlived Poe by a decade) his literary executor.  Griswold set out to savage Poe’s reputation, and it was a long time before the name of Poe shed the taint of Griswold’s hand.  So, if we’re to take the movie with even a grain of salt, how can we reconcile this counterfactual tidbit (one of many, but the easiest to identify and expose) with anything like a viable theory of Poe’s death?  In truth, the writers and producers have honeydipped from Poe’s biography, omitting most information that would interfere with his role here as a sympathetic protagonist (for instance, his sad but sick penchant for tubercular women, or his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin).  It would not be impossible to present an admirable Poe with deep flaws and strange appetites, primarily imaginative, but that would have been a movie with less of the Keystone Kops and bodice-ripping romance and more of a character exploration.  Not the kind of spring/summer fare that makes the box office cash register ring.  I only hope this zany-and-gruesome-but-occasionally-serious (and sometimes quite clever) outing from those eager to cash in on the current splatter craze will not prevent a more serious biopic, which would provide distraction and stimulation for those who are curious about tell-tale hearts and mysteries of the soul (not to mention hoaxes, speculative stories, cryptography, philosophy, feline interment, sibling interment, premature interment, spousal interment and various stripes of disinterment) but which would still not be deficient in shock and awe.  Perhaps we have the new and goofy Sherlock Holmes extravaganzas to blame for this effort, but to raise the interactive level, I offer this little trinket: when the detective asks Poe if he has ever written a story with a sailor in it, before Poe can say he hasn’t, cry out, “The owner of the dangerous ‘Ourang-Outang’ in ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue’ is a sailor.”  [By the way, John Evangelist Walsh’s attempt to put the Poe demise mystery at rest in Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe isn’t much more persuasive, and you have to pop the corn yourself.]

 


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Approaching Warren’s AUDUBON: A VISION

     TELL ME A STORY,” says the child yearning to delay the darkness and the withdrawal of parental comfort as the dream world draws near, and all the better if the story features recognizable characters and patterns, if something important is imperiled in the narrative, then rescued,  and if the tale is, in the end and almost against expectation, soothing.  In an era of so much poetry with fractured syntax— fragmented, elliptical, dissonant, cryptic – I sometimes grow restive and wonder who really has a story to tell and who is just feigning it, juking about, confusing obscurity with profundity, but then I recall how startled and frustrated I was on first encountering the shifting planes, altered pitches and bold, jigsawing parallelisms of Robert Penn Warren’s poetic sequence Audubon: A Vision (all its sections together at last in a slim volume from Random House in 1969).  And I also remember how spellbound and awe-struck I was, like the child hearing some tale of a dark forest and its shadows, how I could truly say, as Warren’s narrating persona does in the final movement, “I did not know what was happening in my heart.”  Forty years after the poem first found me, I am still in awe of it.

     Why was the discovery of that poem so word-altering and world-altering for me?  Operating by turns as agent of historical narrative, allegory, meditation and lyric – Warren had a song as well as a story – Audubon brought back into relevance the frontier, the haunting natures mortes of the great artist/ornithologist and my own questions about both my source and destiny, as well as a reminder of how – despite all the faux pioneering, adventure vacations, taming and “cultivating” – the Other of the natural world confronted deliberately could provide direction and amplitude to the search for identity, a context for essential epiphany.

     The poem is a bench mark for not only Warren’s own vision and work but for Americans willing to admit to shortcomings like pride, greed and pretentiousness always marbling the virtues that lead a person to flee civilization with its (as Merwin puts it) “ruth of the lair” and risk the indigenous perils and destabilizing self-revelations lurking in the wilderness.  And the poem dramatizes both Audubon’s and the author’s attempts to reconcile romantic idealism and pragmatism, to outreach both isms and discover one’s own unclassifiable core in a realistic realm both mysterious and flat-iron factual.

     The shape of the poem is not simple, yet its seven numbered parts signal to readers that its design is near-symphonic, if rife with elements of fugue and aria, riff and outburst:

I/ Was Not the Lost Dauphin (a lyrical introduction to Audubon in the natural environment, aware both of “How thin is the membrane between himself and the world” and how strong that membrane is.)

II/The Dream He Never Knew the End Of  (thirteen subsections – comprising the core of the poem – that recount a gritty and grotesque frontier story of attempted murder, disturbing concupiscence, rough justice and the protagonist’s discoveries of  joy and beauty emanating from the central grotesqueness of a murderous and somehow alluring crone.)

III/  We Are Only Ourselves (a brief statement of acceptance, or an attempt at acceptance.)

IV/ The Sign Whereby He Knew (five sections sampling and disclosing Audubon’s forays into civilization and domesticity as he acts and observes, seeking to understand fate and envying the creatures who do not require self-consciousness and the favor of “great men.”)

V/ The Sound of That Wind (a brisk survey of Audubon’s life, conveyed in part by phrases from his journals and rehearsing his struggles with respectability.)

VI/ Love and Knowledge (a page crystallizing the artist’s complex engagement with birds – “he slew them at great distances .. he put them where they are, and there we see them:/ In our imagination,” leading to the revelation that love is knowledge.)

VII/ Tell Me a Story (a memory of the narrator’s boyhood epiphany, as “there being no moon/ And the stars sparse,” he hears “the great geese hoot northward” in “the season before the elderberry blooms.”  The poet makes a plea, asks to be told a story “of great distances and starlight,” named Time, but that name unuttered, “a story of deep delight,” a phrase surely enlisted from Coleridge’s interrupted dreamer speculating on “what deep delight ‘twould win me,” if only he could reenter the dream.

     The glory of this poem is, in part, its boldness: by turns imagistic and elliptical, in part philosophical, it combines episode, summary and conclusion (as a short story might), but refuses mechanical continuity, employing tonal overlap and emotional resonance instead.  One almost wishes the poem were printed on large panels instead of pages, as its scale of cosmic engagement (the dawn is “God’s blood spilt”) invites a three-dimensional apprehension, while its central episode in which the painter/hunter is rescued from goblin-like outlaws who would slit his throat over a gold watch, is riveting in its naturalism, yet offering a troubling chronicle of the inevitability of horror.

     The two aspects of this poem which most haunt me are the grim story which unfolds at dark in Part II; “On the trod mire by the door crackles the night-ice already there forming” provides the threshold of a “dark hovel /In the forest where trees have eyes,” which he (probably Warren here, through Audubon) retains from childhood.  The deliberate pace, accumulating suspense, the imagery of dim light, a one-eyed Indian, the “whish of silk” as the grotesque hostess hones her knife on a spat-upon stone – it’s one of the great episodes (mostly extrapolated by Warren from Audubon’s journals) in our literature, but when I first encountered it, despite the meticulous enumeration and arrangement of blocks of text within the poem, I kept wondering if Warren hadn’t led me away from what I wanted poetry to be and back towards a peculiar kind of prose, maybe something William S. Burroughs would approve.  I have grown to understand that he had, instead, led me to experience poetry as language sculpture, architecture, without sacrificing the thematic weave, satisfying patterns and echoing, reinforcing sounds, which in Understanding Poetry he had called “the tangled glitter of syllables” and which I went to the well of poetry in quest of.  Once I recovered from my shock at the formal appearance of the poem, I began to learn my way around it, weaving through biography, history, metaphysics and folklore.  I had not expected any poem to quench and nourish me the way “Audubon: A Vision” had.  Although I had long loved “Prufrock,” it was always an objet d’arte, distant from my own central concerns, elegantly foreign, but Warren had diminished the dense allusive component of Eliot’s accomplishment and brought the quest for self-knowledge out of the parlor, away from the pitiful paralyzed man and set moving in my imagination a distinctly American quest accepted by a man who in some vital ways represented our national hardships and achievements, their romantic distractions and their roots in the understory of the forest, where power and access, beauty and apprehensiveness are steadily negotiated.  In short, Warren had made it personal in ways I could neither ignore nor deflect.

     I was living in Watauga County, N.C., up in the Blue Ridge when I first found a copy of the volume Audubon bound in a slender volume (the poem deployed with liberal spacing on substantial paper, itself an artifact) in the teaching assistants’ bullpen at Appalachian State University, and its words often sent me walking into the woods along Winkler’s Creek or up Howard’s Knob in morning fog and rain, at sunset or mid-day, wrestling with the question of what a man, besides his passion[s], might be.  Everything else began to seem secondary, and on good days, I believe this hierarchy is the one I should live by.  About twenty-five years ago I actually gave that volume to a friend who loved Warren and kept saying he was going to become a writer but also said he was too ignorant so far to begin.  He never did write, and for many years I had the poem only in various versions of selected Warren poems, crowded in, caged.  (I did, however, long ago memorize the final section as a talisman, a tune to whistle in the dark.)  Recently a good friend found me a copy of the 1st Edition, complete with the dust jacket pictured above, and I won’t be giving it away.

     A year and a half after the book came into my hands, Warren visited Appalachian State as a guest writer, and I spent some time conversing with him, sharing a flask of bourbon (but only after five) and sometimes chauffeuring him about.  How young was I?  One afternoon I asked him, “Mr. Warren, what kinds of things interest you specifically as a poet?”  I got the soundest and probably most obvious answer, but in a soothing tone, his eyes twinkling: “Why Rod, only those things which interest me as a man.”  I could almost hear “the great geese hooting northward” and knew I had a long climb ahead of me, that it would take a lifetime to become both a poet and a man, to  find and taste Coleridge’s “milk of paradise.”  Nevertheless, the poem, more than anything else I’ve ever read, still delivers that “deep delight” (now in a gift from another friend, the first edition copy of the board-bound book, including the dust jacket pictured above, a powerful object, almost a fetish).  It’s my twenty-third Psalm,  a poem (or sequence or suite) which promises that wonders are possible, comfort is accessible, restoration achievable, perhaps even for me, if I keep the blade sharp and learn to cut clean on the joints as, “in this century and moment of mania,” I try to tell a story myself.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Adrienne Rich 1929-2012

Adrienne Rich’s work so often demonstrates that poetry and politics are as close in nature as currents in a river.  She began as a poet of strict measures and understatement (though already unwilling to be “mastered by” the ordeals inflicted upon women) and moved to an expansive vision of language as a “common dream” necessary but not sufficient in the quest to eradicate sexism and other bigotries.  Her ingenuity, gravity and integrity has been the gold standard for more than one generation of poets.   The following is a poignant statement about Rich from Washington and Lee poet and professor Deborah Miranda:

Adrienne Rich is one of those Ancestors who found me by accident, when I didn’t know I needed to be found.  Another way to put this:  she was one of those guides I was looking for (desperately) when I didn’t know I was looking.  Either way, she caught me unawares and off-guard when I came upon her poetry in my mid-thirties, just as my life as a wife was ending and my official journey as a scholar and poet began.  Rich was more than a role model for me (an intellectual who wrote poetry!  a poet who was a mother!  a feminist who was a lesbian!) – she was a rock on which I could set my feet and push outward, a validation of my dreams, a comfort, a holy terror to live up to.  Indeed, she was a rock for many women in many ways.  How were we so lucky to have her for so long?  “No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone,” she wrote in Love Poem XVII, “The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, / they happen in our lives like car crashes/ books that change us, neighborhoods / we move into and come to love.”  Yes, accidents happen – like the gift of coming to full womanhood with Adrienne Rich in the world.  I believe in accidents.

Late Ghazal

Footsole to scalp alive facing the window’s black mirror.
First rains of the winter    morning’s smallest hour.

Go back to the ghazal then    what will you do there?
Life always pulsed harder than the lines.

Do you remember the strands that ran from eye to eye?
The tongue that reached everywhere, speaking all the parts?

Everything there was cast in an image of desire.
The imagination’s cry is a sexual cry.

I took my body anyplace with me.
In the thickets of abstraction my skin ran with blood.

Life was always stronger . . . the critics couldn’t get it.
Memory says the music always ran ahead of the words.

Reprinted from Dark Fields of the Republic (1995). Permission granted by the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

 


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Now Accepting Entries for the Bevel Summers Prize for Short-Short Fiction

From March 1 to March 31, 2012 Shenandoah will be accepting entries for the Bevel Summers Prize for Short-Short Fiction.  This $500 prize is awarded to a story of 1,000 words or less, and will also be published in an upcoming issue of Shenandoah.  There is no entry fee, and entrants may submit up to three previously unpublished story.  Please mail 2 copies of each story (one with name and contact information, and one without) and a SASE to Shenandoah: Bevel Summers at 17 Courthouse Square, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450.  The judge of this year’s prize will be Chris Gavaler, his colleagues and students are not eligible to enter.  Please see this page for more information about the judge and past winners: http://shenandoahliterary.org/bevel-summers/

Contact shenandoah@wlu.edu with any questions.


2011 Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Contest

 Shenandoah is pleased to announce the winner of the 2011 Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Award. A $500 prize awarded to a poet born or residing in Virginia, this year’s award was judged by the Poet Laureate of Virginia, Kelly Cherry. The winning poem, “Writing on the Window” was written by Margaret Mackinnon.

Mackinnon’s work has appeared in various journals, including Poetry, New England Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her new work appears in the South Carolina Review and is forthcoming in Image, RHINO, and Midwest Quarterly. Mackinnon completed the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Florida, and she has been awarded scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. For the summer of 2010, she was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Currently, Mackinnon teaches literature and creative writing at a private high school in the Washington, DC area, and lives with her husband and daughter in Falls Church, Virginia.

Said Cherry of the winning poem:

The winning poem, “Writing on the Window,” delineates credibly and movingly Sophia Hawthorne’s marriage to Nathaniel. The poem shows us their house and garden, the couple’s financial difficulties, the husband’s creative imagination, and Sophia’s serious engagement with painting and her sensitivity and intelligence. Humor, sensuality, and sadness are almost equally weighted. I particularly applaud the poet for retaining linear integrity in her narrative. Finally, what cinched my choice was that I read it aloud (to my husband): the music of this poem is wonderfully persuasive!

Congratulations also to the Graybeal-Gowen finalists:

  • Patsy Anne Bickerstaff
  • Matthew Blakley
  • Sarah Crossland
  • Anna Journey
  • Charlotte Matthews
  • Marielle Prince
  • Audrey Walls
  • Kristin Zimet

Thank you to all those who submitted work, we encourage you to enter next year’s Graybeal-Gowen contest, and the Bevel Summers Prize for the Short-Short Story, accepting entries from March 1st to March 31st, 2012.

The winning poem and all the finalists will appear as a Feature on Shenandoah‘s homepage in February.


An Update On Contests

Today (December 9th), we mailed notices of selection to the finalists of the 2011 Graybeal-Gowen Prize! We’ll be posting more specifics on the finalists later; while the USPS delivers whether snow or rain or gloom of night, they are not so speedy as the internet, and it’s only fair the finalists be the first to know. Hopefully, the postman is quick and we can make a more detailed announcement very soon.

 

For those that don’t know, the Graybeal-Gowen Prize is an annual contest hosted by Shenandoah through the generous gift of Mr. James Graybeal W&L ’49 and his wife Mrs. Priscilla Gowen Graybeal. The contest focuses upon Virginian poets and poetry- entrants must either have been born in Virginia or have established Virginia residency. In 2011, Shenandoah was very pleased to have received approximately 300 submissions. While submissions for the 2011 prize have closed, there’s always 2012! If you’re a Virginia poet, think of it as ten months to prepare a great poem for us to consider! For full details on the Graybeal-Gowen Prize, please visit the prize’s page here.

 

The contests don’t stop with the Graybeal-Gowen, either. Shenandoah is also preparing to announce the 2011 winners of our annual prizes in Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry. We have just a little more to do, and hope to have the announcement available soon. These awards are selected from work published in Shenandoah in the last year. More information on these awards can be found on our prizes page.

 

For any reviewers out there, Shenandoah will be inaugurating an annual prize for reviews in 2012. The prize will operate in the same fashion as the previously mentioned ones for Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry, i.e., selected from material published in Shenandoah. The current issue of Shenandoah contains five reviews; to see the sort of piece we’re looking to publish (and therefore considering for the prize), please visit the current issue.

Happy Holidays!