Congratulations to Kevin Haworth

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Warm congratulations to Kevin Haworth, who recently won the Lawrence Foundation Prize, an annual $1,000 award by the editorial board of Michigan Quarterly Review to the author of the “best short story” published in the journal that year. Kevin’s winning story, “The Scribe,” appeared in the fall 2009 issue. “The Scribe” features as its narrator-protagonist a self-described “sofer, a writer of the sacred letters of the Torah,” and the travails of his job.

As you may recall, Kevin is a past winner of the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers. In 2006, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin about that prize and his novel, The Discontinuity of Small Things.

MQR is by no means a specifically “Jewish” literary journal, which reminds us of an important point I brought up about a year ago at the Jewish Fiction Writers’ Conference: As wonderful and welcoming as Jewish-focused publications can be, writing on Jewish subjects can be placed in many different venues.

What Does "Submission-Ready" Mean to You?

by Erika Dreifus on
9

“Working on a story. Am determined to get it submission-ready!”

So read a post I “tweeted” on Monday. Lo and behold, somebody actually read what I wrote. And she wrote, in turn:

“@erikadreifus what does submission-ready mean to you?”

What an excellent question. Not just for me, but for all of us practicing writers.

My response on Twitter basically said that I couldn’t possibly address the question in 140 characters. I promised to do so here, instead.

So here’s what I think “submission-ready” means to me: I think it means that I’ve brought the work in question to a point where I can’t envision further edits/changes/improvements. At least, not imminently. And I believe that an editor/agent/publisher will read past the first few lines/pages and take the work seriously.

Now, it does happen that I submit a story or essay or poem (or novel or short story collection), receive a series of rejections (the best ones provide some constructive comments/feedback), and am then prompted to revisit the work. I might ask others who haven’t yet shared their time and insights to read and comment, too. Although I won’t necessarily withdraw the work from any journal/contest/agent/publisher where it might still be waiting to be read/decided on, I’ll refrain from submitting it anywhere else until I’ve had time to consider changes and, more often than not, revise further. In this sense, “submission-ready” is not a constant. It evolves. Because, unfortunately, what I might consider initially “submission-ready” may not necessarily be “acceptance-ready”! In fact, the story that sparked my tweet is one I believed “submission-ready” quite awhile ago, but am revising once again.

I’m eager to hear from others on this. What does “submission-ready” mean to you?

Quotation of the Week: Peter Carey, Interviewed by Gabriel Packard

by Erika Dreifus on
4

As a fiction writer, I’ve never been especially inspired by characters. I know that that sounds awful. I simply don’t write “character-driven” fiction, and, much to my discontent, I don’t ever find myself “possessed” by a character who simply begs to have his or her story told. When I’m lucky enough to find inspiration for a story, it generally comes from ideas and/or circumstances.

Which is one reason why I was captivated by Gabriel Packard’s interview with Peter Carey in the new (March) issue of The Writer. Here’s some of Carey’s response to Packard’s question, “What is the process of writing a novel like for you?”:

“When I’ve finished a novel, I always feel so empty I think I’ll never have another idea. So when I have an idea, a single idea, I feel blessed….I’ll never ever start with characters. They are there to be discovered. Indeed the greatest pleasure, at the end of the novel, is to have made characters who are multidimensional and complicated.”

Ah, there’s the rub. You still need to come up with characters who are multidimensional and complicated! The ideas alone can’t sustain the fiction!

P.S. Carey’s new novel, Parrot & Olivier in America, sounds fantastic (and I’m not just saying that because I have a doctoral degree in modern French history and once took an entire class on Alexis de Tocqueville!). It goes to the top of my tbr list.