When Curmudgeon and Philanthropist Battle It Out

I've been submitting like a fiend lately. Well, credit where credit is due - my lovely and capable assistant has been submitting like a fiend on my behalf lately. The point is that over the last year, a boatload of my work has been sent out for consideration.

Many of those submissions are to contests of one sort and another, and most of those contests are held by college publications. I enter these contests not just for the glory of having someone tell me that my work doesn't suck (which has happened even when I haven't won), but because most of them offer a better payoff than actual publication. If I were to publish a short story in most magazines, I might get fifty bucks for it, but if I win a contest with it, I could garner $250.

The thing that cheeses me off about those contests, though, is that they all come with a catch: you have to pay an entry fee (which is fair enough), and they're then going to send you a subscription to said publication. I now have a 3-foot high stack of these things in my dining room - Tin House and Boulevard and Hotel Amerika and Alligator Juniper and about six with the word "Review" in the title.

When they first started coming to me, I felt it my duty to my fellow writers to look at them - to see who had gotten that coveted first prize instead of me, to see whose work fit the judges' notion of "good writing" moreso than mine. But then they just kept coming.

It never bothers me when the person who beat me for first place writes something wonderful. Even better if the person's style and subject are nothing like mine. That's fabulous! There's room for everybody.

But that do-gooder, beatific, sunshiney attitude goes right down the toilet the minute I read the first "experimental" thing that sounds as though my 6-year-old had written it, then torn it up in shame and hidden it under her bed because in first grade even she should know better. Those bastards! I think to myself. They've got some kind of balls to reject my well-written, beautifully-rendered, heartbreaking prose in favor of this foetid, gelatinous suet of words! And then I stop opening their stupid magazines, no matter how many they send me.

But wait! There's MORE! They've taken your entry fee, they've rejected your work, they've burdened you with the stinking drivel of people whose crap they chose to publish INSTEAD OF YOURS - and then they send a renewal notice!

"Your subscription to We're Never Going to Publish You Even if You Beg Quarterly is about to run out. Don't cut off our gloating before we have the chance to rub your face in the untutored prose of every semi-literate twelve year old on the planet!"

I called my local library. They don't even want these things for their periodical section. They have no use for four copies of Squat and Hunker Review. Who does, really?

I know. This makes me a terrible person. Terrible. I should be doing all I can to further the cause of literature in America, including donating zillions of dollars and acres of storage space to back issues of All-Adverb Review, but I just can't whack up the ginger, really.