Poets & Writers Blogs

Should MFA students think about finding an agent before graduating? How should they approach agents? And what do agents think about working with MFA grads? We asked literary agent Dorian Karchmar of the William Morris Agency, whose client list includes Helene Cooper, Guy Fieri, Kate Jacobs, Jennifer Haigh, and Jennifer Vanderbes, these questions and more.

Where do you find your new talent?
Referrals are the primary thing—mostly clients who recommend me to friends of theirs who are writing. Also editors refer promising people to me. Sometimes an editor will go to an MFA program or a conference. Editors are, for the most part, not going to sign up a writer without an agent, so oftentimes they will put my name into the mix if they are interested in someone.

What do you look for in a query letter?
Doing a query correctly is important. When writers query me, and it’s clear they’ve done their homework—they know who I am, have listened to my interviews, and know my list—then, of course, I will take them very seriously. I get queries all the time from people who graduated from Iowa, Michigan, Columbia, The New School, five years or ten years prior and have been working on things ever since. That’s always very exciting to me. I really like seeing work from people who show a real writer’s level of commitment—people who are ready now, years after receiving their MFA, because they have the passion and the patience. Writing requires tremendous patience.

Are you wary of working with freshly graduated MFA students?
I am not wary of it at all. While certainly a number of students need to work harder and longer on what it is they have to say and how to say it, there are plenty of MFA students who have been out of school and working and also working on their writing before going back for their masters. These are not all twenty-one-year-olds.

Should MFA students even be thinking about agents?
MFA students shouldn’t be thinking about agents. They shouldn’t be thinking about what other people are doing. They shouldn’t be thinking about any of it. They should be thinking about the project they’re working on.

What’s the most important thing to take away from an MFA program?
One or two really trusted readers—people who are particularly good readers for your work and are tactful but ruthless about what is and is not working. Agents and editors are looking for work that has been taken as far as it can go. If you can come out of a program with a couple of people who really understand what you’re trying to do with a project and who can dig into the work and solve the problems, it is probably the single greatest value aside from being given a couple of years of time.

In publishing nonfiction, is it better to first publish a nonfiction piece in a magazine, and then try to craft it into a book? I think getting a piece in a magazine first can oftentimes be extremely helpful in raising the author’s profile and sousing out if the subject matter deserves a book. A lot of the time, a story can be told in a piece and doesn’t necessarily need to be a book.

You’ve said that critiquing is about the person’s work being as good as it can be, and that a true professional will embrace negative criticism. What about questions in workshops that seem to be more of a matter of taste? Should a student listen more to the professor? The students? Her friends? Whose opinion matters?
I think the question is, Do they seem to understand what it is you’re trying to do? Do they seem to understand the book or the story in the fundamental spirit of the thing? If the answer is yes, then they may have a pretty good idea about why it’s not working. Very often writers know what is working and what is not. Sometimes we don’t want to believe it because that might mean starting something over. And sometimes the answer lies in putting it aside for a while. Take great notes while people are giving you feedback and come back to it a little while later with those different notes in hand and see what seems to click.

No writer ever feels 100 percent about her work. How can she know when it's ready to be shown to an agent?
Whatever your self-criticism is, you can feel when you’ve taken a work as far as you can take it. Obviously you want your key readers to read it and feel it’s working, but the thing has to have its basic shape. It needs to be very clean; you need to understand what it is. It should never be, “I think there’s something here, and I want to get an agent’s take on it.” That’s a mistake. An agent is not your professor.

The Minnesota-based Bush Foundation, created in 1953 by Edyth Bassler Bush and 3M executive Archibald Granville Bush, announced last week that it will no longer administer its longstanding individual fellowship programs, including one targeted to artists. Instead of discipline-specific awards—grants had been offered specifically to artists, medical doctors, and nontraditional students—the organization will now run a single fellowship competition open to innovators of any stripe who are invested in social change in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

"We need 'all hands on deck,'" the foundation says on its Web site, "every social entrepreneur, business owner, artist, public sector employee, community volunteer, and the like—to embrace the opportunity to learn and grow so others in our communities can have the hoped for future." The foundation says it will focus on tackling "tough problems through building individual leadership capacity," particularly in schools and with Native American nations working to rebuild their governments.

Since it began in 1976, 431 artists from Minnesota and the Dakotas received funds from the fellowship program, including poets Robert Bly and David Mura and memoirist Patricia Hampl. Guidelines for fellowship application and information about the new initiative will be posted on the Bush Foundation Web site tomorrow.

In the video below, Bly reads his poem "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings" in an excerpt from the 1978 documentary on the poet, "A Man Writes to Part of Himself." (The film was released the same year that Bly received his first Bush Foundation artist fellowship).

The Hurston-Wright Foundation, established twenty years ago to promote and encourage writers of African descent, presented its 2010 Legacy Awards last week.

Joining a list of Legacy alumni that includes Pulitzer Prize winners Junot Díaz and Edward P. Jones, MacArthur "Genius" fellow Edwidge Danticat, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist Uwem Akpan, are this year's winners, Rita Dove (also a Pulitzer winner) and Haki Madhubuti, who shared the poetry award, and fiction writer Percival Everett.

Dove received the honor for her collection Sonata Mulattica (Norton, 2009), inspired by the life of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, the biracial violinist who in 1803 premiered Beethoven's "Kreutzer" sonata in Vienna with the composer's accompaniment on piano. The poet "is concerned equally with the status of musicians in a world of precarious patronage," according to a review in the New Yorker, "and with 'the radiant web' of music itself." (A poem from the collection is available on the New Yorker online.)

Madhubuti won for his collection Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems 1966–2009 (Third World Press, 2009). A pivotal figure in the Black Arts Movement, Madhubuti is the founder of Third World Press and established the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University, where he had also directed the MFA in creative writing program. He resigned from his work at the university earlier this year.

Everett was honored for his novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier (Graywolf Press, 2009), which follows a character named Not Sidney Poitier on what the Believer calls "journeys through the minefields of American expectation, ugliness, and absurdity" accompanied by "a cadre of beautifully sketched characters, including [Ted] Turner and a rotund professor of 'Nonsense Philosophy' named Percival Everett."

Nonfiction writer Robin D. G. Kelley also took home an award for his book Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009).

Each writer received a statuette and five hundred dollars, a prize amount that is revised yearly based on funds raised for the occasion (in the early years of the award, created in 2002, the purse was ten thousand dollars), and the authors were feted at a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

The winners of the National Book Award, including a punk rocker, a poet influenced by music and memory, and a dark horse indie press author, were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City. Terrance Hayes won in poetry for Lighthead (Penguin); Jaimy Gordon won in fiction for her horseracing novel, Lord of Misrule, published by independent publisher McPherson; and Patti Smith won in nonfiction for Just Kids (Ecco), a memoir of her life as a young songwriter in New York City and her friendship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

This year's judges were Rae Armantrout, Cornelius Eady, Linda Gregerson, Jeffrey McDaniel, Brenda Shaughnessy in poetry; Andrei Codrescu, Samuel R. Delany, Sabina Murray, Joanna Scott, Carolyn See in fiction; and Blake Bailey, Marjorie Garber, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Seth Lerer, Sallie Tisdale in nonfiction.

Each winner received ten thousand dollars, and the finalists in each category, including poet C. D. Wright, novelist Nicole Krauss, and nonfiction writer Megan K. Stack, each received one thousand dollars.

In the video below, Smith reads from her winning book and performs her classic song, "Because the Night."

Aspinwall, Pennsylvania-based Black Lawrence Press, an imprint of Dzanc Books and sponsor of two contests for poetry and short story collections, has just launched a novel publication prize. The Big Moose Prize, open for entries now, will award one thousand dollars and publication of the winning book, and finalists will also be considered for publication.

While this is the first novel contest for Black Lawrence, the press has released a number of novels, including Todos Santos (2010) by Deborah Clearman, The Consequence of Skating (2010) and Temporary People (2008) by Dzanc publisher Steven Gillis, Every Bitter Thing (2010) by Hardy Jones, Dead Letter Office (2009) by Daniel Natal, and Christopher Torockio's Floating Holidays (2007). All of the press's books are trade paperbacks, perfect-bound, and with the option of a color cover.

Submissions are accepted via e-mail only, and the twenty-five-dollar entry fee must be paid using PayPal. The deadline is January 31, 2011. Complete guidelines are posted on the Black Lawrence Web site.

In the video below, Clearman discusses her process for writing her debut novel.

Last week, we reported on a poetry chapbook contest that recently increased its prize, and this week, we're highlighting an award for a full-length poetry collection that's made a similar move.

Spire Press, founded in New York City in 2002, has recently bumped its annual book prize to one thousand dollars. The winner will also see their collection published by Spire and receive twenty author copies.

Spire counts among its authors Maureen Alsop, Matthew Hittinger, Jennifer MacPherson, Alice Pettway, and Elizabeth Rees, a winner of the aforementioned Codhill Press chapbook contest (she also won Spire's chapbook award in 2007). Last year's book prize winner was Christina Olson for Before I Came Home Naked, which received praise from poets such as Paul Guest, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Katrina Vandenberg.

To submit to this year's contest, send a manuscript of forty-eight to eighty pages with an entry fee of twenty dollars (low-income writers may apply for a waiver) by December 20. Full guidelines are available on the Spire Web site.