A month in the life of a poetry editor…
20th Feburary - I’ve been writing this blog for more than a month - put it down to my inveterate tendency to dither! - so I’m bringing it to a close today.
Gena and I have been incredibly busy over the past week - lots of great submissions have arrived just as we’ve been up to our eyeballs applying Bournemouth University’s Style Guide to the wonderful poems and short stories that have made it to the competition anthology. (I know it is tantalising for short-listed writers not to know who is the overall winner in each category, but, rest assured, an announcement will be made early next month).
I heard today, from a poetry friend who entered the Bournemouth Writing Prize this year, that she has received an email to say she has not been shortlisted this time. So, assuming that everyone has heard at the same time, may I sign off from this blog by sharing my commiserations to the many worthy writers amongst you who have had a similar disappointment today.
The writing community salutes and cherishes you!
12th Febuary - Exciting News! Sales of Helen Kay’s ‘It Was Never About the Kingfisher’ are going so well that we’re about to go for a reprint. This is a first for Dithering Chaps and we’re really excited…
As many of you will know, Helen was the ‘winner of winners’ for the Bournemouth Writing Festival’s ‘Lines in the Sand’ competition last year. She’ll be making several appearances at this year’s Festival too and her book will be on sale at the Festival Bookshop - so look out for a kingfisher flash of orange on the stand and grab your copy soon, ‘cos they’re literally (Ed: ‘literally’?) flying off the shelves…
In fact - and you heard it here first! - Dithering Chaps is organising an open mic event at the Goat and Tricycle pub on Festival Saturday (April 26th) where Helen will be doing a set. Keep an eye on our Events tab for more details!
11th February - Dithering Chaps has just received our copy of the Bournemouth Journal’s ‘Style Guide’ to help us make sure all the shortlisted entries we are including in the Bournemouth Writing Prize anthology sit on the page perfectly! We’ll be up to our elbows in edits over the coming days.
A quick zoom meeting with Festival Director, Dominic Wong (big congrats, Dominic, on the BWF Gold Tourism Award!) and Bournemouth University’s Brad Gyori (the mastermind behind the Prize and the associated Bournemouth Writing Journal) tells us that emails will be going out to let Prize entrants know their fate later this week. The waiting’s nearly over, folks.
8th February - They haven’t been announced, but the two winners of the Bournemouth Writing Prize, along with the shortlisted poets and short-story writers have all been chosen. It’s a very Schrödinger’s Cat kind of moment for anyone reading who has entered. You’re in that tantalising superposition of ‘I’ve won this thing!’ and ‘Darn it! I thought I’d won this thing!’ Gena and I may have thought we’d collapsed your wave function by making our choice, but that cat is still alive and kicking! Enjoy it while it lasts: I know how hard it is to open an email that starts, ‘Sorry, but…”
4th February - If you have submitted poems to the Bournemouth Writing Prize this year, you will be wondering how your entries have fared. A record number of poems were submitted and the team at Bournemouth University have worked around the clock to complete their ‘judging sift’. (In other words, a small, dedicated team read through all the entries and decided which entries to send on to us as judges.) Gena and I have both been avidly reading, separately, the thirty short-listed poems and comparing notes. We like to think we’re a good editorial team because we look out for different aspects of the poet’s craft: Gena homes in on the emotional heft behind a poem while I focus more on form and poetics. What’s interesting is that our judgements normally coincide. We sat down for a pub lunch in Weymouth today (I’m a member of the great poetry group down there, Harbour Poets) and we shared our top three as well as our top ten poems. True to form, we had both picked the same top three and the same overall winner. However, we had a little haggling to do about the final ten (the ones whose poems will be included in the competition anthology). Seven of the poems featured on both our lists. We each read our remaining picks out loud to each other (at around the point where the wine bottle got turned upside down in the ice bucket) and shared what had piqued our interest in these poems. Over coffee, we wrote down our final ten. However, we’ll let all the poems simmer for a few days (a classic dithering technique - something can leap out at you that you’d missed on your earlier readings) and, if we still feel the same way, we’ll send our results in…
We’re judging blind and have no idea whose poems we are selecting. Good luck everyone!
31st January - We’ve already beaten our record for the most submissions in a month, but we’re still in the sweet spot where I have enough time to read each submission carefully, and write my feedback, without impacting too much on other activities (my own reading and writing, Tai Chi and walks with Gena, catching the next episode of Dix Pour Cent…) I find it fascinating to see the commonalities between different poets’ writing and love it when I land on a take on the world or the English language that I’ve never seen before. We’ve had several sonnet sequences this time and it’s been fascinating to see contemporary approaches to this form, whether in voice, use of blank verse, or the ways fourteen lines can morph and torque to suggest an underlying thematic eg of body dysmorphia. It’s made me reconsider my own, rather staid, Shakespearean, iambic-pentameter, final-couplet-zinger sonnets and consider being a little more adventurous!
January 26th - Again, my six weekend reading slots are full and more jaw-droppingly good poetry has landed on our (virtual) doormat. The bios these poets have been providing are like rollcalls of all the poetic-places-to-be-seen in the UK: a National Poetry Prize winner; a Bridport Prize winner; people with poems in Acumen, Orbis, Stand, Butcher’s Dog, Tears in the Fence, Poetry Wales … truth be told, (I think that last great poetry forum has made me come over all Nessa from Gavin and Stacey!), though a strong bio is always a good sign, we’re sometimes totally wowed by someone who has none of those credentials. One I’ve just put down has had me jumping up and down excitedly at its formal experimentation and poetic chutzpah!
January 18th - Gena and I have travelled north to Nantwich for the launch of Helen Kay’s fabulous new collection, ‘It Was Never About the Kingfisher’. A launch is a big moment for a poet. It’s also the culmination of a six-month cycle for us as her publishers. We do our best to sprinkle fairy dust (and cakes) on the event, which is another sellout - don’t you just love to see a room packed out with poetry aficionados and with standing room only at the back! We sell a healthy stack of books and conversations with local poets tell us that we’ll be seeing more submissions from the North-West and Wales in the near future…
January 15th - Today is the final day of the "Bournemouth Writing Prize". There's a bit of a crisis to wake up to: a flurry of emails that tell us that the entry portal has closed a day early!! Luckily, Bournemouth Writing Festival Director, Dominic Wong, is on the case - when is he not?!! - and a new final day link is created. Phew! Relax and read those remaining submissions.
January 11th - One of my favourite tasks as Lead Editor is writing a critique of each of the ten-page submissions we receive. It's one of our USPs at Dithering Chaps, to give you around 300 words of constructive critique (positive, while possibly noting one or two aspects that might be improved). Feedback from recipients of this feedback always tell us how helpful, uplifting and 'downright unusual' getting such feedback is. (I know this only too well from my own submissions to other publishers - elsewhere the best you can hope for is often the 'soft rejection' email - 'we'd like to see more of your work'.) Our view is - you've paid us a tenner to read your poems - the least we can do is tell your our reactions, even if we don’t choose to publish you. I limit myself to reading three submissions at any one time - again, this is only fair ... my mind needs to be fresh if I’m to be receptive to work that someone has nurtured and honed to the stage where they take the big step of submitting it. I read my three, write my comments and assign a mark to help me rank this reading period's submissions. I have several to carry forward to Sunday and, as I check back to our email, a couple more land in our in-tray...
January 7th - The first week of the new year brought a flurry of sales and submissions. It's a lovely feeling to know that our efforts to make ourselves known are reaping success. I make a submissions 'first reading list' for the weekend to clear this new backlog (and do my admin tasks of numbering, saving and logging these submissions). I can't resist taking a quick peek! As always, I find some submissions are so compelling in form or poetic verve that I find myself still 'flicking through' an hour later... I pop next door to let Gena (associate editor/wife) know that "we've got some good ‘uns" and find her hard at work creating video content for the final-week big push promoting the Bournemouth Writing Prize. As well as judging the shortlisted poetry entries this year, we've been tasked with using our social media and email contacts to get the message out. We've sent emails to the leads of over 900 writing groups worldwide (maxing out our Gmail quota over consecutive days) and Gena estimates that the social media groups we have posted to have over three million followers. Still, we know, from last year's 'Lines in the Sand' competition that at least half of competition entries will come in the final week, so we can't relax our efforts! Gena is a trained voice-over artiste and is getting very nifty with her film edits - she shows me her latest promo reel - great stuff - I hope you caught it! (If you haven't seen our films for recently published collections by Louise Walker and Helen Kay, searching for Dithering Chaps on Facebook, Insta, TikTok, X and Bluesky should hook you up!)