Granta posted me a reply to my submission. (I had not sent a SAE.) They thank me for submitting work, but unfortunately will not be able to respond individually to my submission if unsuccessful. They will contact me only if they wish to publish my work.
This is a new one. An individual letter to inform me that they cannot respond individually? So, is this better or worse than the rejection they sent last time?
I got back from a long-overdue holiday on Sunday, at four in the morning. A few hours sleep and then it was time to get the bus to Belfast. I reckoned on a couple of hours snooze on the bus, but the sun was blazing through the glass and made me feel lucid. It felt like the beginning of something.
I hadn’t bothered looking up maps; I was sure the first person on the street would know the John Hewitt bar. Bad mistake. They were all as big a stranger as myself. The shops were all closed (I thought the Sunday closing only applied to big stores) and the only people in the city centre were tourists. But a security guard at last pointed me in the right direction.
The shortlist was kept secret. Each person on the shortlist knew they were on it (obviously), but the names were not published or posted anywhere. I didn’t see any familiar faces when I came into Hewitt’s. It was too early for a pint, so I ordered a coffee.
The fellow beside me at the bar looked pretty ordinary. Given that one-in-three of the tewnty-four people in the pub must be on the shortlist, it was a reasonable question to ask. “I am indeed,” he said. “Are you on it yourself?”
We had a small chat, but seeing as I was there on my own, and he apparently had no-one with him, it became quite a long chat. He was a big fan of Brian Moore (he pronounced it Breen, which I understand is how the writer preferred it), and had read 17 of his novels. Brian Moore, he told me, was greatly under-rated these days, and there was bound to be a resurgence of interest in his work. The enthusiasm came out in his voice as he recommended me what to read.
And what about the judge, Richard Baush, I asked. “I’ve only read two of his books,” he answered apologetically. “But I really like his stuff. Great short stories.”
Now I had read nothing by Brian Moore and less by Richard Bausch. If there was any justice this guy would win and not me. But I was pretty sure neither of us would win anything. It was a gut feeling.
The shortlist was read out name by name. Then the third place was announced: Korrena Bailey from Monaghan. This was one of her first pieces of writing. She’s far left in the photograph. Second place was Sheena Wilkinson. Both had just finished the MA in creative writing at Queens. The competition was open to all in Ireland, but I would imagine it got more attention up north, especially through the work of the host organisation, the Creative Writers Network. By all accounts they are a great resource, providing a much-needed hub for writers across Northern Ireland.
Then Richard Bausch called out the winner, Hugo Kelly, the man I’d been talking to for the last hour. Sometimes the right person wins.
Hugo has won a number of competitions, including the George Moore short story competition no less than three times. He’s been shortlisted for Fish, the Francis MacManus, and several other places that either I forget or that he didn’t mention. I’d love to read some of his work, I think a collection is long overdue and hopefully this win will change that.
Later update:
I emailed him a few weeks later asking if there had been any repercussions or developments. “Yeah” he replied, “the phone was hopping with calls from literary agents.” It took me a few seconds to realise he was being ironic.
Got a rejection slip from the NY. It came by real post. “We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material.” An extra message was handwritten underneath: “Thanks for the read. Keep writing.“
Thanks NY. It’s a little courtesy that counts for a lot. Their last rejection (by email) went:
“We’re sorry to say that this manuscript is not right for us, in spite of its
evident merit.”
The Paris Review on the other hand have never replied. Their stated policy is not to send a rejection slip at all. If your piece gets accepted, fine, they are good enough to contact you. Otherwise, silence. If on the other hand your submitted piece gets accepted somewhere else in the meantime, you are obliged to inform them.
Well, it happened that indeed my piece was accepted somewhere else several months later. Dutifully I informed them the story was taken. They do not communicate by email, so I brought the letter to the post office, bought a stamp, stuck it on, posted the letter.
It was one of those quirky things you do, like talking to the bolts and clips when you are trying to assemble IKEA furniture.
originally posted March 2009
Djelloul Marbrook has been maintaining his online commentary on culture and journalism for just over three years now. He is a one-man assault of reason on the bullshit apparatus closing in around us. Without bitterness, with no resort to irony, he picks apart the issues of the day: Iraq, media standards, the car industry, the election campaigns, the financial crisis.
For decades he worked inside the belly of the beast: Marbrook has had a long career as a journalist with papers such as The Providence Journal, The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, The Baltimore Sun, The Winston-Salem (NC) Journal & Sentinel, and The Washington Star. He has witnessed at first hand the changing nature of newspapers, the manifest decline in respect for the truth. His breadth of perspective is not measured in the days or weeks, but stretches from the 1950’s to the present.
Marbrook began his blog when he was 74. He has been making several posts each week since then. The energy, acuity, and variety of the writing is truly astonishing. It is always the whole man talking – not a mud slinger, nor an exhibitionist, nor someone trying to make a name in journalism. He has already been down that road, but finally found the freedom to say what he needs to say in this new medium of the internet blog. The topics range from the political to the personal, from art to climate change. Always the topic is grounded in the events of the day, though the perspective broadens out. The energy and occasional experimentation with style suggest a much younger mind grappling with the world. There’s nothing to suggest a writer of over 75, except where he explicitly brings in his own experiences. He is a man of integrity in an age when such a statement sounds quaint.
It comes as a surprise – given the close acquaintance with current affairs – to find out that he is a poet. That is to say, he had a collection of poetry, his first, published last year. Far From Algiers won the Wick Poetry Prize last year. He keeps track of reviews here.
Here’s my pick of Marbrook’s posts from 2008.
Journalism as Imperial Circus, Jan 2008
Reflections on picking up a glossy magazine while waiting at the dentist’s Feb 2008
Are too many books being published? Feb 2008
The many ways to stroll down a street in New York, March 2008
Djelloul reflects on his journalistic career in Baltimore, and the TV series The Wire. March 2008
The triumph of packaging over content, April 2008
On walking the streets of New York talking to yourself, April 2008
An appreciation of Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems, April 2008
One of the many blessings of growing old is a certain integrity of smile. May 2008
Declining of newspaper standards and whether internet sites can take up the slack, May 2008
Though there are not many posts on the topic, but Djelloul has some experience in how the art world operates. Here he takes a look at the galleries of Hudson, New York and gives some tips to art buyers. June 2008
This post is what happens your brain if you watch too much television, July 2008
Just one of many observations on the Bush administration Oct 2008
America’s drugged press, Oct 2008
Notes on the Detroit car industry crisis, unions, and legacy of Reaganism, Nov 2008
The press corps doesn’t like a public figure who understands what he is talking about Nov 2008
The commercially censored press, Dec 2008
Do you remember the severe ice storm in the USA last December? Dec 2008
Ran in Bewley’s Cafe, Sept 2009
It’s a hot night in Belfast. Johnny Meister is sweating, pumped full of energy. He roams the streets bumping into friends, popping a few pills, bumming a toke, and trying to avoid an encounter with his arch enemy The Stitch.
The argot can be as dense and menacing as that in A Clockwork Orange. And yet it’s real, taken straight from the street.
It’s a fast-paced amoral world, and we are swept along by The J.Meister who relates it all. He jumps freely into his own version of the friends he meets. His anecdotes of the past are interrupted by the impinging events of the now. There are underage girls, drugs, milfs, speeding, revenge, piss-takes, and always razor-sharp humour.
Davey Stitch takes over the monologue for the second part of the play. From J.Meister’s constant anxieties, I expected this guy to be as hard as fuck and hell-bent on revenge. In fact he is even more keen to avoid any violent encounter. But when his sister claims to have been abused by J.Meister, we can feel things are going to turn bad.
A little familiarity with the Belfast accent will serve you well in following this play. The dialogue makes no compromises for a middle-class Dublin audience. And rightly so. The play might possibly set the viewer off thinking about social deprivation, class divisions, binge drinking culture … but there are no such reflections in the drama itself. It’s just Meister and The Stitch, in their own language and on their own terms.
The playwright is Rosemary Jenkinson. I feel like saying “she has a remarkable ear for the rhythms of Belfast English” but to be honest I’ve only been to Belfast twice. I take it on trust from the excellent reviews this play has got from previous runs in Belfast and Edinburgh. I know this play is brilliant though, and acted with astounding energy. By the end of it the two lads were wringing.
orig. posted Oct 2009
I have a piece in the latest issue of The Dublin Review. It was one of those occasional long stories that engage me fully. I get caught up in the characters and the story keeps demanding greater space for development rather than cutting. But as the finish comes into sight I get more depressed. There is nowhere to publish a story more than about 5,000 words long. The knowledge of my wasted effort gets me down.
In this case however the story escaped. Before submitting to the DR I emailed the editor, Brendan Barrington, and asked if he would even consider one that length. He said he would, and off it went.
This issue also has a prison story by Carlo Gébler and a gaelic pastiche by Robert Cremins. I haven’t yet read all the non-fiction articles, but what caught my eye was Adrian Frazier’s essay on Yeat’s late play Purgatory. Oddly enough, I’d made an attempt to read that play some weeks before. It struck me then as being non-Irish, drawing from some tradition I was unaware of. I read it as an uncompromising study of those whose lives are cursed and who have moved beyond hope. Few such reports are returned from the world of despair.
Frazier points out that Yeats believed in such things as hauntings and spirit voices. The play, he writes, is not a gothic ghost-story or a modern version of a Noh play; it is realism.
But apart from this Frazier’s essay mentions a late work (around 1938) by Yeats, On the Boiler. I have to get my hands on this. It seems to be a diatribe against the consequences of over-democratization as Yeats foresaw it. Modern society has proceeded in a diagrammatically opposite direction to every sentiment expressed here. Here are three quotes:
Most Irish people should not be taught to read or write.
Representative democracy has given Ireland to the incompetent.
The success of the Abbey Theatre has grown solely out of a single conviction of its founders – ‘Not what you want, but what we want.’
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
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Irish Times Q+A