Write What Makes You Cry

This week, Publishers Weekly published a conversation with Bill Henderson to mark the 50th anniversary of the Pushcart Prize. He was describing how the prize still operates.

The nominations come in by mail. Not email. U.S. mail. One hundred and sixty contributing editors send their suggestions on paper, in envelopes, to the same address they have been sending them to for decades. Eight hundred small presses are invited to nominate each year. This year, submissions arrived from Kenya, South America, Germany, China, England, and Ireland.

Henderson was asked why he has kept going for fifty years without profit. “There’s a faith in it,” he said, “and you can’t just toss it away for money or commerce or fame.”

When asked what he looks for in selecting work, he said: “Make me feel, make me think.”

When asked what advice he would give to writers, he said: “Don’t write what you know. Everyone knows something. I don’t especially want to hear about it. Write what moves you. Write what makes you cry.”

Bill Henderson founded the Pushcart Prize in 1976 because he saw the best writing in America appearing in small literary magazines and independent presses — places with a few hundred subscribers, places the major publishing houses and the major awards were ignoring. He decided to fix it. He began with no institutional backing, with collaborators Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Reynolds Price, and he published the first anthology himself under Pushcart Press.

Fifty years later, the Pushcart Prize is one of the most prestigious literary honors in America. A Pushcart Prize on a writer’s CV opens doors. Writers who appeared in its early volumes include Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Tim O’Brien, and Denis Johnson — some before their names were widely known.

Henderson lives on Long Island and in Maine, where he runs the Pushcart bookstore. He calls it the world’s smallest bookstore. He founded the Lead Pencil Club in opposition to digital technology. He still operates by U.S. mail. He has never made a profit. He is still doing it.

In October 1912, a poet and editor named Harriet Monroe opened a magazine called Poetry in Chicago. She had raised $5,000 to fund it — a hundred pledges of fifty dollars each from Chicago businessmen who may not have known much about poetry but trusted her conviction.

Her founding editorial position she called “The Open Door.” The magazine would publish any poem on its merit, regardless of who wrote it or how famous or obscure the writer might be. She wrote: “The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine — may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half shut, against his onslaught.”

She appointed Ezra Pound as her correspondent in London. He began sending her poems by writers he admired. In June 1915, a poem arrived from a young American writer named T.S. Eliot. No major publication had been willing to print it. Monroe published it. The poem was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Over the next twenty-four years, Monroe published Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes. She ran the magazine from Chicago, far from the literary centers of New York and London, on fifty-dollar pledges from businessmen, until she died in 1936 at the age of seventy-six.

She was found dead in Arequipa, Peru, while on a trip to attend a poetry conference. She died doing the work. Poetry magazine is still publishing today, one hundred and fourteen years after she founded it.

She published “Prufrock” not because she knew it would change English-language poetry. She published it because it moved her.

Henderson and Monroe worked from the same conviction. The writing worth finding rarely arrives through the most powerful channels. It arrives in small magazines, in literary journals with five hundred subscribers, in places the market has decided don’t matter. Someone has to be looking for it. Someone has to build the room where it can be read.

Henderson built the room and has been tending it for fifty years. Monroe built her room and tended it for twenty-four. Both rooms are still open.

The Power of Authors teaches: the author writing from genuine purpose writes what moves them, not what they know the market will receive. Henderson’s advice is not craft advice. It is purpose advice. Don’t write what you know. Write what moves you. Write what makes you cry. The reader who needs exactly this piece of writing is out there. They may not be at a major publisher’s imprint. They may be at a small press with eight hundred subscribers. They are there.

Monroe found Eliot’s poem in a stack of submissions and published it before the world knew his name. Henderson found Raymond Carver’s story and printed it before the world knew his name. They were not looking for famous writers. They were looking for writing.

Write what moves you. Write what makes you cry. The Pushcart Prize has been looking for it for fifty years. Someone is always looking for it.

Write it so they can find it.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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