In the land of American Idol and endless “favorite 100 kid stars of the 80’s” countdowns on VH1, there’s nothing that entertains better than a) contests, and b) best-of lists, compiled for our covenience. Both lend themselves well to the real fun, which is betting on who the chosen ones will be, and arguing for favorites who were unfairly passed over. The literary world doesn’t shy away from this. Pick up any issue of Poets and Writers magazine and the listings of contest finalists wlll be the thickest part of the whole publication. The Nobel, Booker, and National Book Award finalists are endlessly discussed. And there’s a whole host of annual best-of publications that come out every year, some of them so highly specific as to be redundant. The Best American series publishes annual books of sports writing, science writing, essays, and magazine writing. If you wrote an essay about, say, the physics of sports, and it was published in a magazine, which book would they put you in? All four?
I haven’t even gotten to Best New American Voices, Best Nonrequired Reading, Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, Best American Comics — and that’s just ONE Houghton Mifflin series. There are other volumes as well, like Da Capo’s Best Music Writing, the O. Henry Prize Stories and occasional magazine issues like Granta magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists, and the New Yorker‘s New Fiction Issue. The ultra-narrow specificity of the best-of books can get a little annoying. The magazines that the editors draw on in order to compile the list is, similarly, ultra-narrow. Lately, Best American Short Stories will throw a bone to small and innovative publications like One Story, but for the most part you’ll see a lot of Harper’s, New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly reprints.
All of this is just a preamble to my real point: thank heavens for the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. If you want to know where the real engine driving American writing is, one must look to the indie presses and magazines run by people with day jobs who do it out of the love in their hearts for literature, and who don’t give a crap about losing subcribers (possibly because they don’t have any). The brick-sized 32nd annual Puschcart Prize Anthology throws together memoir, essay, fiction, poetry, science, sports, and music writing, and a bunch of unclassifiable works that wouldn’t comfortably fit in any of the tiny niches the Best American crew has carved out.
Pushcart Prize nominations are made by editors at independent publications, who alert the Pushcart editors, headed by Bill Henderson, to their choices. The selections are winnowed down to, in this year’s case, 63 pieces. (By contrast, best American Short Stories chooses precisely twenty stories per year.) The list of contributing presses is many pages long, and includes both venerable old survivors like SF’s very own ZYZZYVA, and new upstarts like the terrific A Public Space. Inclusion in the anthology IS the prize itself. There is no process of longlisting and shortlisting and declaring one person a winner, while the rest grit their teeth and pretend they were happy just to be nominated. If you’re in, you won, and congratulations.
Bill Henderson’s stirring and brief introduction to the new volume is enough to make you want to leap out of your boring little life and do something fabulous yet financially non-remunerative. “Money is the yellow brick road. Oligarchs pick our entertainments, our celebrities, our presidents, and our wars. We children of the spirit are yesterday’s news, if we ever were news. Yet for three decades…[we] have flourished. The reason? (Simple, stupid.) Spirit will never be quelled, certainly not by mere bucks and bluster.” Henderson goes on to eulogize the woman to whom this year’s book is dedicated: one Hannah Turner. Up until her death this year at age 88, Turner penned a HAND-WRITTEN, calligraphed announcement for each and every Pushcart winner — at least 20,000 over the course of several decades. “She did it for a pittance, tirelessly, and was adamant that we not change the nomination format to make it easier for her.” Nobody loves a paying job as much as a dedicated amateur loves their avocation, and the loving dedication of the Pushcart organization, which still assembles its annual book through unpaid labors in a backyard shed, is a beautiful testament to this.