I’ll get to why the call for transparency is questionable at the end, but first I’ll try to understand what some of the fuss is about, with qualifications that are worth considering before we go mouthing off about ABR’s commitment to youth literature.

One, it’s disappointing because it’s one less young writer published in an established journal. But this happens all the time and we don’t blog angrily about it. Perhaps that’s because, two, this collective rejection casts a shadow over the whole community of young writers. But the implication that zero out of 100 young writers are not good enough to be published in ABR is not so hard to swallow – that’s not a big slush pile, and I know a bunch of young writers, outside of that slush pile, who have written for ABR, myself included.

So, I dunno, it just seems like a lot of anti-ageism noise. Worse, ill-thought-out allegations that this decision means ABR don’t really support youth literature only shitcans their attempt to do so. Worst: Ben’s claims that ABR refused to award the prize because ‘its reputation or the respect of its readers might be damaged by the publication of a young person’s ideas’.

Phooey! Such a blatantly antagonistic, deliberate misinterpretation of their decision is simply uncool, and posting this as a comment on Virgule seems determined to pit the gilted applicants against ABR. Yep, that’s anti-ageist noise alright, especially when you consider the form letter doesn’t say this at all. It says:

In [discharging our right not to award a prize] we are mindful of our responsibilities to readers, to the magazine’s reputation for excellence, to our sponsor and – most importantly – to the entrants themselves.

Who’s to say the ABR editors aren’t on the phone/keyboard right now to the shortlist, commending them for their work and commissioning an In Brief, to get the shortlistees working on something more manageable than a full-length essay? So far we’ve only had a snapshot – from people who are upset they didn’t win, as much as they’re upset that no one won.

Even if the editors aren’t on the phone, it just doesn’t seem like something worth making a big deal about. Rejection slips are nothing new. Applicants are free to send their essays elsewhere. They’re running the prize again (another commendable initiative forgotten by most of the commenters), by which time the dedicated among the applicants might have developed enough to enter a winner.

Meanwhile, pulling the prize this year might actually be considered commendable: they are presumably (and understandably) worried about publishing poorly expressed ideas, which, let’s face it, are going to be among the majority in a slush pile of 100 from young writers – even at Voiceworks, where we would receive between 200 and 300 submissions per quarter, we were often scraping the barrel, because it’s true: young writers are usually not as accomplished as older, established writers – the ‘established’ is important: it’s not age that qualifies you as a good writer, but the amount of time, energy and dedication you’ve poured into developing your work, plus the extent of your natural affinity for ideas, and the ability to express them.

During Voiceworks Editorial Committee meetings we would often debate the merits of publishing a lesser-quality piece by a younger writer. There were usually two fronts: doing so might encourage the writer to continue developing their work – to keep writing at all, even – and we might get to publish their higher-quality work later; doing so might undermine the magazine’s reputation for exceptional quality, meaning that readers might not hang around until the time the younger writer had grown up.

Deciding to pull the prize this year does not, necessarily, undermine ABR’s commitment to youth literature. In fact, two alternatives to pulling the plug on the prize could be worse.

One, run something mediocre, which ABR’s older readership might read with disdain, which they then carry over to the broader community of young writers. And every applicant other than the winner remains equally gilted, as they read the winner that’s not as good as they think their essay is.

Two (as suggested in the comments), edit the fuck out of the piece, which undermines the integrity of an award anyway – it’s not an award for an essay-with-great-potential – and establishes a misrepresentation among older readers, as well as a sense of false hope among the winner – few other outlets (Voiceworks aside, of course) will give the author the same extent of editorial attention in the future, when they start shooting equally mediocre essays from the hip at every major paper that still runs them.

In anticipation of the retort that who are Peter Rose and Mark Gomes to determine the nature of mediocrity, I come back to the questionable call for transparency.

Reading the article that Sam Cooney linked to from the comments at Virgule, I was reminded prizes are not much more than simple publishing decisions with a fancy label.

The decision might look different – it is preceded by a public call for submissions, presided over by a public (albeit usually secretive) panel of judges, and succeeded by publication with a gold sticker.

Compare this to other publishing decisions, which are preceded by a private solicitation of submissions, presided over by a private (albeit disparate, but no less inaccessible) panel of arbiters – agents, editors and (if you play with the big kids) marketing departments – and succeeded by publication without a gold sticker.

The only real difference is the sticker, which might momentarily and marginally influence sales, but does little to influence the aesthetic judgement of readers, which is what really drives sales, and therefore the extent of an author’s readership.

The decision to award a prize to a piece of literature is no less subjective than to publish one in the general sense, so ABR deciding not to award a prize merely means that nothing they received was worthy of a prize. It takes balls to do that – especially with so many egotistical writers (read: writers) running around – and at this stage I remain convinced that they not only have a right to do this, but a duty, to prevent mediocre literature being published as award-winning literature, an idea that is inherently contradictory.

ABR is a journal of particularly high … uh, calibre, so the upset over its rejection of these young writers’ advances is understandable, on a superficial level. But the panel was just a couple of editors looking for outstanding submissions from young writers. Attacking an establishment outlet for failing to award a youth-literature prize doesn’t help the very cause this outlet is trying to promote.

This is an important new prize run by an important journal with a long-running history of publishing high-quality ideas about literature. If we shitcan this prize it in its inaugural year, I bet the loud mouths won’t blame themselves for it folding – it’ll be the fault of yet another esteemed, establishment journal looking down on youth literature.

It’s not cool of the youth literati to go shooting their mouths off like this, so if you have a legitimate and informed criticism of the decision, I would love to hear it, and will happily respond in comments below, while eating the form letter. That means I will try to eat my twenty-inch iMac, so I’m pretty serious about this – please comment: tear me to shreds!

I now realise that’s a bit harsh: Australia has a proud history of publishing amazing literature, and my comment was, perhaps, inadvertently disparaging of Australia’s avid-reader population. It was a holier-than-thou thing to say, the implication being that general readers are less discerning than me, which may or may not be true, but a book editor crapping on about his discerning palate is kind of like a mechanic being righteous about the fact he knows how to tune a car better than his customers – this fact is self-evident, otherwise people would tune their own damn cars.

Anyway.

All I was trying to say is that I am excited about having the ability to get amazing manuscripts to publishers on behalf of authors. This is what I want to be doing for my day job. To prolapse the metaphor further: I want to paddle around in a leaky boat, scooping up princess ducks and bringing them to shore, handing them over to publishers and saying, ‘Feed them well, they will nourish many.’

This felt like a pipe dream until I read Nic’s manuscript. It felt like a pipe dream because I knew that I was missing an important element of the equation that equals successful agenting: quality manuscripts.

Quality manuscripts + diligent, active authors + publishing contacts + editorial savvy + youthful naivety + insanity + the empirically unfounded conviction that communication through literature will make the world a better place = Paine Management, my latent literary agency.

I have all of these now, so it’s only a matter of time, patience and dedication – the three core things that got me as far as working as a book editor by 22, something that I had never imagined possible when I was smoking bongs in the back shed and dropping out of uni and scribbling all over those beautiful Peter Carey paperback reprints that UQP released.

So, yeah, the name of my imaginary literary agency is Paine Management. Get it? I will take the pain out of getting your manuscript published, and the pain out of finding a manuscript to publish. I’m allowed to make bad jokes about my name. You are too. (In fact, Sam Twyford-Moore already did it, in a letter to Voiceworks while I was there.)

I want to bundle together a portfolio of the best unpublished manuscripts of young, emerging Australian writers, fold it under my arm and take it, in my leaky boat, to New York City.

I’m thinking of further honing the subject and theme of this blog to cover this journey as an emerging agent – to cover things like trying to develop an author-agent contract when I know almost nothing about contracts. (I’ve taken on contracts administration at work, but I still feel as though I’m learning a second language.)

So if you’re into that sort of thing, come along. Meanwhile, I have a question for you. It’s pretty broad, but here goes: what are your experiences of trying to find a literary agent in Australia?

If you don’t have any experience with this, but know someone who does, please forward a link to this post. I’d like to start a dialogue about it, so I can start thinking about how to achieve this ridiculously ambitious dream of facilitating the best emerging Australian writing onto the world stage.

Sam reckons that literary prizes pick books and raise them up as symbols of our ‘national consciousness’, which gives them inordinate cultural weight. He uses a lovely Lion King metaphor – think:

I agree, and would go on to say that a culture heavily influenced by such a top-down, arbitrary and selective approach cannot be representative of the broader public’s diverse reading tastes. This is why I’m so interested in literary prizes – they are at odds with my interest in promoting the self-determination of our literary culture.

Chris Flynn made the point once, when I got angry about Tim Winton winning the Miles Franklin again, that prizes don’t have to be relevant to everyone, because a culture of alternatives exists. This would be fine if the general reader had as proactive an approach to reading as Chris, who is so passionate about literature that he publishes his alternative source of literature that he likes.

Maybe we should just leave the award crowd patting each other on the back for sharing the same impeccable sense of taste and go make/find our own literature. The large publishers and other cultural institutions that run these prizes make it difficult to do this by using their considerable market share to drive trends around by putting stickers on adult books, like decals on a racecar. Sam quotes Ann McCulloch on this:

McCulloch herself deems panels and the public as ‘a malleable beast that will generally move towards “winners”, even if non-winners are writing some amazing books’

If people do gravitate toward award-winning literature when deciding what to read, then the determination of what qualifies as award-winning does lend inordinate cultural weight to certain books. If the public’s vision of culture (which, to some extent is derived from the literature they read) contributes to the way culture is actually realised in Australia, then if we change the literature they read (by awarding different literature with relevant accolades) we alter the nature of the culture that is realised and we all have to endure. As in, cultural agency needs to be distributed more equally among the reading public. Surely someone with a serious name has written about this.

When we charge judging panels with this responsibility of concentrated cultural agency, it becomes especially concerning to read that ‘ideological soundness’ has so much as been uttered in the same room as a judging panel – Sam quotes Michael Meehan, novelist and judging panelist:

at the outset we all agreed to put forward the books we liked best – to put forward his or her own personal preferences on quite a subjective basis. Otherwise … you can get into some pretty sterile formulas – which novel best embodies national themes and current issues, or worse, which novels are ethically and ideologically the most ’sound’.

If this culture permeates our cultural agencies, and if enough readers base their bookstore decisions on gold stickers, literary prizes become ideological mechanisms of the institutions that run them. A government institution, whose independence is constantly in question, should not wield this sort of control over the marketplace.

Their power undermines individuals’ power to determine the good books and places this power with a handful of individuals. Of course, if individuals were left alone in the market to ‘vote with their wallet’, a lot of worthwhile literature would remain unpublished. A model for subsidising and awarding quality literature needs to be designed and implemented by interested planners – government as well as private funders and lobbyists – with a view to generating greater diversity when determining who receives the funding, who receives the awards, and what constitutes both.

Unfortunately Sam pulls his punches in the conclusion of his column, but if prizes are dodgy, we need to continue to question their virtue, and amend the way they are delivered: have more readers’ choice awards, such as the Inky Awards; reconsider the dividends – get the right mixture of publication contract and prize money and maybe a prize that encourages audience engagement with the text, especially the more obscure awards and the manuscript awards; use the prize money to financing marketing, advertising and publicity campaigns.

If these books are being awarded such accolades as being in possession of ‘the Australian voice’, as many Australians as possible should know about who is speaking on their behalf, and what they’re saying. Meanwhile, the longer literature represents and appeals to an elite, privileged sector of the community, the longer people go wanting for good literature, and the more likely it is that people will move away from literature altogether – if it is neither entertaining nor insightful in a way that is meaningful to you, why would you bother?

She likes to rely on her own curiosity when choosing the film she’d like to see, and her own judgement when deciding whether she liked it or not.

He is happy to rely on critics’ opinions when choosing, and then employ his judgement.

Fine, whatever. I don’t choose books by reading book reviews, and I only read reviews after I’ve finished the book – to compare notes.

Good for me.

What annoys me about this article is when the author, Alan Bissett, claims that critics have realised their only skill is determining whether they like or dislike something, and that because the public is in command of a similar faculty, critics must ‘tend towards the elitist’ opinion. To protect their jobs, see.

As a book reviewer who fervently believes in the value of empowering readers with discernment, I find this suggestion utterly unfathomable.

Does anyone have experience of a critic writing reviews for any reason other than to inform the public of art they might like to see?

So is YA taking over the grown-ups’ table? It’s a revealing question, steeped in the kind of condescension that assumes books aimed at young people are intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books, speculative or otherwise, that are ostensibly for adult readers. It’s also drenched in fear because, oh my lord, the young people are invading! With their depressing music and tight jeans!¹

But I’ve never come across anyone actually saying that about young-adult literature – that it’s ‘intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books’.

Are there cases of people saying or writing this? Or is this the inferiority complex of an adolescent genre in an adolescent culture in an adolescent nation?

Whatever the case, I’d like to know the source of this contention. It seems like something worth nipping in the bud.

1. I found this in an article by Karen Healey called ‘Where the Popular Kids are Sitting‘ at Strange Horizons, which I found through Alien Onion

I’ve come up ambivalent about a book I’m reviewing. When this happens I like to make note of the positives and negatives and try to round up with a suggestion that readers should check it out for themselves.

I have no problems suggesting that readers don’t bother if a book is below sub-par, but if something comes up halfway decent, I assume that one person’s free review copy is another person’s first edition.

My problem is that in the process of scraping the barrel, I find myself ploughing deeply into speculation and interpretation of the author’s intentions. I tend to say things like, ‘The author didn’t quite carry this theme, but that’s because they were focussing on this other theme, which is explored well.’

Is this a problem? I’m worried that I’m making concessions for books when they should be flagged as undeveloped. That I might save people the trouble if I were more honest about the book.

If I think the book warrants being supported – if it’s a debut novel and the author has demonstrated considerable promise for certain styles and techniques – is that enough to warrant concocting a positive interpretation? It’s not just this novel in particular – I come up against this with many young-adult and debut novels.

This has been just like trying to fix a car engine: as soon as you start pulling it apart, you find more things to fix, or questions to answer.

There are comments to this post here. I couldn’t carry them over to this new site.