At Landing Press we are currently sending out a call for submissions for our latest anthology, which will be about water. We’ve been going for ten years now, not bad for a tiny press run by a group of volunteers (although very skilled volunteers). Our new book will be, as always, poetry that everyone can enjoy, and will include very well-known poets and first-time writers, and about two-thirds of it will be submitted poems. We’ll receive 300-400 poems and we’ll select about 60 from those.
The submission process – inviting people all over the country to send work on a particular theme – is the traditional and conventional and efficient way an anthology is put together.
But at Landing Press we are also committed to including voices not normally heard – in past anthologies these have been the homeless, cleaners, people queueing for free food, people living in cars. And we won’t get these poems through a submission process. That process depends on two things. First, that you know about the proposed publication. The call for submissions will come through various writers’ and other networks and contacts, and you need to be part of one of those networks.
Secondly, you need to have the confidence to send your work to an unknown person who will read your poem and make a decision about it. Even for very good writers, that can be daunting. For new writers, it can be an insurmountable wall.
So the submission process works very well for part of the population – people like me, and maybe you if you are reading this – but we’re a small part.
At Landing Press we’ve been very aware of this for several years. Our first anthology was More of us, poems by migrants and ex-refugees. We called for submissions and received many excellent poems. Then we looked at the gaps: no poems by new migrants, or people learning English, or students. So we ran writing workshops with English Language Partners (which offers English language learning programmes) and with ESOL students in four high schools. That way we created a collection with the range and diversity we wanted.
For our next anthology Somewhere a cleaner – poems by and about cleaners – a nationwide call for submissions resulted in a very large number of poems. There were lots of very good poems (a lot of Kiwis clean on their OE!). But the problem was that about 90% were by pākehā writers; that didn’t reflect the cleaning population of Aotearoa New Zealand. We decided not to publish the book until it better represented the cleaning industry. But we were under covid restrictions and couldn’t run workshops. So we went out and found cleaners, in offices, boatyards, window cleaning companies, rest homes, and railway stations. We worked with the union E Tū and with cleaning companies (one company ran a competition for its employees!) And we mentored people. We’ve developed a way of working with new writers, which enables them to write in their own voice, and learn to edit their work, and slowly we expanded the range of the book.
With our next anthology More than a roof, poems about housing, we had a clearer idea of how we wanted to work – with partner organisations. Our two major partners were the Wellington City Mission and Community Housing Aotearoa. By working with them we were able to include poems by the genuinely homeless, those in transitional housing and in social housing.
Then we second-guessed ourselves. In the next year, we were pushed as a team for resources, so we decided to choose the theme of generations for the next anthology. We chose the theme because it was less specific than earlier themes, and maybe this was a book we could complete largely through submissions. Of course we were wrong. We read through a years’ worth of submissions, and although we had many excellent poems, the range and diversity we wanted weren’t there. We lacked the voices that one doesn’t usually hear that we are committed to including. So we gave ourselves another year, to get the poems that we knew would never be submitted to us. We ran workshops in retirement villages, with climate change activists, grandparents and grandchildren, teenagers, a mental health facility, the Māori Women’s Welfare League, Migrant Connexions in New Plymouth, Homeground in Auckland, a group of Arabic-speaking women, and high school students.
So our new book, on water, will be a mix of poems from writers all over the country, and poems that will come from workshops and mentoring.
There’s nothing wrong with the submission process. We depend on it for a large part of every collection. It’s an essential and very efficient way of gathering work. But it’s always useful for those of us privileged enough to a) have access to the information, and b) have the confidence to submit, to remember that we are part of a relatively small group. The wonderful challenge is to think about how we can keep pushing out the boundaries of the literary landscape to include a wider range of people. The effect on a person, who has never written before, or ever seen themselves as a writer, of writing their first poem, learning how they can strengthen it, seeing it published in a high quality mainstream book, maybe reading it an event, can be transforming. Both for the writer, but also for the reader, who might discover a completely new perspective.