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Every few months I ask on Twitter for work I can consider for Pushcart nominations. I’m guessing that if you’re reading this you know what a Pushcart is, but in case you don’t, the Pushcart Prize is an anthology published every year since 1976 that is dedicated to publishing the “best of the small presses.” I’m not going to delve into what “best” means here, but I will say “small presses” means, mostly, literary journals, and that every time I ask I get lots of questions about how the nomination process works, including people who sometimes deride me for only asking on Twitter, when they, the person private-messaging me, might have missed it.

There isn’t much mystery about how the basic process works. The following is from the Pushcart Prize website:

 The Pushcart Prize Nomination Process 
We welcome up to six nominations (print or online) from little magazine and small book press editors throughout the world. We also accept nominations from our staff of distinguished Contributing Editors. The nominations may be any combination of poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs or stand-alone excerpts from novels. We welcome translations, reprints and both traditional and experimental writing.

Nominations are accepted between October 1 - December 1 (postmarked) for next year's Pushcart edition. Nominations must have been published (or scheduled to be published) in the current calendar year. There is no entry fee and no form to fill out.

            For literary journals to be able to nominate their contributors, they “just have to contact the Pushcart Press and let them know you exist,” says James Tate Hill, editor of Monkeybicycle, who was kind enough to answer a few questions from the literary journal end, but more of JT in a few. (Follow JT on Twitter @JamesTateHill)

            I have nominations as a former contributor. In 2015 my essay “The Hornet Among Us” was nominated by War, Literature and the Arts, a literary journal published by the Air Force Academy, and then “won” a Pushcart Prize. The next fall, around October 1, right about the time the Pushcart Anthology and Best American Essays were coming out, I got a letter from the Pushcart people informing me I could nominate up to 10 people or pieces. (I, unbelievably, had essays in both Pushcart and Best American Essays that year, and I might do a Substack about BAE in the future).

            I use the word “or” because I can nominate individual pieces I’ve read, or I can nominate people. As in, I can send in their names, and the Pushcart people contact the people whose names I’ve sent, and the people whose names I’ve sent can then send their best published work, providing it was published that year.

            Every year in January I open a file on my desktop: “Pushcart Noms 2022” is on my desktop now; 2021 and previous years have been archived. When I read something I like online or in a print journal, I copy/paste a link, or type in the name of the story/essay and the issue of the lit journal. A few times a year, as I said, I ask on Twitter for pieces published that year. I usually get too many to read, but I read them all anyway.

            Some of the pieces I get don’t meet the criteria: they were a blog post or a Substack or something that’s not a literary journal, but most of the pieces I get, the vast majority, are good. Many are very good.  

The ones that get into the consideration pile are outstandingly good. They hurt me. They make me cry at my computer. Or they make me laugh at my computer. They make me laugh then cry. They make me feel something. If I don’t want to feel anything I’ll scroll Twitter. When I read a piece I want to feel like an autumn leaf being swept down the sidewalk in a swift wind that speaks of winter. I want to feel like the beauty in the world outweights the sadness or, if it doesn’t, at least we can remember the beautiful moments amidst all the heartbreak.

            I narrow down, from the hundreds of pieces I read every year, to 10. I don’t know why I get 10. I assume it’s because I’m better than James Tate Hill, who only gets 6. But I digress (Don’t get testy—JT is one of my dearest friends in the world).

In December I send my 10 picks to the Pushcart people and then when the anthology comes in I look through it to see if any of my nominees have been accepted.

Here’s the truth: very few of them have been accepted into the actual anthology. It is not because I choose bad pieces. It is because of numbers.

            This is the part I want to delve into. As I said, the nomination process is simple, except it’s not. Publishing rarely is, because we have to factor in all kinds of things, such as taste, temperament, and, perhaps, what the temperature is outside (I get in a foul mood if it’s too hot, so I always assume any time I get a rejection it’s because of the weather).

            “The Hornet Among Us” had been rejected 20 times by literary journals before WLA accepted it. I’ll say that again: my Pushcart-winning piece had been rejected 20 times. I also had been nominated for a Pushcart 16 times previously, without even an honorable mention. I’ve had pieces in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading that didn’t get a nomination. I’ve had pieces that won other awards that didn’t get a nomination.

            Here’s James Tate Hill again:

“We only publish fiction, so we send in six nominees each year from the 40 or so we publish. . .if we're nominating 6 stories, and every other journal in the U.S., online and print, is nominating six stories, and previous Pushcart winners as contributing editors are nominating multiple stories, imagine the miniscule odds of a nomination actually becoming a Pushcart Prize or even an honorable mention. I've been nominating since 2014 and to my knowledge we've yet to earn as much as a mention for any of our stories, though I think we've had a story in every edition of Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions.”

This article gives us a few more numbers: https://www.writermag.com/get-published/promoting-your-work/pushcart-prize-nominations/

It says:

“Fox cited the numbers: with 1,800 journals (a conservative estimate) nominating six writers apiece, this means at least 10,800 writers are nominated every year.”

(Note that the above article also spends a lot of time on whether you should have “Pushcart-nominated” in your bio/resume, a thing about which I do not care. You do you.)

This doesn’t take into account contributing editors, either. In other words, it’s really, really, really hard to win a Pushcart.

            But you can put yourself in a better position by becoming part of the literary community. Read other writers. Read their work, not just when they announce they got something accepted but when they link THE ACTUAL PIECE. Follow lit journals and read the entire issue. Subscribe to print journals if you can. Follow people who are generous in the literary community, because they are always retweeting other people’s writing. Read the things that are winning awards. Read the anthologies, past and present. Read genre mags and read weird books and read old books and new books and books by people who don’t look like you. Read everything.  

            You can’t control taste. You can’t control nominations. You can’t control what I’ll like or what an editor will like or what other people will like. But you can write without worrying, at least during the process, about awards. Writing is the only thing you can control. This goes for any award, any publication, any fellowship, retreat, conference, job, meeting, query, submission, blurb, review, sandwich board outside a coffee shop. The only thing you can control is your writing.

             So get up in the morning and sacrifice a small woodland creature. Carve your name on the skulls of the dead, or whatever it is you do to prepare yourself for the writing day. Light a candle and sit in the darkness whispering the name of your worst fear or your happiest moment. Conjure the ghosts that live inside you. Tell me a story that makes me feel so small I might disappear into whatever world you’ve created, like a leaf blowing in the coming winter wind.   

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I’ll leave you with a few examples, pieces that have hurt me, moved me, made me feel something beyond what a Netflix series can do:

This one by Wells Woodman because of the way it confronts masculinity, the assumptions men make that keep us from connecting to other men:

  https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/people-like-us

This one by Steve Edwards on the heartache and hardship of being a father:          

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/542/rain-shadows

And here’s my Pushcart piece from 2015:
http://www.wlajournal.com/wlaarchive/27/Crenshaw.pdf

And here’s a ranking of literary journals by @cliffgarstang based on how many Pushcart Prizes and Pushcart Special Mentions the magazines have received over the past ten-year period: https://cliffordgarstang.com/2022-literary-magazine-rankings/

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