Writing the Life Poetic

Catching Voices: Engaging the Broader Community Through Submissions

By Jenn Lalime and Sara Guest  

It is early 2005 in a cozy living room, steam rising from cups of tea, women in a rough circle on couches, chairs, ottomans and the floor. The facilitator, Emily Trinkaus—one of the original founders of the VoiceCatcher collective—launches a prompt. Pens fire up around the room and women start writing.  

Later, when we share what we’ve written, we access the raw materials of each other’s lives. And after a while, we start to realize the writing being shared around the room is powerful. More powerful perhaps—or at least in a different way—than the work we read in poetry and fiction journals or yearly anthologies. “We’ve got to start capturing this stuff!” we say. “We need to start sharing.”  

From this shared impulse, the VoiceCatcher anthology (soon to be publishing its fifth issue) was born. And the desire to feel connected to the authentic, powerful, emotional, raw collective voice we have been hearing howled into living rooms all over Portland has kept us going all these years.  

We want fledgling writers who are afraid to put their work in the world to have a logical place to send it. We want veteran writers from the area to find it worthwhile to place their work with our project.  

And since the first year, that’s pretty much what we’ve gotten back from the Portland women’s writing community. We’ve received gorgeous, heartfelt letters from writers taking a first stab at owning their collective voice. We’ve heard from women just moving to town looking for the best way to get connected. We’ve had the pleasure of publishing Oregon Book Award-winning poets alongside stories sent from Coffee Creek Correctional Facility (the prison in Wilsonville housing the entire women’s prison population in Oregon). Everything goes as long as it speaks to us.

Our submission window opens like a spring sidecar on February 1 and closes on March 31^st – just in time to get geared up for heavy doses of reading in April and May while many of us are tending our gardens. What women throughout the Portland, Oregon area have planted on the page in the dark days of winter blooms into our sunrooms and kitchen tables.

We take submissions at our PO Box (below), and also in-person at any of our spring readings. In addition to supporting authors from the previous year’s book, these events remind our very large audiences that the submission window is open -- and we encourage everyone to submit. (Please visit our website in January for a full list of spring readings celebrating the current issue – VoiceCatcher 4).   

Want to get involved? If you are a woman living in the Portland, Oregon area, send us the writing that’s hanging out in the dark clotted space on your desk, or in your dream journal, or on your hard-drive, or in your heart. We look forward to hearing from you.

VoiceCatcher submissions: February 1- March 31 at VoiceCatcher, PO Box 6064, Portland, OR 97228-6064.

More about VoiceCatcher at www.voicecatcher.org.

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Sara Guest, a native mid-westerner, has been tripping the light wowtastic in Portland, Oregon since 2004. A longtime producer and editor, Sara works as a program coordinator for Write Around Portland and volunteers with Literary Arts and VoiceCatcher (currently as board chair). She writes poetry and fiction and is a voracious reader and lover of Powell's City of Books.

Jenn Lalime is a northwest native, a writer and editor, a mother and a wife. She's lucky to work with the following organizations to bring the words of fellow writers out into the world: Portland Women Writers, VoiceCatcher, and Tin House Books. She thanks the universe every day for President Obama whose presence in the White House gives her the peace of mind to stay focused on her first and true love: reading great fiction.

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Catching Voices: Building an Editorial Team and Calendar

By Jenn Lalime and Sara Guest

A good editorial team is like any balanced team, holding space for different types of people to bring skills to the party, be productive and feel fulfilled. A community-writing team, in particular, ought to be of the community. From her earliest moments, VoiceCatcher wanted to be a collective large and diverse enough to represent many potential “kinds” of readers. In this way we could be receptive to and supportive of many “kinds” of writers.  

Additionally, the notion of building consensus was a concern and goal. For this reason the collective evolved naturally into a body of nine, easily split into three teams of three. Three is a consensus-builder. Splitting women into teams of three allows for diversity on each team: strengths in different genres, a range of age and experience.  

Of course no one was tapped to represent a particular kind of writing or experience, but balancing is a comfort in making sure work is read broadly and deeply by women who feel adept to judge the work and stretched toward new understandings. In this way each stack of submissions represents both comfort and challenge to each of the team members reading it. Some of the magic of what gets published slips in here.  

How did we recruit the collective? This felt easy. At first, the founder talked to her friends. Everyone who joined the inaugural collective was a friend of the founder in a writing capacity. These very women had moved the founder with their writing in workshop settings. After that, a simple paradigm emerged: if you’re published by the collective, you’re eligible to join it.  

And who should be invited to join? The women who inquire and feel called by it! These women are particularly easy to spot, actually. They get in touch. They sit in front seats at the reading, their eyes shining at you when you mount the podium. They write cover letters that say, your project matters so much to me.  

How did we develop the editorial calendar? Mostly over eggs and pancakes post-yoga. For nearly a year Jenn and I (Sara) met every Wednesday for yoga class, brunch and VoiceCatcher. It was my favorite part of the week. We pushed a bunch of energy out through our yoga clothes then filled the empty space with ideas about how to produce an anthology. We continually reminded ourselves that this was an experiment -- and taking the pressure off kept it fresh and open.

Our calendar lilted like a butterfly on a branch, gentle and easy. Spring for submissions and reading because in spring we are reborn. Summer for editorial production—stolen hours while the kids are at camp. Fall for launching what would make a great holiday gift. December for post-processing and January for integrating new collective-members into the project. Lilt lilt lilt, wing wing wing. The work meted out to each month like a new branch.

More about VoiceCatcher at www.voicecatcher.org.

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Sara Guest, a native mid-westerner, has been tripping the light wowtastic in Portland, Oregon since 2004. A longtime producer and editor, Sara works as a program coordinator for Write Around Portland and volunteers with Literary Arts and VoiceCatcher (currently as board chair). She writes poetry and fiction and is a voracious reader and lover of Powell's City of Books.

Jenn Lalime is a northwest native, a writer and editor, a mother and a wife. She's lucky to work with the following organizations to bring the words of fellow writers out into the world: Portland Women Writers, VoiceCatcher, and Tin House Books. She thanks the universe every day for President Obama whose presence in the White House gives her the peace of mind to stay focused on her first and true love: reading great fiction.

Catching Voices: Visioning the Project and Collective

By Jenn Lalime and Sara Guest

The concept of VoiceCatcher came to our founder, Diane English, initially in a dream. Once she assembled seven women to turn dream into reality, our conversations too turned down this path: How will VoiceCatcher do it differently? What will make VoiceCatcher unique?

Yes, it will be for women; yes, it will be local; yes, we’ll publish poetry and prose; but one overarching theme rose above it all: respect. How will we respect local women writers? We’d felt the sting of hallow rejection notices and this was a practice we were determined not to perpetuate. But how can we ask women to share their words with us knowing we are unable to publish them all? How will we say “no, thanks” in a way that doesn’t break hearts or discourage a writer on her journey?

The real fun began when we seven, determined women strove to make process as important as product as we brought out our first edition. The two practices that have serves as cornerstones of our philosophy of respect since that time are these: each piece of writing shared with us is read by at least three editors; and each writer whose work is not selected is given specific written feedback on the strongest of their manuscripts.

Since our second year, we’ve operated with three reading teams--nine editors working in groups of three. Editors read the work independently, then the team comes together to discuss and decide collectively which manuscripts rise to the top. Working to reach consensus this way is time consuming but worth it. Women are trusting their work to us and we respect writers by giving manuscripts the opportunity to hook not just one, but three individual editors. We sit together at the end of the day to honor what we’ve read even if we decide against publishing it.

And for those pieces to which we have to say “no, thanks,” one editor, who feels that she connects in some way to the author’s writing, goes back to her desk once all the decisions are made and looks again at it. She composes a letter describing what she feels is strongest, offering ideas and suggestions on where to take the manuscript. It’s a very personal, “from me to you” type of communication.

This final piece, the writing of feedback, gets harder each year as our submission numbers climb. We worry about the commitment we ask of our volunteer editorial staff. But it is this work, the connection from one writer to another, that makes VoiceCatcher what it is—makes us different, keeps us a little closer to the magic that writing is all about.

More about VoiceCatcher at www.voicecatcher.org.

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Sara Guest, a native mid-westerner, has been tripping the light wowtastic in Portland, Oregon since 2004. A longtime producer and editor, Sara works as a program coordinator for Write Around Portland and volunteers with Literary Arts and VoiceCatcher (currently as board chair). She writes poetry and fiction and is a voracious reader and lover of Powell's City of Books.

Jenn Lalime is a northwest native, a writer and editor, a mother and a wife. She's lucky to work with the following organizations to bring the words of fellow writers out into the world: Portland Women Writers, VoiceCatcher, and Tin House Books. She thanks the universe every day for President Obama whose presence in the White House gives her the peace of mind to stay focused on her first and true love: reading great fiction.

Catching Voices: The Concept of Community Publishing Behind VoiceCatcher

By Jenn Lalime and Sara Guest

VoiceCatcher is an anthology of Portland women's writing. It exists because a collective of women -- editors, authors, artists, poets and teachers -- who love to read and write wanted to collect the voices of local women and offer them to the community. This column chronicles the vision behind VoiceCatcher and the cultivation of that vision by two key leaders in the editorial collective.

Like local sustainable agriculture, we see community publishing as an opportunity to cultivate local, sustainable writing. For us, community publishing means of, by and for a particular community. As Michael Pollen tells us thou shalt know your farmer, we decided readers should get to know their local writers, publishers, and editors. Of course not every publication can, or should, operate this way. But ours does. 

In our case, we mean the very-very-wildly-magnificently-fruited creative community in the greater Portland, Oregon where since the fall of 2005 we've helped manage a local, non-profit, women's-only anthology called VoiceCatcher generated once-a-year by and for our peers.

We produce the anthology using a collective model. Ten volunteers, part of a rotating collective, work together as readers, editors, copyeditors, publishers, marketers and event-planners to honor and support the incredible women writers in our community--some known to us, many more met along the way. Authors become collective-members; collective-members take lead roles as editors; former-editors run the board. Our current editor, Jenn Springsteen, calls working on the project the best MFA she never paid for.

We've called it a labor of love, and so it is. It's also an act of empowerment. We've dug a publishing space and publication model--our own little garden plot--that seeks inclusion and support as core premises. Though we produce a book of high quality, we also engage extensively with every piece submitted.

For those who share their work with us but are not selected for publication, we provide a personalized feedback letter that speaks to what's working and not working in their individual manuscript. For those authors we publish, we launch the book with an authors-only party to say, Hey! Look at all the other people publishing great shit in this town. The voices in the book, after all, are attached to lives and practices and bodies of work. We also provide space at the microphone, hosting several readings each year, which gives most of our authors an opportunity to read in public.

When we first got started, these were just ideas hatched in a dream-space by women who'd been writing together and impressing each other. Why isn't what's available to me over the counter as vibrant, emotional and risky as the stuff I'm hearing every week in workshop? Why are so many of my friends demoralized when they try to put their work into the world?

Our first website had pithy little taglines like Release your work into our stream and Our nets are out--our mission was to literally catch some voices and to treat each writer who answered the call with respect and a high degree of nurturing. This continues to be how we approach what we do conceptually--as a receiving space where everyone's work, regardless of where she is in her development as writer--can swim.

More about VoiceCatcher at www.voicecatcher.org.

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Sara Guest, a native mid-westerner, has been tripping the light wowtastic in Portland, Oregon since 2004. A longtime producer and editor, Sara works as a program coordinator for Write Around Portland and volunteers with Literary Arts and VoiceCatcher (currently as board chair). She writes poetry and fiction and is a voracious reader and lover of Powell's City of Books.

Jenn Lalime is a northwest native, a writer and editor, a mother and a wife. She's lucky to work with the following organizations to bring the words of fellow writers out into the world: Portland Women Writers, VoiceCatcher, and Tin House Books. She thanks the universe every day for President Obama whose presence in the White House gives her the peace of mind to stay focused on her first and true love: reading great fiction.