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Vicki Stratton (Class of 2010)
Vicki Stratton enjoys the main Event You'd think I'd won a lottery. I whooped and danced around like a giddy kid. But it was no lottery win -- my first non-fiction submission to a writing contest had made the short list. It didn't win, but that didn't matter. Being short-listed was an event to remember, one that inspired me to embrace a Print Futures work internship with Event , the award-winning Douglas College literary review and home of the longest-running non-fiction writing contest in Canada.
The job description included copy-editing manuscripts and tackling an as-yet-unknown special project for the magazine, but the number-one task was to read and judge the 190 entries to Event' s 21st annual Non-Fiction Writing Contest. I and another intern would help Event editors give someone else a chance to whoop and dance.
Taking home the first 20 stories to read, I knew I carried treasures, ones with owners anxiously waiting for recognition of their value. I pictured authors agonizing over the words to tell their stories and hoped I'd do them justice. Over the next two months, I and two other readers pored over 20 to 30 stories a week. Themes emerged: sickness, death, divorce, theft, abuse, mental illness, travel, self-discovery -- fascinating and often heart-wrenching situations that threatened to blur my evaluation of writing quality.
Picking prizewinners from the many well-written entries was difficult; few submissions were poorly written. But for each story I could make only one choice: reject, another reader, or short list. My hand hesitated over the damning reject option. It took even more nerve to choose short list , committing my opinion of excellence. Asking for another reader opinion lacked decision. But slowly, I came to trust my judgement, and the three of us whittled the 190-story list to an 11-story short list that went to a final judge. I hope the short-listed authors and the winners danced and whooped. I did -- two of the three winners were among my original short-list picks.
But Event isn't just about the writing contest. Event editors choose from hundreds of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry submissions for the three issues published each year. Another part of my job was to copy-edit those selected for publication. In prose and poetry, creative licence thrives, and I had to learn to leave it alone. Sentence fragments often dance freely across the pages. Invented words and creative punctuation sometimes appear among the lines like paint flicked on a canvas. Light touch, light touch became my mantra. Challenging yes, but also interesting, and the task opened my mind to new job possibilities.
Finally, the time came to tackle the mysterious special project, which developed into crafting a readership survey. The project brought into play technical writing, research skills, and layout design, skills I hadn't expected to use at Event. The job continued to surprise me. I may have jumped at the Event internship for the non-fiction contest experience, but I got much more from it than that. The job not only stretched my skills, but also kept me whooping and dancing as I discovered more of what I can do.Read more about the author.
Posted April 2010
