(See the list of winners here.)

Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen, and Omega Institutes, and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.

Here’s her winning non-rhyming poem, “Charring Lemons.”

Charring Lemons

by Alison Luterman

February, and those fat yellow

knobby-nippled grenades

are dropping from everyone’s backyard tree,

to be kicked around like little hockey pucks,

or left to rot in tall grass.

One neighbor fills a cardboard box

with precious Meyers and sets it,

as an offering, on the sidewalk.

Another leaves a bag on my doorstep–

Take, take, m’ija, my tree is bursting!

And I remember walking

in the Berkeley hills decades ago

with my first husband who was not yet

my husband, gaping at all the front lawns.

Look, a lemon tree! Another one!

Fresh out of Boston, naive as a new puppy.

Everything in this golden state

was a wonder to me, not least

the boy-man on my arm

with his black curls and high-wire heart.

What did I know then of fire and flood,

mudslides or earthquakes?

Oh, to be twenty-five and free

from even the thought of disaster,

to be so simply dazzled by a tree

heavy with fruit in the heart of winter!

That was our first year together,

when everything was still possible.

Before the marriage collapsed

under our feet like a beautiful building

not built to code. Well now he’s dead

and I’m old, and standing over a hot skillet,

charring lemons—a trick I learned

on the Internet—blackening them just enough

to bring out the hidden sugars.

Hold anything over the fire

for a few minutes or a lifetime

and it turns into smoke.

Get recognized for your writing. Find out more about the Writer’s Digest family of writing competitions.

The post Writer’s Digest 94th Annual Competition Winning Non-Rhyming Poem: “Charring Lemons” appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Irene Te always knew she wanted to self-publish her YA romance novel, This Place Is Magic. “I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to query this project,” she says. “I never even attempted it. It wasn’t a story that fit neatly into any boxes, and if it was difficult for me to position and pitch, I felt it would be difficult for an agent, too. And since there were so many elements I wasn’t OK with negotiating, I chose to self-publish. I saw it as the best way to stay true to the story I wanted to tell.”

Her instincts proved right, earning her the top prize in WD’s 32^nd Annual Self-Published Book Awards, but this also dispels the notion that self-publishing is merely a backup plan for authors if traditional publishing isn’t working out. The benefits of self-publishing—writing the story the way she wanted to, going against traditional romance tropes—far outweighed those of traditional publishing for Te to begin with; and now, the validation of winning Grand Prize is something she hopes teaches others the legitimacy of self-published books.

WD spoke with Te about why she entered the competition, the inspiration behind This Place Is Magic, and more.

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Congratulations on winning Grand Prize! What made you decide to enter our competition?

Thank you! I chose to enter this competition because I consider Writer’s Digest to be a reputable and reliable source of support for anyone who writes. I felt that winning—even an honorable mention—from a WD competition would be a great thing for me as a writer; I also felt that it would help me continue to dispel the misconception that self-published books are not worthy of critical acclaim on the same level as books that are traditionally published. I don’t think I’m the only self-published author who feels like no matter how much effort, care, and craft I put into my work, it’s still dismissed as lesser quality because I didn’t choose the traditional route to publication. It was nice to receive validation that I’d chosen the right path for my book. Winning an award from a respected industry publication like Writer’s Digest could help my book reach more readers.

Tell us about This Place Is Magic. How did the idea come to you?

The fictional K-pop group in this book has been around since 2017, starting out as a list of characters in a Google doc. Pretty much all my projects take a long time to simmer. Case in point, I didn’t return to the idea of writing about K-pop until early 2023, when I saw an Instagram post featuring an idol on an evening walk. He had his back turned to the camera, just strolling through some neighborhood in California. Initially, I was drawn to the aesthetic: the dark blue of the sky, the streetlamps, the billowing white shirt. It felt hopeful and carefree, but also kind of sad. Someone so famous would have a hard time taking a walk anywhere without being recognized or interrupted. Even the casual nature of this picture was, at heart, a kind of performance. It seemed exhausting.

I kept scrolling after that, but there was something about the image that just stayed with me. I started looking at all the other posts by idols in my feed and totally overthinking each one. I thought about how crazy it would be for someone to find a random K-pop idol wandering down the street outside their house. Why was he even there? What if he’d gotten lost? And then, the question that led me to my protagonist: What if he wanted to be lost? What if this character was running away?

Something I think you capture really well is the banter between characters. Charming, charismatic dialogue is critically important to a successful rom-com. How did you go about creating the unique voices for each of the characters?

In my experience, a character’s unique voice is directly tied to who they are as a person. I spend a lot of time thinking about where a character comes from, whether they’d be wordy in their responses or very brief and to the point, and if they have any phrases that they use a lot. Then I come up with “rules” for how each character uses language.

The fun part of banter and conversation between characters, for me, is watching the interplay of all these different “rules” in action. Some characters never interrupt. Others do nothing but interrupt. Some characters never curse and one character curses constantly. When you get them all interacting together, I think the dialogue has no choice but to be lively.

Were there any surprises in the writing process of This Place Is Magic?

The biggest surprise was how easily the story fell into place. It was the rare project that seemed to be writing itself. Although he’s the quietest and most undemanding protagonist I’ve ever written so far, Eunjae really had a story he wanted to tell me.

If you could share one piece of advice to other writers considering self-publishing, what would it be?

I think the best thing you can do for yourself as a writer is to cultivate a willingness to learn. Remain open to the idea that there’s always more learning you can do. This means studying craft, but also taking feedback and figuring out your unique process. Take the time to improve your skills. To me, learning is an investment in yourself. 

Enter the 33rd Self-Published Book Awards now!

The post Interview with Irene Te: WD’s 32nd Annual Self-Published Book Awards Winner appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Out of many great entries, WD editors selected the following 25 winners:

1. “The Fountain of Ruth” by Karin Patton

2. “Cotton” by Jasmine Griffin

3. “Sixteen, Summer” by Shannon Bowring

4. “Epilogue: The Story After the Story” by Jim Hunstein

5. “Unscratched” by NVMann

6. “Midrise” by Michele Ruby

7. “The Personality Writer” by Jenno Kane

8. “Ghosts of Winter” by Ronald McGuire

9. “Beyond the Fence” by Noreen Kilbride

10. “We Could Never Afford a Headstone” by Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal

11. “The Smell of Old Books” by David Osgood

12. “Twister” by Gary V Powell

13. “Last Writes” by William County

14. “Last Call” by Kate Adams

15. “Road To Nowhere” by Jennifer Braunfels

16. “A Crown of Azaleas” by Ramona Richards

17. “Hope Never Stops-at-All” by Tiffany Link

18. “The Last Migration” by Robyn Dabney

19. “The Thought of Remembering” by D’Spencer Luyao

20. “The Empress in the Front Yard” by Kristofer Schleicher

21. “A Numbers Game” by John Foley

22. “Dear” by Marilyn Hope

23. “Last Words of Ordinary Things: The Wristwatch” by L.C. Davis

24. “The Okie Dokie” by Rachel Childers

25. “Why Do They Call It Toilet Water?” by Amy DeFlavis 

The post Announcing the Winners of the 24th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Competition appeared first on Writer's Digest.

As we met to discuss her winning novel, Claire Fraise said something that resonated with every part of her writing and publishing journey: “I just try to keep a curious mindset and to explore and to keep doing something to move myself in the direction where I want to be going. Even when it can feel challenging.”

After falling in love with dystopian YA fiction while reading series like The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner, she asked herself, “Why can’t I try writing one of my own?” For two years, she did nothing but think about her characters and write. Then she self-published that novel, titled Imperfect.

She was only 16 years old.

“What really attracted me to self-publishing was that I would be able to hold on to all of the ownership of this work that I’d spent so much time creating and that I had the final say and control over all aspects of production in that book,” she says.

With this ownership came challenges of all kinds, but also the wisdom that comes with overcoming them. “I have so much experience now marketing and doing design and learning how to interact with readers and be on social media and run ads and do all of these different things that fit into publishing,” she says. “That has been amazing, and I’m so glad that I’ve been able to have that.”

While she wrote Imperfect as a young adult, she continues to write young adult fiction now that she’s in her 20s. Fraise explains that she loves it because the stories tend to be more hopeful than stories written for adults. She says, “Even though they go through stuff, they still have that optimism … If they go and do things like confide in others and lean on others and ask for help, their situations can get better, and they can improve them. … It’s really fun as an author because I can put them through a lot of really horrible stuff, and they’re still managing to keep their fighting spirit.” But readers can rest easy knowing that everything Fraise writes will end with some kind of hopeful note—something else that she equates with YA literature.

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Her next big project—what would become They Stay—would take a few more years to come to fruition. She wrote the early draft while in her freshman year of college, and candidly explains that it wasn’t a successful draft. “I knew after I wrote it that I was not going to do anything with this book,” she says with a laugh. “It was a mess.”

But instead of shutting that story in a proverbial drawer and forgetting about it, she continued to wonder about what it could be. “For the next year and a half, I couldn’t get those characters out of my head. Like, that girl who could see ghosts was really interesting to me. And I loved the friendship dynamic between that school bad boy and the nerdy kid. … So, I sat down one day, and I was like, How could I structure a book with these characters in a way that fixes all of the problems that I had before?”

That was the first question of many that drove her revisions. Rewriting can often be a frustrating and painful process, but Fraise focused on staying open and kept asking questions until a clear story outline presented itself. But then, another hurdle: “I had heard that if you publish a series, it’s a lot easier to gain traction when you’re just starting out in self-publishing … you can run ads [for] Book One, and your ads are more likely to be profitable … a certain percentage of [people] will go on to read Book Two and Three and Four, et cetera.

“I came up with a way to turn that book into a story with serious potential and to widen it … It was the product of me sitting down knowing that I wanted to write a series and making a bunch of tweaks and being really thoughtful about how I was going to construct it. Because I have a plotter’s brain, and I like tinkering with projects and moving things around and constructing them almost like I’m building a puzzle.”

Her love of puzzles makes sense; she’s a genre author, and solving puzzles is integral to the stories that she tells. “I don’t know how mystery and thriller writers can write mysteries without plotting them and figuring out how they go together because I used to get so overwhelmed trying to figure out what information was being revealed to the readers when,” she says with a laugh. “… a couple of years ago, I started outlining all my books using plot grids, which was super helpful because then I could see exactly what was happening in every single subplot over the course of the story, and then track what was happening in each chapter.”

All writers can learn from the way Fraise approaches these kinds of changes to her writing process. Even though she released the first four books in the They Stay series in three years, an incredible feat, she believes she still has a lot to learn and remains open to switching things up. “My goal is just to make every book that I publish a little bit better than the last one … If I tried to publish a book that was absolutely perfect, I would never publish anything!”

More recently, she began to consider entering competitions. She confessed that, from a business standpoint, having the social capital from a competition placement can be what tips the scales when a reader is considering whether they should purchase a self-published book. But beyond that, she says that what’s most important as a self-published author is that “you need to be curious and put yourself out there in a bunch of different little ways and experiment to try to see what works and what ends up sticking and what doesn’t end, because there are so many things that change all the time with self-publishing.” This willingness to put her work out there netted her grand prize in the 31^st Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards for They Stay, which includes a $10,000 cash prize and a paid trip to the 2024 Writer’s Digest Annual Conference.

When asked what advice she would give to other writers, her response is instantaneous: “Be persistent. Keep your eye on your goal, and don’t expect things to happen all at once. Keep moving in the direction that you want to go in, keep trying things, and stay curious; learn as much as you can. But don’t put all the pressure on yourself to be an expert in everything overnight. Just go into it with a mindset of learning, keep an open mind, and keep showing up for your book and for your dream. Because that’s the only way it’s going to come true.” 

The post Claire Fraise: 2023 Self-Published Book Awards Winner appeared first on Writer's Digest.

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Grand Prize

The Cruel Dark by Bea Northwick, NorthwickBooks.com

Contemporary Fiction

First Place

Secret of the Hindu Kush by Anthony Stone, AnthonyStone-Author.com

Honorable Mentions

Jaguar Spirit by Zoe Hauser, ZoeHauser.com

Pheidippides Didn’t Die by Autumn Konopka, AutumnKonopka.com

The Playgroup by Jami Worthington

The Way It’s Supposed to Be by April Garner, AprilGarner.com

Fantasy

First Place

Children of Cain by S. L. Myers

Honorable Mentions

Find Them by Julia Ash, JuliaAshBooks.wordpress.com

The Kimoni Legacy: Initiation by Omari Richards, Omari-Richards.com

The Sword and Shield by Emma Khoury, EmmaKhoury.com

Mystery/Thriller

First Place

The Girl with the Face of the Moon by Ellis Amdur, EdgeworkBooks.com

Honorable Mentions

Cobra Pose by Susan Rogers and John Roosen, SusanERogers.com

Final Belongings by Sarah Beauchemin, SarahBeaucheminWriter.com

The Sinful by G. W. Allison, GWAllison.com

The Starlet Letter by Julie Mathison, JulieMathison.com

Narrative Nonfiction

First Place

Crew of Three: How Bold Dreams and Detailed Plans Launched Our Family’s Sailing Adventure by Kimberly Ward, KimberlyJWardwriter.com

Honorable Mentions

Barbwire, Brothels and Bombs in the Night: Surviving Vietnam by Connard Hogan, ConnardHogan.com

CLOSE TO HOME: Sexual Abusers and Serial Killers, Memoir and Murder by Janine O’Neill, JanineONeill.com

In Death’s Shadow by David Branham, DavidMBranham.com

You Matter More Than You Think by Phil Williams, PhilWBooks.com

Prescriptive/Informative Nonfiction

First Place

Paint, Sweat, and Tears: 150 Days on the Appalachian Trail by Carolyn Matthews-Daut, CarolynDaut.com

Honorable Mentions

Into the Fire: The Life, Love, and Revelation of Dragon Parenting by Deborah Ackerman

Living All In: How to Show Up for the Life You Want by Chris Janssen, ChrisJanssenCoaching.com

Reflections: On Time, Culture, and Spirits in America by Dennis McCarty

Visual Impact: Quick, Easy Tools for Thinking in Pictures by Wendi Pillars, SketchMoreThinkMore.com/author

Romance

First Place

Everything in Between by Emma Wilde, EmilyKnowles-Artist.com

Honorable Mention

The Little Tea Room on River Road by Susan Lute, SusanLute.com

Science Fiction

First Place

Cloudthinker by Andrew McGlinchey, Cloudthinker.xyz./

Honorable Mentions

Ash and Sun by Jonny Thompson, JonnyOnThePage.com

THE INSTITUTE Stolen Case Files by T.S. Galindo

Young Adult

First Place

Into the Black by Brian Work, BrianWork.com

Honorable Mentions

Social Vampire by James Schannep, JamesSchannep.com

The Valley of Stars by Yona Katz, YonaKatz.com

The post Announcing the 11th Annual Self-Published E-book Awards Winners appeared first on Writer's Digest.

And while that’s not a typical faith-journey story, for Mattern, a former nun who left the convent after six years, it’s the hard-fought truth of her experience. An experience that began on March 23, 1986—the day her 5-year-old daughter Laura was attacked by a mountain lion at Caspers Wilderness Park in Orange County, Calif.—but lasted for years as Laura underwent countless surgeries and her parents fought extensive legal battles to get the county to admit they could’ve done more to warn park guests about the known danger.

Through all that, Mattern’s faith was tested and eventually provided the basis for the book. Mattern told WD, “When this trauma happened, we just tried to live through it. And then when I lost my faith, it was just such an unusual thing, because most people do come back to God. … I didn’t want to write a book just about the trauma of what Laura had gone through, because there’s a lot of stories that are about that, and I didn’t think that was really anything that unusual or that memorable. But then the whole faith thing, that was kind of unusual. And I thought, Well, I’d like to write about that, because so many people have such a negative attitude about people who are atheists and I wanted to somehow get out the idea that atheists have morals too.”

But not everyone thought writing about losing her faith was a prudent choice. Mattern showed an early draft of the book to a friend who told Mattern it wasn’t a good idea. She remembers her friend saying, “‘I like this, but you just have to take out the part about being an atheist. That’s just not gonna work.’ And I said, ‘Well, [laughs] I know I can’t do that, because that’s my journey. …’ She said, ‘Well, you’re not going to sell very many.’ And I said, ‘That’s the way it goes. I still need to write it.’”

So how did she write about events that happened decades ago? “Piecemeal,” Mattern said, starting in 1992, with the help of journals she kept throughout her daughter’s surgeries and court documents from the extensive trial and appeal. “I don’t think I ever really thought that I would actually publish it, probably until 2014 or something. Then I thought, You know what? I’m just going to do this. And then I just put it all together and published it on Amazon.”

It also helped that by the time Mattern decided to focus on writing the book for publication, years had passed and with it the weight of the events. Instead of writing the book to process the trauma, she was able to approach it with clear eyes. “It was really interesting because by the time I wrote the book, it was almost like it was a movie. To me, the trauma was over with. The trauma was gone because Laura had recovered. She lost the sight in her one eye, and she had some residual problems, of course, but she was just a beautiful girl and doing so well, and we had gotten along so well as a family. It just worked out beautifully. So, it was kind of easy.”

Of course, more went into it, including working with an editor, who was hooked by the power of the first chapter. “I worked with Lisa Lenard-Cook. A friend of mine met her at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference—and she was a wonderful editor. My friend showed her the first chapter of the book. … Lisa called her I think at 11:30 that night and said, ‘So what happens? Does Laura live or die?’ Marsha said, ‘She lives,’ and Lisa said, ‘OK, I just needed to know that.’ So, then after that, she helped me edit the book.” That first chapter is what hooked the WD judges, too, helping Mattern earn grand prize for the 10^th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published E-Book Awards. Her winnings include $5,000, a trip to the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in New York City, and a spot at the agent Pitch Slam.

[See the list of category winners from the 10th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published E-Book Awards.]

It wasn’t just the first chapter that lent itself to natural storytelling though. As the memoir progressed from survival tale to medical thriller to court room drama, Mattern didn’t really have to work to build suspense, tension, or cliffhangers into the story. It was there by nature of the actual events because, as Mattern told WD, “that was our feeling, too, because we didn’t know what was going to happen and what were the residual effects going to be for quite a while.”

Now Mattern, who has always been a creative writer, is working on new projects using other parts of her life as inspiration. Her award-wining second indie-published memoir, Poverty, Chastity, and Disobedience, is available now and chronicles her six years in the convent. “It’s a lot about breaking the rules and not getting caught. I have a very good friend Pam, who—we had a lot of adventures in the convent. They were daring adventures convent style. In the real world, they were pretty simple. … It kind of gives a good insight into what the convent was like in the mid ’60s.” She’s also using that knowledge of how convents work to write a series of murder mysteries set in the convent.

During her time as a nun, Mattern taught creative writing, but it isn’t writing advice she gives when asked what she’d tell WD’s readers. Instead, she tells a story: “I have a birdhouse out in the backyard, a wren house, and it has a very small hole in it. I watched a wren a couple years ago take a stick that was about three times the size of the hole, and [it] tried to get that in the hole. … it would never get it in the hole. It would just drop it. … I wanted to go over there and break the stick in three pieces so the wren would be able to build this stupid nest [laughs] in the birdhouse! And then I thought, No, they’ve been doing this for millions of years. … they know how to do this. … And after a while, they were done. Three weeks later, I heard little chirping in there, and the eggs had hatched and there were little wrens in there. I thought, They just kept going. They just kept trying and trying and they failed so many times, but they kept going and nothing stopped it. I was so impressed by the persistence of that bird [laughs]. I know it’s stupid to get impressed by the persistence of a bird, but when I saw that, I thought, I give up after I try once or twice on something. … And I thought, I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to just keep trying and trying until I finally get it, until it finally works. These birds had a beautiful nest, they had their babies, they hatched, they grew up—it was a success. So that’s what I learned from that wren—to just keep trying and trying no matter what.” 

The post “That’s My Journey” appeared first on Writer's Digest.

[Read Toni Lepeska’s winning essay here.]

“Those stories, I think they resonate with people because we all have something that challenges us and that maybe we think we cannot beat,” she says. “Those stories can be so inspiring to people.” She recounts a particularly impactful story of a woman who had a facial tumor that led to her being permanently disfigured—but it was her optimistic attitude around her diagnosis and treatment that Lepeska carries with her, years after the interview was conducted. “I just want people to be able to grab a hold of something in a story … and be able to go through their situation and overcome it or to survive it with a more positive way for them [to live] their lives.”

She had been writing about others and their challenges for about 20 years before she lost both of her parents. While dealing with the emotional backlash of grief and loss, she set to the task of cleaning out their home, which took several years. “I couldn’t bear to throw away or give away much of anything. Everything had enormous feeling attached to it … even though I’d be crying, it was very healing.”

The deeper she explored these feelings, the more she felt the call to write about them. She says, “I don’t think writers can resist emotional journeys—especially their own … I was compelled to tell my own stories for personal reasons, but I also felt compelled to help other people with the many facets of grief and loss through storytelling. I’m still in the journalism world! But that’s how I transitioned into learning about how to tell a personal story.”

This sent her on a quest to write a memoir that documents that experience. Very early on in the writing process, she says that a literary agent recommended she read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. “I just was riveted by that memoir because of her voice. It’s so conversational! It was almost as though she was sitting on the other side of my coffee cup telling me her story. I kept thinking, Gosh, this sounds so familiar. That’s when it dawned on me that I write long emails to my friends that had a similar tone. I realized that I had been stiff in my telling personal stories [for publication].”

She changed her approach to storytelling and started focusing more on personal essays. A subscriber of Writer’s Digest, she set about entering the personal essay competition—and placed as honorable mention the first two years. “As delighted as I was to be receive an honorable mention, I was wondering, What do I need to do
to place?”

At the same time, she began wondering if she should enact a drastic change to her memoir—replace the past tense with present. “But was I correct? That was my question. I had that doubt that we all—all writers—carry around with them.”

She decided to try it out on an essay she titled “Five Nights in Milford” and enter that into the Writer’s Digest Personal Essay Awards. “I thought that if I could place in the Writer’s Digest contest … it would be an affirmation that I could do it, I could write in the present tense, I could write in scenes. So, winning this essay contest was really a big breakthrough for me.”

This excerpt demonstrates this journey of experimenting with her writing and finding a solid voice:

I am alone, more than 1,500 miles away from home, in an unfinished basement illuminated by a single shop light to save what’s left of my family. My grandfather built this Cape Cod style house in Milford, Conn., 70 years ago. My daddy grew up in it, and my uncle brought his bride to this home. They are all dead now. Everyone who ever lived in this house is dead, but my uncle’s hoard is here. It is as tall as I am and as wide as an entire basement wall. The mound feels like a single, impenetrable, impossible mass. It’s the last of his accumulated possessions. I know it hides gold. Emotional gold. The essence of my family.

It’s all that is left of them.

With hands on my waist and elbows cocked out, I look like I’m in command, but I’m not sure where to begin.

How in the world am I going to do this?

Hoards seem to be a genetic component of my family, but I’ve never had to dismantle one this massive to find the stuff worth keeping. It puzzles me that despite his attachment to stuff, Uncle Karl did not sign a will for the distribution of his property. And my aunt, his wife, who survived him by six years, was not medically fit to make a will the courts would accept.

That means her family is inheriting everything. People I barely know.

I asked one thing of them. Allow me to go through my family’s things.

They gave me five nights.

Lepeska’s winnings include $2,500 in cash, a paid trip to the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference (including a coveted Pitch Slam slot), and more.

So, what’s next for her? “I’m picking that [memoir] back up this year! I want to show people through my story that they can go through grief and loss and lose a sense of safety and security, try to resurrect it and get no results for some of the things they try, and yet find beauty in life again. That there’s hope for restoration. The grief is hard, but it’s also the pathway to a sense of healing.”

And for all aspiring essayists out there, she wants to leave you with this: “Keep learning. Writing can be a gift, but it is definitely a skill. Believe in your ability to be able to learn even when your head is spinning and even when you don’t seem to be getting it. … I could have given up, but I decided there was something else for me to learn and apply. … You just need to find the right resources, find the right teacher, and find what works for you.” 

The post Unearthing the Personal appeared first on Writer's Digest.

If you ask Neal Hutcheson how long it took him to create his book, The Moonshiner Popcorn Sutton, the answer could be two years, or it could be 20 years. It depends on the framing.

By trade, Hutcheson is an Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker whose works are focused on “documenting heritage in transition,” and it was the work he did on one such film—2004’s Mountain Talk about language and culture in Southern Appalachia—that introduced him to the man would ultimately become the subject of several additional documentaries: Popcorn Sutton. Hutcheson filmed and interviewed Sutton extensively about Sutton’s illegal moonshine distilling and distribution business until Sutton’s death in 2009, and it’s from those experiences that this book was created.

“The purpose of this book,” Hutcheson writes in his introduction, “was—in the beginning—to preserve an authentic memory of who he really was, without the hype. That is not to say that the legend attached to his name is not meaningful and interesting in its own right, but it has almost completely eclipsed the actual person I had the privilege to know.”

It’s at least partially due to that hype around Sutton’s larger-than-life persona that Hutcheson chose to independently publish. “I did have some interest from some university publishers in the subject,” Hutcheson told WD. “My conversations with them, however, made me realize that it wasn’t the book that I wanted to make, and it was important for me that this book exists. So, I knew that in order to have the book that I wanted and to have as much control as I wanted over how the book came out, that I would have to do it myself.”

Hutcheson knew from his work on documentary films that creating a documentary-style book wasn’t going to be easy. But that knowledge not only allowed him to make an informed decision about what publishing route to take, it abled him to decide what he wanted to do himself and what he’d need help with. “I had to learn a lot of new skills. I had a vision for the book, and I wanted to do the layout. … I did the design, but I’m not a designer. And on the tail end, I worked with a great designer over in Durham named Dave Wofford. And he gave me guidance on what I had done, like ‘picture larger here, more space for the text’ and things like that. Little things that I never would’ve been able to figure out on my own. … So, I’m proud of how much I figured out on my own, but I definitely needed an experienced designer and bookmaker to get me over the finish line.”

That investment in learning new skills and working with a professional designer more than paid off. The book is a remarkable achievement. It’s a 240-page coffee-table book of stunning photos, the majority of which were made by Hutcheson while he was filming the documentaries. They’re perfectly paired with the story of Popcorn Sutton’s life told via interview excerpts from the documentaries, plus additional research and memories from Hutcheson.

Hutcheson writes in the book that more of his own writing appears in it that he originally intended in part thanks to an early reader, a friend and film professor who asked about the lack of detail about Sutton’s personal life. Hutcheson initially thought, “that was a part that he held back from me and so it wasn’t within my purview.” But on further reflection, “I was doing a disservice to these people who had been a part of his life by not talking about that, and also not giving a fuller sense of who he was, because I didn’t want to hold back on the bad aspects of him, which he did have.” The book is richer, and the life of Popcorn Sutton is more vividly rendered with the inclusion of these details.

Following the interviews are three essays for further reading to put Sutton’s story into context: “In the Pale Moonlight: A Brief History of Moonshine,” “Our Contemporary Ancestors: The Hillbilly in Hindsight,” and “Mountain Talk: Translation & Transcription.” It’s that third essay about Appalachian English that demonstrates the level of care Hutcheson took when transcribing the interviews with Popcorn Sutton.

He writes in part, “Transcribing Popcorn’s speech into the text that appears in this book has greatly diminished the character of his speech … Much of his personality is conveyed in cadence, tone, and emphasis, most of which does not translate well to the page. Furthermore, the way speech is rendered has implications worth considering. ‘Mountain talk’ has long been used (usually incorrectly) in cartoons and literature in ways that depict the speaker as folksy and uneducated, a fact that made me hesitate over the unintended message in a faithful transcription of Popcorn’s speech. Would trying to preserve the character of his voice produce a respectful portrait of a highly intelligent man who not only read the paper every day, but also wrote a book? However, the alternative—converting his speech to ‘Standard English’—does little to respect him either.”

When asked at what point in the process of creating the book did he realize he needed to include an explanation of how he approached the transcription, Hutcheson explained, “… Since I had done documentary work on the same subject, I’m used to having his voice in my ears, and then in translating it to the page—all of a sudden you realize we’re talking about a nonstandard dialect, and you realize that you are, as the person who’s transcribing it, being asked to make a lot of decisions that are much more actually important into how the subject is perceived [by the reader] than you realize until you get to that moment of transcription …”

The time, care, and intention put into writing, designing, and transcribing the book won Hutcheson the Grand Prize in the 30^th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards, along with a National Indie Excellence Award and an Outstanding Book—Independent Spirit Award from the IPPYs (Independent Publishers Book Awards); it was also a finalist for the Next Generation Book Award.

For Hutcheson, these awards not only serve as a way to continue marketing the book post-publication, but they also confirm his dedication to all aspects of the quality of the book was worth it. “The biggest thing for me personally,” he says, “is the kind of affirmation that these awards provide and encouragement for doing these kinds of projects. Not just a reward for doing them, but it kind of keeps me going to the next project to realize, like, Yeah, people will look at this. You’ll find your audience and it takes work and you have to be all-in to it, but the universe will respond if you put your heart into it.”

Finding that audience is part of what made the whole independent publishing process worthwhile: “I would definitely underscore that it’s a lot of work and be prepared for that. … I would say … my weak area is self-promotion and that has to be a part of it too. I mean, that’s a big part of the equation. Once you’re done with the book, in a way, you’re just starting. But on the other hand, if I get your interest today and you’re asking me questions and I get to talk about my experience with the book, or I get to present it in a bookstore or in a group, that’s just been so rewarding.” 

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