Backstage Poet Wins Finalist in a Poetry Contest
Frontier Poetry named me a FINALIST in their (Not) in Love Tanka Challenge!!!
See there’s my name! Smack in the middle of the list of Finalists!
Frontier is an excellent poetry journal and I am honored to have earned a mention here. From their website:
But you know what?
When I first saw “Faith Kearns” there I was, successively,
shocked
elated
devastated
confused
vaguely hopeful
They couldn’t mean me.
My polite rejection letter came back in June and stated specifically:
So what gives?
Doubt, Imposter Syndrome, Self-Sabotage
Surely some other Faith Kearns out there submitted to the exact same poetry contest and fared better than I.
I know for sure of one other person with my name. She’s a scientist, hosts a podcast, and published a book about science communications (which I’m actually really interested in reading). Maybe she took up poetry?
Was I hacked? Did AI spit out my name for someone else’s pen name? Did I black out and make several submissions? (This one I could easily check and quickly ruled out.)
I also complicated things by putting a silly pen name in my profile but using Faith Kearns in my cover letter and bio. The contest was run blind so I wasn’t even sure which name they’d see or when in the process they’d see, let alone which name they’d use when announcing winners and finalists. Self-sabotage much?
Then I started rationalizing.
Is this just imposter syndrome? Would a more confident version of myself just take the win? Share and celebrate and keep moving without this mental/emotional drama.
Even if it wasn’t my submission, it was still ostensibly my name. What’s a little stolen valor in the morally bankrupt hellscape that is the internet?? Who would I really be hurting?
Given that I’m “trying to do this all in good faith,” I obviously wasn’t going to intentionally take credit for something I wasn’t 100% sure was my submission.
Perhaps the rejection message simply meant “finalist” in the sense of, “just so you know we’re no longer considering you for the prize/ publication” and not necessarily that I was no longer being considered for the category or title, “Finalist.”
I chose, then, to be brave and vulnerable. I fired off a (probably neurotic (but they’re a poetry magazine so I figured they must’ve seen worse)) message to Frontier for clarification.
Then, I shared the page and my confusion with a few close friends. They responded compassionately with measured enthusiasm and reminded me that my name isn’t that common. They were pretty sure it was me but understood that I refused to celebrate until I got confirmation directly from the magazine.
I hope everyone who reads this has friends like mine who love you and see you clearer than you see yourself
This is gonna sound crazy but I often forget that I’m a writer. Helpful then, isn’t it, to have friends who can remind you who the eff you are?
Actually, compiling everything to put on my Poet page here helped too. You can check out the specifics of all my fancy accomplishments there but for context and whatnot, I’ll include a bit here.
My sweet friends reminded me that: as a kiddo, I regularly won essay and short story contests.
When my second grade teacher teased and asked if I was “writing the great American novel” in the computer lab, I thought with all my 7-year-old bravado, “well, what if I am?”
Between 2013-2015, I won a couple poetry awards and received Highest Honors for the thirty page book of poetry I wrote for my creative writing thesis. UCLA even wrote this article about me. I gave a reading at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The Chair of the theater department at my community college honored me by organizing a reading for me in our black box theater.
Around 2018 I started writing dramatic monologues to bring into an acting class. I had moved out of LA proper and found it difficult to meet up with scene partners, so I turned to a lot of solo work to bring into class.
More friends rallied around me and we ended up filming one of those dramatic monologues (also on the Poet page) in the beloved Complex black box theater on Santa Monica Blvd. A few months later I performed a selection of new and older (UCLA-lauded) poems during an independent night of one-acts we put together.
It was the first time in a while I really worked my poems into something presentable. They were received well. After the show, one kind, enthusiastic, actor friend asked, “What are you going to do with your poems?”
Ah the creative curse. Just when you think you’ve accomplished something, the first thing they ask you is, “what’s next?”
1/7 ain’t bad at all
Flash forward to December 2023. Writing took a backseat while I had a few personal crises and career hopped and eventually decided to go back to school.
I had survived my first quarter of grad school. The wild hopes and expectations I had for my Acting MFA experience were settling into craggy reality like the coarse particulates of human ash. Home in California for a long winter break, I had some time to write again.
Poets & Writers became my go-to search engine for magazines accepting submissions. While I sent out a few general submissions, I found I preferred the contests some of these magazines run where they give you a prompt and short deadline. Rattle has quite a few including their ekphrastic challenge and prompt lines.
This helped me to be less precious about my work. I could release what Sam Laura Brown calls my “perfectionism handbrake” and engage more playfully with a prompt, work at it for a set amount of time, and submit the work without obsessing over every syllable into eternity as I and many poets are wont to do.
I made seven submissions to poetry contests and publications between New Years Eve 2023 and March 2024, including Frontier Poetry’s (Not) In Love Tanka Challenge.
Sure, seven submissions in three months doesn’t sound like a lot– but it’s a lot more than the ZERO submissions I made in the several years prior. Even while I was performing my poetry I hadn’t kept a consistent habit of submitting for actual publication.
And even though they didn’t publish my poems, I’m proud to have my name published under the Finalist banner!
Seven submissions isn’t many at all, but receiving some recognition or validation for 1 submission out of 7 is not a bad stat. I’m rather proud of it actually. It’s a nice place to start and actually kind of bums me out that I didn’t submit again after March.
Stolent valor? What happened to good faith?!?!
You’re right. I should catch you up.
Fantastic Editor in Chief at Frontier Poetry, Michaela Emerson replied rather quickly to my bizarre inquiry about the Faith Kearns on that Finalist list.
It’s for sure me!
I’ve also learned my lesson about silly pen names. We’re going to keep things consistently under Faith Kearns from now on!
Bonus: I’ve decided to share the four tankas I submitted online! Here’s the links to see them on YouTube:
This one is about reproductive rights.
This one is about when the guy you’re talking to wants to send you something.
That means two more tankas are in the barrel from the same Finalist placing submission so be sure to subscribe! I plan to share more poetry videos and actor content in the future so there’s lots to look forward to.
I’m also going to be sharing part two of this blog on Saturday, August 31. In that post I’ll go how I wrote these Finalist tankas while onstage rehearsing and performing a mainstage show for my MFA, my writing process as I went about responding to the prompt, and a little more about how I’ve negotiated being a multi passionate writer and actor.