To accompany our May/June 2012 issue's feature "Winners on Winning," part of our special section on writing contests, we're posting a selection of mini-interviews with prize recipients on the benefits of their awards and what they learned from winning. The final author in our series is New York City fiction writer Sarah Falkner, who received the Starcherone Books Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2010 for her debut novel, Animal Sanctuary.

How did winning the Prize for Innovative Fiction change your career?
Winning the prize changed my life enormously in a variety of ways—I was so surprised and elated after hearing the news that I rode my bicycle very joyously and recklessly through a rainy night in Brooklyn. The prize money was extremely helpful to me as a self-employed person of modest means and frequently-tenuous existence, but the money was the least of the advantages I have enjoyed from winning the prize. I am a writer who for various reasons did not pursue an MFA in creative writing, although I value and recognize many reasons why a person might do so, and am not myself wholly an outsider: I do possess a BFA in painting. While I might, outside of an MFA program, still be able to reach some of the same goals an MFA candidate strives for—sustained focus and purpose; devotion to craft and technique; submission to peer and mentor analysis, guidance, and feedback—there is no easy substitute for the public credential of having completed a degree program. After all, an MFA is justifiably and understandably a clear demonstration of a writer's quality and seriousness. The juried evaluation and approval process that winning a prize suggests confers some sort of quantifiable credential, a common currency that peers and the public can measure and accept. After winning the Starcherone Prize, I applied for the first time to the MacDowell Colony, and was given a fellowship; I highly doubt that without the credential of the prize I would have been accepted.

Did the award have an effect on any decisions you made as a writer, on the path you chose to take in life or in your work?
Winning the prize encouraged me greatly to take myself more seriously as a writer, to feel entitled to publicly identify as a writer, and to allow my writing even more time in my life. Artistically, I have navigated many storms of cognitive dissonance during my development—my origins are of low socioeconomic status, but thanks to my mother and the wonderful thing that is the public library, I was exposed early to arts and letters that were foreign to our friends and neighbors. That both saved and ruined me. Since first studying visual art in college alongside people of greater privilege and means than I, then working for a time in the palace of inequity that is the New York City art world, I have frequently found myself at odds with myself—and others—about the necessity, wisdom, and appropriateness of identifying myself as an artist and prioritizing my artistic practice over more "practical" activities like earning a living or working for social justice, or other things that would more directly and immediately benefit my family, friends, and all sentient beings. Sometimes it's like I have an internalized hardline Maoist who tells me I shouldn't spend time alone at my computer expressing my most personal feelings in selfish bourgeois decadence when instead I could be out contributing to the collective good. Lately, the inner Maoist seems appeased by the fact that The People, or at least Some People, value my writing enough to have given it a prize and a readership.

What advice do you have for writers looking to contests as a way to get their work into the world?
I don't feel qualified to speak to the majority of writers or contests out there—but for writers working in experimental, interdisciplinary, and other non-mainstream modes, and less-common forms such as novellas and chapbooks, all of which are published by only a fraction of all the presses in existence, I can attest to the fact that there are a number of very high quality small independent publishers and literary magazines who seem to use the contest model very effectively to find emerging writers. Starcherone Books, Fiction Collective 2, Dzanc Books, Fence Books, and DIAGRAM are just a few who accept unsolicited submissions [via a competition model] during a specific reading period each year. Often an esteemed writer not published by or affiliated with the press is chosen to judge the winner from a group of finalists. My only advice for writers is the obvious and logical: Read a lot, apply to contests for presses that publish lots of books you think are both generally exemplary and also somehow simpatico with your own projects, and especially apply to contests judged by writers whose books you greatly admire and with whom you feel a kinship or resonance.

Below is the video trailer for Falkner's Animal Sanctuary.

Write an essay about a small part of the country or the world with which you are intimately familiar. Focus first on the landscape, wildlife, and architecture: What flora and fauna are native to the area? What do the houses and centers of town look like? Then introduce the people: What do they look like? What do they do for a living? Incorporate dialogue into this section, including words, phrases, and colloquialisms that are specific to the area. Using as much detail as possible, bring the place and its language to life.

The twenty-fourth annual Lambda Literary Awards for LGBT literature, also known as the Lammys, were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City, where authors rubbed elbows with luminaries in other arts, including actress Olympia Dukakis, Broadway performer Anthony Rapp, and drag legend Charles Busch.

Dukakis and National Organization for Women founder Eleanor Pam presented Lambda's Pioneer Awards for lifetime achievement to novelist Armistead Maupin, author of the San Francisco–based Tales of the City series, and feminist writer Kate Millett. Fiction writers Stacy D'Erasmo and Brian Leung won Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prizes.

The Lammy for gay poetry award went to A Fast Life, the collected poems of the late Tim Dlugos (1950–1990), edited by David Trinidad and published by Nightboat Books. The prize for lesbian poetry went to Leah Lakshmi Piepza-Samarasinha for Love Cake (TSAR Publications).

In lesbian fiction, Farzana Doctor won the Lammy for her novel Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn Press). Colm Tóibín won in gay fiction for his story collection The Empty Family (Scribner). The award in bisexual fiction went to Barbara Browning for her novel, The Correspondence Artist (Two Dollar Radio). Debut fiction writers Rahul Mehta and Laurie Weeks were also honored, Mehta for his story collection, Quarantine (Harper Perennial), and Weeks for her novel, Zipper Mouth (Feminist Press).

In lesbian memoir, Jeanne Córdova won for When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love & Revolution (Spinsters Ink). Glen Retief won for gay memoir with The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood (St. Martin's Press). Justin Vivian Bond won the transgender nonfiction prize for Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels (Feminist Press).

For the list of winners in all categories, including erotica, young adult literature, and mystery, visit the Lambda Literary Foundation website.

In the video below, poetry awardee Piepza-Samarasinha performs a poem from her winning collection at a finalists reading held in April.

Last week the New Yorker’s fiction department serial tweeted Jennifer Egan’s story “Black Box,” which appears in the magazine’s science fiction issue. Egan structured her story in prose bursts of 140 characters or fewer—the limit for a single tweet. Challenge yourself to write a story that could appear in small installments by shortening the length of the story’s paragraphs to one or two sentences. Try to advance the story with each terse paragraph.

Write a poem in which you give the reader directions about how to assemble an object or an emotional experience. Think of the various sensory stimuli your directions provide and experiment with the order of the lines. For inspiration, read Matthea Harvey’s poem “Setting the Table.” 

Last week the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced James Salter as the winner of its twenty-fifth annual PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. The author, whose collection Dusk and Other Stories (North Point Press, 1988) won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, will receive the five-thousand-dollar prize named in honor of story writer Bernard Malamud on December 7.

Salter is also the author of the story collection Last Night (Knopf, 2005), as well as novels such as A Sport and a Pastime (Doubleday, 1967), Light Years (Random House, 1975), and The Hunters (Harper, 1956). Also recognizing his contribution to short story form, he was awarded the 2010 Rea Award last summer.

Below is a brief digest of online access points to the literature and life of the author PEN/Malamud juror Alan Cheuse said "has shown us how to work with fire, flame, the laser, all the forces of life at the service of creating sentences that spark and make stories burn."

In a 1993 Paris Review interview (with Edward Hirsch), Salter said, "I've never had a story in The New Yorker; everything has been rejected." (Salter's story "Last Night" is available online in the November 18, 2002, issue of the New Yorker.) He also discusses practice (in solitude, in longhand), revision ("Normally I just go a sentence at a time"), and his own short fiction influences (Babel, Chekhov).

The Paris Review published a number of Salter stories, including "Am Strande von Tanger" (Fall 1968). Last year the journal awarded Salter the Hadada Prize, and celebrated the author with a month of coverage on the Paris Review Daily blog. (Online literary review fwriction paid similar tribute.)

The video below, the first in a series of four, Salter reads "Palm Court" from Last Night. The reading took place at an event held by the literary journal Narrative.

In Bird by Bird (Pantheon, 1994), Anne Lamott's classic instructional treatise on writing and life, the author says: "Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't—and, in fact, you're not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing." Keeping this in mind, write the beginnings of an essay whose direction and ending you don't yet know. Start small, focusing closely on a single place, person, or incident, without thinking ahead. Then keep going: Allow the writing to tell the story, and see what develops. 

The sixth literary pairing in the biennial Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative was announced earlier this month. The program, launched a decade ago, offers emerging artists the opportunity to spend a year under the tutelage of established professionals in their respective fields.

The 2012–2013 literature mentor, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, selected as her protégé thirty-seven-year-old British writer Naomi Alderman. The author of three novels—Disobedience (Viking, 2006), which won the Orange Award for New Writers, The Lessons (Viking, 2010), and The Liar's Gospel, forthcoming from Viking in August—Alderman is also a game designer (her latest, Zombies, Run!, is available as an iPhone app).

"The future is a subject of interest for both Margaret Atwood and me," Alderman says in an interview on the Rolex Arts Initiative website. "I have another life outside literary novels: I write computer games. I think games are going to be an important art form in the next hundred years. They’re only just beginning to approach what they'll be. Margaret’s work is grounded in the present, but also the same desire to look forward."

Atwood's thirteen novels include the dystopian classic The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the speculative work Oryx and Crake (2003), the Booker Prize–winning The Blind Assassin (2000), and, most recently, The Year of the Flood (2009). She is also the author of seven short story collections, as well as volumes of poetry and nonfiction and books for children.

In addition to time spent with her mentor in both London and Atwood's home city of Toronto, Alderman will receive twenty-five thousand dollars to subsidize her work during the mentorship year, followed by an additional twenty-five thousand after the program ends. Atwood, for her service as a mentor, receives an honorarium of fifty thousand dollars.

The finalists for this year's mentorship award, all interviewed by Atwood as part of the months-long protégé selection process, were Malaysian novelist Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening Is the Whole Day (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008); American author Claire Vaye Watkins, whose debut short story collection, Brattleborn, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in August; and South African writer Mary Watson, who won the Caine Prize for short fiction in 2006.

Past mentees include Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet Tracy K. Smith; Togolese novelist and Prix Goncourt finalist Edem Awumey; and Australian novelist Julia Leigh, who recently made her debut in the medium of film as writer and director of Sleeping Beauty (2011).