A Note from the Judge
September 1999

This month marks eight Golden Quills and something over two hundred applications, and I have been asked often enough what separates the winners from the rest that I thought I would try to say.

It is not polish. Several of the sites below were built by people who had never written a line of HTML before this year, and it shows, and it does not matter. It is not length, either. What every one of them has in common is that the writer chose a small, true subject and stayed with it. A turtle who is always late. Forty onions. A maple tree on a corner. The writers I turn down, on the other hand, very often want to write about Love, Life and the Universe, capitals theirs, and they give me all three in the first stanza and leave nothing for the second.

The other thing, I am sorry to say, is the page itself. I cannot count the good paragraphs I have squinted at through a tiled background of roses, or lost to a tinkling tune that began the moment the page opened and would not stop. Please: write your best and then get out of its way. Plain words on a plain page have outlasted every other kind of publishing so far.

And to those of you who wrote back after a "no" to tell me you had fixed the colors, cut the music and finished the third story, and would I look again: I did, and two of you are on this page. That pleases me more than I can easily say.

— S. McC.

September 1999
Planet Zorbo: A Serial Story, by Greg Tannenbaum
I do not read science fiction, and I read all three chapters in one sitting and was annoyed to reach the end. Mr. Tannenbaum is writing an old pulp serial on purpose, "with the corn left in," and the trick of it is that he never once winks at you: the cliffhangers are played absolutely straight, and so they work. Commander Rex Starling is a splendid fool. I confess that a character named Professor Quill did not hurt his chances. He lost most of his chapters when an old host closed his account, and he is retyping them one a week. Go and encourage him.

August 1999
The Sonnet Workshop, by Leonard Ashby
A professor emeritus puts his spring seminar online, and anyone may pull up a chair. He explains the Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms more clearly than any textbook I used in thirty-four years, walks slowly through Sonnet 18, and then, bravely, gives us four sonnets of his own. He says he will try not to lecture and will fail. He fails charmingly. There is homework. Do it.

July 1999
Bedtime Stories from Grandpa Lou, by Lou Burks, typed by his daughter Angela
Six stories made up at bedtime over eleven years, finally written down before they could be lost. Read "Tobias the Turtle Is Late Again" aloud and you will hear what I heard: the rhythm of someone who has told it a hundred times to a sleepy audience and knows exactly where the pauses go. He says they end quiet on purpose. They do. That is harder than it looks.

June 1999
The Meade Family Movie Guide, by Larry Meade
Movie reviews are not usually my territory, but these are models of plain, useful prose. Mr. Meade answers the one question parents actually ask, can the children see it, and then tells you honestly whether he enjoyed it himself, which is not always the same answer. His review of October Sky sent me to the video store, and I had not rented a movie since Driving Miss Daisy.

May 1999
Salt Marsh Sketches, essays by a schoolteacher on the Carolina coast
Twelve short essays on tides, herons and a crab trap that would not stay baited. The author has since taken the site down; she tells me she is turning the essays into a book, which is the best reason I know for a site to disappear. No link, then, but it belongs on this roll.

April 1999
Lines Written in a Kitchen, by Marcel Dufresne
A retired chef writes a paragraph for each thing in his kitchen: butter, bread, salt, onions, stock. They are short, and not one word is wasted. The piece about salt, and the man who tasted over his shoulder for thirty-one years, is as fine a small elegy as I have read anywhere, in print or out of it.

March 1999
Poems from the Attic, by Margaret A.
A retired librarian's poems, written for years on the backs of overdue notices and kept in a shoebox. They are plain and short, as she says, and they look closely. "Kitchen Window" is about what stays when everything else in the yard has changed, and I have thought about it every morning since, standing at my own sink.

February 1999
The first Golden Quill went to a fifteen-year-old's online journal
She has since taken the journal offline and asked me not to list its name, and I have honored that. I will only say that she wrote about her grandmother's hands better than most published poets I know, and that I hope she keeps writing, somewhere.