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CATHY WURZER: The time right now is 10:36. Well, every day, words are written down in many, many forms. Words, filling journals, poems springing to life and short stories are created. We are fortunate in this area for the depth of the writers who call the Midwest home.

The voices of the region are celebrated each year through the Minnesota Voices Project competition. Five new books published this month mark the 10th anniversary of this annual contest. And to celebrate, Minneapolis-based New Rivers Press is hosting a reading, book signing and reception tomorrow at the Landmark Center in Saint Paul.

Joining me in the studio this morning to talk about the MVP are Catherine Meyer, managing editor of the New Rivers Press and two Minnesota Voices Project authors, Sharon Oard Warner, who wrote Learning to Dance and Mark Vinz, who wrote The Weird Kid. Did I get everyone's name right?

ALL: Yes.

CATHY WURZER: All right, very good. Good morning. Catherine, let's start with you first. The Minnesota Voices Project celebrates new and emerging writers throughout the region.

CATHERINE MEYER: That's correct.

CATHY WURZER: So can you give us a sense of the depth of the talent that we have here in this region?

CATHERINE MEYER: It's immense. Every year, we get submissions from all over the upper Midwest, from everything ranging from professional writers, people who are business writers, people who are college professors to people who are lawyers and doctors who simply write on the weekends. And it's a very diverse, huge pool of talent.

CATHY WURZER: Is there any theme that connects Midwest writers, or is there something special about Midwest writers?

CATHERINE MEYER: I really don't think so. We're constantly asked this question, and I really don't think so. A lot of times when we're putting in proposals for new projects, that's a common question.

And I think the answer is no. And I think that's wonderful in itself. We really don't have one theme that we see. We see a multitude of themes.

CATHY WURZER: What is it, though, about this region that seems to breed an awful lot of writers?

CATHERINE MEYER: I've heard every theory from cold long winters where people bundle up and read more, and therefore more likely to write to just having, along the lines, a lot of people inspiring a lot of other people. And I think, again, there are probably a thousand theories out there on why we have so many writers. But certainly, there are a lot of presses. There's a lot of support for the arts in general.

Thus, we have a lot of support for the presses. And I think if you have strong presses and strong organizations like the Loft, good writing programs, you're going to have a lot of support for writers. And so writers tend to come to communities like this.

CATHY WURZER: Sharon, let's go to you. What has the competition done for you and your work?

SHARON OARD WARNER: Well, it's certainly given me a great deal more recognition than I had before. And I've just enjoyed getting to know the people at New Rivers. They've been wonderful. They've done a wonderful job with my work. They've taken a lot of care in the cover art, and the editing process and much more than I think I would have gotten with some of the New York presses.

CATHY WURZER: What was your first feeling like when you realized that you won the competition?

SHARON OARD WARNER: Well, Bill Truesdale called me at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night. And I thought it was somebody calling to ask me to give him a ride again to Des Moines and so I was really taken off guard. I expected this one person and somebody suddenly said, you won this competition.

And I just sat there and he said, do you remember entering this competition? And I said, oh, yes, yes, yes. I didn't want to seem, but I was stunned. I really was stunned. So then I called several of my friends who were by that time in bed and woke them up.

CATHY WURZER: And screamed, guess what? Guess what?

SHARON OARD WARNER: Yes.

CATHY WURZER: Mark, what do you think the challenges are or what are the challenges to a new or emerging writer?

MARK VINZ: Well, I think the main challenge is getting published, getting that kind of recognition, which is validation. Why you do it is, as one of my third graders once said when I worked on writers in the schools, if you painted a picture, you wouldn't hang it in the closet. And I think there's an analogy there. Writers want to have their work in print and distribute it.

And one nice thing about New Rivers and about non-commercial presses is that they will keep-- they will publish work according to its merits as literature, not according to what sells or doesn't sell. New Rivers is not dominated. There's a lot of the big New York houses are by marketing.

And they will keep it in print. You will see New Rivers books like my book, which was published in '83, is still in print, still available. Now, if that were a New York house, that would have been probably pulped within six months after its issue.

SHARON OARD WARNER: Definitely.

MARK VINZ: Yeah. So there are a couple of other things that independent, non-commercial publishing does for writers to offer them a special kind of support.

CATHY WURZER: And so it seems to me then that the big challenge to getting published is trying to get beyond. This seems like a roadblock here, especially with the big publishing places then?

MARK VINZ: It is. And increasingly, the big publishing places, you cannot send manuscripts. You have to go through an agent.

And again, they're looking at marketability. The marketing people call the shots. The small press, independent press, whatever you want to call it, non-commercial press in this country, especially with fiction, and poetry and especially with poetry, are the ones committed to publishing the work because they believe in the work completely aside from any questions of marketability.

CATHY WURZER: Speaking of work, last night, I got to read your book, The Weird Kid, and I would really appreciate it if you could share a little bit of that work with us.

MARK VINZ: These are prose poems, and nobody quite knows what a prose poem is. And that's the joy of writing them, because you can invent them as you go along. Some of them are like poems, some of them are like stories.

By the way, this book will be a part of a New Rivers Press book, which will be published next month called Late Night Calls. It's a kind of collected prose poem. So this is, again, something that small press can do. This whole manuscript will be a part of a larger manuscript.

This is called "Letters from Old Friends." Sometimes they arrive like suitors with tattered flowers, polite and threadbare, almost afraid to speak. The weather has been good, hasn't it? There's much to be done.

After a while, they get up to leave, thankful to be through with it, backing toward the door and bowing with many kind wishes. Perhaps they'll be back, but not for a long time. Sometimes they arrive like messengers with trumpets, elegant in there tight gold suits, a little flash of something not quite seen, a promise that the real emissary will arrive one day. Soon, they insist, very soon.

Sometimes they're like tired old widows and black, stocky duennas whose faces are hidden by their shadowy veils. They sit in the most uncomfortable chairs, wringing their hands, their tiny jade rosaries. Then just when you think they will disappear completely, they move closer, stretching out to pat your arm. You settle back in your chair and the fireplace warms your face, filling all the damp spaces with waves of yellow light.

CATHY WURZER: Very nice.

MARK VINZ: Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: Catherine, what criteria do you use in terms of which books that you pick for publishing?

CATHERINE MEYER: Well, I should explain the process a little bit. Every year, a panel of five judges read all of the entries to the Minnesota Voices Project competition and so that these five judges who change every year on any given year will have a different set of criteria. And usually, the judging sessions are marked by heated debates and often have come close to blows. And we really encourage this lengthy debate.

People pull for manuscripts that they feel are important. But one of the most important criteria that we always ask is, does this person have the opportunity to get published elsewhere? And if there are two manuscripts that are equal in everyone's mind, but one person, just for whatever reason, the judges feel, has little or no opportunity to be published elsewhere, that person is probably going to be selected.

We feel it's really important to get those people into print. And that's something that a commercial publication, like Mark said, which is really tied into marketing, probably they won't take the chances. And we're in a really unique position to be able to take chances and we like to do that.

CATHY WURZER: Any criteria to decide what stories to pass by? Or does that just go all along the same vein?

CATHERINE MEYER: Same vein. Critical decisions. So we're always-- and we're looking at something that works as a manuscript.

CATHY WURZER: Sharon, I'd like to close the segment, if I would. Please, if you would like to read one of your works.

SHARON OARD WARNER: This is an excerpt from a story called Working Puzzles. In March of 1959, while I was in first grade and concentrating on other things, my parents separated. Divorce was not so common then. I had never heard of it before it happened to me.

Little girls from other classes cornered me in the bathroom and asked frightening questions. How would we eat? Where would we live? I had visions of a tornado touching down on the roof of our house, scattering us and our possessions to the four winds.

Actually, the dispersal was a good deal more orderly. Mother, my four-year-old brother Sonny and I moved to the other side of Dallas, a big jump even then. Mother must have answered an ad in the paper because we took up living with two strangers, a woman Meda and her grown daughter. Their house was in the country just off the intersection of two farm roads that seemed to go there and then on to nowhere.

A mimosa tree sprawled across the front yard. And I loved to lie under it and stare up through the twisted branches. When we moved to Meda's, the tree was heavy with long curling pods.

Our first days there, I distracted myself by gathering the pods in the skirt of my dress. I would sit on the porch and split them open, dividing the flat green peas, some for Meda's daughter Linda, some for Sonny, some for the dogs. I chewed a few gritty seeds myself and was tormented afterwards by the thought of seedlings attaching themselves to my stomach and winding their blind way up my throat.

Sonny and I stayed outdoors as much as possible. Meda's house was dark and silent. No matter what the day was like outside, inside it was always the same.

The blinds were closed and light bulbs burned. In the den and dining room, dark paneling absorbed the available light. The house had that sour, closed up smell children hate.

Meda boarded and bred dogs for a living. She boarded any sort of dog, but she bred Pekingese. Cages were stashed around the house and along the walls of the garage. Chicken-wire cages, wooden cages, cages with doors and tiny latches, and gathering dust in the corner of the dining room a wrought-iron bird cage, birdless.

A kennel stretched down the middle of the backyard, a long concrete rectangle that housed up to 20 dogs. Each dog had a tiny indoor area just big enough to lie down in and a small fenced patio outdoors for pacing. Like most little girls, I was drawn to small spaces and wanted to convert one of the pens into a playhouse. When I got up the nerve to ask, my mother snorted and Meda laughed out loud. The answer, I understood, was no.

Like my brother and me, the dogs preferred the outdoors. Some stood for hours on their little patios, snouts pressed to the chain link fence, eyes roaming the fields to the strip of road hunting that familiar car. Loyal, they never thought to hold a grudge. When their owners returned, they became happy circus dogs, barking, twirling, leaping into the air.

As soon as they'd run through their tricks, though, they expected to be released. And if Meda weren't quick about it, they became desperate and hurled themselves against the fence. Once out of the cage, they resumed their circus antics and ran in dizzy circles around the pair of legs that had come to retrieve them. I often wondered whether they remembered that these were the same legs that had brought them to Meda's in the first place.

CATHY WURZER: You paint wonderful word pictures.

SHARON OARD WARNER: Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: I have to ask you a question, both of you. As I've tried writing in my past and it never really succeeded. So where do you find your inner voice? How do you tap into that? We'll start with Sharon first.

SHARON OARD WARNER: Well, one of the things I try to tell my students is just to let go, to have the experience of really dreaming while you're awake. Because you don't have that much control of your dreams and you sometimes do surprising things.

CATHY WURZER: Mark.

MARK VINZ: Well, I think that voice can come from a lot of places. The book, The Weird Kid, has a lot to do with dreams. But other books that I've written have to do with domestic life, or observations, or traveling or people in my family.

And again, I tell my students, be open to all possibilities. I think we get in trouble if we think writing has to be one thing or another or it has to use a certain kind of language. Writers are constantly trying to push back those barriers.

CATHY WURZER: So there's still hope then?

MARK VINZ: Oh, yeah, there's always hope. Always hope.

[LAUGHS]