Hot Line for Writers

In an effort to “create and maintain” a broad “sense of community” among U.S. writers of fiction and poetry, Poets & Writers Inc. has launched a toll-free literary hot line for Californians. Funded by a “generous” grant from the Los Angeles-based Lannan Foundation, the project is the first of a proposed nationwide outreach program for poets and fiction writers.

By calling 1-800-666-2268 between the hours of 8 a.m. and noon, Pacific time, Californians can find out the names, addresses and, if available, telephone numbers of more than 6,700 poets and fiction writers currently publishing in the United States. Staff members from the Poets and Writers’ information centers also will answer questions about publishing, copyright, literary agents, legal matters, health insurance, grants and awards, workshops, seminars and domestic and foreign writers’ colonies. The service is available both to writers and to people interested in writing.

Brian Lemna, a spokesman for Poets & Writers, said his organization picked California as its first target for the telephone project for two reasons.

“One,” said Lemna, “we wanted to expand our national presence. Second, there was a discrepancy in California between the number of artists and writers living there and where it ranks in terms of state funding for the arts.” California, said Lemna, is second only to New York in the number of artists and writers who reside within the state. But it ranks at least 20th in state funding.

Poets and fiction writers are solitary workers, contends Poets & Writers Inc., so the organization acts as a resource to provide “community, communication and professional information.” Poets & Writers also serves as a data source for schools and libraries. Its bi-monthly publication, Poets & Writers Magazine, has more than 13,000 subscribers.

Writers are also a transient lot, so Poets & Writers tries to keep tabs on where they are hanging their word processors or yellow pads. “We really do try to keep track of them,” Lemna said. “I don’t think there’s anyone else doing what we do.” Some writers, preferring to stick to “the alienation principle,” eschew the attention, Lemna said. “But then they find out we do grants and awards, so they always come back.”

The service offers a kind of life-link for some writers, Lemna said. “Like this woman in Alabama who calls me every once in a while. She sent a manuscript to a literary agent, and when she doesn’t hear for a while, she goes crazy. She says no one where she lives understands. She doesn’t know any other writers.”

TO BORROW A LINE FROM MR. CLEMENS, reports of the demise of The Fessenden Review are greatly exaggerated. Although “always” on the brink of financial disaster, in the words of its publisher, Lorenzo Milam, “the noisiest book review in the known world” has not yet breathed its last cranky gasp.

By phone from San Diego, Milam said he had guaranteed the review’s editor, Douglas Cruickshank, that, thanks largely to the wonders of credit card economics, the journal would make it through at least one more edition. “We call it the Visa foundation,” Milam explained.

That’s a blessing for the 1,500 subscribers and 3,500 newsstand readers who have come to rely on its cantankerous analysis of contemporary literature. To wit: the opening sentence of a review (Vol. 13) of a book by Suzy Menkes called “The Windsor Style” (Salem House): “We figure that if you want to convert someone to Marxism, you sure as hell don’t hand out ‘Das Kapital’ but instead, ‘The Windsor Style.’ ” Milam’s own favorite was the review of the new edition of “The Stranger,” which began, “It makes no difference.”

The tone, said Milam, is a reaction to the “soppy, inbred” quality of most book reviews. (Truth to be told, Milam did exempt the Los Angeles Times, but that may have been because he wanted to see his name in the paper.)

“What we are doing is going back to the tradition of H. L. Mencken,” Milam said. “When the Saturday Review of Literature began, it was very grouchy, very snotty. We are trying to reinstitute that.”

The review, published by the Reginald A. Fessenden Educational Fund, takes its name from radio pioneer Reginal Aubrey Fessenden who in 1906 made the first scheduled radio broadcast from his experimental transmitting station at Brant Rock, Mass. Some years later he traveled to the Malay Peninsula to search for the Tree of Life. Milam, a former radio station manager, cashed in on the early days of cable TV “when you could put in an application to the FCC and own a station.” He filed for Channel 48 in San Jose, and “a group came along and bought us out.” On that basis, the Fessenden Review has been funded for the last four years.

Milam said he is in negotiations with at least one foundation that may provide grant money to allow the irreverent publication to continue. Meanwhile, the review vows to preserve its arch point of view, it keeps hoping for books to laud, Milam said.

“There are 60,000 new titles coming out every year,” Milam said. “You know that in that mass there are bound to be some that are good.”

AWARDS: Martha Hollander has won the 1989 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets for her manuscript of poems, “The Game of Statues,” to be published by Atlantic Monthly Press. Richard Howard has been chosen as the academy’s 55th recipient of the fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement.

Herschel B. Chipp, a professor of art at the University of California and author of “Picasso’s Guernica,” has won the Gold Medal for nonfiction, presented in the 58th annual Commonwealth Club of California book awards competition. Betty Levin, author of “The Trouble With Gramary” (Greenwillow Books), is the winner of the fourth Judy Lopez Memorial Children’s Book Award, sponsored by the Women’s National Book Assn.

The USC Library’s Lawrence Lipton Prize in Literature has been awarded to Leslie Scalapino for her collection of poems, “Way,” published by North Point Press.