Henderson Still Pushing Cart Full Of Fine Writing

This year abounds with anniversaries for the editor and writer Bill Henderson.

It was 40 years ago that his idea was first hatched to create a collection of the best writing published by small presses. Five years later, the idea became a reality with the release of “The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.” The most recent edition of the annual collection is the 35th anniversary one. And then there is the anniversary of his birth—Mr. Henderson will turn 70 this Sunday, a milestone that will be celebrated with a party his wife, Genie Chipps Henderson, and others are throwing for him in Sag Harbor.

While there have been many changes in his life, including the “The Pushcart Prize,” which has evolved into a 600-page volume—what hasn’t changed is Mr. Henderson’s passion for fine writing and the standards for a piece of writing’s selection for inclusion.

“It has to mean something to me,” he emphasized during a recent interview at his home in Springs. “There’s no written standard on the wall. It has to be heart and soul. Write about what you love. Not what you know, what you love. That’s what I tell everybody. It’s got to get your gut. It’s got to get your head. It’s got to make you get up and jump. The people published by the small presses, they can do it. Small presses are the hope of everything because they’re not commercial. They don’t give a damn about money, for the most part. They’ve got to get the money to pay the printer.”

Getting the money to pay the printer has also been Mr. Henderson’s challenge since “The Pushcart Prize” first appeared in 1976. Unlike many other anthologies over the years, Mr. Henderson has never charged a submission or nomination fee, and as a result, “Pushcart” has been anything but a cash cow.

Distributed by W.W. Norton, the volume is published by the Pushcart Press, which has from time to time released other books. One that will be published April 23—designated as the “International Day of the Book”—is “Book Love,” edited by Mr. Henderson and James Charlton. The book is a collection of more than 600 quotes submitted by more than 800 owners of independent bookstores that celebrates writers, readers and the printed book.

The seed for “The Pushcart Prize” was planted four decades ago when Mr. Henderson was a junior editor at Doubleday, which at that time published more than 700 titles annually. He was put off not only by such an overflow of output, but by the fact that so many of the books Doubleday and other large publishers were selling were not very good, he said.

In contrast, small presses, both independents and those affiliated with colleges and universities, were offering examples of very good writing in their publications, he declared. Mr. Henderson hatched the idea of collecting the better examples into an annual volume, thereby expanding the readership of the small presses.

It took five years to launch “The Pushcart Prize.” During that time Mr. Henderson recruited volunteer contributing editors and an impressive array of founding editors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Ralph Ellison, Anaïs Nin, Buckminster Fuller, Ishmael Reed and Paul Bowles. The editors nominated short stories, poems and essays published in literary magazines and Mr. Henderson began reading.

Now, more than 35 years later, he is still reading. And there is more to read than ever, Mr. Henderson said.

“It’s three months at least of just reading,” said Mr. Henderson, who reported that for the next “Pushcart” edition more than 8,000 submissions were received. “And another three or four months of clerical work. I’ve become a sort of literary traffic cop. Or I think of myself as a glorified secretary, but maybe not so glorified. When I start to read in January, it’s depressing because there’s so much out there. And there’s wonderful, wonderful stuff at the end of the line. I notice after 36 years you’d think I’d realize that in April you’re happier than you are in January because you don’t have all this stuff. But it’s still a hard slog.”

The agony and the ecstasy of his annual labors is that there continues to be a high level of quality being generated by the small presses, making it more difficult to choose what gets included in “Pushcart” and what is not.

“Every year there’s great and wonderful stuff that makes my heart sing and that’s why I keep doing this thing,” Mr. Henderson said. “The most difficult thing is the competent work. Somebody writes a competent short story and it’s obviously been written by somebody who’s been in a creative writing class who has nothing to say. It’s the competency, the middle ground, that takes a long time, to see if it’s heart and mind or just competence. There’s purely awful, then there’s the competent, and then there’s the truly great that makes you cry and cry.”

Many book publishers are making the transition to e-books. And those same publishers, like most companies, contend that the internet makes their jobs easier. This does not sit well with Mr. Henderson, who once founded the Lead Pencil Club as an antidote to the alleged advantages of the internet and computers for writers and editors.

“I think the internet is very dangerous for writers because they think up an idea and they fart it out right away and they don’t consider it or think about it,” he said. “Writers are all full of themselves, anyway. I know I was; I thought I was a genius. I had editors to get through to get published in those days. And as noisome as that is, you had to wait and think about your work and come back to it in two years of rejections. And put it in a drawer and think about it and see if you thought it was any good. That’s not the way it is anymore. People just think of a poem or a short story or whatever and fart it out into the air, and I think it’s very bad for writers. This is great for freedom but the writers have to find some sort of self-control. For 99.9 percent of writers, new writers, it’s very dangerous to think that you can just write and put it out there and become a published writer.”

To no one’s surprise, Mr. Henderson is not a fan of print-on-demand and instant publishing, which allow anyone to become a published author.

“You send off your disk to AuthorHouse or iUniverse and you send them 500 bucks and you get 10 books which look professional. And they’re awful. And they’re yours. And you can put them on the shelf and you’re a published writer,” he said. “Almost a million titles are published every year in this method. And it’s very bad for a writer. If you’re setting your sights it should be on being as good as Faulkner or Shakespeare, you shouldn’t just type out something and send it off and get your book back and say that’s it. People don’t aim to be great. They aim to have a book.”

Somehow, Mr. Henderson has found time to be an author himself. One of his books is “Her Father,” written about the birth of his daughter, Lily, who is now a documentary filmmaker. Next up will be “All My Dogs: A Life,” a new memoir that will be published later this year. That book will be previewed at the party to celebrate Mr. Henderson’s four score and 10 on Sunday.

For Mr. Henderson, however, the real celebration is the ongoing excellence of the small presses and the labor of love—with emphasis on the latter word—that every year represents that excellence to a wider readership.

“I was totally amazed in 1976 when ‘Pushcart’ came out the New York Times not only gave it a major review but features in separate issues as well,” Mr. Henderson said. “I was catapulted from a shmuck living down in the Village to somebody who everybody said was important. I was terrified, to tell you the truth. I still am a bit by what it has become. But what’s keeping me going is the writers. There are tons of people who love it and who are so excited when they get nominated. I just can’t give it up because it means so much to people. I couldn’t let them go. I’d love to go take a cruise around the world, to get out of here and try to read books that I haven’t read ... But not yet.”