The Missouri Review

Yesterday after I had left the office and was standing outside waiting for my carpool ride, I felt something on my foot.  I looked down.  It was a big black ant, and it was heading up my leg.  To stop it, I scraped at it with the sandal on the opposite foot, knocking it to the sidewalk.

At first I thought it was okay.  It was moving.  Then I saw that it was running in half circles; it looked like a dog sniffing at something—it would run this way for a couple of centimeters and then turn and go in the opposite direction.

I haven’t closely observed ant locomotion ever, but this ant wasn’t moving right.  Its navigation system was down.  After a minute or two it appeared to be widening the radius of the half-circle it kept traveling, but it wasn’t going to recover.  I felt  sad, though it was “only” an ant.  That’s what I thought and felt, and at the same time I had turned on my mental video camera.  “Get this down,” said a voice in my head.

Most writers have a built-in radar for those moments that are important to notice and record, mentally or on paper.  The moment that says “notice me” is different for everyone, but for me, the deaths of animals, from gnats on up to horses, have always triggered the recording and writing reflex.  (As evidence there is archived somewhere in a box of juvenilia my adolescent poem “Salute to a Dying Wasp.”  I had sprayed the wasp with Raid and then repented as I watched its death throes, and my penance was an elegy. At least it didn’t rhyme, but I’m ashamed to admit it had something of the tone of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”)

My point is not about the ant, though I was even sadder when it just stopped, like a battery-powered toy running out of juice.  It twitched a little, and then I had to get in the car.  I took out my notebook and “got it down,” though writing in a car makes me sick.

There’s no substitute for those experiential “finds” writers harvest that give authenticity to a piece of fiction.  Someday, in something I write, that ant will probably die again, just a sentence or two of ant death that will lend verisimilitude to a scene—or perhaps its death will carry some emotional weight also.  And it will feel real because it was.

While proofing the issue one last time yesterday, I was struck by a passage of description from Andy Mozina’s forthcoming story. It had that aura of something actual, not invented, harvested from real life so that it would be preserved, and I’ve been charmed every time I read it:

. . . a street where trees don’t grow very tall. South Milwaukee. Small houses with complicated roof lines: dormers, additions, awnings and porches; an air conditioner punched out a window like a Pez in mid-dispense. Gutters sag, downspouts dangle, shingles grow moss. Inside, staircases with hairpin curves, dining rooms with old built-ins, upstairs bedrooms with slanted ceilings, tiny closets shaped like mathematics problems.

One scrubbed kitchen smells from years of meat, a century of congealed gravy, coffee grounds, pill canisters. A candy thermometer has fallen between the stove and the cupboard, visible with a flashlight but essentially lost forever.

If you’re one of the millions who are suckers for brain candy and/or celebrity news, it’s an act of extreme willpower to ignore the daily onslaught of lists-of-things-not-worth-listing on MSN.

One such item recently caught my eye:  “Hot and Dirty: Stars We Like Better Grimy,” said the headline.  I could imagine who “we” liked better with some grime on:  Johnny Depp, Harrison Ford.  Really, there was no reason to click, and I didn’t. But for just a second I pondered whether there might be a cadre of literary grimeballs:  “Writers We Like Better Grimy.”  Cormack McCarthy came to mind, and Norman Mailer, but the latter has passed on, and it seemed disrespectful, so I let the thought go. 

It continued to pop up at random moments, though—often enough that I came up with a thesis:  American writers are good grimy, but British not.  Annie Proulx, yes.  Sherman Alexie, yes.  Julian Barnes, no.

Until I thought about Robert Olen Butler and Joyce Carol Oates.  They would not be so good dirty.  But Ian McEwan would.   And Zadie Smith.  William Boyd. Yes.

A theory based on stereotypes is bound to be predictable—wrong.  A piece of writing grounded in stereotype will be . . . bad.  We expect our better writers to be thinkers.  How else can they dodge predictability?  They’re fundamentally mental types, and isn’t the exercise of one’s intellect antithetical to getting dirty?  No, yes, maybe.  It just depends.

Mentally griming your favorite author is a really, really stupid thing to spend any time thinking about, but it’s strangely addictive.  Go to the article (I finally looked at it today).  Look at the photos of Uma or Harrison (yes, he’s on the list) and then try to imagine, say, John Updike with the same film of greasy, yucky dirt.  Look at Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, and try to picture J.K. Rowling, in a similarly dirty state.  She was the highest-paid celebrity last year,by the way—but that’s another list.

This morning my husband startled me with one of those questions that because they are so odd and come out of nowhere can really alarm you: “If I had to have my eyes removed, what would you do?”

I almost asked him where the idea came from, but then decided I might not want to know.  Instead I told him I thought it would be harder on him than on me: he’s very visual; I’m verbal.  He likes to look at things; I like to think about things. 

Still, I have fretted on occasion about losing my sight.  How would I edit? Read?   Write?

In recent years I’ve worred a lot less because technology offers so many solutions for the differently abled.  I bought my first IPod recently so I could listen to books while I ride my exercise bike.  If I couldn’t see, I’d just listen while I wasn’t biking, too.

I could even listen to TMR.  We’re the only literary journal (to our knowledge) currently producing an audio version of the entire content of every issue.   And to enhance our increasing commitment to literature in the audio format, we’re sponsoring our second annual audio competition, with categories for voice-only literature, narrative essay and documentary, and with a new video category this year.  To find out more, click here.

At the first of the summer I had a terrorist cell of moles hiding out in my front yard. They were real professionals. Their ankle-high bunkers zig- zagged across my lawn. That was until I brought home a calico cat named Edie. She is more stealth than the Israeli assassins who revenged the murdered Munich Olympians. In three months, she has nabbed and play-tortured, eleven moles, and those are only the ones I know about.

For her, it’s all in the thrill of the hunt. Like a Zen master, she sits atop a rock in silent meditation, her head bowed, patiently waiting. I know the sound of success. When she trots in the house with her catch, she trills.

Edie typically releases her prey in the middle of my kitchen floor. Bored or simply self-satisfied with her ability to bring home fresh meat for her pride, she trots back out of the house, head and tail held high, more Pepé Le Pew than a huntress of the Serengeti.

I am the one left with the moral decision. Rather than kill, I chose to relocate them to an empty lot at the end of my street, a fact that I mistakenly revealed to my neighbor, Mr. Hardcore Gardener.

“You let them go?” he said after I had told him about catching one and then realizing that I was half-dressed. Running down the street to the corner lot in bra and panties was out of the question, so I tiptoed out my back door and tossed the little guy into my back yard.

“What would you have me do? Wring their tiny necks.”

He requested that I bring the next one to him and he would take care of it.
Well, he wasn’t exactly around this morning when Edie’s most recent capture scurried behind my refrigerator. While my husband was at the doctor, I sat on the kitchen floor for more than an hour, one eye on The New Yorker and the other on the slender line between refrigerator and tile.

Finally, when my husband came home, we had to do the unthinkable. I flushed the mole out with a yard stick and he brought a broom handle down squared on its head. He tossed its body into the trash, vetoing my request for a more dignified interment. (What’s with these men?)

I’d admire moles. A group of moles is called a “labor,” maybe because they work so damn hard digging and eating. Their streamlined, cylindrical bodies, tapered heads, and fleshy paddle hands are perfectly designed to travel their underground by-ways in search of worms and grubs. If you look closely, they have a devotional look about them as if their pinched, monkish faces and their gold, pin-sized eyes are the sacrifice of transcribing religious texts. Think about it, these workaholic, thumb-size rodents really move some earth. Perhaps we hate them because by comparison we are weak and lazy.

Of course, I would never say any of this to my neighbor. In fact, I told his wife that her husband would be proud of me. A particularly large mole had been taken out.

She told me that her husband was just talking tough. Last summer, he had killed a mole with a pitchfork and felt awful about it.

“When he walked in the house, I swear I saw a tear in his eye.”

The fall issue of TMR is about to go to press, and despite some last-minute changes, we’re running on time.  Our broad ”theme” is Pick Your Poison: all of the selections deal in some way with damaging habits or traits or behaviors or other bad stuff.  Obsession, sex, bad dogs, risk, impulse, bad professors and old-fashioned greed and vanity are some of the subjects you’ll read about.  Come to think of it, the issue includes at least four of the deadly sins.  The only one I’m sure we don’t have is sloth: there’s tons of energy in this surprising mix.

In our interview, pop-culture critic Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) talks about how the Internet has wrecked interviewing. And consistent with our reputation as discoverers of new writers, there’s an engaging first published fiction by Maury Feinsilber.

Did you know it was possible for an English grad student to make $60K without working? Todd James Pierce writes about his very lucrative former career hunting bonus money from online gambling casinos. And Jillian Weise offers playful poems that take some chances with language–and one poem written in a motel room at the height of a scary incident that threatened her life.  There’s a back-to-school review essay on academic satires by Charles Green.  We even have celebrities: Charles Darwin makes an appearance in William Lychack’s short-short, and Carl Adamshick’s long historical poem features the voice of Amelia Earhart. 

We’ve always been about quality and variety, and this issue proves it once again.  Look for it next month.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died yesterday, apparently of heart failure, at age 89.  When I saw the news last night and mentioned it to my husband, he said it was incredible that the author had lived so long, given that the average Russian lifespan must be shorter than ours (I looked it up; it’s about 67) and that Solzhenitsyn had endured harsh labor-camp conditions for so many years of his early life and survived cancer in his thirties.  Almost miraculous that he’d lived so long, but it is even more incredible that out of the happenstance of being arrested and sentenced for writing a letter containing a few negative remarks about Stalin, a man who had not initially trained in the field of literature was launched into a career that would culminate in his Nobel Prize for literature.  In between the arrest and the novels were years of forced labor—the experience that compelled him to write.

I’m ashamed to say that his short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is the only novel by Solzhenitsyn that I’ve read in its entirety.  In the seventies, after The Gulag Archipelago was published in this country, I read substantial portions of that work and later a bit of The Cancer Ward.  I was old enough to be interested but too young and self-absorbed for the things he was writing about to seem quite real or important to me, though I knew they ought to seem important.  Moral vision is not something teenagers look for in their reading material. For whatever reason, after I got old enough to want it, I never went back and read either book.  Maybe now I will.

Both those books—Gulag and Cancer Ward—were on my parents’ family room bookshelves.  Book club editions?  Probably.  Or maybe they had been recommended by friends, or my dad had read reviews of them.  My family was a reading and book-buying family but not necessarily a literary one, and there was a lot of forgettable popular fiction on those shelves, along with other, stronger works that have lasted.  

It gives one hope, doesn’t it?  Solzhenitsyn’s death will not dominate the popular media the way celebrities do, but at the height of the Cold War his name and vision dominated the literary scene, and his importance as a chronicler of totalitarianism will not evaporate with his death.

The June issue of Scientific American featured an article by Jessica Wapner, ”The Healthy Type,” (reprinted online as “Blogging–It’s Good for You,” describing recent research on the potential physiological benefits of blogging. Neuroscientists, psychologists and other medical researchers theorize that since expressive writing has been demonstrated to improve people’s health (it makes you sleep better, boosts the immune system, helps cancer patients feel better and even accelerates healing after surgery), blogging may be similarly good for you.

To my mind this falls into that category of “stuff we all knew without knowing we knew it.” It makes perfect sense: something bad happens to you–disaster or illness, whatever–you want to write about it. And having written about it, you feel better. And if you feel better, you probably will be better. Can most of us explain the medical science? No, but we can all cite examples of people coping or healing through writing. Everyone knows some eccentric case on the periphery of their life–uncle or aunt, neighbor, coworker–who is a pathetic mess of physical and emotional problems. And who writes. And who, presumably, is able to survive being a misfit in an unforgiving world by doing so. “Normal” people who have bad things happen to them also recover or heal by writing. The crisis memoir is a legitimate subgenre, as is the memoir of illness. Now we have the blog, which in its most intimate and personal manifestation allows the writer to engage in repeated and public catharsis of whatever is bugging or ailing them almost up to the minute. Why shouldn’t such public displays be as healthy as the journal you kept in a composition notebook when you were going through that  particularly stressed-out period?

Not to downplay the health benefits of blogging for people who are gravely ill, but having recently returned to a novel after a long hiatus, during which I was raising (still am) three intense, gifted, incredibly difficult children, I am aware that a lot of what I’m doing under the guise of “art” is really just exhibitionist venting. Here’s a strange thing, though: I’m not embarrassed about it. “Writing is basically just complaining on paper,” I told my twelve-year-old last week. She looked surprised. I’ve been getting up early in the mornings to write, defending my right to the computer on weekends. She thought I was doing something serious. Now here I am telling her that I’m just airing grievances that I hope to eventually put out there for people’s consumption. It probably didn’t sound too much different to her than blogging–which of course doesn’t impress her because the whole world blogs.

I’m not embarrassed about my textual whining because it actually is helping me to blow off the onslaught of negativity that one must deal with day to day. If this were a personal blog, you’d be hearing the sordid details. But it’s not, and, good-for-me though that type of blogging might be, it’s more of a challenge, I think, to take all the specific instances of small-mindedness, oversight, dimness, cruelty, injustice, etc. that bother one and transpose them into invented elements: the engine of a story.

Is it healthy? Who cares? It’s a lot more interesting.

A few days ago, a news story out of Australia reported that pop songs have replaced hymns at funerals. One of the most popular songs is Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” a choice that made me wonder whether the people who selected it had in fact followed their bliss or sadly wished that they had. Or perhaps Frank Sinatra’s beloved in-your-face boast is simply the anthem of the self reliant GI generation that’s beginning to die off.

My stepfather picked the song for his funeral even though his life had been one of obligation to family and work. Like many men of the post–war generation, he deferred his needs for others. He had made a few bold moves in his life but ultimately died feeling, in his words, “as if he had missed the boat.” Knowing this, the song made me wish that he had been less self-denying, though by putting himself first my own life would have been considerably less comfortable.

Remember the opening scene from The Big Chill? At the end of a traditional service in an austere church, JoBeth Williams’ character takes her place at the organ to play the deceased’s favorite song. When the opening notes of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” fill the small sanctuary, his friends knowingly smile to themselves; the song about optimism and disillusionment capture the struggles of a life that has just ended in suicide.

As the church organ fades, an acoustic guitar and Mick Jagger’s raspy staccato vocals take over. His singing accompanies the funeral procession as it passes through a rural South Carolina landscape. The iconic scene of a group of Baby Boomers burying one of their own not only made pop songs funeral appropriate but also made selecting the perfect one paramount. Ever since, song has trumped sermon, casket and burial garb.

All week, while at the gym listening to my iPod, I’ve thought about my perfect funeral pop song. When I was a kid I loved Judy Garland and owned her albums, read every biography and ate off of Wizard of Oz limited-edition collector’s plates. But “Somewhere over the Rainbow” ranks up there with “My Way” in terms of popularity. You don’t want your last impression to be a cliché.

More difficult than selecting a funeral song is picking one for a political campaign. While Bill Clinton seemed to have gotten it right with Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” so many of them get it horribly wrong. In 2000 George W. Bush tried to use Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” Petty was not amused and threatened to sue. Apparently his feelings for Bush are akin to the Dixie Chicks’. John Mellencamp had a similar reaction when McCain tried to use “Our Country.” McCain must have missed the fact that Mellencamp was stumping for Obama in Indiana.

When Hillary let her supporters pick her song, they chose Celine Dion’s “You and I.” Toward the end of the primary as the media began their “death watch” and her former competition and political friends scurried on the Obama bandwagon, Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” seemed more appropriate.

Barack Obama might consider David Bowie’s “Changes.” Not because his campaign slogan and lately some of his policy opinions are as grand and amorphous as Bowie’s sexuality but because he has seemingly overnight transformed himself from a wide-eyed, anti-establishment idealist into a dour, standard-issue politician finger wagging at The New Yorker for their satirical antics.

If I were picking a ditty for McCain, I’d tweak the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Enough said.

Political campaigns aside, this is a long winded way of saying that after much thought, I’ve found my song—The Church’s "Under the Milky Way."

So now I’ve told you mine. What’s yours?

If you’re a skeptic in need of a reason to pick up our summer issue - and why not a subscription, while you’re at it? - trust me when I say just one word: “Bearskin.”

James A. McLaughlin’s novella is, simply put, a great story. A great, naturalistic, suspenseful story, complete with bees, a wizened mushroom hunter, vultures circling overhead, ATVs, guns held on hips, Forest Service employees running drugs and, of course, bears.

Not only is “Bearskin” a great story; it’s great in the most delightful way: it is less an intellectual exercise than a sensory experience. This is not to say it’s not a smart story, because it most definitely is. But here the intelligence does not flaunt itself metafictionally, instead manifesting in the traditional elements of plot, characterization and vivid description of setting.

The latter is my favorite aspect and is especially well-rendered, engaging all the senses, sometimes in a single sentence. I found myself completely immersed in the muggy Virginia heat in which the protagonist toils as a caretaker for a private nature preserve. What a great summer read! Near the air conditioner, I got all the feeling of the season without the pesky heat rash and bee stings.

Pick up a copy of TMR and let us know what you think about “Bearskin.” I’ll eat my Mac if you don’t like it. Seriously.

As a grad student intern at The Missouri Review, one of my duties besides reading manuscripts is to blog. But what? After a few false starts it finally hit me: keep it simple, stupid. Write what you know, or at least what you’re learning. Blog the day-to-day at TMR. Blog the bundle.

Now I imagine this endeavor could get boring, but I think it will serve at least one useful end: to demystify what goes on at McReynolds Hall, the place where many thousands of manila envelopes are delivered each year. Perhaps one is yours. This summer I will bike to McReynolds every Tuesday afternoon to meet with the other students enrolled in “Internship in Publishing” and then again on Wednesday to put in my office hours.

The first place we interns learned about was the mailroom, number 357 of a nondescript brick building on the northwestern edge of campus. Submissions to the magazine are delivered here and sorted by genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry). They are then logged into the computer and bundled with rubber bands into groups of ten. A packing list is included with each bundle of submissions. The intern/reader writes a brief note about each manuscript on this sheet of paper. More lengthy critique can also be written on the submission’s envelope. At any time In the mailroom there are stacks and stacks of bundles piled a foot high and sometimes six feet long. Scores of bundles, hundreds of submissions, all waiting to be read. When a bundle is checked out by a reader, he/she makes a copy of the packing list, signs it, and drops it into a bin. This indicates he/she has taken possession of the bundle.

You’re probably thinking this all sounds very bureaucratic and inartistic. I agree, but I guess banal systems are the only way to deal with mounds and mounds of paper without fast becoming overwhelmed. The eureka moment requires a lot of patient sifting - probably why they call it the “slush pile.” When a reader finds a good story, essay, or poem, he/she passes it off to another reader for a second opinion. This process continues until either a consensus is reached that the piece isn’t up to par or until it’s passed up the editorial chain to the senior editor, Speer Morgan, who has ultimate say over everything we publish.  One of the goals of TMR is to discover new writers, and we do read everything you send us, whether or not you have an agent or a beefy list of publishing credits to your name.

But don’t fret too much if you get a rejection letter. We receive so many submissions, even superior pieces are bound to get rejected. I know this is easy for me as an intern to say; as a writer, I know the feeling of rejection, like someone has looked into my soul and said, “No thanks.” It’s really not that bad, though. Think of it more like a lottery. The stronger your writing, the more tickets you have, but your odds of winning are never going to be great. At any rate, you can’t catch a fish if your hook ain’t in the water.

That’s what I like about my work here so far: the off-hand chance that the next story I pull from a bundle will be an undiscovered gem, a new classic. The process makes me feel like a prospector. The bundle becomes my claim, my mountain stream, my sluiceful of ore. Send us some gold, people.

During an early scene in Roberto Rossellini’s 1953 film Voyage to Italy, Katherine Joyce sits in a canvas sling chair on a sundrenched veranda, eyes obscured behind stylish shades.  Tempestuous Mt. Vesuvius looms in the distance as she tells her remote, work driven English husband Alex (George Sanders) about Charles Lewington, a former lover and poet who died two years before.  The stark, romantic landscape evokes memories of Charles, though Katherine’s sad, rapturous voice suggests that his ghost has been with her all along. 

“We got on terribly well together,” she says and then goes on to describe how the weak, frail man braved a high fever to be with her.  

Her husband, languid and blasé, calls her dead lover a fool.

Rossellini re-tailors Gretta’s mournful reverie from the close of “The Dead” to suit Katherine’s sophistication and Europe’s post-war ennui.  Still there are so many echoes that it stirs one’s passion for Joyce’s classic short story.

Katherine’s confession further irritates the couple’s troubles as does her spiritual pilgrimage to find Charles’ presence in the locations of his poetry.  What if Gretta had had gone back to Galway in search of Michael Furey?

Gabriel transcends his jealousy to empathize with his wife’s loss, while Alex remains resentful and bitter.  In the end, Rossellini reunites his couple during a scene so sudden and abbreviated that the viewer is left nervously off-balance while Joyce’s reader is awed by his hypnotic closing intimation of universal mortality.

Voyage to Italy’s themes, the miscomprehension that can happen between couples and the continued presence of the dead among the living, takes the reader back to the original text as does a much truer adaptation, John Huston’s The Dead (1987).

In the hands of an artist, literary borrowing is an exciting, creative endeavor.  Updike was able to retell Hamlet from Gertrude’s and Claudius’ points of view.  (In Updike’s tale, Hamlet is what my students would call a “girl-pants wearing emo boy” whose pathological recklessness leads to the downfall of the kingdom.).  In Kate Moses’ Wintering , the last days of Sylvia Plath’s life are creatively imagined as she struggled in a cramped flat with two young children, her husband’s betrayal and one of London’s worst winters while writing the poems that would make her name.  And, of course, Jean Rhys 1966 post colonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea tells the tale of the first Mrs. Rochester, a white Creole woman who is transported from the Caribbean to England only to endure an unhappy marriage.

In the film adaptation of Brian Morton’s novel Starting Out in the Evening,retired professor Leonard Schiller’s (Frank Langella) monastic life is interrupted when Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious graduate student from Brown, wants to write her senior thesis about him and his out-of-print novels. He’s flattered but politely declines. He’s recently survived a heart attack. Time is precious and the writing is coming slowly. His fifth novel refuses to take shape. The characters, he says, don’t seem to want to do anything interesting.

I was so intrigued by this movie and its depiction of a mid-list writer in the twilight of his career that I showed it to my creative writing students, thinking that they might identify with, or at least admire, Heather’s boldness and tenaciousness as she efficiently bates and nets her prey. Not only does Leonard let her into his home, he also submits to her fierce personal questioning, an affront to his high decorum and his belief in New Formalism.

After an hour, I released the students who had “real” finals to study for and dorm rooms to pack, but I kept the movie playing for the four who stayed.

As Leonard and Heather’s relationship develops into a quirky, fragile May-December romance, one young woman I know to be squeamish about sex started fidgeting in her seat.

She erupted into a loud, barbaric “yuck” when Heather dips her fingers into a jar of honey and touches them to Leonard’s lips.

An argument about the appropriateness of the relationship was ignited. Two of the students were all for it. “It’s mostly just brain sex,” one said.

But all of them felt that Leonard was being manipulated. Though Heather has only published a brief essay on Stanley Elkin in a small literary journal, youth has conferred her with power. The old, too-long-ignored writer is putty in her hands. When he gives her a key to his apartment, my students groaned “oh no,” as if he’d signed his own death warrant.

Heather’s youthful arrogance angered me, too. Over tea, she accuses Leonard of using age as an excuse for not getting on with his work. She also wants to know whether sacrificing his personal life for his art has been worth it; after all, who is reading his books?

I’ve heard that during World War I when military men were given a few days furlough, they found the business-as-usual bustle of the Parisian streets befuddling. To them the city seemed untouched by war and they found few who could relate to their experiences on the battlefield. Writers feel a similar lack of empathy for what goes in their own private artistic trenches.

Writers are hard on each other. Even worse, they are hard on themselves and seldom feel the pride they deserve for confronting the blank page.

Few people worry themselves with the struggles of the imagination. I was reminded of this when I read Roddy Doyle’s story “The Bullfighter” recently published in The New Yorker. The protagonist is perfectly content with his life of nine-to-five work, wife and children, and weekly drinking buddies. Or perhaps this is simply a writer’s idealized depiction of the easy joy of a life more spectacularly ordinary than his own.

Lisa K. Buchanan, who was our first runner-up in the voice-only creative non-fiction category of our 2007 Audio Competition, can currently be heard on the KQED’s “The Writers’ Block” reading her winning entry to Opium Magazine’s 2007 “Bookmark Contest” in which authors had to submit a 250-word story that could be printed on a bookmark. You can listen to this episode of “The Writer’s Block” here.

You can also listen to Lisa’s winning entry in our audio competition on our podcast.

I was riding my electric bike through the neighborhood last evening at the quiet hour.  No wind, no traffic, no hard pumping up the hills. A few people gardening in their front yards looked up and smiled as I tooled by.   And what was I thinking about?

The meaning of the suffix “-ate.”  Yes, that’s right.  Riding my magic bicycle at the perfect hour of the perfect day of the year, I was thinking not about love, not about vacations, not about the price of real estate, but about suffixes, particularly the one deriving from the Latin that means to cause to happen-expectorate, recreate, congregate, stimulate, cogitate, fornicate, mediate, associate–one could go on forever with the -ates.

What a wonderful thing the mind is.  It is as free flowing and unpredictable as the weather.  If a hundred experts sat in a room working hard for a week, they could never guess what I was thinking about on my ride.  Or if they did, they could certainly never guess both that and what I thought about next.  And to guess three successive thoughts?  No way, except with the help of Borges’s infinite library.

I think that’s why fiction and poetry are potentially more amazing than every other art form. It’s not a single moment, not a work of static art or of the awkwardness of moving pictures, powerful or not, but an unpredictable process of unfolding which a good story or poem can follow with the ease and naturalness of the miraculous weather of the mind.

While we have stacks of submissions waiting to be read, we’re once again short in the interview department. If you have an unpublished interview with an established author, please query me at mutmrquestion@missouri.edu. Past interview subjects include Richard Powers, Antonya Nelson, A.M. Homes, Julian Barnes, Charles Baxter and Stuart Dybek.

We’re also looking for good, sharp essays that deal with current trends in literature to complement our recently revamped book review feature. No scholarship, please—but smart essays that take on literary issues or controversies are very welcome. You can submit online with a note to my attention, or query me at mutmrquestion@missouri.edu

I remember myself as a shy, soft spoken little girl, but the kid that appears in the home movies I recently inherited is anything but bashful.  My father filmed my dance recitals, a riot of miniature ballerinas dressed as pink shrimps, lightening bugs and yellow birds.  Clumsy and uncoordinated, my place was in the back row, but by the end of each number, I was center stage.  During curtain call, I bowed with broad, flourishing gestures.  Dancing, turning cartwheels, generally vamping for the camera, as a little girl I came across as a future sexpot not a book worm.     

People misremember books as well.  We often have ideas about novels that have little basis in reality.  Three obvious examples come to mind. 

The first is On the Road.  Because of its obvious association with the Beats, one might assume that it’s a road book more on par with Natural Born Killers than Going My Way.  But rather than being about sociopathic hoodlums joy-riding across America wrecking havoc wherever they alight, it is a novel about a group of sensitive, well-meaning kids who occasionally nick a tank of gas and a loaf of bread to keep on moving.  They’re not criminals but spiritual cultural seekers.  The book has a sad, sweet generous spirit, and the narrator Sal Paradise is certainly more angel than devil.

Bright Lights, Big City is reputed to be about sex, drugs and rock and roll.  Yet, the novel has three brief references to rock, despite a title borrowed from a Jimmy Reed blues song.  And as for sex, the narrator is all talk and no action.  Depressed over the desertion of his wife and the death of his mother, he lets his promising career at a New Yorkeresque magazine flat line and his sense of self-worth plummet.  The McInerney of Bright Lights is a precursor to today’s metro sexual.

And why does everyone think that Holden Caulfield is crazy?  Some fifty years ago, a rumor was spread that Holden tells his story from a mental hospital because he’s cracked up.  I guess that’s flashier than being in a sanitarium for TB.  Holden is certainly sad, alienated, and, at times, a real bummer, but he’s not mental.  Like the narrator in Bright Lights, he has a bad attitude because life has recently dealt him a harsh blow.  His younger brother, Allie, who he loved and admired, has died of leukemia. 

Perhaps, these mistaken reputations have done these books some good.  Selling a novel as a quiet, thoughtful meditation on loss and loneliness is certainly not going to get a lot of dates with readers.

But mean, brooding and sexy?  We’ll go out with that.

We’re pleased to announce that the second ever Missouri Review Audio & Video Competition is now open and accepting your submissions. You might notice something a little different from last year: the new video category. We’re very excited to see what you can do with this new option. We are also continuing the Narrative Essay, Documentary, and Voice-Only Literature (Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction) from last year.

Full guidelines and the entry form are available here.

And check out last year’s winners in our archived podcasts.

[Tara Yellen is the author of the recently published novel After Hours at the Almost Home.]

My first semester of teaching, I was a graduate student in my early twenties at the University of Colorado. I’d arrived, I was certain, entirely prepared to teach.  I had articles and short stories — and an arsenal of exercises.  Exercises on objective detail.  Exercises on dialogue.  Exercises for free writing.

But, the second week of classes, a student surprised me at my office hours. She was a “nontraditional” student, in her forties, returning to school to work on her writing after raising a family. She was talented.  She was also crying. 

“Everything I write is awful,” she said. “I can’t get myself to turn it in.”

I was prepared with writing exercises.  Terrific exercises. There’s this one where you sit your class in front of the window and have them jot down observations of passersby.  It helps with description. But here was this woman, who’d had kids, spent years writing, older and wiser, asking me what to do. I was suddenly at a loss. Everything I write is awful. I’d been there so many times myself.

            And then, just as suddenly, I was transported.

            “Make it terrible,” I told her.

            She stopped crying and squinted. “What?”

            “Your next assignment.  Make it crappy.”

            She laughed at me.

            “I’m serious,” I said, and tried to look, if not older, than at least taller. ” If it’s good, I’m going to give it back and ask you to do it again.”

            It wasn’t an original suggestion. Many writing teachers use it. I got it from one of my earliest mentors. In fact, as my student stood there, red-eyed and confused in my cubicle, I could hear my teacher telling our class: Dare to be awful. Just get something down. All writers have shitty first drafts.

A moment of support, a small suggestion-and enormously freeing.

I’ve been fortunate. I’ve had wonderful writing mentors throughout my life-first my parents (my mother always had a book in her hand and my father read poetry to me), and then through high school and college and graduate school. At UVa, my professors read the manuscript for After Hours at the Almost Home almost as many times as I did.  They guided and coached and coaxed me as I (somehow) extracted a novel from a jumble of character and idea. And there wasn’t just the writing itself that I needed help with. There was finding an agent, navigating the publishing process.  Figuring out how to make a living. Just reminding me it was possible.

My own mentoring has helped me enormously-certainly in the immediate sense that I’m reminding myself of new approaches, different things to try, but also in that it puts me outside myself, it give me another lens on the world. In addition to teaching, some years back, I helped run a mentoring program for middle school girls, and I was astounded by the difference just a few hours with a kid can make — for everyone involved.  Teachers can inspire and be inspired. In the best situations, it becomes a symbiotic relationship.

We no longer live in a world that automatically fosters young writers — instead we have dazzling, delicious pre-processed entertainment.  So, more than ever, I think, we have to create that world.

That student, we’re still in touch.  She has since coached me at least as much as I’ve coached her. And, as for that class, she’d been able to turn in her next assignment, after all — though it wasn’t crappy. It was actually pretty good. But, no, I didn’t make her redo it.  Dare to be good, I thought, and I felt it: both taller and older.

Photo: Editors’ Prize winners with Jeffrey E. Smith at the Editors’ Prize Reading (4/12/2008): (from left to right) Otis Haschemeyer, Jude Nutter, Jeffrey E. Smith, & Robert Kimber.

On the sleety evening of Saturday, April 12, we had the pleasure of hosting the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Reading and Reception. Despite rampant flight cancelations leading into the weekend, Robert, Jude and Otis were all able to join us. We had an incredible pool of submissions for last year’s contest, but our winners’ readings demonstrated the qualities of freshness and heart that won for them these prizes.

Many thanks to the prizewinners for traveling to Columbia to share their work with us. Thanks, too, to the prize’s benefactor, Jeffrey Smith, and to our local friends for braving the unseasonable elements in the name of literature – and mini-quiches.

Those of you who weren’t able to attend the reading can discover the prizewinners’ work in issue 31:1, now available (those of you who did attend have undoubtedly already secured your copies).

Photo: An excited audience at the Editors’ Prize Reading (4/12/2008).

Visit our MySpace page to see more photos from this and other Missouri Review events.

In 1920 Sherwood Anderson and Ben Hecht were friends in Chicago struggling to make a buck as fledgling writers.  Hecht, who fancied himself a wit and a conservator of literary taste, said that he didn’t think Anderson’s book The Triumph of the Egg was a work of art and surely Anderson had reservations about his just published Erik Dorn.  He proposed that they should attack each other in print, starting a fake feud for the sake of getting their names out there.

Thinking him arrogant and too casual with his criticism, Anderson wrote Hecht a letter telling him that his behavior was unbecoming for such a talented man: 

Consider just for a moment that you aren’t as specialized a thing as you think.  You and I for example are friends.  Try the experiment of saying to yourself that there aren’t any smart thoughts I may have that Anderson may not have them too.

Anderson went on to say that friendship for him wasn’t based on looking either up or down at someone, but eye to eye.  He advised that Hecht give up the bluff of being “so energetic, smart and fast” and try to be himself for a change.  

I recently came across the quote, “It’s none of your business what others think of you,” which is true.  Yet, there are rare times when one needs a friend to tell him what he least wants to hear. 

Unfortunately, Hecht didn’t appreciate Anderson’s candor and accused him of a Pollyanna complex.  They did not talk or see each other again for twenty years.  Their literary “Bromance” took a final tumble. 

There have been times in my own life when fellow writers have given me advice that I didn’t fully appreciate until years later.   

One friend warned that I tried too hard to be cute and clever in my fiction.  “Just tell a good story,” he counseled.

Some of the moments I enjoy most in fiction are when a friend sees in another flaws that they share.  In Christopher Isherwood’s “Sally Bowles” from The Berlin Stories, Chris accuses Sally of always trying to shock people with her flamboyant style of dress and sexual escapades.

“You’re naturally shy with strangers, I think: so you’ve got into this trick of trying to bounce them into approving or disapproving of you, violently,” he tells her, as she stretches out languidly on the sofa powdering her nose, obviously not enjoying his analysis.

Sometimes friends can go too far, mistaking cruelty for candor.  In the movie Margo at the Wedding, Margo-played skillfully by a dressed-down, almost mousy-looking Nicole Kidman-ambushes her sister and her own son with endless debilitating insights and observations in the name of “being honest.”  Her unchecked behavior points out that we don’t have to drag our friends to the alter of truth on every count.

Yet the fact is that most of life’s meaningful lessons don’t come from parents, teachers or preachers but from peers delivered not as a sermon or lecture but as a whisper for our ears only.

The Missouri Review’s poetry editor, Jessica Garratt, gives a tour of the office and offers insight into the process of reading and responding to manuscripts.  Jessica, Katy Didden, and Marc McKee discuss the reading process and the things that make a poem successful.  This is a two-part feature.

Part I:

Part 2:

Of course, there are a few worse things in the world than the inexpert use of similes and metaphors, but at the moment nothing comes to mind. That’s because I just returned from my annual mammogram. Cloistered in a cell, my bare torso draped in a wrinkled sheet-like cape, I sat on my small plastic chair and watched a built-in television play an inexpensively produced video about the importance of breast self exam, mammography, and bone density testing. A long double strip of duct tape covered the on/off button, a sign that others before me had also been driven to shut it off.

I paged through a tattered Smithsonian and tried in vain to ignore the insistently pleasant sounding “doctor” as she explained what I’m looking for each month when I plumb the very shallow depths of my breasts for what in her words might feel like “a marble in a tube sock.”

She went on to explain that other women, perhaps a bit more demure and loathsome of tube socks, described the lump as a raisin beneath a linen napkin.

She saved her best description for last.

“Others say it’s more like a peanut in a bowl of Gummi bears.”

Yes, I just hate when I find a peanut in my Gummi bears.

Years ago, I had a less verbose doctor ask if I knew what a lump might feel like.

“No idea,” I said.

She folded my hand into a fist and had me feel the knuckle of my index finger.

Remembering this, once again I made a fist and shook it at the video screen, which had looped around for a second showing.

Watching these women model self exams I was reminded that some have a lot more real estate than I do. I have postage stamp-sized lots compared to rolling acres.

The doctor advised that when you lie on your back, if your breasts fall to the side, get them sitting upright so that the “nipples float on top like lily pads.”

And the self exam? The pie slice technique is out. Pretend you are mowing the lawn, moving your hand to and fro in long even rows. I prefer my lawn to have a checker-board pattern, but hey that’s just me.

As I was about to rip the tape off the concealed on/off switch, a firm rap on the door signaled that it was my turn to step into the silent, semi-dark room and have my breasts, one little shy bit of flesh at a time, placed into a rotating vice grip and photographed by a machine that evoked medieval torture rather than modern medicine.

But better that than one more lousy simile or metaphor, I thought, until my technician took me in hand and said, “Now, this is going to feel like…”.

If you’re reading this, then you’re seeing our new site design. This has been a project over a year and a half in development. This new design is database driven and allows us to present more of our content more easily than ever before. So click the “Browse Issues” or “Search Content” links in the navigation menu and explore.

We still have some other features in development which we’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks, so check back in later and find out what’s new!

–Patrick Lane
   TMR Webmaster

This month, The Missour Review is launching a redesigned website and changing to a new service provider. As part of this process, beginning this weekend and continuing through early next week, our e-commerce and submission systems will be disabled until the full migration to our new host is completed. We’ll let you know in this blog as soon as those systems are fully functional again. Thanks for your patience, and we hope you enjoy the new Missouri Review experience we have prepared for you!

Patrick Lane
TMR Webmaster

We’ve now concluded our podcast presentations of the winners of our 2007 Audio Competition. You can all of the winners are listed below with links to the podcast containing their work. Congratulations again to all of our winners!

Narrative Essay

First place, $1,000: Judith Sloan, “Sweeping Statements” [Listen]

First runner-up: Kris Saknussemm, “Cahoots” [Listen]

Second runner-up: Richard Paul, “Fighting With My Dad” [Listen]

Documentary

First place, $1,000: Lu Olkowski, “Grandpa” [Listen]

First runner-up and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Richard Paul, “Shakespeare in Black and White” [Listen]

Second runner-up: Ken Cormier, “The Secret Pianos of Manhattan” [Listen]

Third runner-up: Dan Collison, “Lord God Bird” [Listen]

10-minute play

First place, $500: Kris Saknusemm: “Memory Wound” [Listen]

First runner-up: George Zarr: “Old Dog/Newer Tricks” [Listen]

Second runner-up: Sue Zizza, National Audio Theatre Festivals, “Avian Invasion” [Listen]

Voice-only Literature

Creative Nonfiction

• First place in Voice-only Literature category and Creative Nonfiction subcategory, $500: Albert Haley, “The Cough” [Listen] 

First runner-up and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Lisa K. Buchanan, “All That I Missed” [Listen]

• Second runner-up: Randolph Jordan, “A Death in the Family” [Listen]
• Third runner-up: Angela Cervantes, “A House of Women” [Listen]

Flash fiction

First place in subcategory and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Josh McDonald, “Lost” [Listen]

 First runner-up and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Jithendria Kumar Aravamudhan, “Memoirs of a Mad Man” [Listen]

Poetry

First place in subcategory and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Todd Boss, “To Wind a Mechanical Toy” [Listen]

First runner up: Todd Boss, “Yellow Rocket” [Listen]

Second runner-up: Runner up: Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, “The Golden Lesson” [Listen]

Third runner-up: Eric Torgersen, “Taking Tickets” [Listen]

Fourth runner-up: Josh McDonald, “Women in Strange Trousers” [Listen]

On this Missouri Review podcast, we have for you the audio feature “Lord God Bird” produced by Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, which was the 3^rd runner-up in the Documentary category of our 2007 audio competition.

You can listen to this podcast directly here.