textBOX
Our Current Issue
TMR’s Audio Contest
Poem of the Week
Non-Contest Contest #2
Guys and gals of The Missouri Review online world. Given the success of our “48 Hour Poetry Non-Contest Contest” last semester, we’re starting a series of brief online writing prompts. We’ll give you a topic every other week, and a week to turn your entries in.**
*E-mail address: themissourireview@gmail.com (don’t send spam. We do not want a cheap hotel in Vietnam).
*Prizes: 1-year subscription to the online Missouri Review, complete with audio access (pop it into your car, listen to fine literature on your way to work instead of Top 40. Hear the sweet dulcet tones of our soon-to-be-published Editor’s Prize winners while you bench press 300 pounds)
*Rules: 1 entry per person, stick to the word/form limit. Judges’ (biased) decisions final. We’ll put up the winning entry on our Tumblr and Facebook pages.
Week 1:
“Ringo Starr’s interior monologue while playing drums at a sold out show”
250 Words.
Due by: 8PM EST, 2/9/12
Winners Announced: You know, after that
**Not to be confused with the money-awarding “Audio Contest,” entries to which must be postdated by March 15th–details of which (including the exciting sliding scale of contest entry fees) are available in Claire McQuerry’s post from a couple days ago.
Turned off by unaffordable entry fees? Hopefully not anymore…
This year, for TMR’s 5th annual Audio Competition, we’ve decided to try an experiment. Ok, so it’s a little crazy, and we don’t really know what to expect: we’ve decided to leave the contest entry fee up to the entrants; if you decide to submit work to our Audio Contest, you choose what you feel is a fair reading fee. Your entry fee, regardless of what you pay, still gets you a one-year digital subscription to The Missouri Review.
In the past, we have always charged a $20 entry fee—an entry fee that’s fairly standard for literary-journal-run competitions these days. And while we feel that this fee is reasonable (it includes a one-year subscription to The Missouri Review, for which we normally charge $23), we also understand that the cost may be prohibitive for some very talented people—particularly in this difficult economy.
Before I give the false impression that our contest is now free to enter, however, let me be up-front about the fees associated with a literary competition and why they exist in the first place. Literary journals as big as The Missouri Review are quite expensive to run: among other things, we pay the salaries for our full- and part-time editorial staff; the salaries for the office staff; the costs of equipment, technology, and supplies; expenses for advertising and promotional events; the printing and distribution of the journal; and contributor payments (we are one of the few lit journals that pays its contributors). Some of this money comes from grants and some from generous donors, but subscription fees and contest entry fees are another important source that we rely on to meet our costs. When writers pay to enter a journal’s contest, they are acting as patrons of the literary arts, providing the journal with some of the important funding it needs to continue to exist–and ultimately supporting themselves and others in the field.
Of course, there are also costs associated with running a contest: advertising, prize money, staff hours, etc. After receiving as many as several hundred entries, a contest like our Audio Competition might just barely break even; there are years, in fact, when TMR hasn’t broken even on the Audio Contest. Which is why making the entry fee “pay-by-donation” is a bit of a risk. But it’s a risk that we feel is one worth taking: We would like you to be able to enter our Audio Contest regardless of your ability to pay. If you feel that you can afford the standard $20 or even a little beyond that, know that we very much appreciate your support. But if $5 or $10 is all that you can pay at this point in time, we will still be grateful for your donation and happy to consider your work. And rest assured that the entries are blind; the amount that each entrant pays will not be recorded anywhere in connection with his/her payment.
Please spread the word and help make our experiment a success!
Naming Babies v. Naming “Babies”
In the past I have told people that I feel bad for them when they don’t know of any songs that mention their first names. I feel bad that they never feel pseudo-famous the way that I do when Sinead O’Connor sings about a Molly who dies of a fever, but is so committed to pushing a wheelbarrow through Dublin that she continues the task postmortem. I try to downplay how special I feel when The Vaseline’s sing, “kiss kiss Molly’s lips” over and over in a chorus sometimes interrupted by a bicycle horn. I grew up with children’s books where bears and dolls and a girl who likes strawberries all shared my name and the only Molly’s I encountered in real life were usually dogs. My most basic identifier is distinct enough, but has also always loosely attached me to these characters with their own narratives. I’m lucky to like the associations with my name, but wonder about the actual task of naming.
Recently I came up blank when potential baby names were discussed among my peers, but with that daunting reality a far possibility, I found myself thinking about the more immediate choices my fiction friends make when they invent a character and choose its name. Had it occurred to them that naming a character Molly would contribute to some universal Molly narrative? Is there a purposeful distinction between a Brittany and a Britney? Do they consider articles like these or are the implications of Freakonomics moot in fictional story? Are the names associated with time period, ethnicity, class, and gender so engrained that the integration of an appropriate name in a narrative is natural and subtle? I have never made it very far trying to write fiction.
I recognize that consideration for a character’s name varies in importance. Lolita and Romeo are so loaded with an established identity that their use in a story is likely to be a purposeful evocation of those other Lolitas and Romeos. Most of my fiction friends said that character names just come to them and that their only stipulation is that they never use names that they like. This one rule seemed to be the only middle ground between a shoulder shrug concerning a character’s name and using a name like Lolita. When we started discussing possible real life baby names there were rules about the sound and syllables of a name, associations with acquaintances by certain names that could make us groan, and the unspoken desire that our kids would stand out just a little bit on their school roster.
For people who have once or twice referred to their stories and plays as their “babies,” I thought the contrasting name consideration was interesting. Of course I expected that naming a real baby would be more arduous than a fictional character because babies tend to be that way. I like the contrast of inventing an identity for a character with a name that an author doesn’t really like with my own obsession to find a Molly identity in fictional characters. I remember the first time I considered a name for my future offspring. In first grade, after reading the story of a mouse named Chrysanthemum who is teased for her name, I chose it for my future daughter. The beginning of my naming insecurities may be traced back to this moment where I thought I had achieved the perfect balance of distinctiveness and pseudo-celebrity. Chrysanthemum would never have to tack on the the first initial of her last name in class and she could tell everyone she was named after a book. My parents revealed that the mouse in the story was named for a flower and suddenly the teasing seemed justified.
I have never been allowed to name a human baby, but when I do I will obsess over the literary, lyrical, high school nemeses, and nineteenth-century verbs associated with it (Molly once meant “to do women’s work”). I will wonder if it is possible to name a baby after a literary character without invoking a tragic existence or at least requiring that they live out the namesake’s narrative. I would be disappointed in a Walden who couldn’t tear himself away from video games or a Flannery who isn’t even a little bit interested in amputation. I will want a baby that grows up to invent its own identity, but still feels like some bedtime stories were written about them and Little Richard is singing that loudly for them.
TextBOX and Teaching
Before I took over as editor of textBOX, The Missouri Review’s absolutely free online anthology of exceptional fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from its archives, I used the site for a few semesters in the fiction workshops I teach at the University of Missouri. It was a great accompaniment to a craft manual, which was, in my case, Janet Burroway’s excellent Writing Fiction. Burroway divides her book into chapters that cover big topics like plot, point of view, setting, and theme. Each chapter features two or three stories that serve as examples of each topic in action, but for especially sticky topics, I wanted more examples. For instance, to supplement the chapter on point of view, I gave students Seth Fried’s “Loeka Discovered,” which is written in collective first person.
I also found textBOX useful for troubling the conventions of the undergraduate workshop story. While it is generally easier for a student to write a successful short story that takes place over the course of a day or a few hours, there are many fine stories that unreel over months or years, moving characters across counties, countries, and continents. I gave students “Eleven Beds” by William Harrison to show them one way a story can cover vast temporal and literal ground. My students and I had a good time (well, I know I did) mapping the shifts in time and place and tracing the subtle way Harrison renders the shifting dynamics of the central romantic relationship.
Though I have not yet had the chance to use textBOX this way myself, I can envision it as fodder for a workshop organized thematically. Before textBOX’s inception, I taught an intermediate workshop on the literary fantastic. If the site had been available, I could have augmented my story selections with “The Rememberer” by Aimee Bender (a devolving boyfriend!), “Drowned Edward Tug” by Mary Bucci Bush (ghosts!), and “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed” by Robert Olen Butler (just how it sounds!). There are twelve short stories on textBOX with more to come, and I can already see other thematic groupings: stories that have strong settings, stories that take place in a specific historical moment.
Interested in trying textBOX in your classroom? You could assign a textBOX piece to fill a spare day in your schedule. Each piece has accompanying discussion questions and writing prompts, reducing your prep time. Send your students a link to the piece, have them print out and bring to class the PDF that includes the piece and accompanying study materials, and you’re ready to go. Or you could use a textBOX piece to introduce students to another genre. Maybe you feel your fiction students could benefit from a discussion of a textBOX poem’s close attention to language or you’d like to get your poetry students thinking about the construction of narrative in nonfiction. TextBOX is an easy way to do so.
Have you used textBOX in your fiction, nonfiction, or poetry class? Can you think of other ways textBOX might be helpful to instructors?
New Books We Love: The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen
I first met Keija Parnissen last summer when she and her husband Michael stopped by The Missouri Review’s summer launch party. I can’t remember how the conversation started, but we talked for a solid half-hour about … well, a little bit of everything, with that effortless rhythm that happens when I speak to someone genuinely interesting. And it is also really wonderful to know that there is a writer here in Columbia not immediately connected to the university, and thriving with her own work.
Keija has just released her deubt novel, The Ruins of Us, on Harper Perennial. Calling her a local writer is only half-accurate: she’s lived in Saudi Arabia, Texas, New Jersey, Iowa, and now, right here in Columbia where, among other things, she runs the Quarry Heights Workshop. Between flying around the country to give readings and celebrate her book publication with her family and friends, she took the time to sit down and answer a few questions for TMR about her new novel.
TMR: When asked about his famous character, Emma Bovary, Flaubert said “Madame Bovary, she is me.” I’m sure you get lots of questions about how autobiographical your characters are. What elements of yourself do you see in Rosalie? In Abdullah? In Faisal? In Miriam?
Parssinen: While I find it irksome that people assume every work of fiction is autobiographical, Flaubert’s quote gets at the heart of the matter—obviously he’s not a housewife who embarks on a disastrous adulterous affair, but it is he who breathed life into Emma and established her emotional and psychological being. In that way, the author is every character in her book, for she is their creator. So while Rosalie, Abdullah, Miriam, Dan, and Faisal are removed from my biography by virtue of our differences in age, religion, provenance, and in some cases, sex, they are born of my imagination, cultivated from my knowledge of pain, joy, betrayal, love. They are, indeed, me.
TMR: How did you decide to expand your narrative outside the family to Dan Coleman? Why does Isra not also get her own storyline?
Parssinen: The novel actually began as Dan’s story because I felt most comfortable writing in his voice. He’s the battle-hardened expat living as a stranger in a strange world, and I’d known his kind, both within my family and without. I wanted him to serve as the novel’s Nick Carraway, to observe the family in turmoil and report to the reader from a distance. But of course, as Nick and Dan both discover, the observer inevitably becomes enmeshed in the storyline, and that’s where things get tricky. To me, Isra is the catalyst of the narrative but she is unimportant to it—she reveals the cracks in the façade, but she’s peripheral. And while I found her an interesting character—an educated, progressive Arab woman who agrees to become a second wife—there was no room for her voice in this already-crowded story. Much of the book dwells on what it means to be an outsider, and she truly is one, even down to her authorially-enforced silence.
TMR: What was the most difficult scene to write and why?
Parssinen: I nearly cry every time I read the scene between Dan and Rosalie on the dune, when they’re talking about their failed marriages and whether love is worth it. My parents divorced and it was immensely painful for me and my siblings; even though my parents are now back together, none of us kids has fully recovered from that early pain. It was my first real experience with loss, after leaving Saudi Arabia—and to imagine through Dan and Rosalie’s dialogue the pain of negotiating lost love was excruciating for me, but it also helped me understand my parents’ decisions and work towards forgiving them.
TMR: Often in novels, there are storylines and even characters that have to be “cut” in order to make the novel work. Would you please share one or two things that you had to make the hard choice on, and eliminate from the book?
Parssinen: Thankfully, I didn’t have to cut any of my major characters, but I did have to eliminate pages and pages of character rumination. My poor agent and editor, drowning in all those swirling thoughts and wondering how the devil to create a sense of pacing! They were both very honest with me—“Look, Dan is becoming a HUGE drag, could you please just pep him up a little bit, have him actually do something instead of just be sad and ponder his losses?” I probably cut 40 pages of Dan, pages where I really liked the writing and the mood created and had carefully constructed each sentence. It was incredibly tough but absolutely necessary to excise those parts.
TMR: Do you consider Rosalie and Abdullah’s marriage a “failed marriage”?
Parssinen: Yes, but not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine (his taking a second wife, etc). It failed for those most mundane reasons: they stopped communicating with each other and became complacent within the marriage. And while the second wife presents obvious problems (!) for the union, it had started to die before her emergence on the scene.
TMR: Writers read diversely. The books that are recommended in the back of The Ruins of Us are thematically similar. Take your readers in another direction: what is one book that you recommend and love that is completely different from your writing?
Parssinen: Great question! I love Yannick Murphy’s recent novel, The Call. In it, she experiments with form while telling the story of a Vermont veterinarian’s family living in a creaking old house in the countryside. She takes incredible structural risks, novelistically, and somehow manages to pull off a story that is emotionally resonant and incredibly funny. Though on the surface of things, it’s a domestic, pastoral story, it’s pure magic. I plan to read all of her earlier work, I loved it so much!
If you’re a Columbia resident, Keija’s book launch party here in town is free and open to the public: this Saturday, January 28th, at 7:00 pm, swing by Orr Street Studios and meet her, buy the book (what—you haven’t already?!), and hang out for a few hours. If you’re not in Columbia, skip over to Keija’s site to find out when she is coming to your town and, of course, snag a copy of her book.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
Violence of the Lambs; Or Why I Didn’t Write About That
There was more. I was going to write about book reviewing, and my general sense of discomfort with book reviewing, which stems almost entirely from a lack of confidence to write reviews in a coherent and intelligible manner that would be useful or interesting to anyone. I was going to write about James Frey, and teaching undergraduates, and the difference between reading a single essay and a collection of essays, and probably some other subjects that would all tie together neatly for a pretty good Friday read for you, our blog reader.
Here’s the thing. I couldn’t finish it. Or, I could, I guess – did, in fact – but I wasn’t pleased with the result. It was a colossal mess of tangents and half-baked thoughts, and it seemed like a disservice to publish it the way it turned out.
It’s warm here – frighteningly warm for Missouri in February – and I have my windows open, again. All morning yesterday I read manuscripts. I haven’t done that in a while. Downstairs, on the third floor, TMR has a few couches and a coffee maker, and I put my feet up on a table, tucked a pen behind my ear, and read fiction submissions. Away from my desk, away from my computer, away from my phone (both office and mobile, which I wisely left upstairs). Felt fantastic. Felt really great to spend the morning just looking for stuff for the summer issue, reading other writers’ work, stories about Russian dancers or out of work truck drivers or the daughters of war veterans and such, and not really thinking about our audience, our budget, our expenses and income, advertising, none of the other stuff that is often pinballing through my mind in the course of the day.
I felt all right, reading like that.
Someone close to me recently remarked that I never say anything personal in my blog posts. Note, even, how carefully I phrased that previous sentence. Of course, that’s now what my site is for. But this person was right: I’m careful about this blog. It’s been one of the most successful things we’ve done since I started at The Missouri Review—our staff has written several thoughtful, smart, engaging essays on this site in the past two years, and our mantra has basically been to not be negative; remain about publishing, editing, writing; and be interesting. Writing about Sullivan’s work, I worried that I was getting increasingly negative and incoherent, upset about who knows what about his work, and that my post would be the kind of vitriol that our readers don’t want. Morever, the kind of vitriol I don’t like to write.
I bring this up because for almost a year and a half now, my personal life, especially this past month, has been a bit tumultuous (to put it mildly) and sitting in a chair reading this morning, I became aware of how much better I felt. Just in general. No grand epiphanies or realizations or anything like that; dark clouds will certainly move in later in the day (or tomorrow, soon, etc.). Writing about creative nonfiction and its ticks and whirls and wearing a cultural critic hat—it just didn’t feel right. No, it was more than that: it was a recognizable state of discord, both in head and heart, that I wanted nothing to do with. I just wanted to read.
When I was at River Styx, our rejection letters all started the same way: “Look. We’re all writers too, so we know how it feels.” That’s true, of course. But, what was making me a boiling cauldron of frustration yesterday afternoon was writing: not just the act of writing, but the criticism of writing and the Big Ideas behind criticism and interpretation and connectivity. What made me feel calm was reading, just reading, nothing more. And, really, why did any of us start writing in the first place? Because we read. And liked it. A lot.
It would be silly, of course, to have a rejection letter say “Look. We’re all readers too” because that seems pretty obvious, ironic in a hipster way or something, and perhaps even a little snide. Nonetheless, it might be more true to what unifies as, editors and submitters alike, than calling ourselves writers.
If I was clever, if I had my writing cap on, I’d be able to come up with a really snazzy close here. But I don’t. Moreover, I don’t want to attempt to tack this together neatly. The messiness of this post is what’s most interesting to me, and how, by taking a little time to not think, to read without thinking beyond the story in my hands. And, for today, I think that’s all I really want to focus on. I’ll leave it at that.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye