TMR Editors’ Prize
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Current Issue: 35.1 (Spring 2012)
Poem of the Week- David Kirby: “If Any Man Have an Ear, Let Him Listen”
- Larry Levis: “Labyrinth as the Erasure of Cries Heard Once Within It or: (Mr. Bones I Succeeded. . .’ Later)”
- Amy Newman: “The Day After The Dean of Michigan State College Admits Him To Lansing Sparrow Hospital For Rest, A Naked Theodore Roethke Barricades Himself Behind A Hospital Mattress”
Announcing the Winners of Missouri Review’s 2012 Audio Competition
We’re excited to share the news about a stellar group of winners for this year’s Audio Competition! Winners were chosen in collaboration with guest judge Julie Shapiro of the Third Coast Audio Festival. Stay tuned in the coming months for these pieces to be released as featured podcasts on TMR’s website.
Poetry
First Place: Chloe Honum “Spring”
Runner Up: Elijah Burrell “RC and Little Faye” and “Change of Song”
Prose
First Place: Beth Morgan “Sanderstown Testimonials”
Runner Up: Daniel DiStefano “The New Neighbor in Barnum and Bailey Retirement City”
Audio Documentary
First Place: Emma Weatherill “Nuns on Trial”
Honorable mention*: Rachel Coonce “A Brief Investigation into the Origins of a Cookie Memory”
Special thanks to Julie Shapiro, our many talented entrants, and to the TMR staff (especially our contest team and contest assistant Hannah Baxter) who made this year’s contest a success! Every year our contest grows, and the overall quality of the entries gets stronger, which makes choosing our winners very difficult. If you didn’t place this year, we hope you will consider submitting to the 2013 competition.
Last Refuge of the Scoundrel
The Scoundrel has been identified
There is, in a certain Nabokov story that I cannot quite place (and don’t want to, for reasons that will soon appear clear), a line that goes something like, “the square sound of a car door slamming.” In retrospect, Vlad the Encoder probably didn’t use the word “slamming”; it is so terribly gauche. But what I remember is nodding my head very violently when I read that line, and agreeing that, indeed, car doors slamming probably had a very square sound that emanated from the shape of the door itself. The reason I don’t want to know what story it was from, or what the context was (though from my understanding of the Internet, 4Chan will show up and inform us immediately) is that I love that phrase as and of itself. It has a musicality and a charm to it, a certain “rightness” that strikes the reader and leaves the critic’s heart cold, lonely, and desert-y (which, as it should be, is the holy grail of all true writers), and it floats just fine in the ether because it is a complete image, a complete line, and it needs nothing else to be.
I feel like everybody has some of those lines stuck in the brain, ear-worms that please us, that we can draw on from a lifetime of reading. I have also always been enamored of Wodehouse’s description of a butler displeased with his lord’s behavior: “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.” Again, I don’t know what book or story it’s from, or even the lord (or butler) in question. I remember from Primo Levi’s Lilith, “In the space of a few minutes the sky turned black and it began to rain.” Douglas Adams: “I think fish is nice, but then again I think rain is wet, so who am I to judge?”
Which is an unnecessarily complicated way of saying that, while reading, I appreciate and luxuriate at the level of the sentence, the building blocks of larger bits of prose. It’s a fraught relationship though, because for the last five years I’ve waged a war in workshops and in literature classes against Sentences (see what I did there with the capitalization? It means I’m saying something important. Graduate student tip). By which I mean that thing springing up around individual sentences when people sit solemnly in a circle and say things like “evocative sentence” or “he’s a terrible writer, but he does write a good sentence.” Michael Nye’s talked recently about the MFA story, and I think the Cult of the Sentence is one of the red-haired step-children of the MFA story. In that, in workshops, it’s very easy to point to a few good sentences and say, “well, at least they can write.” I think that microscopic focus often obscures larger, structural issues that people’s stories have; we miss the forest for the trees.
I’m not sure why this angers me so much. Maybe it’s because even when I like writing on a sentence level I still need it to do something for me on a larger level. I need not just a car door slamming but a car door slamming as a little breather while attempting to understand a depiction of the nature of evil. In other news: I’m curmudgeonly as all get out.
Recently though, I’ve begun to rethink my position on the Sentence. How much harm does a well-made sentence do? It exists, happily, in the world. It makes its creator happy. It presumably gives the reader a little pinprick of joy as they slog through an otherwise sleep-inducing story about a white, middle-aged man struggling with divorce and loneliness in a suburb or small town somewhere (or, in more recent variations: a girl in her 20s who is very quirky and that’s about it, or people being un-talkative in one of the Big Sky states while they commune with nature in personal or professional ways or unnecessarily Gothic takes on general malaise). Why attack the Sentence?
MFA Story
Because, godammit, no one reads anymore, and it’s because we all write boring stories, and people like “big” stories that tell us about entire lives and countries, that spread their canvas over the entirety of a nation or the world, that offer us intrigue and drama. You can’t do that in a sentence (Oh, here’s another one from Rushdie: “To know just one person you have to swallow the entire world”). A sentence is a nail; when you see the entire house you shouldn’t be paying attention to it.
Right.
But, here’s the thing. We live in an increasingly visual culture. Pictures are worth about a thousand words. People like David Simon are already spreading their canvases out and telling stories about the death of the American city, and you know, we can write about it, but let’s be honest: Omar jumps off the screen in a way that we would be hard-pressed to put on the page. And even if we did, could we write something that encompassed Omar & McNulty, but also found time for Carcetti, Clay Davis, Stringer Bell, Bubbles, and Snoop? Only if the book was really, really long.
Which is a way of saying that, as writers we’ve lost some of our cache as storytellers. The movies and television do a lot of that work for us now. What have we got left? The sentence. We can still write a good sentence, and it’ll give us the opportunity for a moment of communion with our reader that explains that we still have a place in the world. Look at the poets–they’ve been around for thousands of years precisely because they understood this. A good line is worth its weight in gold. And if everything else is taken from us, let’s remember that at least we have that. And not let the world slam the square car door on us as it escorts us out.
Save the sentence!
The Plight of Weird Fiction
Good writing, I posit, is like pornography: you know it when you see it. When it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s not that good, well, at least you’re reading. As a child, I devoured crap sci-fi and Dragonlance novels like they were a precious commodity of laser-guns and sorcery that might one day dry up like a salted slug. Even when I was taught that good writing was about character and feeling and that hard to grasp, tenuous human condition – not entirely plot or concept driven – I still wanted something to happen in the story; someone, please, die, or kill someone, or take up arms against your oppressor. Move, people. Get frightened by that ghost that actually is a ghost. Is that guy sleeping with your wife? You ought to punch him in the face.
I find it odd that I enjoy the works of Jane Austen, because very little happens in her novels besides, gasp, Mr. Wickham being naughty again and Mr. Darcy is scowling and everyone whispering behind their lace-gloved hands, but I chalk up the affection to a middle-school obsession with gossip. Or maybe I’m a product of years of schooling that have ingrained in me appreciation of things I normally would not seek out on my own. Though I still hate Great Expectations with a furor normally reserved for child-murderers, I can see why it’s in the canon, and why I was forced to read it in five different classes.
In March, Michael Nye wrote a blog for TMR that defined, I think very well, the MFA story: they’re often character sketches, and they avoid “cinematic plots” and “violence and melodrama”. I suppose we see enough of that on our screens and, as literary writers, we are supposed to avoid what is un-real. Our lives, to make a generalization, are not bodice-ripping romances, noir detective novels, or boogey-man-under-the-bed nightmares (if yours is, congratulations! And call me – I’m bored). I’m not entirely sure what literary fiction is “supposed” to be, and a definition would be disastrous, but it is something that we can recognize when we read it, and in terms of speculative stories, it’s a suggestion of internal struggle; the ghost is not a real ghost, it’s the narrators mind slipping off its shelf.
I was really pleased when reading The Missouri Review’s 2011 Winter issue to see an interview with one of my favorite authors, China Mieville, whose novel Perdido Street Station was a whirlwind of weird, steampunk and drug culture that I devoured one pleasant weekend and have not forgotten the thrill. The interview is smart, not least because Mieville tackles the question that speculative, genre-defying authors have to face when lit mags and publishers question their target audience: is this for the dum-dums who just like to read about explosions and blood, or is this a language piece? Does it have a deeper meaning once we’re done wading through the bodies?
To be frank, it’s patently unfair that writers who indulge strangeness have to justify their work to either audience as if it was something new that had not been done before, something that has to carve its face into the Mount Rushmore of ‘acceptable’ literature. The world, after all, is a very strange place, and we think and speak in metaphor, calling on the abstract to better understand the real. Thank heavens we don’t have to dig up Mary Shelley’s body and have her defend Frankenstein to us: After all, Mary, did you really need to use a man made of dead parts? Couldn’t you have had your infamous doctor give his wife some bad medicine, and have a baby come out deformed? It would probably make more sense if the kid grew up, instead of the well-articulated five year old monster with greater powers of self-reflection than I can never hope for. Yet it’s that monstrous body we imagine, sewn up of dead parts, that sticks with our imagination and frightens us still today, that same body that could not be so dreadful, so pitiful, unless that gruesomeness is there.
I always wonder about the lyrical pieces, which I confess to enjoy and even dabble in, but when nothing happens except the movement of language I feel somewhat cheated at the end. An entire story of a man staring at a ketchup packet thinking about the thrill of hum-dummery in what is prose-attempted blank verse? Sure, it’s a neat exercise, but I’d probably remember it more if he got up and talked to someone. Or punched someone in the face.
To say that the literary world is crossing its fingers to ward away the evil of fantasy and science fiction is a gross misrepresentation, of course, since many fine magazines will publish weird fiction, and some are entirely dedicated to stories of princess and princes, witches and magic (Thanks, Fairy Tale Review!). But there is an unspoken backing away, a narrowing of eyes, a baited breath when the stories come up: Is this the kind of thing we publish? And, if so, will we be defined by the weird, open up the floodgates of myth and violence and hyperbolic romance.
The one writer I not-so-secretly adore but whose name is something of a dirty word in certain communities, best-selling writer of weird Stephen King, is at the crux of my debate. For some reason or another, possibly because the literary writer should not be enjoyed by the masses but only for a select few trained to understand good work, and because literary fiction just isn’t supposed to sell that much, he is that throw-away author we avoid when looking at one another’s dating profiles: “He READS, best-girlfriend Suzie-Q! And not trite like Stephen King!”. I always wonder if people who revile him have actually sat down and read one of his stories or if they know he’s the go-to bad writer they can easily tick off and everyone knows who you’re talking about. And why does everyone think he’s terrible? I think he’s a pretty damn good writer with attention to language and lyricism, tempered by a masculine Americanism that is fearless and unapologetic, and a sense for the weird, that the ghost can be our internal struggles to overcome trauma. But dammit, the ghost is often still a ghost, and it might tear out your spleen if you don’t struggle against it. And let’s face it, it’s fun.
Lately, the big sellers have been Vampire romances, werewolf romances, boy-wizard-against-thinly-veiled-Nazism, and a girl with a bow caught between two boys and a dystopian future that seeks to destroy her. And yes, most if not all of them are poorly written because we don’t give children enough reading comprehension credit, but the stories themselves, taken at face value, are pretty good. Not so much the vampire romance, but the others have merit. People love these things, and it’s not because it’s anything new, but there has always been a place in our imagination for weird, for wary science fiction and romance and overly-masculine brutes spitting tobacco while holstering their old-timey pistol. I’m hoping the popularity of these stories bleeds upward, that this trend continues, and we, with our steady pens and quick minds, can take these stories further, muddle them, and make something better than high school girl can’t decide between brunette or blond, oh, and one of them happens to have fangs. But he doesn’t bite, no. Not before marriage.
What If There Were No Winners?
This year, the Pulitzer Foundation decided that there was no single book worthy of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. This is not uncommon: nine times the Pulitzer Prize Board has decided that no work of fiction is worthy of this honor. The expected response from the public came forth. Gawker said that Pulitzer Prizes are worthless. Writers everywhere linked to Ann Patchett’s commentary in the New York Times. Publisher’s Weekly detailed the numbers on what kind of boost a Pulitzer Award is for book sales: small press publishers salivated at those figures while insiders at the Big Six publishing houses considered those exact same numbers as relatively small. Many writers took a public “Who cares about a Pulitzer?” stance while privately wishing they had been the winner.
So, that got me thinking: What if a literary magazine pulled a Pulitzer and refused to declare a winner in its prize?
It isn’t uncommon for a book prize to not award a winner . This oldie but goodie from Poets & Writers details a specific decision made in 2006 by Winnow Press, but it also touches on the Yale Series in Poetry and others. Those are book prizes, however, which are just a little bit different from the literary magazine world. You should check out the newest Poets & Writers as they dive a bit more into this subject.
Literary magazines run contests all the time. Almost every magazine, regardless of size, has a contest. Usually for a prize of around $1000, an award is given in one specific category (and often more than one, say fiction and poetry), a writer pays an entry fee (anywhere from $10 to $25) which will often get the writer a one-year subscription to the magazine. A few months later, the winner is announced, and the prize-winning manuscript is published in a forthcoming issue of the journal.
Has a literary journal ever refused to award a contest prize? I’m sure it has happened, but I couldn’t think of one. I asked Travis Kurowski, a founding editor of Luna Park Review and author of a forthcoming book on the literary magazine, and he pointed to only one example: when Zadie Smith refused to award a winner in the Willesden Herald Short Story Prize in 2008. Beyond that, I couldn’t come up with any examples of this happening with a literary magazine. Why is that?
Let’s use The Missouri Review as an example. Our 22nd Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize is now open for submissions. Our deadline is October 1st, and we have already received entries. This is the time of year when we start advertising for the contest. Our first mailing goes out this week. We review the various promotional venues, both in print and online, and decide on a budget. We consider where previous entrants said they heard of our contest (if they gave us this information) and decide if we need to find new venues, stick with the old ones, or try new ones.
During the summer, our promotional push is a little bit lighter: we don’t wish to be a nudge! But when the fall semester starts in late August, the deadline is six weeks away. Our contest editor gets cracking. Postal mailings, emails, blog post, tweets. We dedicate three of our interns to the contest. Everything that rolls in needs to be processed: all payments verified, addresses logged, type of subscription (print or digital), whether this is a newer subscriber or old. All the entries need to be recorded, marked, and set in the right location (print goes in one mail bin; online submissions get routed to reading folders). As the deadline nears, we do everything we can to contact as many people as we can to make sure that we get all those entries: we don’t want to miss out on any great writing simply because someone didn’t know about it.
Once the deadline is over, we need to read all the entries. How many do we receive? A low-end figure is 2500. We have roughly eight weeks to read all 2500 entries. We cull that down to a list of “semi-finalists” in each category: call it 50 in each of three genres. Then we read them again. And again. And again. And argue, debate, implore, pontificate, beg, reconsider, and thoughtfully “hmmm” our way to the final choices, which then go to Speer Morgan, our editor-in-chief.
Winners are selected, notified, and then we have more work to do. There’s a tight deadline for us to proof, edit, and layout each piece, which goes along with the other pieces in our issue, and we don’t know in advance how many that will be (in the last three years, the quality of entries means we typically are publishing several finalists in each category … which means we really don’t know the content of our spring issue until early January). We also need to make travel and venue arrangements because we bring our winners into Columbia for a reading and a reception, which is one of our showcase events for our community each spring.
Our contest is really a continuous all-year event. This isn’t necessarily true of all literary magazines, of course, but the amount of administrative, marketing, and editorial time is probably at least six months for any other journal … and often they have a much smaller staff and smaller financial resources.
Now: what if went through that entire process and in early January declared there was no winner? Or, if we said there was only a winner in two categories but not a third?
A few years ago, our Audio Competition had a video category. We didn’t receive a ton of submissions for the video category, and after reviewing everything and discussing it internally, we made the hard decision to not award a winner. We wrote a letter to each entrant, explaining our decision, and that while each entrant would still receive the one-year subscription to our magazine, we would return the entry fee. Still, we received some very nasty, threatening emails and phone calls about this decision.
Imagine if we did that in poetry. Poets might have the smallest audience in the world of writers when compared to Famous Authors on the large presses. But, boy, are they fierce and pushy about their work! (The good folks at Barrelhouse say it pretty succinctly with this t-shirt) The blowback would be tremendous. One of the benefits of being in the (comparitively) small world of literary magazines and journals is that it’s a supportive community, where the connections are not casual. Telling our writers that collectively their work isn’t good enough could have some nasty consequences.
The amount of time, labor, and financial investment that goes into running a good contest gives a literary magazine a strong incentive to declare a winner, which is not necessarily true of a small press or the Pulitzer Foundation. We’re very fortunate that this isn’t really an issue. The quality of the work TMR receives is always quite high; we never look at the finalists and think “Ugh.” One can credit the Program Era for this one—MFA programs have produced terrific writers over the last thirty years, and as far as magazines go, particularly in the last decade, entries to our contest have been terrific.
Another problem with saying “No winner!” is administrative. We’re at the University of Missouri, and when it comes to mailing out checks (we are not permitted to use PayPal or similar services), there is a lot of paperwork. A lot of paperwork. We would need to collect every social security number from every entrant. We would need a permanent mailing address. We would need to type all this up, send it off to one of the, oh, seventeen departments that verifies all this information, and then it all needs to be processed, mailed, received, cashed.
On the purest level, we always have good work from which we can select a winner. But there are clearly other considerations, too: public relations, administration, human resources, time and labor, all of that good stuff. On our end, this type of decision isn’t made lightly. And incentives will always shape the planning, development, and execution of every organization.
Back to Patchett and the Pulitzer Foundation. What incentive does the Pulitzer Board have to awarding a winner? I’d say almost none. They didn’t write the books. Nominees pay $50 to submit the work. Publicity? They probably get more by saying “there is no winner” and getting a response from a Famous Author like Ann Patchett written in the New York Times about it rather than awarding the prize to a posthumous book by an author who died four years ago. Patchett wrote, “With book coverage in the media split evenly between “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “The Hunger Games,” wouldn’t it have been something to have people talking about “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s posthumous masterwork about a toiling tax collector (and this year’s third Pulitzer finalist)?”
Really? Isn’t the public talking about Suzanne Collins and E.L. James for, well, every reason other than the quality of the book? Sure, all three are books, but in many ways, the comparison of James and Collins to Wallace is almost apples to oranges.
It’s one of the reasons that literary magazines thrive: we respect the audience and the work, the writer and the reader. We have an incentive to do so, and we want to do so. What incentive does the Pulitzer Board have to declare a winner? What do they want from a reading public?
I have no idea. I’m not sure they do either.
Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye
Reading Without Care: The Depthless Culture of Ebooks
With the recent lawsuit against Apple and some of the major publishers, it may seem like some are trying to keep a dying industry alive. But here is what people who get angry about price-fixing and “expensive” ebooks don’t realize: the cost of production of ebooks is only 10% less than the cost of production of the same book in print. The thing that people forget is that when you buy a book the majority of your money does not go to a publisher: it goes into writing and editing content: it goes to authors and the people who help them refine their craft. There is a difference between those who write and those who sell, and ebook’s real service is to those who sell.
The internet has convinced people that content is free: that once it is written, they should get it fast and without having to pull out their wallets before moving onto the next item popping up on the screen. This is fine for some things, like personal twitter statuses, or news that becomes old two days after it breaks. That is content that matters now but not later. But what happens when we try to put something like literature on a screen; when we start treating an author’s hard-wrought stories and livelihood like information that can be deleted faster than it took to download?
Perhaps it all comes down to sentimentality and whether or not our emotional attachment to physical books has any value.
As a hopeful writer, the prospect of all my hours of hard work, self-hatred, and personal triumph being read on a screen and never an actual book seems like a huge slap in the face. Maybe it’s just because I want all the hours I will have spent writing instead of working at a job that provides basic health care to pay off and to mean something to other people. This may seem like a worthless idea in a society currently fixated on the price of gold, but let’s look at the value of sentimentality from a reader’s point of view.
For the reader it’s not just sentimental attachment to the experience of holding a book and smelling the pages; it’s a love and a sense of reverence for the experience you share with the author and everyone else who has read that book before you. Screens promote selfishness; they don’t beg you to think of other people: they’re personalized devices that only you control and see. When you buy someone a book for Christmas you buy him or her a hard copy, wrap it in pretty paper, and put it under the tree. You don’t tell them your credit card number so they can download The Hunger Games onto their Kindle or iPad. Ebooks take the community and the bond out of books. People don’t lend friends their Kindles; you lend paperbacks and don’t get too upset when they are never returned because they have a new home now.
When I was young, after I got past the phase of Nancy Drew and Goosebumps, I began asking my father for reading suggestions. He would walk me to an old, closed bookcase his grandfather had made and pull from it a book he or my mother had owned and loved for years. With the book he would give me one understated line like, “Now here’s a real adventure story,” for The Hobbit or, “I’ll be really impressed if you can make it through that one” for Gravity’s Rainbow.
Also, this guy probably shouldn't be allowed near Kindles
I would sit by that bookcase and read the shelves and shelves of titles, imaging all the stories my parents had collected, and all the work I would have to put in to learn everything they knew and more. And I was excited by this task, not daunted, because their physical form in my great grandfather’s bookcase made these books a part of my family, not just a reading list.
There is an importance to the permanence of something printed on paper rather than digitized on a screen. Books need time to grow, to grow meaning and love between the author and readers. Putting books on a screen and reducing them to cost of production seems like the inevitable capitalist outcome of the writing industry, but it’s not. That sentimentality behind reading a hardcopy has value for the consumer, but it’s a long-term investment. Reading and writing is about making connections and remembering all the places you still have to go for years to come, a sentiment that could potentially be forgotten on a screen. I have never made it through Gravity’s Rainbow but every night I fall asleep with it on the shelf next to my bed, and it is a constant reminder of where I came from and who I am trying to be.
Facebook statuses, news blogs, tumblers, stumble upons, tweets, pintrests, memes, are all constantly updated on our screens so fast and so often that we simply can’t keep up and consider how it all got there. So we shrug and say, “It’s magic,” and move on because our lives demand it, but that mentality cannot be applied to writing because the ultimate consequence is the undervaluing of the author and the strenuous process of writing itself. If writers have to try to keep up with a fast and cheap online system, quantity, not quality, will be the necessary goal as the ability to feed ourselves becomes more dependent on replacing the story just deleted off of somebody’s Kindle instead of creating a work that will be loved and nestled in a family bookcase for generations to come.
This blog post is temporary; that’s the nature of these things. It seems important or convincing right now as you read it, but as soon as a new post is up, the relevant topic will change and mine will eventually get lost and forgotten in the enormous slush and invisibility of the internet. And that’s OK. It’s a blog post, it’s not meant to be permanent. But some things are. Some writing is more important than a free, quick read and deserves merit and visibility and a home of actual pages and binding. Sometimes good stories, essays, poems, and plays contain a very real and very intimate part of an author’s life and deserve to be remembered long after today and this year. By putting everything on a screen how do we know what we mistakenly make obsolete? How can a writer and good writing survive in a world where their words can so easily be deleted or clicked off a screen?
How I Became The Managing Editor at TMR
With the end of the spring semester, there is a new batch of freshly minted graduates of the University of Missouri. Which means there is a new batch of anxiety about what to do after graduation. Around our offices, the bulk of our graduating students have majored in English, and have aspirations of working in publishing, or being writers, or teaching (often abroad, or anywhere that isn’t Missouri), or some other nebulous concept that revolves around the printed word. All the excitement of finally graduating college and, for the first time since kindergarten, not having to go to school of gives way to the existential question of “Okay, now what?”
Weirdly, the anxiety isn’t all that different from graduates of MFA programs. These graduate students are inherently older, some by a few years, some by many years. And being a bit older, there are often other more complicated factors: careers put on hold or new careers started; family to consider, whether its your own parents or being a parent; envy of your friends that might have gone to the “real world” and are already having children and paying off home mortgages; life as an adjunct—even if a temporary one—staring you in the face.
A few months ago, I wrote about the “off-year” from undergraduate to graduate school, which for me became three years not one. All that still holds. But that just got me from one degree to the next. What about after that? One of my friends who works as an editor at one of the Big Six publishing firms told me that no one every grows up wanting to be an editor (I wonder if that’s true, actually, but another time on that topic …). I’ve had a few conversations with students who have wondered how I got this position with The Missouri Review, maybe out of politeness, maybe out of genuine curiosity. How, exactly, did I end up here?
My first experience with literary magazines was in graduate school. Natural Bridge, out of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is primarily student run. There is a rotating “guest editor” made up of the faculty on the MFA program, a managing editor who is a graduate student, and then a class (“Literary Journal Editing” is what I think it’s called) made up of graduate students who read all the manuscripts. I took the class because my friends were also taking the class and I got to read a bunch of stories. That was it!
Anyway, post-literary editing class, I thought reading manuscripts was fun, and wanted to keep doing it. Sophiscitated thought process, right? I applied for a job at River Styx, a magazine out of St. Louis that was looking for a managing editor. It was a part time job, three days per week, twelve hours only … and I didn’t get the job. So, instead, I volunteered to read fiction manuscripts. Six months later, the managing editor quit, and Richard Newman, the magazine’s long-time editor, offered me the job, which I did for five years.
River Styx isn’t a big shop: it’s the editor, the managing editor, and a bunch of volunteers. And it was awesome. We were on the twelfth floor of a building that was a hodgepodge of city services. Arts organizations like River Styx shared a large open area on the twelfth floor: we were up there with the Bach Society, Springboard for Learning, Dance St. Louis, and a few organizations that had signs on the door but never seemed to have anyone there. The windows rattled on windy days. Once, the toilet overflowed (“geysered” seems like a better word), flooding our floor and the elevator shafts. We had used furniture. There was a smell.
Magazine editors do more than read manuscripts, a fact that now seems really obvious to me, but at the time I started with River Styx, I didn’t really know. There is the editing of the manuscript: most don’t come to any magazine perfect, and they all need copy edits, line edits, sometimes even developmental edits. Interns and volunteers need work to do: they need to be assigned tasks, and the person assigning those tasks (read: me) better know how to evaluate if the work is done right. Lots of mail: manuscripts, bills, taxes, query letters, withdrawals, requests for donations. I wrote grants, and discovered how that world works. Board meetings. Printer issues. The postal service. Distribution. Manuscripts got read when they could, but there was so much more that goes into running a magazine and keeping it relevant, keeping the world interested in you, then I realized. And I’m leaving a ton of stuff out.
All this while trying to write stories and my novel and teaching three classes per semester between Missouri-St. Louis and Washington University. Which is, to state the obvious, not nearly as hard as many other people have it.
Five years later, River Styx was in new digs at the Centene Center, and both dealing with the exact same issues and stronger than ever. My girlfriend and I made the move to the University of Missouri, one hundred miles west, for her to enter graduate school. My plan? To continue my adjunct teaching in St. Louis during the week, then drive back to Columbia on the weekend, and keep this up until I found something full time in my new town.
From my years in St. Louis, I knew quite a few poets and asked them who they knew in Columbia, who I could look up and say hi to. Oh, yeah, they said: look up my friend Katy Didden. Oh, yeah, look up my friend Darcy Holtgrave. Which I did, getting over my anxiety about emailing a total stranger out of the blue and asking if we could get a cup of coffee. Five minutes into that conversation, explaining who I was and what I was about, I was told that the managing editor at the Missouri Review had just left.
Whoa.
This might have been the easiest job letter to write ever. Dear TMR: I live in your town! I just moved here! Your people told me about the job! I love your magazine! I have experience! Lots! You should hire me, like, today!
And come January of 2010, I was TMR’s new managing editor.
This is a blog post, and a brief one (for me, at least), and there are about a hundred other things that happened over the course of those six years that got me here. But one of the things that I want to stress, that I’ve stressed to my students that have asked “How did you get here?” is that I had no plan. Really. It really came down to liking to read stories. Stories were found in manuscripts; manuscripts were mailed to journals; journals need staff. I didn’t want to write grants, manage a staff, think about circulation, fund raising, stuff like that. I just wanted to read. Discovering that all that other stuff is actually pretty interesting to (despite any groaning and moaning I might make on any given Tuesday morning) was accidental.
There’s not a road map. As a neat, organized person, I’m not always comfortable with this idea but it’s what I’ve found to be true over the last few years. Follow your passion, and things work out. Probably some Zen Buddhist stuff in there, but, well, you know.
I’m not sure where many of our current editors and interns who are leaving us will end up. They probably don’t know either. What I stress to them is to keep in touch—I can’t emphasis this enough—and to get involved in the literary community wherever they are. Maybe there’s a job. Maybe there’s an open mic, a reading series, a good bookstore. Whatever it is, come to it with enthusiasm, generosity, and true interest. You never know where it will lead.
Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye