Monthly Archives: December 2011

Winners of the 2011 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize

December 20, 2011 by Michael | Comments Off

We are delighted to announce the winners of our 21st annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.  Let’s get to it!

Fiction

Winner: Yuko Sakata of Madison, WI for “Unintended”

Finalists:

Jessica F. Kane of New York, NY, for “The Essentials of Acceleration”

Thomas Pierce of Charlottesville, VA, for “Grasshopper Kings”

Bart Skarzynski of Columbus, OH for “Project X”

Poetry

Winner: David Kirby of Tallahassee, FL

Finalists:

Steve Gehrke of Reno, NV

Cynthia Marie Hoffman of Madison, WI

Mark Wunderlich of Catskill, NY.

Essay

Winner: Peter Selgin of Winter Park, FL, for “The Kuhreihen Melody”

Finalists:

May-Lee Chai of San Francisco, CA, for “The Blue Boot”

Mako Yoshikawa of Cambridge, MA, for “My Father’s Women”

Dave Zoby of Casper, WY, for “Leftovers, 1993”

We received over 2500 manuscripts this year, and the overall quality was extraordinarily good, making our decision a difficult one.  This is of course a good thing: selecting winners of a contest should never be easy, and it certainly wasn’t for us.  We’re very thankful to all the writers who entered this year. TMR is only as good as the work we publish, and we are grateful that so many writers sent us their very best work.

We were particularly thrilled to find out, after we accepted her work, that “Unintended” will be Yuko Sakata’s first published story!

I also want to say “Thanks!” to our staff. Promotion of the Editors’ Prize began in May, months before we get the chance to even start reading the submissions. Also, there is the never-ending amount of administrative work that goes into promoting the contest. Then we had to make the tough decisions on semi-finalists, finalists, and making the recommendations for our winners. And, we pulled it off! All of this was done successfully only because of our contest editor, Claire McQuerry, who did all the hard work behind the scenes to make our contest a huge success. Her staff was once again tremendous this year. Thank you to all the editors, advisors, and interns who made it happen.

We’re making plans right now for our Editors’ Prize weekend, our annual spring reception and reading honoring the winners of the contest. Details will be forthcoming as soon as we lock down the date. The 2012 Editors’ Prize issue will be out in April. I’m positive you’ll find these stories, poems, and essays as engaging and memorable as we did.

Congratulations to Yuko, David, and Peter!

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

What is Read and What is Remembered

December 20, 2011 by Joe Aguilar | 1 Comment

In U and I, Nicholson Baker writes about the books of John Updike without actually looking back to reference the books of John Updike. Sometimes Baker tries to quote Updike from memory. He doesn’t do a good job of it, almost on purpose it seems, though footnotes are included so readers can look at Baker’s corrupted recollection of Updike side by side with Updike’s actual words. It’s funny, of course. Nicholson Baker is funny. In U and I, a lot of the humor comes from how much precision Baker devotes to his enormously imprecise task. 

U and I brings up questions about brains and texts: What stays with the reader when the book is done? What determines what remains? What does it mean to write about the “anxiety of influence” while (as Baker does) aggressively refusing to read Harold Bloom, the guy who popularized the term? To what degree do we warp the memory of what we love to our own image? How do people enact texts with their bodies?

Like Baker, Billy-Billy Jump, the narrator of Rudy Wilson’s 1987 novel The Red Truck, wants to know how the intangible carves itself into the tangible. He thinks, at one point, “Our brains have lines on them from what we do…Probably born smooth and then the ditches began” (108).

I learned about Rudy Wilson only a couple of years ago. My MFA thesis advisor told me about Rudy, with whom she went to MFA school. Her writing professors would praise Rudy’s stories so highly that other student-writers started to feel jealous of what he could do.

When I found out that Ravenna Press had reprinted The Red Truck, I ordered it online. I read it and I read it again. I ordered Sonja’s Blue. I searched Abebooks.com for literary journals with more stories of his. I tried to find his novella A Girl Named Jesus but I couldn’t. I wrote a short note about Sonja’s Blue on Goodreads, the only review of Sonja’s Blue on Goodreads (which is ridiculous).  Rudy saw it and he emailed me a message to say hello, and we emailed each other a few times, and I felt happy.

Now I am going to write about The Red Truck without looking back at the book.

I remember the narrator Billy-Billy, as a child, remembering an old merry-go-round. He thinks about it, sitting there in the dark, shiny, and then this sentence happens (I think): “Wind blew on it.” When I first read that, I couldn’t believe a sentence had been used just to say, “Wind blew on it.” It is amazing! Later, Billy-Billy is being held in the air by his father (I think) against a sky full of light, and Billy-Billy says (I think), “He held me. He looked at me.” It’s heartbreaking in its simplicity, but the precision is vital to the meaning–the act of father holding son and the act of father seeing son are miraculous enough alone; to inflate the language into anything more would clutter the import of the action. I remember a sex scene between Teddianne and Billy-Billy, built mostly (I think) with prepositions and uncertain objects and lines like (I think) “She was naked underneath,” and somehow through its surgical omission the scene grows so deeply and embarrassingly private that I recognize its truth, unfettered. I remember the color yellow, Teddianne painting herself yellow and painting Billy-Billy yellow, all the color, everywhere, and the light, and the hands of people, touching each other. I remember how Billy-Billy’s little brother Ned falls purple and dead out of the icebox that the two children get trapped in for too long and afterward Billy-Billy says (I think), “I was still alive; my lungs were bigger.” I remember how I called my little brother on the phone soon after I read that. I remember how I cried at the end of the book at the last line (I think), “Sometimes I lift my eyes to look out the window at the sea.”

I rarely read books more than once, but I’ve read The Red Truck so many times. Rudy Wilson’s writing is tangible. It’s big and bright, and fever-like. I don’t exactly put The Red Truck down; it’s more like I wake up from it.

What stays with you after you’ve finished a book? Which books have you read more than once, and what does it take for you to read a book again, and again?

On The Recent Semester Teaching Creative Writing

December 12, 2011 by Michael | Comments Off

This is finals week of the autumn semester at the University of Missouri, which means it is also the last week I’m teaching my Intro to Fiction Writing class. Today, my students will turn in a revision of one of the two stories they wrote this semester, or a third, brand spankin’ new story. Then we will be done.

I don’t know when I will teach fiction writing again. This is not by choice. I requested English 1510 this semester, was lucky enough to snag it, and was told even then to not expect to receive this course ever again. This is not about because of my ineptitude as a teacher (I hope) but because typically the managing editor teaches English 1000, a freshman composition class. I was told that I was given creative writing only because of how many people were on sabbatical and unavailable. Don’t expect to get again, they said. Well, then!

Since this might be it with teaching creative writing for a while, here are a few things I took away from my class this semester:

–I haven’t read Harry Potter and they haven’t read Moby Dick. Perhaps the one thing that can be guaranteed in a writing class is that the instructor has read more than the students (digression: some of you are thinking “Actually, I know that’s not true” and I’m nodding along glumly). When I was an undergraduate, I often felt embarrassed because my teachers all referred to novels and stories and poems that I had never heard of, and because of this, I not only missed crucial points of their lectures but also felt that I was unqualified to be in their class. Insecurity, and all that. This semester, I’ve usually found that talking about films is the best way of proving a point: there’s a better chance of my students having seen a particular film, and since films are generally narrative like novels and stories, an easy-to-understand analogy could often be drawn between movies and stories when I was trying to demonstrate a point about characterization, point of view, framing, dialogue, setting, and so forth.

In class, I’ve lamented the fact that we need movies to teach us about writing fiction, but perhaps seeing these links isn’t a bad thing at all. We make do with what we got—what good, really, does it do to expound on A Separate Peace or Revolutionary Road or Underworld if my students haven’t read those books?—and it also might, I hope, make us all realize that writing doesn’t live in a vacuum. We’re shaped and formed by our greater culture, not just pop culture, but film, music, painting, sculpture, dance, and the like.

–Be honest about what they write and what they read. This might seem obvious, but too often I’ve had and heard about creative writing teachers cheerleading more than teaching. Hey, if the work isn’t good, how does it benefit the student to think otherwise?

–Style and ideas worry students more than substance. Style is, of course, significantly easier to mimic than substance. Mimicking a minimalist story is pretty easy. Having a surprise ending is pretty straightforward—withhold one crucial bit of information until the last page. This is how we all learn, though, isn’t it? I used to copy Fitzgerald stories in order to learn how he made his sentences dance; I wrote an entire book in response to a Charles Baxter novel. It’s a terrific way to discover that one doesn’t really sound like anyone else: I sound like me, my students sound like themselves.

More than once this semester, a student said “I have an idea for a story! *insert idea here* Do you think that would work?” To which I always answered, “It could. You should write it and find out.” In time, I think they’ll learn that all the bells and whistles on the page can’t cover a story that wholly lacks an emotional core. Perhaps they too already knew it. By now, I hope they definitely know it.

–Grading stories helps. I’ve gone back and forth on this over the years, but I think that I’m generally on the side of putting grades on student stories. I hear you: how can you tell this story is a B+ rather than a C-? My first response to that question is: really? In conversation with every colleague about writing workshops, we know which students are the best writers. This does indicate that there is some criteria, however difficult it might be to articulate, as to why something is “better.”

Students at a university receive these things called grades, and grades, more than anything, get their attention. I wrote a criteria for story grades on my syllabus, explaining why grades are given on their work, and, no, an A story is not perfect or necessarily complete. Grading gives the students an understanding that those elements of fiction I lectured about way back in September are not suggestions, but things that must be considered seriously when constructing a story.

–Stories may not change, but I do. I used a mixture of stories each semester, combining stories I’ve read before and stories I haven’t. Fresh eyes, and fresh stories, are often beneficial to everyone. One good example is Dan Chaon’s “Big Me.” To be honest, I’ve always assigned it because it’s in the textbook and students seem to like it. I’ve always thought the story was competent, just not for me. But this time, for whatever reason, the story really hit me: the duality of the characters, the non-linear construction, the haunting of memory, the way Andy forgets large chunks of his past. What once struck me as pretty straightforward now seemed remarkably complex, tenuously but perfectly held together, sad and funny and strange all at once. None of this would have struck me if I hadn’t assigned it again.

There are others I’ve always thought were good for teaching but I’m not crazy about, and there are others that I adore that never seem to win over my students. And there is always at least one surprise story each semester that resonates with my students when I had expected they would dislike it. Which is always sorta fun to discover.

–Be generous. Two weeks ago, one of my first writing teachers, Melanie Rae Thon, was visiting MU, and I was asked to give the introduction to her reading. I thought of her teaching first, even before her books, since that’s how I first knew her. And what she gave us, always, was her time, her spirit, her belief that our work was worth reading. She was generous. This quality is not easy: there are too many constraints on our time, too many people and tasks pulling at us from all sides. To really be patient with a student’s story, to remember that the writer is still learning, can be easy to forget. Having a visit from one of the teachers who gently nudged me in the direction of the writing life was a nice reminder that beginning writers need, perhaps more than anything, an attentive reader and a pat on the back.

I hope I provided a little bit of both this semester.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye 

Audio Announcements

December 7, 2011 by Claire | Comments Off

Rachel Yoder: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Prose)

Greg Brownderville: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Poetry)

Ken Cormier: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Self-Recorded Documentary)

Anna Pinkert: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Professionally Recorded Documentary)

We’re excited about many of the new developments with our audio content here at The Missouri Review. We’re excited, for instance, that the opening of our 2012 audio competition follows closely on the heals of the addition of our (free) podcast feed to iTunes. If you’d like to have our weekly podcasts delivered to you, please sign up. And please, if you enjoy what you hear, give us a good rating on the iTunes site. Our podcast feed is so new that it hasn’t yet been rated.

As I already shared in a recent post, Julie Shapiro of the Third Coast International Audio Festival has agreed to serve as a guest consultant for our 2012 Audio Competition, joining TMR’s editors in the final judging round. This year, we’ve also streamlined the competition to three, simple categories–prose, poetry, and audio documentary—in an attempt to eliminate any confusion entrants experienced last year. And, we’ve improved the contest entry process. For your convenience, we now take MP3 recordings by email and accept online payments. (Submissions by mail are still acceptable as well). This should make the competition more economical to enter, especially for those submitting entries from overseas.

We wanted the renaming of our categories to convey that they are fairly open: in each we accept entries with multiple voice tracks, or with other tracks of sound or music, or simply good, clean recordings of entrants’ pieces. Any of these things are acceptable. The “prose” category includes any prose piece: fiction or nonfiction. “Audio documentary” is now open to professionally and non-professionally recorded pieces. Please see our audio contest site for full guidelines.

If you would like to check out previous contest winners and get a sense of the range of work our judges responded to favorably, you can find them in our recent podcasts. We’ve posted our four first-place winners from last year’s competition and plan to post entries from our first-runners up in the coming weeks. (So check back)!

 

Word Missouri: Happy belated birthday, Mark Twain

December 6, 2011 by davisdunavin | Comments Off

Head to KBIA to listen “Hannibal: living in the shadow of Twain,” a walk through one of America’s great literary meccas (during the off-season.)

Like a great white knight of Missouri lore, Mark Twain tends to pop his head up every now and then, just to ensure his legacy’s still intact. (It is.) 2010 was a big year for Twainiacs, as they’re probably called by someone, with the “Event”-style publication of the first volume of his autobiography. Last Wednesday was Twain’s 176th birthday, and this one was a little quieter. But earlier this year the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal released a compilation called “Mark Twain: Words and Music,” featuring an impressive lineup of country musicians performing songs about Twain and the voice talents of (seriously) Garrison Keillor, Clint Eastwood and Jimmy Buffett.

I went to Hannibal to find out what experts and everyday locals thought of living in a town famous for being home to one of America’s most complex literary minds and also home to, I’m not kidding, “Mark Twain Auto & Tire Repair.” This is their story.

On Wanting to Teach

December 1, 2011 by Molly Pozel | 1 Comment

My little brother told us over Thanksgiving that his ninth-grade French teacher is “New-Agey” in a voice that made him sound like somebody else’s conservative father. The term wasn’t exactly correct, especially after my older brother replied by recounting his bad experience with a creative writing professor who made the class sit on the floor. Now that’s New Age. My little brother said his teacher didn’t teach them any new vocabulary or require them to use a textbook. He felt unprepared for tests and next year’s course. But worse, he knew that he wasn’t learning French.

I’m writing this blog post from a literature class that I described as “completely pointless” over my plate of mashed potatoes. There’s no gimmick to this class and the professor is Old Age in more ways than one. Our class has a book, tests, and we sit in chairs, but I have the same complaint as my brothers; I don’t feel like I’m learning anything. We discussed our best and our worst teachers for most of dinner and we all recognized that crossed-legs, textbooks, or not, there was a distinguishable divide of good and bad. What seemed blurrier was how to measure the distinction and what exactly could make a student feel like they weren’t learning anything.

Before I misrepresent myself as an overly critical student in an end of semester slump, I’ll go ahead and reveal that I’m actually a terrified senior reaching post-graduate paranoia. I don’t want to attend graduate school and I don’t want to spend a couple of years backpacking. I want to be productive and engaged somewhere between these poles. I think I want to be a teacher. This has made hearing my little brother groan at his young teacher’s tactics make me want to just go get my MFA (no offense), something easier than being at the front of a classroom while a student rolls her eyes and continues typing a blog post.

I have had national teaching programs bookmarked on my computer for months and I have only mustered the courage to apply to a job writing copy for a clothing company in Los Angeles. I have no desire to go to Los Angeles. I only thought to apply after I read over the application to teach and felt too unqualified to do anything but online shop. I can participate easily in a conversation about the United States’ failing model for education, where systems lack in providing adequate degrees for teachers, how a student like my little brother is considered successful as long as he keeps his test scores up, but still leave his classroom wondering what the point was. When it comes to articulating a 200-400 word response on an application about what I would do in a hypothetical situation where inner-city middle schoolers won’t turn off their Ipods or sit up in their chairs, I remember that I don’t know what I would do.

Obviously there are legitimate reasons for asking a potential teacher about classroom distractions, but these hypothetical situations have Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, white savior connotations, which I want no part in. Both women played problematic roles in movies where they inspired classrooms of inner-city youth until they were obedient. I understand the important job of a teacher, but it’s not the most intimidating or enticing part of my desire to become one. I’m both a twenty-one-year-old and a Creative Nonfiction writer. I’m expected to be self-centered and it’s an expectation I don’t reject. I know how to get excited about reading and writing and learning. I want to be a teacher because I think it will be selfishly satisfying. As far as I could discern after three glasses of wine at Thanksgiving dinner, this want for self-fulfillment seems to be an indicator of a good teacher.

A selfish teacher isn’t distracted with being noble. I am more qualified and happier than most to talk about the fun, nuance, art, language, history etc. of storytelling. I want to impose my excitement on a classroom of students because this is what I want to talk about and what I believe is important. I will be obnoxious or weird, but as long as I don’t leave a day of school feeling empty, I don’t think that my students could either. I still haven’t completed an application, but if a student is listening to an Ipod, I guess I’ll tell them to turn it off.