The Missouri Review

As a few of my students at Stephens College and graduate students here at TMR prepare to graduate in May, I am reminded of the film Reality Bites about a group of over-educated, underemployed Generation Xers in Houston, Texas in the early 1990s. Reality hit that generation hard as they graduated into a recession [...]

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I know why books of poetry don’t sell. I witnessed part of the problem last month when I attended a conference put on by Missouri’s Center for the Book. Several of the local poets who were invited to read had also signed up to have tables at the book fair to sell their [...]

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As a teacher, I actively avoid complaining about student writing. In my first short fiction writing class as a student, I recall struggling with the concept of conflict. It took me a semester to understand why writing an unflattering portrait of my roommate wasn’t story enough. I had never heard of a [...]

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I love clothes and have enjoyed the primaries and this election in part because all the candidates are so snappily dressed. We are well past the days when politicians were limited to power ties, button-down shirts and navy blue Brooks Brothers suits. Much of Washington has discovered designer duds.
Yet, female politicians and political [...]

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I’ve never been a baby person. More than that, I find baby lust a boring subject. There’s been a recent spate of movies about women whose biological clocks are ticking loudly, the alarm set to go off somewhere around forty. Baby Mama, Miss Conception, and Then She Found Me are three movies [...]

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Earlier this afternoon, almost running late for our weekly editorial meeting at The Missouri Review, I rode my bike hard along a stretch wooded trail. Walking toward me was a short white-bearded man in a straw Panama hat and tropical shirt and a very tall, fresh-faced nun in a full, modern-day habit. I [...]

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The best poetry is timeless and speaks to any age. Yeats’ often-quoted poem “The Second Coming” was written in 1920 in the aftermath of the First World War. He believed the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, a feeling that resonates today.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy [...]

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Why Enter Our Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize?
Our former poetry editor Jessica Garratt’s poetry collection Fire Pond has won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her book will be published by the University of Utah Press, and she will be reading in their upcoming guest writer series. Also Jessica will receive [...]

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It takes some pretty fancy foot work to forge over 400 literary letters and then get a book deal out of it as Lee Israel has done with her recently published memoir “Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger.”
In the 90s when Israel’s career as a biographer stalled she made a bold [...]

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According to Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History, the word “biography” was not coined in English until the late seventeenth century (the word is a Greek concoction meaning “life depiction”). Until a hundred years ago biography was relegated to inferior status in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a sub-branch of literature devoted to [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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As someone who heard throughout high school and college, “you’re nicer than I thought you were,” I grieve a little for Hillary Clinton every time a political analyst or primary voter brings up the L word-likeability-to say that she ain’t got it. 
At my high school in rural Missouri in the early 1980s, a rather average [...]

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About rewriting and editing the American playwright Tennessee Williams said, “You have to murder all your little darlin’s.” It’s been known for several decades that the editor Gordon Lish did more than slay a few precious lines in Raymond Carver’s 1981 story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In [...]

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On behalf of this year’s Editors’ Prize contest coordinators Jessica Garratt, Stephanie Carpenter and Darren Pine, we would like to thank everyone who entered this year. The quality of entries in all genres was exceptional, making reading fun but deciding on winners and finalists daunting. Around the office, we had many discussions about [...]

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I’ve been a fan of B.R. Myers since reading his essay “A Reader’s Manifesto” in the Atlantic Monthly in 2001 and have taught the piece to my creative writing students every semester since. Everyone likes their suspicions confirmed, and Myers provides cogent explanations . . .

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For the past three months, I’ve been romanced by a dead man. I met him this summer when I traveled to London to research for TMR at the British Library. There he was, dashing and handsome, in a folder of eight-by-ten glossies. And his entire life—his fears, hopes, ambitions, failures, and many successes—were available to [...]

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A couple of weeks ago, while my husband and I were in Conway, Arkansas, visiting his mother, we stopped by our friend Gene Hatfield’s house.  Gene is a retired professor of art at the University of Central Arkansas.  He is also known around town for his salvaged-art sculptures that fill his yard.  He retrieves children’s [...]

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One of my first workshops at the graduate level was led by a visiting poet who, emboldened by his temporary status, was, as my students might say, “off the chain” in class. 
He sat in a leather wing chair while our diminutive chair desks were arranged in a horseshoe snugly around him.  He was the self-assigned [...]

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One’s person’s kitsch is another person’s art, a fact that was most evident to me when I was attending college in Branson, Missouri in the early ‘80s. First there are the Hee Haw-style country music shows with their religious and patriotic jingoism. The area also celebrates the illustrator Rose O’Neill, who retired there [...]

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Okay, here’s the truth of my current reading habits.

More often than not, I prefer to read about writers rather than what they’ve actually written. Ann Charters’s Kerouac: A Biography instead of On the Road? You bet. Diane Middlebrook’s Anne Sexton, A Biography rather than Sexton’s poetry? Positively. Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Byron, Shelley [...]

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Flying to Durham, North Carolina, a couple of weeks ago for a summer seminar on Italian cinema (see last week’s blog), I was seated in the back of the plane, among a cluster of husky, garden-variety twenty-something boys. Not sufficiently engaged by my Mina Loy biography, I eavesdropped on their conversation as they [...]

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This summer I packed my book bag, sharpened my pencils, polished a few apples and went back to school, for three weeks anyway. I had been selected by the college where I teach to attend a seminar in Durham, North Carolina, on Italian cinema (first bad sign: I don’t know a thing about Italian [...]

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“Come here, you hoary sewer rat,” I said, patting my lap, encouraging my cat to jump up and get some long-deserved affection. As I stroked his ears, he purred to a litany of name-calling spoken in a dulcet tone.
If you think this is bad, you should hear how I talk to my husband, who I [...]

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For a mere admission price of 12.50 pounds (that’s $25.50), fans of Charles Dickens can now visit a theme park based on the author’s books and life in Chatham, Kent, England, where he spent most of his childhood [. . . .]

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