The Missouri Review

I was riding my electric bike through the neighborhood last evening at the quiet hour.  No wind, no traffic, no hard pumping up the hills. A few people gardening in their front yards looked up and smiled as I tooled by.   And what was I thinking about?
The meaning of the suffix “-ate.”  Yes, that’s right.  […]

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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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[Tara Yellen is the author of the recently published novel After Hours at the Almost Home.]
My first semester of teaching, I was a graduate student in my early twenties at the University of Colorado. I’d arrived, I was certain, entirely prepared to teach.  I had articles and short stories — and an arsenal of exercises.  […]

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

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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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It seems as though it is time once again for more hand-wringing about the cruel deceptions wrought by authors upon their publishers (and/or by publishers upon a naive and trusting public): another memoir turns out not to be true!
As reported by the New York Times, Love and Consequences, Margaret B. Jones’ memoir ”about her life as a […]

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With sadness we learned of Raymond J. Smith’s death this week. Smith, along with his wife of more than forty years, Joyce Carol Oates, was a founding editor of The Ontario Review and Ontario Review Press. He leaves a rich and distinguished contribution to literary publishing.
In the essay “On Editing The Ontario Review,” which […]

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We’re thrilled to announce that Katie Chase’s short story, “Man and Wife,” has been selected by guest editor Salman Rushdie for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2008! “Man and Wife” — Katie’s first publication! – appeared in our Summer 2007 issue and has quickly become a staff favorite.  In fact, we gave it to our […]

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As we continue our expansion into different forms of online media, The Missouri Review is pleased to introduce you to own first video posting on You Tube! In this short feature, TMR Editor Speer Morgan talks about the early days of the magazine.

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Somehow we’ve neglected to raise a fuss yet over the fact that Paul Guest, one of the poets appearing in our current issue, very recently won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award, which currently comes with a sturdy cash prize of $50,000. Since 1985 it’s been awarded annually to ten emerging writers of promise, in […]

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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 Tuesday, January 8, Governor Matt Blunt named Walter Bargen, one of our favorite local poets, as official poet laureate of Missouri.
Walter’s work has appeared in the pages of The Missouri Review no less than four times–in 1983, 1989, 1991 and 1997.

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We are finalizing our winners of the Audio Competition, and we’ll post them soon after the beginning of the semester. It was a great success, with many wonderful entries. We’ll also be posting the winning entries on our site. Stay tuned. 

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Being a black woman in the world of creative writing today is very intimidating. As I prepare to graduate, I have started thinking about what I have learned over the last few years and find myself coming up with some difficult answers.
The other day I was walking through Barnes and Noble and wondering where the […]

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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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Christmas is looming, and as embarrassed as I am to admit it, I am a chronic consumer. Sadly, however, my funds are limited, and therefore I must be selective in my purchasing. My favorite things to buy are – surprise, surprise – books.

However (I have to make a confession here and […]

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When I was sorting through the mail last week shortly before leaving for Thanksgiving break I spied our copy of Best New Poets 2007. As I flipped through the pages two names stood out, so I wanted to take a moment to congratulate these individuals–Elizabeth Langemak and Brett Foster–both former TMR interns.
Good job and […]

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At this time of year we are reminded to be thankful, so I decided to make a quick list of people and things we at The Missouri Review are thankful for.
Things we are thankful for (in no particular order):
The British Library, The Huntington and the HRC
Gutenberg
Independent Publishers
Readers everywhere
A staff of great interns and […]

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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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We had a wonderful evening Monday night with Peden Prize winner Seth Fried.

Seth read from a new piece he’s working on concerning a group of brewers addressing a public health crisis. A good time was had by all!

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One of our editors recently asked me about creative writing workshops and mentoring. I’m in a PhD program in creative writing, so I’ve had plenty of workshop experiences, good and not so good. No matter how many workshops I’ve attended, though, none of them have paralleled the mentoring I’ve received in working one-on-one with writers. […]

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Mark Sarvas over at The Elegant Variation calls it “the essay heard ’round the blogosphere.” In the latest issue of The American Scholar, Melvin Jules Bukiet takes on writers Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Alice Sebold, and just about everything their books stand for:
Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, […]

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I have a confession to make. Currently hidden under a pile of books in my bedroom there is a paperback copy of Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure. Essentially, the book reads like the choose-your-own-adventure books made for children, splicing together characters and events from Austen novels into a story about the […]

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A few weeks ago at the University of Missouri, I had the opportunity to go and listen to Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate. In fact, I got to see him speak twice: first at a question and answer session attended by a small group of writers in the Corner Playhouse, […]

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It’s something like a universal truth that in times of governmental repression and institutionalized violence poetry becomes an enemy of the state. Consider Anna Akhmatova’s situation in Stalinist Russia: after being identified as a “bourgeois element,” her poetry was banned from publication for fifteen years (1925-1940). Wole Soyinka, the great African poet and activist, was […]

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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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A little light reading. That’s a good way to describe the idea behind an item which appeared in Harper’s index in July, which reported that all the information transferred through the Internet in 2006 weighed .00004 oz.
Thinking back to junior high science class, when we learned that protons and neutrons have masses and weights and […]

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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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