The context: last weekend I was visiting Springfield, Missouri, with my family to see a Civil War reenactment of the historic Battle of Wilson’s Creek. My parents live in Springfield. The reenactment took place a few miles from the nearby town of Republic, and at some point during the weekend my parents mentioned that the Republic school board had just voted to remove two books from the high school curriculum and library; one was Kurt Vonnegut’s antiwar classic, Slaughterhouse Five. You probably read this story, but I was on an inner-city mission and out of media reach the last week in July, when the story broke.

I’m religious, so I’m sorry to say the story featured one of those extremists of the kind that for a while now have been concerned with problems such as whether the Harry Potter books promote witchcraft. The initial objection was raised by a Republic resident who complained that three books in the high school library that were also used in high-school classes taught ideas which opposed biblical principles. These objections were reviewed by the school board, and two of the books were removed from the curriculum and the library (not for religious reasons but on the grounds that they weren’t “age appropriate”). One was retained.

Ironically, my husband and I had recently been talking about Slaughterhouse Five, and I’d recommended it to my thirteen-year-old son, who has already read The Catcher in the Rye. (I guess as parents we don’t have a good handle on “age-appropriateness.”) But what bothered me most about this news was the reality it illuminated, of readers so incompetent they miss the significance of a book entirely and can only see sex or profanity and respond reflexively. That is, if they read a book at all: not all the board members may have read the offending books; one story reported that only one of four voting school board members had read the books in question.

I was already thinking along these lines, when someone forwarded me a link to Juliet Lapidos’s Culturebox feature “Overrated” in Slate.com from August 11, about works of literature that readers love to complain about. Notable authors, editors and critics were invited to weigh in about classics that didn’t live up to their reputations. Thomas Hardy took criticism for his morose worldview. Don Quixote was judged to be tedious, after a lively start. The House of the Seven Gables, The Faerie Queene, The Sound and the Fury, Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, Of Human Bondage all had their detractors, as did others. Lapidos’s feature was pleasant entertainment, not a serious bashing of good literature. Readers jumped in to add their favorite “hated” works to the list, all in fun. But I bring it up because while reading the comments of some of the people Lapidos surveyed, and of the readers who commented on the article, I again found myself musing about readerly capability. Many of the opinions were informed, sensitive and astute; a number of others, not so much.

I’m personally not a fan of D.H. Lawrence, but years ago, when I was reading Women in Love for my PhD comprehensive exam and not liking it at all, I found myself simultaneously not liking and appreciating Lawrence. And realizing something else: that I didn’t have to like it to appreciate it, and that the point was not simple reading pleasure anymore; it was command of a field of knowledge. The profession of literature demanded that I give up pre-formed opinions and tastes and embark on a mission to understand each work and take it on its own terms. Later, I learned that editors have to do this even better than scholars.

The gap yawns wide between the five-star readers and some one-star readers—not just in Republic, Missouri, but all over. It’s useful to remember that the gap exists. It’s even more important to think about how to narrow it because great literature can’t survive without great readers.

Let’s take the question of the editors’ attitude toward they work they read, consider, publish. This is something that develops over years. Our younger readers and interns often display a love-it-or-trash-it mentality. They’re ardently for or against the submissions they admire and dislike, respectively, and they don’t worry so much about the vats of submissions which could make the cut but don’t, or don’t enchant. The interns are young. Idealists. As they should be. But as idealists, they are attuned to the wonderful and the terrible; they tend to overlook the middle.

Almost three decades on, the middle is mostly what I see. As Michael noted in his blog on criticism of the memoir genre, the TMR staff abjures negativity. Literary journals promote literature for its own sake—and that’s a really valuable aim that I believe in. My daily job is to help and promote our writers. I also like them, enjoy their work, am grateful for the opportunity to mentally commune with individuals whose stalking ground for creative inspiration is different from my own. A rich education in art and empathy?  Indubitably. Wouldn’t trade it. Yet when I read an essay such as Genzlinger’s,  which Michael cites in his blog, honesty requires me to call up in memory the thousands of short memoirs I’ve read in my twenty-six years here. Most of them, again, in the middle in terms of quality.

And then what? What can I think, except there’s validity to complaints about the many ordinary, or lesser, specimens of the genre. As there is to complaints about ordinariness in any genre, any human endeavor. Here I am, then, on an uncomfortable fence:  support writers, commend them for their effort, encourage, assist? Sure. But claim that everything in print is always publication-worthy—even decently crafted works that are praised by fans of their authors? That would not be saying what I believe.

I’ve been in a mood to quote Browning lately (don’t ask why). “Ah, but a man’s reach should exeed his grasp,/Or what’s a heaven for?” says “faultless” Andrea del Sarto, bemoaning his inability to quite attain the inspiration and emotional range of some of his less technically perfect contemporaries. Stated plainly, Browning’s Andrea has talent. But not genius. The double life of the editor is to think like a critic—note the absence of genius or even basic technical skill (and on the rarer occasions we live for, to discover the genius)—but speak and act like an advocate. Thank God I’m an editor, not a critic; but astute critics who are passionate about their role are the prophets of whatever field they’re operating in. And vital, if the handful of geniuses out there are going to be inspired, incited, to reach.

As for the editor’s position on the creative/scholarly fence, that can wait for a future blog.

Evelyn Somers is Associate Editor of the Missouri Review.

Photo courtesy Stuart Pilbrow.

Our spring issue is imminent. Last week the digital proof came from our printer.  We have twenty-four hours to go through and send it back—which meant, for me, hunkering down in my office with the pages and going over the errors that still linger—things that get missed maybe because they’re so obvious you forget to look for them (right title, wrong poem); or because everyone, from author to proofreader, let down their guard at the same spot in the text (Cheese Whiz?  No, Cheez Whiz). I have been called “eagle-eyed” by our poetry editor, but it’s only partly true; and the above mentioned errors are fictitious, fyi.

For me, the final go-through is not fun.  I am not a “detail person,” but here I am, checking whether page numbers are right and sequential. Does anyone want to do this? It is, honestly, boring.

I check pages, footers, openings, endings and similar things emitting an aura of discontent over labor that demands an extreme of attention I don’t want to give because my boredom threshold is pretty low. Handing it off to someone else is not an option, however.

The one tradeoff—and it’s not a terrible one—is the experience of being at something much like a dress rehearsal of the latest issue.  Subscribers aren’t going to ever see this almost version of TMR. It gives me an extra opportunity to think about how the long process of building the issue has paid off.

This time I found myself pleased and admiring at the way all the very distinct talents coalesced in our spring issue, which is titled “Peril.”  Meditative nature writing by John Hales, painfully truthful “love” poems by Josh Booton, comic memoir by Patricia Bjorklund, a somewhat sassy interview with Jo Ann Beard, whose novel In Zanesville will be out next month, a “historical” fiction about the O.J. Simpson trial and the soap opera The Young and the Restless by Erin Flanagan: they all get between the covers together in our spring Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize issue, with some other very good pieces, and seem to get along.

Evelyn Somers is the assistant editor of The Missouri Review.

Over the years we’ve occasionally had writers who took offense at being rejected by TMR. Some never submitted again. What more often happens is that after three or four tries here, a writer stops submitting on the grounds that we must not like their work.  Others hang in there and keep sending, up to twenty, thirty or more times. This year, both Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize winners in prose have, in the past, come right up to the brink of being published in TMR and then been let down.  For at least six years I’ve been reading work by Anna Solomon, our fiction winner, inviting her to send revisions in a couple of instances—and yet we’ve finally said no, until now. John Hales, the nonfiction winner, has been faithfully sending us near misses for probably fifteen years, perhaps more.  Patience and a degree of forgiveness of our past rejections has paid off this year for both of them.

“Blog about some manuscripts that came close recently that you almost accepted but didn’t,” someone suggested. People want to know why their manuscripts were rejected.”

I know they do.  So do I.

Experience tells me, though, that the reasons a capable manuscript is rejected may be difficult to articulate.  “Not quite” is a euphemism for a lot of serious problems.  But it can also mean precisely “not quite.”

Here are some of the problems with pieces that crossed my desk in the past week.  These were pieces that had been looked at and passed along by more than just one or two readers:

I saw—we often see—a couple of pieces with great verbal dexterity—marvelous lines but not much emotional impact. High concept that fails to engage readers’ sympathy is a related problem, and we saw that.

In one concept-driven story we read, the conceit was outright silly, though the writing was nice, and the writer had obviously worked hard. Also, characters who don’t feel or behave in plausible ways are everywhere.  Readers respond to characters based on their own individual experience, so this is partly a matter of familiarity and opinion; but if more than a couple of us have the same reaction, then the problem is really there. Unfortunately, it’s common.

Finally, several pieces were imitating current or recent trends or writers: one in collective voice, one with footnotes that made up quite a bit of the story.

Writing is hard, and none of the “misses” I’ve mentioned were terrible.  They just weren’t working, not for the TMR editors, right now. If there were a magic formula for immunity to literary rejection, I’d be selling it online.  Read, write, revise, submit, try again.  There it is.

Evelyn Somers is the assistant editor of The Missouri Review.

Recently CNN featured a video about twins who were born in two different years. The mother says she wanted both boys to be born in 2009, which is understandable from the point of view of convenience and mental tidiness–think about how many times she’s going to have to tell the story of their different birth days, months and years–though really, what difference does it make?  Experientially, labor is labor, birth is birth, dying is dying, all part of a continuum that can only barely be interpreted and superficially managed by means of “clock time.” Whatever psychological need people may have for the breaks in the calendar that renew hope or sweep away disaster, it’s a good exercise now and then to remember that they are illusory.  Sitting by my relative’s bed and remembering other younger, more vital “versions” of her–which all seemed as real and present as the wasting person in the bed–I asked myself, as I frequently do, whether time exists at all.

Anyone want to weigh in on that?

Then I started reflecting about narrative: how authors use organizational strategies such as breaks, chapters, section headings and other types of segmentation to create the impression of unsegmented time.  All of which was making my head spin, but you get the idea. And the irony:  what we can’t control or understand, we chop into pieces (minutes, days, years) so that it seems like we can, and then some of us–writers–are compelled to recreate the illusion of continuous experience by means of a whole other set of pieces that are the conventions of narrative structure.

My son will be 11 on January 23.  But really, what is that saying?  He’s already older than he was a minute ago. What difference does the number 11 make?  I used to think if I picked him up every day, there would never be a day when I couldn’t pick him up (unless of course I broke my arm, which I never have) because how could he weigh that much more one day then the previous?  But that was when I could pick him up.  Now it’s impossible. Explain that, and you’ll be one step closer than I am to understanding the difference between a moment and a moment later.

While most American writers are justifiably spitting mad (I’ve heard a misguided few say they agreed with Engdahl), there are also some Europeans coming to their defense, including Sam Leith of the Telegraph.  His stance is that “You’re wrong, Mr Engdahl. Wrong, wrong, big fat hairy wrong. So yah boo.”  Words well spoken, and oh-so-true when you consider our Roths, Updikes, and other younger stars ascending.

For a lively, well-reasoned defense of literature in English in general and American literature in particular, see his column—and the rather impassioned commentary that follows.

There’s no human wisdom that can answer the big questions all Americans are asking right now—so we won’t even try.

Instead, let us remind you that no one ever won $3000 in TMR’s Editor’s Prize Contest for a piece that wasn’t entered. 

Life is short.  You might die before next year’s contest, so enter this one. The deadline is fast approaching.  Carpe diem.  Don’t miss the boat.  Don’t get left out.  Don’t get left behind.  You won’t get a more careful read anywhere than you’ll get from our contest readers and editors.  Did I say $3000?  And PUBLICATION in one of the nation’s top literary magazines? 

Life is short.  Enter now.  Online or by mail—you choose. YOU have a great story (or essay, or group of poems).  WE want to read it and reward you.

Whatever difficulties you may have with the fact that Oprah fans and ambivalent readers go along with her book club choices seemingly like sheep, lay them aside for a minute or two.  Think about what it means to a writer to  spend a decade on a labor of love, knowing that the likeliest scenario is that it will be published to minimal acclaim and gain a small number of readers–and then to have it all validated a hundred times over, with money and an enormous readership and international publicity.  For a writer, it’s like being transported to heaven without the death part.

I haven’t read the book yet.  Not everyone takes their cues from Oprah, and if I read Wroblewski’s novel it will be when my book-choosing hormones compel me in that direction.  But I think it’s worth noting today that the celebrity-obsessed culture we book-loving types complain about can actually bring people together with good books.  When was the last time you convinced someone to read Anna Karenina?

Take a look at the list of Oprah’s past selections.  I’d forgotten how many great modern and contemporary classics she’s promoted.  Aspiring novelists, take note:  write your heart out, and you could be the next winner of her literary lottery.

We published David Foster Wallace only once, in our “Signifying Rappers” issue of 1990.  The essay was a condensed version of a book excerpt from a book of the same title by Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, and we took it eagerly, back in the day when essays were a hard-to-come-by commodity. 

We would have taken it at any time, I suspect. Freshness of subject, cultural relevance, razor-sharp writing and intellectual rigor are not qualities to send packing, especially not when they arrive together in one piece of writing, as they did in “Signifying Rappers.” As lead essay, it gave a title to the issue; and incidentally, it was one of the first essays I edited.  There was not much to do with writing so fine, but the excerpt had to be condensed, and it was a cut-and-stitch job to meet our length requirement. When it was all finalized, the authors offered what was, to a young editor-in-training, a memorable pat on the back: the edit was one of the best they’d seen.  No doubt they both went on to work with stronger, more experienced editors, but that stamp of approval early on is something I’ve remembered for eighteen years.

Our interaction with David Foster Wallace was limited to the one publication and, over the past decade or so, the continual reminder of his literary influence as we’ve read essay submission after essay submission that in voice or experimental technique showed their authors to be DFW wannabes. Now the field is wide open, but there will not be anyone to take his place.

There are a lot of answers to that question, depending on how you interpret it.  If one asks, for instance, where are our Samuel Johnsons or William Hazlitts, the answer is not so obvious because essayists of that order are not writing the same kinds of essays—for a lot of reasons, partly cultural (the moralism of  a Johnson would almost certainly not gain a broad popular following–among the intellectual set, at least–in 2008), partly aesthetic (the quaintness of a Lamb or a Hazlitt is by current standards . . . well, quaint).  Broadcast media and now the Internet have created new venues for the types of commentary authored by the great Augustan and Enlightenment essayists, and with the arrival of each new venue, authors have molded their styles and subjects to fit (and, if possible, to bring in revenue. Surprise!)

If the vanished coffeehouse milieu of high-class gossip and literary inspiration that Harris remarks on has been replaced by the blogosphere, we can’t expect or demand that the blog be “like” the 18^th-century essay.  In an age when publication on a worldwide scale, via the Internet, is instantaneous, we can’t exactly turn our literary/journalistic clocks back to a day when mass periodical publication in print (“mass” meaning primarily the literate population of London ) was the innovation of the moment. 

Articulate, even elegant, nonfiction is all around us: in commercial and literary magazines like The New Yorker, Harpers, the American Scholar, the Missouri Review and many others.  In the regular columns of premiere journalists.  In TV, film and video documentaries and radio essays.  And yes, sometimes in the blog, which is a really exciting new “genre,” if you think about it.  I mean, what can’t one say or do in a blog?

The personal essay has undergone an efflorescence in the past two decades.  We can personally testify to that fact at TMR when we tally the daily essay submissions that outnumber probably by ten times what we used to get in a week.  With the expansion of knowledge, the advancement of science and technology, increased specialization in every field and much greater cultural diversity, we will never again see great essays that much resemble those of centuries past (we might see bad ones that do, though).  I think it’s kind of exciting to wonder whether, and how, the blog is going to evolve, and if it will ultimately become the vehicle that Harris says it isn’t now, and what that might look like.