Author Archives: Evelyn Somers

Future Winners Only–Read This Blog

It was quite a week: sad, scary and history-making. Paul Newman died, the country suffered the largest bank failure in U.S. history, Obama and McCain debated, and Americans—and their representation in Congress—split over a proposed financial bailout package.  It’s Monday, and things don’t look a whole lot different.  Americans are leaning slightly more toward Obama than they were last week.  Uncertainty continues over a Presidential election that looks too close to call and an economy that might slowly come back but might also crash.

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.

Oprah's latest: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Among the weekend’s big publishing stories is Oprah’s selection for her book club of a debut novel by David Wroblewski.  The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which had already made the NYT best-seller list this summer, is billed as an epic with a tinge of mystery, about a mute boy who communicates with dogs (his family raises them).  Wroblewski acknowledges the influence of Hamlet  on the story, which, he also says, is intensely personal and took him ten years to write.

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.

David Foster Wallace: some thoughts on his death

The devastating news of Wallace’s suicide is all over the Web today.  It’s tempting to compare him to other similarly tragic literary figures—the Hemingways and Woolfs and Plaths, Kosinskis, Berrymans, Sextons—and offer a thesis about creativity and depression.  Or to pull out one of his books and look for clues, or simply to speculate . . . but these responses are always, I believe, more about oneself than about the life that has ended. Laura Miller in Salon offers an insightful tribute today that avoids the usual traps. 

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.

Blog vs. Essay

Yesterday in the NY Times books blog, Bob Harris posed the question of where one can find essays in 2008 on the order of the periodical essays of Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, De Quincey and other celebrated English essayists.  And, he says, it’s definitely not happening in blogs.

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.

The Evil Home Inspector

First off, why the ?  It’s because as a literary editor I’m employed to ask questions.  This, after decades of spending hours upon hours tinkering with textual representations of other people’s imaginations, is how I’ve come to understand what I do.  Someday I’ll blog about it, but today I’m more concerned with the evil home inspector.

We have been trying to sell a house that belongs to an elderly relative.  It’s a sweet, small house, perfect for a family of one or two, and we were hopeful when we listed it and delighted when we had a contract within the first three weeks of its being on the market.

Then the evil home inspector came.  Our agent had not warned us, exactly, but she had looked sober when the prospect of inspections was mentioned.  It wasn’t “our” house she was worried about; it was houses, and sales, in general.  Like me, the home inspector is paid to ask questions.  Where I’m also employed to tinker and fix, though, the inspector gets paid only to locate problems or the spectre of problems.  The fixing part is up to the buyer, and if the buyer doesn’t want to do it or to negotiate with the seller, or in any other way balks, the contract is, of course, null and void.  One function of the home inspection is to unseal deals.  That’s what happened to ours.

We got a copy of the inspection report.  Nothing about it was so terrifying.  There were no structural threats of disaster. He’d found a lot of possible concerns, such as vegetation growing too close to the back of the house, and  a number of small inconsistencies with current local building code (the house was built twenty-two years ago).  The only big issue was an aging roof—we would have negotiated on that one, but the buyer was done with us and had moved on.

I tend to think it’s the buyer’s loss, and I find myself wondering if she or the home inspector asked all the right questions.  This is a values issue—or do I mean a philosophical one?  Is a house a material investment/physical container for people, or is it a place to be? 

In fact, the home inspector (who wasn’t really evil), did what he was supposed to do, and the buyer opted to be cautious.  You can’t argue with common sense.

But I keep envisioning another kind of home inspection, where the inspector is focused on invisible things:  Can you be happy here? All the sunlight in the kitchen and living room—will that lift your depression?  Do you see yourself growing nicer or meaner from having lived in this place?  Is it a problem that no one has ever had sex in this house?  That’s kind of weird.  There should have been sex or children. But when you walk in the front door, it really does feel like it’s its own house—it has integrity.  This would be a good house to invite people to because it’s easy to find.

Do you like this house?  Is it a satisfying place to be? I think so. Do you like it a lot?  Let’s walk through it again. What do you think?

By the way, those are the kinds of questions I ask myself these days about submissions to TMR.    

Writer's Eye

Yesterday after I had left the office and was standing outside waiting for my carpool ride, I felt something on my foot.  I looked down.  It was a big black ant, and it was heading up my leg.  To stop it, I scraped at it with the sandal on the opposite foot, knocking it to the sidewalk.

At first I thought it was okay.  It was moving.  Then I saw that it was running in half circles; it looked like a dog sniffing at something—it would run this way for a couple of centimeters and then turn and go in the opposite direction.

I haven’t closely observed ant locomotion ever, but this ant wasn’t moving right.  Its navigation system was down.  After a minute or two it appeared to be widening the radius of the half-circle it kept traveling, but it wasn’t going to recover.  I felt  sad, though it was “only” an ant.  That’s what I thought and felt, and at the same time I had turned on my mental video camera.  “Get this down,” said a voice in my head.

Most writers have a built-in radar for those moments that are important to notice and record, mentally or on paper.  The moment that says “notice me” is different for everyone, but for me, the deaths of animals, from gnats on up to horses, have always triggered the recording and writing reflex.  (As evidence there is archived somewhere in a box of juvenilia my adolescent poem “Salute to a Dying Wasp.”  I had sprayed the wasp with Raid and then repented as I watched its death throes, and my penance was an elegy. At least it didn’t rhyme, but I’m ashamed to admit it had something of the tone of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”)

My point is not about the ant, though I was even sadder when it just stopped, like a battery-powered toy running out of juice.  It twitched a little, and then I had to get in the car.  I took out my notebook and “got it down,” though writing in a car makes me sick.

There’s no substitute for those experiential “finds” writers harvest that give authenticity to a piece of fiction.  Someday, in something I write, that ant will probably die again, just a sentence or two of ant death that will lend verisimilitude to a scene—or perhaps its death will carry some emotional weight also.  And it will feel real because it was.

While proofing the issue one last time yesterday, I was struck by a passage of description from Andy Mozina’s forthcoming story. It had that aura of something actual, not invented, harvested from real life so that it would be preserved, and I’ve been charmed every time I read it:

. . . a street where trees don’t grow very tall. South Milwaukee. Small houses with complicated roof lines: dormers, additions, awnings and porches; an air conditioner punched out a window like a Pez in mid-dispense. Gutters sag, downspouts dangle, shingles grow moss. Inside, staircases with hairpin curves, dining rooms with old built-ins, upstairs bedrooms with slanted ceilings, tiny closets shaped like mathematics problems.

One scrubbed kitchen smells from years of meat, a century of congealed gravy, coffee grounds, pill canisters. A candy thermometer has fallen between the stove and the cupboard, visible with a flashlight but essentially lost forever.