Author Archives: Kaukonen

Web Exclusive

Michael Martone never lacks for interesting things to say, whether it be about his native Midwest or the craft of writing or himself (or more accurately, all of himselves, real and invented). In a web-only contribution to The Missouri Review, “Four False Starts: On Beginning and Continuing,” Martone (or rather, “the author”) “reveals (in a brief narrative) the particulars of a creative (he believes) creative writing assignment and attempts to connect it (via metaphor and/or symbol) to some amorphous thinking concerning the concept of process.”

Martone is the author of, among other works, Michael Martone, The Blue Guide to Indiana, Alive And Dead In Indiana, Penseés: The Thoughts Of Dan Quayle, and Fort Wayne Is Seventh On Hitler’s List. He is currently a Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. Before that, he taught at Syracuse University, Iowa State University, and Harvard University. He lives with the poet Theresa Pappas and their two sons Sam and Nick.

On the Move

On the academic calendar, May is one of those transitional months. For the Missouri Review, the end of this May means the end of an era. The physical offices of the Missouri Review are returning to the campus of the University of Missouri-Columbia. The Review, which has been housed for the past sixteen years in Hillcrest Hall on the campus of Stephens College, is moving to McReynolds Hall on the northwest portion of the Mizzou campus. For those who submit to the Review, the change in address below should be duly noted. If we’re a bit slow in responding over the next week, it’s only because we’re packing boxes and computers and back issues and hauling them across town.

Please address all correspondence to: The Missouri Review, 357 McReynolds Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211.

Further Adventures in Audio

As part of our effort to participate in the ongoing audio/video revolution that’s sweeping through the Internet, The Missouri Review offers its latest podcast. While previous editions have featured TMR writers reading from their work, with this edition, a pair of TMR interns chat with Steve Almond, which inevitably means conversation about sex. And chocolate. As well as fiction. The writing of it. The reading of it.

Almond is the author of the short story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, as well as Candy Freak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America. His most recent publication, Which Brings Me to You, is a novel co-written with Julianna Baggott. Almond has published four stories in The Missouri Review since 2000; most recently, “My Mouth, Her Sex, The Night, My Heart,” which appeared in 28:1 (2005). He is a past recipient of the annual Peden Prize from TMR.

[The podcast can be downloaded via iTunes or it can be downloaded directly here.]

Joanna Luloff on "Let Them Ask"

Joanna Luloff’s short story, “Let Them Ask,” received the 2006 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for fiction from The Missouri Review. It will appear in our forthcoming issue (29:1). Below, Luloff talks briefly about the roots of the story.

“This story was prompted by my experiences teaching English in a village school in southern Sri Lanka. The Peace Corps had arranged for me to live with a host family, and I became quite close with my host sister, who, at the time, was 14 years old. She was incredibly bright and determined, but she was from a lower-caste family who was quite poor, and her only chance at further education was through excellent exam scores and scholarships. She was always after me about starting an co-ed English club, and after much argument, I finally relented. So, part of the story is based on that, well, failure. In some ways, this particular story was easier to write than some others I’ve written as part of a linked collection set in Sri Lanka. I was using a lot of first-hand experience and Amali was a character who had appeared in other stories I had written, so I felt like I already had a good grasp of her character. But, because it was more closely based on my actual experiences, it was hard sometimes to separate myself from the “real story”–i.e. what really happenend to Amali and Chamila and to me, in order to craft a “fictional” story around those real experiences, a story that ultimately diverges quite a bit from my own memories.

“I thought about different ways to tell the story–should it be through the American’s point of view? First person? Third-person? But, in the end, I really wanted to look at how my host sister might have viewed me–my reluctance, my seeming laziness, my unprofessionalism. What she would have made of a 23 year-old, single woman, who left home to be a teacher, but in most ways, acted like a young girl. I also wanted to reflect on what I saw as a cultural tendency toward silence, particularly when the war was concerned, certainly when personal loss was concerned. When juggling all of these aims, I ended up choosing Amali’s perspective as a way to enter a story that is trying to be about all of these things–cultural differences, gender separation, social propriety, and a kind of privacy/silence that can be stifling and lonely.”

A Few Words with Derek Mong

Our forthcoming issue (29:1) features the winners of our annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. As part of the celebration, we were able to bring two of the three winners to Columbia for a reading and reception in late April. Our poetry editor, Jason Koo, spoke with Derek Mong, our winner in poetry. Mong, a native of Cleveland, as is Koo, recently completed his MFA at the University of Michigan. The following is a brief portion of their conversation.

JK: When did you begin writing poems?

DM: Well, my earliest “poems” probably date back to a high school creative writing assignment. I composed some garish ode to my pet dachshund (Rudy) or the NASA space shuttle. I was always more of a visual kid (the class artist, later the photographer) who wrote well enough to get by in class or do a little student journalism. Occasionally I’d combine the two in cartoons, and even did a little work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Still, it wasn’t until a summer writing camp at Denison University, The Jonathan Reynolds Young Writers’ Workshop, that I realized just what a poem really was and was simply swept off my feet. It was there that I met David Baker, Ann Townsend, and Alison Stine. I distinctly remember how difficult it was to write a poem, and my own stubbornness compelled me to keep at it till there was some music in the lines. There’s probably a lot of that pig-headedness in my approach today.

JK: What were those cartoons like that you drew for The Plain Dealer?

DM: My comic strip for The Plain Dealer was called “The Armpit Epiphany,” a name that captured both my burgeoning misuse of literary terms and my continued fondness for scatological and/or bodily humor. There were no characters per se, save an adolescent kid who wore a bowler hat and looked a lot like me. Targets of the satire included Carl Monday (local Cleveland exposé reporter/parasite), homophobia, and the kids who egged my house over Christmas.

JK: What was it like growing up in Cleveland?

DM: Well, I should state both my fondness for the town and my comfortable distance from it (which very well might account for the fondness). Like many folks “from” Cleveland, I in fact grew up in a suburb called Brecksville, due south of I-77. Frequent trips were made into the city for concerts, the art museum, theatre, Little Italy, etc., but my parents lived (until recently) in a very tame, very cloistered suburb. Still, after leaving Northeast Ohio I found myself claiming something of Cleveland’s mopey defeatism, its hunched-shoulders and lazy gait. This was the city where the river burned—I suppose I want some of that tragicomedy to background my life, whether my right to it is authentic or not.

JK: Who have been your most influential teachers?

DM: There are probably too many to name, and I’ll feel awful slighting someone if I don’t, but certainly Ann Townsend, David Baker, and Ben Doyle at Denison University, where I took my undergraduate degree. I also met with a poet named John Miller, an emeritus professor living in Granville who had been Ann’s teacher and essentially built the DU writing program with his colleague (and fellow poet), Paul Bennett. The whole writing community there was (and is!) rich and supportive—I consider myself very lucky to have been a part of it for those four years. I try to contribute my small share by working at the Reynolds Writing Workshop in the summer. Here at Michigan I’ve been blessed to work with folks like Khaled Mattawa, Lorna Goodison, Larry Goldstein, and Linda Gregerson as well as the English Department’s gifted scholars: Yopie Prins, John Whittier-Ferguson. If there’s one thing I’ve taken from all these folks (different as they are) it’s the nobility and necessity of writing poems…a fact one needs reminding of on a daily basis.

JK: I like that you use the word “nobility” to describe the work of the poet. Could you say a little more about what you mean by that? Do you think there exists a certain anxiety about the “nobility” of the poet’s calling within a democratic society?

DM: I do believe poetry’s a noble calling, though I feel little right (again) to claim such distinction for either myself or my work. I’ve been lucky; for the past few years I’ve had great teachers, amazing funding, and an environment so very conducive to a writer. I suppose real nobility, or at least the nobility of poetry in our society today, involves a certain sacrifice, financial or otherwise. God knows, those of us still glowing from MFA-land know little of that world. There is, though, the role poets play in discussing issues the country’s disinclined to address: mortality, language, the influence of the past. In this way, all can be called noble.

A TMR Writer on NPR

As the assistant managing editor for metro news at the New Jersey Star-Ledger, David Tucker has acquired the reputation of a tough, gruff newsroom boss, the sort of presence whose persistence and sheer relentlessness embodies the hard-nosed, hard-news glory days of journalism. In fact, he was part of the team that won a Pultizer Prize for breaking news reportage with the Star-Ledger‘s coverage of New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey’s resignation in August 2004.

But Tucker’s also a poet. His poems appeared in The Missouri Review (24:1) in 2001, and they reflect his newsroom experience, as is clear in the titles of those poems: “City Editor Looking for News”; “My Father Taking Arms Against a Sea of Troubles, Etc.”; “For Them”; “Downsizing”; “And This Just In”; “You Know.” He won the Slapering Hol Press (SHP) chapbook competition in 2003, and the manuscript for his new boook, Late for Work, was selected for the Bakeless Prize at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, by Philip Levine, and has just been published by Houghton-Mifflin.

As part of National Public Radio‘s celebration of National Poetry Month, Tucker is featured in an audio story, “Newsroom Poetry,” which originally aired as part of Fresh Air on May 2. It includes Tucker reading from one of the poems first published in The Missouri Review.

We think you’ll enjoy.