The cover image for our Summer issue

Readers will see the work of Vasmoulakis again in an up-coming feature on street art that will also feature the work of Banksy, BTOY, and Miss Bugs. Hop over to his website to see his work on buildings and in galleries, videos, drawings, and other work he has called “miscellany.” Don’t expect a lot of personal bluster about who he is and what he does, though: his biography is as simple as this: “Alexandros Vasmoulakis was born in Athens in 1980. He studied fine arts and works as a freelancer. His main purpose is to communicate.”

The summer issue is at our printer now, and should be hitting your mailbox in the next three weeks(-ish). Inside, you’ll find new stories by Tom Barbash, Elisabeth Fairchild, A.R. Rea, and Amin Ahmad; essays by John W. Evans and Daniel Anderson; poetry by Steve Gehrke, Diane Seuss, and Peter Jay Shippy; and a brand spankin’ new omnibus review by Anthony Aycock. We’re really proud of how this issue has turned out, and know that you’ll be delighted, too!

Kris Somerville is The Missouri Review’s Marketing Director.

Some news groups are reporting that the misprint will be pulped and that the 8,000 copies already sold can be exchanged. While others are saying that for “logistical reasons” the books will not be tossed in the shredder. What is not clear in the second version of the story is whether the publisher intends to sell the misprint.

In the meantime, Victoria Barnsley, Harper Collins UK CEO, is blaming the typesetter, a small Scottish outfit called Palimpsest, though no one is saying who sent them the wrong version and who failed to read the final proof. These are the real questions that need answering. But for now, damn those blimey Scots.

So if you find a typo in this blog, don’t blame me. The Scottish typesetter did it.

British novelist Tony Parsons, author of the list, defined a troubled man as one who is “working through his problems, and trying to make sense of the world and his place in it.”

The genre of coming-of-age literature is full of both young men and women who are trying to navigate the world and its conflicts. So, of course, Parsons’ selection of troubled men leads me to ask, what about the women?

Of course, I have several favorites: Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, Emma Bovary, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. And most recently I’ve been touched by Ree’s story in Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone. Her troubles are inflicted on her by her father and extended family, crank dealers who cook up their product deep in the Ozark woods. Her recently arrested father uses their house as collateral to post bond and then disappears. If he doesn’t show up for court the house is lost and Ree, her catatonic mother, and two younger brothers will be tossed out. As she searches the frozen winter landscape for signs of him, dead or alive, she is pulled deeper into a lawless society that lives according to an ancient and brutal code.

Perhaps my favorite troubled woman is Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson’s millennium series. In this case, skip the books and go straight to the Swedish movies: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. The role is perfectly cast; Noomi Rapace plays a tattooed, pieced, leather-jacket wearing genius hacker who has been abused by the male authority figures in her life. Now she doesn’t like guys, though through a series of accidents she becomes reluctant friends with middle-aged journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

Lisbeth is one of the most memorable cinematic antiheros since Le Femme Nikita. Though she’s tiny and lithe, you believe she can fight off a series of attackers in the underground, ride a motorcycle, and exact all matters of revenge. She also cleans up well. When she dons a blond wig and Chanel-like suit, she wouldn’t be out of place next to Anna Wintour at Paris’ fashion week.

Those are a few of my favorites. How about one of yours?

Stocking your shelves with Le-Tan’s handiwork will set you back about $1,500 a clutch, almost as much as a first edition.

You can take a look at her handiwork at www.olympialetan.com

Our up-coming cover for the fall Shadow’s issue is by English filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist Sam Taylor-Wood from her Bram Stoker’s Chair series. This summer I took in one of her video installations at Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a playful piece of Robert Downey Jr. lip-syncing badly to an Elton John ballad as he walks languidly through an empty mansion. Her first feature film Nowhere Boy about John Lennon’s childhood in Liverpool opens in October before the seventieth anniversary of his birth. It stars Aaron Johnson as Lennon and Kristin Scott Thomas as his buttoned-up Aunt Mimi. You can view Sam Taylor-Wood’s work at www.whitecube.com

Kris Somerville is the marketing director of The Missouri Review.

I was reminded of Esther’s self-questioning a few evenings ago when I got together with several of our interns and poetry editor to review Editors’ Prize contest submissions.

One of the poetry interns was graduating in December to return home to an uncertain future. He wanted to go to law school but didn’t have the money. He thought he might enlist in the military. The other two had sent out graduate school applications and were waiting to hear if they were admitted for fall.

All three had what you might call “buyer’s remorse.” They openly wondered where an English degree from a state university would get them. The figured, at worst Mom and Dad’s basement and a counter-culture career, at best more school and, if they were lucky, a teaching job.
One regretted not going to J-school. Another thought he should’ve gotten a teaching certificate. All of them knew how to write decent papers for class, but wondered what explicating a text had to do with the “real world.”

I told them if they knew how to write they were already ahead of the competition on the job market. I said, “Writing and editing is a valuable commodity. Employers are desperate for workers who can put together a sentence.”

One of them admitted that he wasn’t even sure he was such a great writer.

We passed the bottle of wine and refilled our glasses.

Twenty years earlier, I was one of five who graduated from my small liberal arts college with a BA in English. Most of my classmates had BS’s in business management and computer science and were going onto jobs as soon as they turned in their caps and gowns. My career trajectory was slow and roundabout, but somehow I had ended up with the work that I wanted: writing, teaching and editing. Looking back, I made my way by accepting little bits of work that became increasingly steady and higher paying. Rather than talent, I’ve always had a simple willingness to work.

I know our three poetry interns will be fine. It will simply take them awhile to find their ways. In the meantime, I know where you can find three bright, funny, and energetic English majors for hire. Will work cheap.

It’s all quite nice and cheery. Except for me. As a kid on the day after Christmas, I felt much like Esther does in The Bell Jar: dull, stuffed and disappointed. As I got older, I began to feel this way well before and long after the holiday.

Fortunately I have a husband who feels the same way about most major holidays. For Thanksgiving break we went to Palm Springs. On turkey day we took a tram into the mountains to hike and picnic. For Christmas we are planning a similar escape, first to Arizona and then to Mexico.

Around the office I made the mistake of announcing that I don’t like Christmas. My co-workers looked at me as if I had sprouted horns on my head and warts on my nose. I know better. There are certain likes and dislikes that you share only with your intimates. For example, you should only divulge how you feel about babies, holidays, religion, drugs, nude beaches, and your childhood to those who know and like you. None of these topics works in polite conversation.

So I’ve outted myself. I don’t like Christmas. But unlike Scrooge, I can do without visitations from ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. In fact, because I dislike the holidays so much, I practice the old axiom that it’s better to give than receive. My husband and I write Christmas checks and send gifts to our family and friends before we put out a “gone fishin’” sign and fly off to warmer climes.

Last year, Christmas dinner was sushi at Nik Sans, and we spent the next day sunning on a beach on the Sea of Cortez. Sitting in the shade of an umbrella sipping a daiquiri, I had forgotten what day it was until two young girls in bikinis walked passed me carrying brightly wrapped packages with floppy red ribbons. The juxtaposition of sea, sand, and Christmas presents made me smile as I ordered another drink to toast the holidays.

In Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” she combs through various notebooks that she’s compiled over the years and remembers what inspired her to jot down fragments of overheard dialogue, odd facts, and place details. Unlike Tharp, the material in Didion’s notebooks seldom feeds her art. Rather it provides insight into her former selves. She writes, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not.”

With these artists’ habits in mind, this semester I asked my nonfiction students to fill their own scratching boxes or notebooks with mementoes that pertain to both the essays they’ve been working on and their writing process. Over the years, I’ve learned that simple assignments like this one are often the most successful.

Last week they brought their baroquely decorated boxes and notebooks to class and like kindergarteners squirmed in their seats until it was their turn to share. They passed around pictures of themselves, boyfriends, best friends, family. They read poems and quotes from their favorite books, burned their favorite candles, played their favorite mood music and passed around their favorite pens. Many held up T-shirts and concert tickets and fake IDs and peacock feathers. By the end of show and tell, the classroom looked like a small bazaar, exotic stuff scattered everywhere. The students continued passing around pictures as they walked out the door, leaving me envious that I had not put together a scratching box of my own.

Often called Generation Me for their attachment to Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, I shouldn’t have been surprised that they enjoyed talking about themselves. Yet, they had an openness and innocence as they explained their inventories that that nixed any air of narcissism. The exercise tapped into the primitive desire we all have to say “look at me; this is who I am.”

As model essays I use several examples from TMR’s archives. Both “Ingo Prefers Not To” and “Renee” are written by mothers who find their daughters’ choices inexplicable. One daughter becomes a heroin addict while the other simply prefers not to finish high school. Tracey Crow’s “The Facelift” tells of her husband’s nip and tuck and his resulting popularity. “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” by Catherine Rankovic is a lesson in how to describe the nearly impossible—Elvis’ phrasing and singing voice.

I also teach John LeCarre’s terrific portrait his five-star conman father “In Ronnie’s Court” published in The New Yorker and Annie Dillard’s memorable, much anthologized piece “The Stunt Pilot.”

The point is that these essays illustrate a range of subject choices and approaches to the assignment. So what did my students do? They either wrote about their mother or their father. For weeks we’ve been reading about parents who by their children’s accounts have committed grave sins; everything from abuse, drugs, alcohol and neglect to dirty houses and bad cooking.

One student’s essay was a cut above the rest. Rather than enumerating her father’s failings; she tried to understand her “absent daddy.” To get closer to him, she tagged along on his hunting and fishing trips, even though they weren’t past-times she enjoyed. She learned that he never had the opportunity to go to college. At nineteen he went to work for the railroad, an industry that she depicts as exploitive. To advance, he made himself indispensible, which kept him away from home for long stretches. She recognized that he worked hard to give her a life better than his own and thus far had succeeded.

After the eighth essay in this series, we joked that we should put together an anthology. I asked them what they wanted to call it.

“How about ‘Fined: Violations in Parenting’,” one student suggested. Her mother had spent three years in prison for dealing drugs.

A few students nodded. All right, but not great.

“What about something like ‘Broken Ashtrays and Double-wides: Pieces on Terrible Parenting.”

The students agreed that we were getting closer. The title we eventually decided on was ‘Hello, Child Services? Tales of Terrible Parents,’”

When I asked them what we could learn from the essays we’d spent more than a month work shopping, they had many answers. No one’s childhood is perfect. Parents don’t know crap. And the phenomenon of super parenting is more media hype than reality.
Children and parents have always struggled to get along. I recently re-watched the film adaptation of Tobias Wolfe’s memoir This Boy’s Life. Wolfe’s stepfather reminded me so much of my own that I could barely watch it. But more surprising was that I’ve never much considered writing about my parents. And now it seems to me that I’m too old to carry on about their failings.

Poetry’s merchandize is distinctly understated, classic and elegant. A lot of cashmere sweaters, velvet dresses and blazers, white blouses, a few swing coats that are worn with loafers or ballet flats. The women are pictured outside of country estates, stepping off the bow of small yachts, or ambling down the cobbled streets of quaint English-looking villages.

I had paged through the catalog a few days before and other than a pleated jersey dress didn’t see anything I wanted to buy. It was a little too holiday at Balmore for me. I only occasionally have fantasies of myself walking the Scottish hillside in wellies and a mac with a pair of welsh corgies trailing after me. The look is too Sloane Ranger to suit my taste. I didn’t start admiring the way their patron saint Princess Di dressed until after she bolted from Prince Charles and started lowering her necklines and raising her hems.

Surprisingly, several of my Ugg and sweat pant wearing students said, “I would totally wear that.” They loved the cardigans and sweater vests worn with springy cotton skirts.

“Really? The clothes aren’t too staid, too preppy?”

We had just been discussing Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, so the idea of east coast chic must have been on their minds.

“We’re bringing preppy back,” one of my more vocal students said.

I nodded, hiding my skepticism. Most of them were still regular wearers of tiny T-shirts and low-riding jeans.

I dislike the whole preppy scene and the sense of entitlement that went along with it. Cashmere and pearls were never my thing.

But the real point was the retailer’s view of poets: stately, elegant, classic. Where did this come from? Not the poets and writers that I know. As far as I can tell there are two schools of dress: Edna St. Vincent Millay flash and Dylan Thomas fizzle. They either care too much or distinctly too little.

All the clothes in Poetry start at $100, prices more in line with the corporate world than academia. Many times when I admire a fellow writer’s clothes, they confess, “thrift store” or “resale shop.”

Perhaps we can’t help but romanticized and re-dress writers a bit— Shelley in Marc Jacobs and Byron in Armani. When I imagine of Fitzgerald, he’s as coiffed as his literary creation Gatsby, and, when I first took a look at Poetry I couldn’t help but envision Sylvia Plath at Cambridge.