TMR Editors’ Prize
textBOX
Current Issue: 35.1 (Spring 2012)
Poem of the Week- David Kirby: “If Any Man Have an Ear, Let Him Listen”
- Larry Levis: “Labyrinth as the Erasure of Cries Heard Once Within It or: (Mr. Bones I Succeeded. . .’ Later)”
- Amy Newman: “The Day After The Dean of Michigan State College Admits Him To Lansing Sparrow Hospital For Rest, A Naked Theodore Roethke Barricades Himself Behind A Hospital Mattress”
Author Archives: Michael
On The (Not So) Fine Art of Literary Rejection
Each semester, The Missouri Review gets new interns at our magazine. We also hope to have at least a few interns take the class for a second semester, and this semester, we do have six students who were with us in the fall. I don’t have to explain to anyone who has run a literary magazine (or, really, any business) how tremendously valuable it is to have good, reliable people working for you, and we’re very grateful to have them back with us again this year.
This also means we also have a new batch of interns joining us who haven’t read manuscripts for us before. The vast majority of manuscripts we receive, even the really good ones, are returned to the author, unaccepted. That’s just the nature of literary magazines: we receive far more manuscripts than we can possibly publish.
How we handle rejection is a delicate thing. It’s very easy to think of it as just another mindless task when there is always a fresh stack of manuscripts that have just rolled in and need to be read. In our first production meeting of each semester, our associate editor, Evelyn Somers, always emphazies the same critical point: we read looking to accept, not to reject. It’s a tremendous difference in your frame of mind not to say “What’s wrong with this piece?” but to say “What do I love about this piece?” In class, I regularly remind our interns that the writer spent weeks (and, really, more like months or even years) writing the story that they just read and that we need to treat each manuscript with the same amount of respect and patience that went into creating it.
We’re two weeks from AWP, and this will be my third spin with The Missouri Review staff. When writers come and visit us at our table, they tell us how much they appreciate our rejection letters: I’ve heard that “you send the nicest rejection letters” and “you give the best responses.” To be fair, usually, people do not come up and curse us out and tell us our rejections are cruel and unfeeling. AWP tends to be friendly. Still, saying, essentially “That was nicest refusal, like, ever!” used to strike me as a very odd thing to say.
However, the more I write, and consequently the more work I send to other journals, the more rejections I receive. I get it. I really do. How we handle your work matters. I’ve brought up specific things every single week to my class—compliment or comment but not critique, keep it professional but friendly, don’t make assumptions, etc.—and our staff takes this task very seriously.
This past week, I received three rejections on the same story that bothered me a little bit. And a taste of my own editorial medicine is a good reminder that there is someone, always, who receives those SASEs from us and that even with the best intentions, can get pissed off. Including me.
The point of this post is not to point fingers or be angered that they turned down my work. Hey, I wanted my story to appear in their magazine because I know they publish terrific fiction. They turned down the work, not me, and that’s just how it works. I know that better than anyone. No, what bugged me were the comments. Each editor gave comments that were, I believe, intended to be helpful. Instead, their comments made me question their judgment, that they misread the story in such a fundamental way that I wondered how on earth they had read the same story I wrote.
In one of his essay collections (I’m afraid I can’t recall which essay), Charles Baxter wrote about receiving a rejection letter from an editor. I remember being stunned that Baxter’s stories still got rejected (his are probably from the New Yorker. But, still) but also how he viewed the rejections: he understood the editor’s position but also believed the editor was wrong about the work. The editor had seen so much of a certain type of story that his exhaustion immediately turned him off to Baxter’s story, making him believe Baxter was attempting something that, in fact, he wasn’t.
All three editors focused on a particular part of my story that, I knew, was the most challenging, both for me and the reader, and that if the story fails or succeeds, it’s probably right there. I’ve never received such a length response to my work from an editor (unless the editor was accepting it), and so I know, from writing such lengthy responses myself, that these editors were genuinely trying to be helpful. But the commentary turned into criticism, and suggested that I do something that I am less and less interested in fiction: explanation. One editor suggested nothing happened in the story up to this particular scene, which is about two-thirds of the way through the story. Another editor asserted that all the events in the story should be explained, all the connections drawn clearly, scene by scene, so that the reader could completely understand exactly what the story was trying to say.
Well. This sounds awfully didactic to me. I don’t quite see why any work of fiction (or any other form of creative writing) needs such a clear explanation. The more things get explained in fiction, to me, the more the story feels less imaginative, less engaging, less true (in whatever sense of that word you want to go with). This is a fine line to be sure; stories have to make sense within the milieu they exist in. But, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the reader of my story hadn’t experienced heartbreak before. I made a judgment on the editor, as a person, and that’s absolutely the wrong way to view editorial comments. It’s just about my story. That’s all.
Maybe my story needs more work. Maybe it gets accepted today. The point is that even though the comments I received felt off to me, they were written with genuine belief that the story deserved a detailed response. These editors were being generous, and despite my initial annoyance, I understand that. All of us at TMR know how awful rejection is. We all do. Every single person on our staff that has had stories, poems, and essays rejected knows it all too well, and we know that our work will be rejected again in the future. It’s not pleasant. And if we screw up and send you one of these rejections, one of these notes that angers or annoys you, believe me, it was not done with any malice. We’re doing our best, whatever failing that might bring. Keep having faith in the work we do. Because we’re definitely keeping our faith in yours.
Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye
What In The Doghouse Really Means
1.
On the coffee table in our meeting/conference/hangout room, there are several back issues of Ploughshares scattered about. One of these issues was Jean Valentine’s issue, the Winter 2008-09 issue, which was one of the last issues with Ploughshares old look, two issues before their redesign. I picked it up and flipped through the table of contents, and remembered that I had read the stories by Andrew Altschul and Fan Wu before, but that I hadn’t read the Megan Staffel story “Salt.” While waiting for coffee to brew, I sat down and read the story.
A few days later, one of our office assistant’s was flipping through the same issue. I told him he should read the Staffel story.
“You can tell it’s by a mature writer,” I said.
“How?”
I frowned. “You just can. There’s a richness to the narrative. Just something about the first two pages screams Confidence. You know?”
He nodded. I nodded. Neither of us really knew what I was talking about.
2.
I don’t know where I first heard the phrase “in the doghouse.” When my friend asked me where I got the phrase, I had no idea. I wanted to say, who doesn’t know what that means? But, obviously, she didn’t know where it came from, and trying to answer her question, it was pretty clear I didn’t either.
I said my parents. I said my grandparents. I’m sure we’ve all said “You’re in the doghouse” to suggest that someone is in trouble. No, not just in trouble: it’s not for something immediate, something that just happened, like catching a child who has just accidentailly thrown a baseball through your living room window. “In the doghouse” suggests a state that you’ve been in for a while and will remain in for the foreseeable future. Doghouse stats has been earned over the course of days, weeks, even, and a current doghouse resident is not getting out of there anytime soon.
Where did that phrase come from? I asked our audio editor, Kevin McFillen, about this. Had he heard the phrase “in the doghouse”? He said, sure. When I asked where it came from, he didn’t know either. He said he remembers seeing a couple of old black and white cartoons from the 1930s where people were finding their tents occupied by dogs, and that, maybe, he wasn’t sure, the etymology of the phrase had something to do with Tent Cities all across the country, when people found that had to literally live in the doghouse.
With Kevin’s help, I looked up the cartoonist A.B. Frost and found these images, which when you think about it, are pretty vicious: teasing the homeless, the downtrodden, literally sending the dogs after them.
More searching. One website suggested this was from the old custom of banishing a bad dog outside to is doghouse, which probably is, for words, fairly new: once we started living mainly in cities, we brought our pets indoors with us. Banned to the doghouse, then, is a bit bougy!
Two more from this website, which I’m just going to go ahead and fully crib here:
Alternative: The story of Peter Pan – in which Mr. Darling treats the beloved pet dog badly and his children fly off with Peter Pan. Mr. Darling feels so guilty that he lives in the doghouse until his children return home.
Alternative: This expression is a railroad term dating back to the era of steam locomotives. The railroad unions mandated that a head-end (front of the train) brakeman be so positioned. However, there was no room for another person in the engine cab (which housed the engineer and fireman). The railroads then built a small windowed shelter on top of the engine tender (where the coal and water was stored) behind the engine. It was called a doghouse since it was small, cramped, smoky, cold and generally miserable. Thus, the expression ‘he’s in the doghouse’ referred to the brakeman in his uncomfortable moving shack.
3.
I was re-reading one of my student’s stories, and came across a description of a cafe that was troubling me. The narrative was describing the way the waitstaff was moving from the kitchen to the front room. The word “room” came up three times in two sentences. The phrasing, while struggling to be clear, lost its rhythm.
From working in bars and restaurtants, I knew that restaurant staffs referred to being up front—where the customers are, rather than in back, which is the kitchen—as being “on the floor.” But, of course, the entire restaurant is on a floor: it doesn’t float in space or something (digression: I would love to go a restaurant where everything floats). Floor has many conotations, but the right one, for the scene, can be a bit confusing. You can’t say the staff is moving from “the kitchen to the floor” because it sounds then like the entire staff is diving to the ground to avoid machine-gun fire.
Of course, one could call the front room “the floor.” It’s not just a matter of the word choice. It’s a matter of all the sentences and images and actions and characters around the word “floor.” What the story lacks, what the writer is still working out, is how to sink fully into the world of the story with words that make it seem effortless. Any arresting phrase or image or moment needs to make the reader dig deeper into the story, not instantly claw one’s way out.
But how do I explain all that?
4.
Recently, a writer-friend posted on Facebook, asking all of us—that old collective “we”—about a dispute she was having with her editor. She wanted to know what we thought of the word “tweaker” and what it means. We were asked to not look it up. Just post what we instantly thought of the word. I thought “Meth!” (hey, I live in Missouri …) which is what, for the most part, everyone else said, with one or two exceptions. At least one person, perhaps several, pointed out that it entirely depended on the context.
This is true! And not. The word is loaded. Full clip and one in the chamber. If you sat and thought about it, there are dozens, hundreds probably, of words divorced from their original meaning to become something entirely unintended. Maybe because we’re all pals on Facebook, all of us were too like-minded to give a fair response, for all of us to represent the Intended Reader.
Let me try now to bring this altogether. I’m going to fail. Which is, actually, the point that I’m after. How does the full awareness that I’m reading a confident storyteller like Megan Staffel, the etymology of phrases that doesn’t seem to have any clear genesis, and consideration of how to use the words “floor” and “tweeker” all come together? Looks, to me, like I went from big (story) to medium (phrases) to small (word choice).
Focusing on choosing the right word is not a mistake. Looking for the specific word, tearing through the dictionary and thesaurus, pondering the syllables, the rhythm of the word, what images the word conjures for the reader: yeah, that’s what writers do. However, there is something else here that is bigger than examination of a single word.
There is also that larger quality of the work that seems to absorb everything else the writer has seen or heard, osmosis I guess, and sponged it into the story. You tend to know when you are reading a Southern writer, right? Same thing here. We can learn from other writers about how to make shapely fiction, the art of fiction, how burn down the house, bring the devil to his knees, all that good stuff, but in the end, we can’t mimic someone else entirely. “What’s the word” starts becoming “What’s my vision”—and that small change of possession makes all the difference.
Other than on weird celebrity reality shows, doghouses are quite small. Their closed off, contained. No one likes being there. Outside, though: that’s your world. Our world. Taking ownership of that vision, and speaking of it with the kind of confidence that blends the best word with the distinct phrasing of your vision is what takes the work from pretty good to unforgettable.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
Violence of the Lambs; Or Why I Didn’t Write About That
Originally, this posted was going to be about John Jeremiah Sullivan’s new collection of essays, Pulphead, which I finished reading last week. I was going to write about how the book itself is really fantastic, but there is one essay “Violence of the Lambs” that I really didn’t like, at all, almost to the point of anger, because Sullivan’s makes most of it up, then says so, doing one of these not-so-clever clever things that seems to be happening in creative non-fiction lately: poking holes in the idea of “truth” in a way that is lazy and not particularly interesting.
There was more. I was going to write about book reviewing, and my general sense of discomfort with book reviewing, which stems almost entirely from a lack of confidence to write reviews in a coherent and intelligible manner that would be useful or interesting to anyone. I was going to write about James Frey, and teaching undergraduates, and the difference between reading a single essay and a collection of essays, and probably some other subjects that would all tie together neatly for a pretty good Friday read for you, our blog reader.
Here’s the thing. I couldn’t finish it. Or, I could, I guess – did, in fact – but I wasn’t pleased with the result. It was a colossal mess of tangents and half-baked thoughts, and it seemed like a disservice to publish it the way it turned out.
It’s warm here – frighteningly warm for Missouri in February – and I have my windows open, again. All morning yesterday I read manuscripts. I haven’t done that in a while. Downstairs, on the third floor, TMR has a few couches and a coffee maker, and I put my feet up on a table, tucked a pen behind my ear, and read fiction submissions. Away from my desk, away from my computer, away from my phone (both office and mobile, which I wisely left upstairs). Felt fantastic. Felt really great to spend the morning just looking for stuff for the summer issue, reading other writers’ work, stories about Russian dancers or out of work truck drivers or the daughters of war veterans and such, and not really thinking about our audience, our budget, our expenses and income, advertising, none of the other stuff that is often pinballing through my mind in the course of the day.
I felt all right, reading like that.
Someone close to me recently remarked that I never say anything personal in my blog posts. Note, even, how carefully I phrased that previous sentence. Of course, that’s now what my site is for. But this person was right: I’m careful about this blog. It’s been one of the most successful things we’ve done since I started at The Missouri Review—our staff has written several thoughtful, smart, engaging essays on this site in the past two years, and our mantra has basically been to not be negative; remain about publishing, editing, writing; and be interesting. Writing about Sullivan’s work, I worried that I was getting increasingly negative and incoherent, upset about who knows what about his work, and that my post would be the kind of vitriol that our readers don’t want. Morever, the kind of vitriol I don’t like to write.
I bring this up because for almost a year and a half now, my personal life, especially this past month, has been a bit tumultuous (to put it mildly) and sitting in a chair reading this morning, I became aware of how much better I felt. Just in general. No grand epiphanies or realizations or anything like that; dark clouds will certainly move in later in the day (or tomorrow, soon, etc.). Writing about creative nonfiction and its ticks and whirls and wearing a cultural critic hat—it just didn’t feel right. No, it was more than that: it was a recognizable state of discord, both in head and heart, that I wanted nothing to do with. I just wanted to read.
When I was at River Styx, our rejection letters all started the same way: “Look. We’re all writers too, so we know how it feels.” That’s true, of course. But, what was making me a boiling cauldron of frustration yesterday afternoon was writing: not just the act of writing, but the criticism of writing and the Big Ideas behind criticism and interpretation and connectivity. What made me feel calm was reading, just reading, nothing more. And, really, why did any of us start writing in the first place? Because we read. And liked it. A lot.
It would be silly, of course, to have a rejection letter say “Look. We’re all readers too” because that seems pretty obvious, ironic in a hipster way or something, and perhaps even a little snide. Nonetheless, it might be more true to what unifies as, editors and submitters alike, than calling ourselves writers.
If I was clever, if I had my writing cap on, I’d be able to come up with a really snazzy close here. But I don’t. Moreover, I don’t want to attempt to tack this together neatly. The messiness of this post is what’s most interesting to me, and how, by taking a little time to not think, to read without thinking beyond the story in my hands. And, for today, I think that’s all I really want to focus on. I’ll leave it at that.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
New Books We Love: The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen
I first met Keija Parnissen last summer when she and her husband Michael stopped by The Missouri Review’s summer launch party. I can’t remember how the conversation started, but we talked for a solid half-hour about … well, a little bit of everything, with that effortless rhythm that happens when I speak to someone genuinely interesting. And it is also really wonderful to know that there is a writer here in Columbia not immediately connected to the university, and thriving with her own work.
Keija has just released her deubt novel, The Ruins of Us, on Harper Perennial. Calling her a local writer is only half-accurate: she’s lived in Saudi Arabia, Texas, New Jersey, Iowa, and now, right here in Columbia where, among other things, she runs the Quarry Heights Workshop. Between flying around the country to give readings and celebrate her book publication with her family and friends, she took the time to sit down and answer a few questions for TMR about her new novel.
TMR: When asked about his famous character, Emma Bovary, Flaubert said “Madame Bovary, she is me.” I’m sure you get lots of questions about how autobiographical your characters are. What elements of yourself do you see in Rosalie? In Abdullah? In Faisal? In Miriam?
Parssinen: While I find it irksome that people assume every work of fiction is autobiographical, Flaubert’s quote gets at the heart of the matter—obviously he’s not a housewife who embarks on a disastrous adulterous affair, but it is he who breathed life into Emma and established her emotional and psychological being. In that way, the author is every character in her book, for she is their creator. So while Rosalie, Abdullah, Miriam, Dan, and Faisal are removed from my biography by virtue of our differences in age, religion, provenance, and in some cases, sex, they are born of my imagination, cultivated from my knowledge of pain, joy, betrayal, love. They are, indeed, me.
TMR: How did you decide to expand your narrative outside the family to Dan Coleman? Why does Isra not also get her own storyline?
Parssinen: The novel actually began as Dan’s story because I felt most comfortable writing in his voice. He’s the battle-hardened expat living as a stranger in a strange world, and I’d known his kind, both within my family and without. I wanted him to serve as the novel’s Nick Carraway, to observe the family in turmoil and report to the reader from a distance. But of course, as Nick and Dan both discover, the observer inevitably becomes enmeshed in the storyline, and that’s where things get tricky. To me, Isra is the catalyst of the narrative but she is unimportant to it—she reveals the cracks in the façade, but she’s peripheral. And while I found her an interesting character—an educated, progressive Arab woman who agrees to become a second wife—there was no room for her voice in this already-crowded story. Much of the book dwells on what it means to be an outsider, and she truly is one, even down to her authorially-enforced silence.
TMR: What was the most difficult scene to write and why?
Parssinen: I nearly cry every time I read the scene between Dan and Rosalie on the dune, when they’re talking about their failed marriages and whether love is worth it. My parents divorced and it was immensely painful for me and my siblings; even though my parents are now back together, none of us kids has fully recovered from that early pain. It was my first real experience with loss, after leaving Saudi Arabia—and to imagine through Dan and Rosalie’s dialogue the pain of negotiating lost love was excruciating for me, but it also helped me understand my parents’ decisions and work towards forgiving them.
TMR: Often in novels, there are storylines and even characters that have to be “cut” in order to make the novel work. Would you please share one or two things that you had to make the hard choice on, and eliminate from the book?
Parssinen: Thankfully, I didn’t have to cut any of my major characters, but I did have to eliminate pages and pages of character rumination. My poor agent and editor, drowning in all those swirling thoughts and wondering how the devil to create a sense of pacing! They were both very honest with me—“Look, Dan is becoming a HUGE drag, could you please just pep him up a little bit, have him actually do something instead of just be sad and ponder his losses?” I probably cut 40 pages of Dan, pages where I really liked the writing and the mood created and had carefully constructed each sentence. It was incredibly tough but absolutely necessary to excise those parts.
TMR: Do you consider Rosalie and Abdullah’s marriage a “failed marriage”?
Parssinen: Yes, but not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine (his taking a second wife, etc). It failed for those most mundane reasons: they stopped communicating with each other and became complacent within the marriage. And while the second wife presents obvious problems (!) for the union, it had started to die before her emergence on the scene.
TMR: Writers read diversely. The books that are recommended in the back of The Ruins of Us are thematically similar. Take your readers in another direction: what is one book that you recommend and love that is completely different from your writing?
Parssinen: Great question! I love Yannick Murphy’s recent novel, The Call. In it, she experiments with form while telling the story of a Vermont veterinarian’s family living in a creaking old house in the countryside. She takes incredible structural risks, novelistically, and somehow manages to pull off a story that is emotionally resonant and incredibly funny. Though on the surface of things, it’s a domestic, pastoral story, it’s pure magic. I plan to read all of her earlier work, I loved it so much!
If you’re a Columbia resident, Keija’s book launch party here in town is free and open to the public: this Saturday, January 28th, at 7:00 pm, swing by Orr Street Studios and meet her, buy the book (what—you haven’t already?!), and hang out for a few hours. If you’re not in Columbia, skip over to Keija’s site to find out when she is coming to your town and, of course, snag a copy of her book.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
On Literary Readings and Community
The number of “Best of 2011″ lists is pretty daunting. Not only does ever major media outlet have a “Best of 2011″ list, some even have a “Worst of 2011.” There are lists for Most Overlooked and Underrated and Overrated and probably several others that my brain is unable to process at the moment. Often the effect of these lists is to remind me that there were many terrific books this past year that I did not read and, perhaps even worse, never heard of in the first place.
While I missed many books this year, I went to a ton of author readings. Last semester alone, I attended about seven events at the University of Missouri (new PhD student readings and visiting writers), probably three more at Orr Street Studios, and another, oh, let’s call it five at Get Lost Bookstore in Columbia. Over the last five months, I probably went to an average of a reading per week. If I sit and think about it for a while, there are also all the readings from this past summer and this past spring, which would then include readings I went to in St. Louis and Washington, D.C., where the AWP Conference was in February.
Believe me, all semester long, I bitched and moaned about going to readings. We all did. Hey, people like to complain. There was definitely a time this semester when I looked at my calendar, and there was something like seven readings in ten days. I tried to make all of them, too. But why? Why did I want to go to all these things? Especially when, as you probably can guess from this, more than once, I had the sinking feeling I didn’t want to go at all.
But readings aren’t just about me. They are about my literary community, my arts community, and even when I’m cranky, it was always the right decision to get myself in gear and attend.
Readings are, in many ways, just like editing a magazine journal. To paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates, editing is a we, and one can get somewhat tired of an I. She was talking, of course, about the difference between being an editor and being a writer, and why being a magazine editor is an attractive vocation. But the same idea – being involved and being for other people rather than just yourself – applies to readings.
Writers, when writing, spend their time alone. The solitude is essential for deep thinking and the process of creation. Loneliness, of course, goes hand-in-hand with this quiet, and after spending years working on something – poems, a novel, stories – getting in front of an audience of people and sharing that work can be a welcome shift.
It can also be a disaster. Many of us, I’m sure, have been to readings that were … well, lackluster. We’ve also been to readings where people are trying a wee bit too hard to be “entertaining.” There are plenty of these stories. This makes the readings that are really and truly an amazing experience. For me, hearing Edward P. Jones read his work is still one of the most incredible things I’ve ever heard.
Readings are the chance for writers to be outgoing, extroverted, friendly, celebratory. Listeners, often writers and avid readers too, are warm and gregarious. Alcohol is (hopefully) involved. We gossip. Laugh. Shake hands. We crave remarks and thoughts about the work, discover what other people are working on, what we’re reading: we want to know who and what is being read not just published. We’re eager to talk.
Here in Columbia, there are three regular spots for readings: any event our English Department holds, the Hearing Voices series at Orr Street Studios, and at Get Lost Bookshop down on Ninth Street. I attend as many as I can, and hope that wherever you’re reading this from, you’re doing the same in your part of the world.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
A Personal Blueprint for AWP Chicago
In this space, we’ve written about AWP before. Michael Kardos wrote about how overwhelming it can feel. Michael Petrik wrote about last year’s conference in Washington D.C. before we went, and I did a roundup after we got back. The year before, I wrote about AWP Denver. And if you keep picking through our blog archives, you’ll find that everyone has different responses: former managing editor Richard Sowienski wrote about AWP 2007 (held in Atlanta). Officially, AWP has its own useful series of questions and answers, and the good folks at Tin House can help you identify poets.
The other day, I ran into one of my friends who is a first year MFA candidate at a Big University. He said that he too was headed up to Chicago, and asked what it was like and what he should do up there. Which got me thinking about my last couple of AWP experiences and how they’ve shaped my current plans. Here’s a quick rundown:
2004: Chicago. I went with my graduate program. Our program didn’t have a table at the book fair for the program or our literary journal, so we went as a wandering pack of about two dozen people. The first year I went to a lot of panels and picked up a ton of free merchandise and cheap sample copies. Back home, I dumped my back of thirty some odd journals and a weird mixture of Things I Do Not Need (rulers, bookmarks, shot glasses, pens, etc.) on the floor of my apartment and wondered what I was supposed to do with all of this stuff.
2009: Chicago. Went representing River Styx, though we couldn’t afford a table. Out of graduate school, none of my old workshop buddies were there. Went to less panels. Spent more time at the book fair and at the bars. Randomly ran into Richard Bausch again (I’d met him in St. Louis the year before), and he actually remembered me! Brought home less stuff.
2010: Denver. My first year with The Missouri Review. Nice to be behind a table. Went looking for, and found, lots of other editors to ask them questions about their magazines and what made them great. Wonk-ier. Lots more off-site readings. Saw many old friends this time. Warmer weather. “It’s the altitude!” was the running not so funny joke. Bummed I missed the Nuggets game.
2011. Washington D.C. Nightmare trying to get there due to 20 inches of snow (!!!) in Missouri. Half our staff didn’t make it. On a panel about print journals with online content. Otherwise, didn’t go to any panels. Tons of friends to see for catchup drinks and dinner (read: more drinks). Hotel room was awesome. Refused all free gifts at tables. Missed about a hundred people that I wanted to talk to. Exhausted by Saturday night. Did not bother seeing if there was a Wizards game.
Based on this experience, here’s my current loose rules of thumbs—subject to change at any time—for this year’s AWP.
Skip the panels. Controversal advice, I’m sure. A regular criticism of AWP panels is that they are not particularly good and poorly organized, and that panels are selected for name recognition rather than the quality of the presentation. I wish I could disagree. Most of the panels were far more interesting to me as a grad student than they were once I was working at a literary journal, but even then, the rooms were cramped, the panels started late, and mostly, I wanted to have a conversation with a particular panelist rather than hear what all of them had to say. I usually just looked for said panelists over the course of four days. Remember, everyone wears badges.
Hit the bookfair hard. The bookfair, to me, is where it’s at. I’m completely and totally biased: I work on a literary magazine, and love it. So, of course, I go to the tables and want to hear about what they are doing and what they are up to. I love talking shop. And when you find a table, and the editors are really interesting? You learn a ton about publishing. I highly recommend it.
Do not drink at the hotel bar. Last time I was in Chicago, I ordered two mixed drinks: whiskey and Coke, and a gin and tonic. This cost me $22. Really. And I waited fifteen minutes to get these drinks. You’re in Chicago. Go find another place to hang out.
Do not plan to go to any readings. This will make people mad, but, so be it. If you ask me about a reading, I will say “I’ll do my best.” And I really will. But I go to a lot of readings already. Readings are cool. But I can do that anywhere. There are sixty billion readings in Columbia alone. What’s another reading? This does not mean that I don’t go to readings; in Denver, Christina Hutchins said “Have you ever heard Forrest Gander read?” with such awe that I thought: Gotta go. Plus, I got to hang out with Christina Hutchins. Sold! But that wasn’t planned. My reading attendance is more of the standing in a pack of people variety, someone asks what we’re up to, someone else answers “There’s a reading across the street!” and we say, “All right, let’s do that!” So, I go to readings. I just don’t pre-plan to go.
Smart Water. When I get to town, I find a convenience store and buy as much Smart Water as I can. I drink an entire liter before I go out, and when I come back, I drink an entire liter before I go to bed. You really should not need an explanation why.
Eyes up. It’s aggravating how people look at your lanyard before deciding whether or not you are worth talking to. Remember that you are with other writers, and we’re all really eager to say Hello to a wide-range of people: politeness and dignity can go a long way in making good impressions. Don’t be that person (though, at AWP, we are all that person). Keep your eyes above the neck. It’s much appreciated by all.
Above all, enjoy it. That’s the biggest thing. It sounds like the kind of advice your parents give you, but AWP is really what you make of it. It really is a wonderful time. Do come talk to us: we’d love put a face to a name, see old friends again, and make lots of new ones.
Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye