Author Archives: Morgan

Writing as Vocation

A friend of mine recently went to a job interview for a teaching position in creative writing at a university. To prepare, she bounced possible questions and ideas for answers off of me and I contributed ideas and said what I thought about her ideas. A wise friend of hers suggested that she should sell her craft in a vocational sense. But how do you sell writing as vocation? How do you tell those business majors how creative writing is going to help them sell hundreds of thousands of teddy bears or whatever?

We thought about it and decided that the best thing creative writing does for a young mind is teach it to anticipate. Look at it this way: You’re writing along and you’re character jumps off a bridge into some water. Now you have several options. The character could drown, he could miraculously surface and swim to safety, or your character could take flight mid-fall and fly to his or her villa in Tuscany to live happily ever after.

Regardless of which scenario you choose, you have to anticipate what will happen next. If your character drowns, you’re going to have to end the story or switch gears to another point of view. As the writer, you need to think about all this in advance. Otherwise, you’re going to be sitting there with a dead character on your hands saying to yourself, “Wait a tick, I just killed my character! Now he can’t go to college and become a dentist as I had planned!” If, on the other hand, your character takes flight mid-fall and flies to Tuscany, you’re going have to anticipate utter and complete mockery at your workshop.

Also, a good writer looks for problems as he or she goes along. A good writer creates a scene and writes to avoid problems with character development, tension, etc. A good writer anticipates problems and avoids them. Interestingly enough, so does a good businessperson.

A good businessperson, while creating a teddy bear prototype, says to herself, “If we glue this nose on, little kids are going to be chewing on the bear’s nose, pull this little nose thing off, and choke on it. And that wouldn’t be cool. Yeah, we should probably sew that sucker on.” In this way, the businessperson looks for possible problems during production, and also anticipates the consequences of his or her actions. And this good business person probably learned this valuable skill from a creative writing workshop after a group of vicious college students said, “What, were you trying to be funny with this character taking flight mid-fall? Because, dude, you’re not funny.”

Writing as vocation: it’s a beautiful thing.

My Theoretical Thousand Dollars

I have a thousand dollars…in theory. Periodically, I offer my theoretical thousand dollars to authors by way of letters and e-mail in exchange for their outstanding works of non-fiction. I’ve never actually had a thousand dollars in hand, much less a thousand dollars I can give away, but thanks to The Missouri Review, I can realize that dream.

As a member of the solicitation team, I have been given the opportunity to work with Speer Morgan and Michael Kardos to attract promising authors and their works of non-fiction. It’s surprising what a theoretical thousand dollars can buy.

Here’s a list of things a theoretical thousand dollars can buy:

1. Outstanding non-fiction submissions
2. Unusual experience concerning communication with authors and letter writing
3. At least two lines on my resume that will cause a human resources person to raise his or her eyebrow and nod approvingly

Maybe those three things aren’t important to you, but that’s probably because you’re not trying to get a job in publishing. The Missouri Review, in giving me the chance to offer authors a thousand dollars I will never be allowed to hold in my hand and call my own, has given me at least that much money in experience. They have also given me the opportunity to say, “We at The Missouri Review are now offering 1000 dollars for accepted works of non-fiction.”

What's so great about Faulkner?

I recently had my first, serious set of interviews in the publishing business. For those of you who haven’t tried it, getting ready for interviews is a bummer. To get ready for my interviews, I thought up questions and came up with possible answers.

It seems that certain questions often go hand in hand. When I meet new people, they often ask, “What is your major?” and I tell them I’m an English major and wait politely as though I have no idea what their next question will be. More often than not the next question inquires about my favorite author. It’s a logical step that everybody seems to take. So rarely does somebody ask about my major and then say, “Cool” and walk off. Observing this pattern, I have come up with a standard response: Tobias Wolff for short stories and William Faulkner for novels. This answer seems to satisfy most people. As it happens, human resources people at large publishing companies aren’t “most people.” It’s their job to ask questions, and they do it with gusto.

At my first interview the woman with whom I met asked me about my favorite books. I assumed she was asking to make sure I wasn’t reading choose your own adventure books and X-Men comics (make no mistake, the X-Men rule), so I brought the Wolff/Faulkner response out of the barn. As it happens, she didn’t really care about that part of the question. She really wanted to know why I chose them.

Secretly sweating beneath my very corporate power suit, I struggled to come up with the answer she wanted. I had an answer: I love the authors because their books move me, because they’re beautiful, because reading them sucks me into a different world I would normally never see.

So much of giving a great answer is figuring out why the question is being asked in the first place. What does she want to know? I was about to say something about the beautiful prose when it hit me: she wants to know what I want to contribute to the literary landscape should I ever work my way up to a position in which I could choose what books go out into the world. She wanted to know what I thought made the books so great. I told her the unadulterated truth: books are important because the closer a person gets to another person’s life, the better their perspective is. Better perspective cultivates the ability to feel something close to empathy and empathy allows people to be something other than selfish. If Faulkner brings a privileged reader so close to poverty that the reader can nearly feel it, then the reader will view poverty as real and tangible and a problem that needs solving. The creation of perspective is what Faulkner and Wolff do so well and therein is the value of their work.

Having said my piece, I watched for the interviewer’s reaction. She knitted her brows and nodded, agreeing that what I said about the value of literature was very true. Sensing her reluctance, I quickly added, “Of course, the escapist value is also substantial in both authors’ books. I mean, people love getting sucked in, which is why commercial fiction is so great.” The interviewer smiled and my literary mind finally empathized with a commercial world.

Spalding Gray

A body identified as Spalding Gray was pulled from the East River on Sunday. The cause of death is still under investigation.

Gray, famous for writing and acting, is best known in the literary world for his autobiographical monologues, “Monster in a Box,” “Cambodia” and “It’s a Slippery Slope.” You can read the full story at cnn.com.

The literary world, as well as the entertainment world, will certainly miss Spalding Gray.

English Major Appreciation 101

For our first assignment in Art Appreciation, we were to learn about an art movement and, in the course of our eight minute presentation, discuss what the movement was all about, analyzing three works of art within the movement. Before we began our presentations, we were encouraged to give our name, our year in school, and our major. I’m not being biased when I say the English majors showed the rest of the class how it’s done.

On the whole, the English majors had exceptional organizational skills. Their presentations began with a clear thesis and the topics were all closely related to the thesis and linked with smooth transitional phrases.

When it came time to analyze the art, the English majors suggested possible meaning behind the work and the work’s place in society. While some students simply used the vocabulary from the class to describe the pieces, the English majors tended to be more insightful, wondering what a whole dead shark floating in a glass case of formaldehyde really means in a metaphorical sense.

The English majors rocked our presentations because we have been trained to see things differently. We have been trained to look for what’s under the surface. In a more global sense, we have been trained to identify and understand artistic expression.

As another English major finished her presentation, I looked at our teacher’s satisfied nod and half smile. Then and there, it occurred to me that I will be acing Art Appreciation because I’m an English major.

Literary Rock Stars

A little more than a year ago, I was interning at a cinema cafe here in Columbia. One of my tasks was to help set up a reading with Dave Eggers. He was promoting his new book, You Shall Know Our Velocity, which is a good read if anybody is interested. We knew it would be a big event, but we hadn’t predicted the throngs of students and teenagers that would be waiting outside the door in the late autumn cold, hours before the reading, hoping to get a chair. Of course there were adults there too, but the crowd was mostly young people. Standing inside, waiting to open the doors and begin selling books, it hit me: Dave Eggers is a rock star of the literary world.

Maybe it’s the little pictures scattered throughout the text of You Shall Know Our Velocity. Maybe it’s Egger’s style or his willingness to promote new, young writers through McSweeney’s. I’m not sure what he’s got that makes him so beloved by hipster kids and people in the know, but I do know there are others like him, and I’m pretty sure there’s got to be some kind of pattern or similarity in their work I haven’t quite nailed down. Whatever the formula for their success, I’m thrilled to death that authors like Dave Eggers exist. A wise teacher once told me that the literary world needs rock star writers, and I couldn’t agree more completely. We need authors like Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, Craig Arnold, and David Sedaris to interest young people, create some hype, and keep the proverbial ball rolling. Young people feel like they can be the next Sedaris for the same reason kids keep forming bands in their parents’ garages. Literary rock stars, I salute you.