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: Nell
Ordered Chaos
In ten days my partner and I will pack a rented truck with furniture, kitchen appliances and hundreds – many hundreds – of books, and move across the country. My daughters’ bedrooms are full of boxes and scattered piles of toys, crayons, books and scraps of paper. The kitchen looks as though several small explosives knocked everything out of the cabinets and across the counters. Every surface is covered in things waiting to be put into boxes.
Yesterday, as I was lugging boxes across the room and stacking them in rows along a wall, it occurred to me that preparing to move and writing a novel might have a few things in common. With both, I try to get a little bit done each day and feel frustrated and annoyed with myself if I don’t manage to carve out time to write or pack at least one box. And with both, sometimes things look worse before they look better.
In my life and in my writing I require a certain sense of order. I just can’t think straight if my house is a mess. But when the house is full of boxes, it can be tricky to find the space to think, so I create a kind of temporary order by showing the boxes to once side and moving the things covering surfaces into groups. Writing a novel, like packing, means spending a lot of time in the messy middle with scenes and kitchen gadgets, snippets of dialogue and Barbie dolls, unruly characters and things that just won’t fit in a box.
A few months ago I began using Scrivener. I wasn’t sold at first, but then I took the time to work my way through the tutorial and now I’m hooked. It gives me places to keep all the messy bits and pieces of my novel without feeling like they need a place to fit right away: the virtual equivalent of labeling and stacking boxes as I pack. It’s not a single linear document in which a paragraph has to go before something and after something else because that’s just how it works, and it’s also not a complicated hierarchy of folders on my desktop filled with dozens of separate documents that are tricky to find when I need them, even if I remember they’re there in the first place.
Using Scrivener hasn’t just changed the way I keep track of things; it’s changed the way I write. Because I don’t have to either move from point A to point B, or keep things in separate documents, it has freed me to work on scenes even when I have no idea where they’re going to go in the end, to write conversations between characters that are important, but as yet unattached to a particular scene. In short, it has made me more productive, because, like reordering the boxes in my living room and sliding the cleaning supplies and wine glasses into groups on the kitchen counter, it creates a kind of temporary order. Even when just beneath that order is the kind of chaos that makes my head feel cluttered and stifled, grouping and moving the pieces from one place to another provides a semblance of order. Moving the description of a key location into the Fragments section, or sliding an entire scene from chapter six to chapter four frees me to work on the novel as though it were an enormous puzzle; even when I feel like I’ve lost the lid to the puzzle and have no idea what it will look like when I’m done, I still have all the pieces there to move around until they fit.
Whenever I move I always reach a stage at which I stop and look around. I take in the stacks of things that go together and the piles of things I don’t know what to do with and think, it’s not going to get done. But then I remind myself that, one way or another, it always does, and until moving day arrives, the best way to keep my sanity is to keep filling, labeling and stacking each boxes as neatly as possible; clearing out a place to think in the middle of the room, and remembering that one way or another, the pieces will come together in the end.
Magic, and other innovations.
This past week I (finally) completed edits on the additional materials for two pieces that, although they were part of textBOX’s launch this past January, have very patiently been waiting for their extra pieces to join them online. To Cynthia Miller Coffel’s Editors’ Prize winning essay “Letters to David,” we have added an introduction, questions, writing prompts and a brief note from the author. As with all of the additional materials provided on the site, the goal is to enhance readers’ experiences, to illuminate a particular aspect of the text, or encourage consideration of some of the piece’s subtler elements.
Rural mailbox photograph by Mark McGee
In the note that accompanied the essay when it was first published in TMR, Coffel describes her motivation, saying, “I wanted, in my essay, to honor the generous impulse of my twenties—working to help all those poor people, trying to make our country better—and I also wanted to treat that impulse lightly, to admit that it was mixed up with arrogance and exuberance and naiveté. I also wanted to honor my friendship with the man I’ve called David. I think that kind of friendship is one you can only have at a certain point in your life.” Understanding the author’s intent can have a profound impact on a reader’s approach and while intent may not be everything, in this case Coffel’s explanation simply clarifies the tender, yet honest evaluation of her own past that is evident throughout “Letters to David.”
L. E. Miller’s short story “Kind,” is also about a woman reflecting on the life she led in her early twenties, although of course this story is fiction and its protagonist, Ann, a fictional character. In addition to adding our usual introduction, questions and writing prompts, I am pleased to announce that “Kind” is the first textBOX piece to be presented with a full audio version. Recorded along with the first-ever audiobook edition of TMR in early 2007, “Kind” is read by Mark Kelty and you can listen via the toolbox in the right sidebar of all the pages on which “Kind” and its additional materials appear.
There is a special kind of magic in listening to stories read aloud. More than once over the past decade I’ve found myself sitting in a parking lot, transfixed by PRI’s Selected Shorts, unable to complete whatever errand I intended to run until I’ve heard how the story ends. At AWP a few years back, I attended a Selected Shorts performance of B. D. Wong reading Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” and remember feeling as though the other thousand or so audience members simply weren’t there. It’s as if being read to can hold me perfectly in the present by reminding some part of my subconscious of the pleasure of being read to as a child.
(I admit this resembles my childhood not at all, but I like the photograph.)
Adding full audio versions of the stories, essays (and eventually poems – more on that soon, I promise) on textBOX has been something we’ve been thinking about for a while. This summer we are going to make it happen. “Kind” is just the first of many. William Harrison’s short story “Eleven Beds” has been recorded and will be edited soon, and our new team of anthology interns are already hard at work selecting which essays and stories will be next.
In the meantime, if reading “Letters to David” along with Cynthia Miller Coffel’s commentary, and listening to “Kind,” leave you wanting more, you can always listen to all of the pieces from The Missouri Review’s first audiobook issue (30.4, Winter 2007) here. Of course if you like that, you can always subscribe to our digital issue, which comes complete with a full audio version four times a year. And if that’s just not enough storytelling for you, maybe my favorite fiction podcasts (here, here, and here) can tide you over until we can get back down to the studio and start making more magic.
Nell McCabe is The Missouri Review’s Anthology Editor.
The Story of the Story
The latest addition to textBOX is not a new story or essay, but a very brief piece written for the anthology by Mimi Schwartz to accompany “Off the Record”—a chapter from her prize-winning memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village. In the note that now accompanies her essay in the anthology, Schwartz writes that she discovered her task was “less about finding THE RIGHT ANSWER about the goodness or badness of Germans in my father’s village and more about the complexities of finding out.” In other words, the truth she thought she was looking for turned out to be only part of the whole story, a story that included the process of discovery as well as the journey of its author.
Despite being just three paragraphs long, this mini-essay has gotten me thinking about the evolution of writing projects—how they can grow out of one thing and into something else and how that transformation can be such a frustrating and productive part of the writing process. The novel I’m currently working on began life as a screenplay over a decade ago: one with quite a bit of expository dialogue explaining the character’s extensive back-stories and more than a few larger-than-life coincidences carrying the overly intricate plot. Since its inception ten years ago I’ve put it down and returned to it more times than I can count. I’ve also earned a BA and an MA, had two children, written two short screenplays, a dozen or so short stories, an equal number of academic essays, moved halfway across the country, and, most recently, discovered Scrivener (with which I am madly in love – more about that in another post).
Process can be anything from the basic act of putting pen to paper to traveling across the Atlantic to uncover the complexities of your family’s past. What was once an amateur screenplay is now an almost finished novel. Thinking about the long, sometimes painful, sometimes incredibly rewarding process reminds me just how much perseverance is required to keep working on a project that quite frequently just doesn’t seem like it is ever going to work. My novel no longer bears anything more than a superficial resemblance to its former self and despite the fact that I was arguably a very different writer when I began the project, I am more committed to it now than ever. It’s the many changes that have taken place in both my life and my manuscript that have shaped what it has become. Whether it ends up being a part of the story itself or is the invisible scaffolding beneath the story, process is an essential part of the finished product and it’s good to be reminded of that every now and then, especially when the process is long and hard.
Not all of my writing is this way. I’ve written stories that came to me in a flash and were written and rewritten in a matter of days. This story is different. For this story the process has influenced every character, every scene, every scrap of dialogue. How does process affect your work? Is there a piece of your own writing for which process has been particularly integral?
On a completely unrelated note, if you’ve got three minutes and twenty-nine seconds to spare, I recommend watching the animated video interview I did with TMR’s social media editor Rob Foreman.
Nell McCabe is the Anthology Editor for The Missouri Review.
Vibrancy, Stability and the Process of Selection
Nearly ten years ago I worked as part of a small non-profit agency whose mission it was to empower the local youth and help them find alternatives to the drugs and alcohol that had become a real problem for our rural community. The organization was not just for kids, but had been founded by kids, and was run by kids. The vibrancy of the organization in its early days would be hard to beat, but turnover was high. Most of us only worked there for a year at the most before going off to college or moving on to something more lucrative. Energy and enthusiasm may have been high, but information fell through the cracks all the time and work that had been done by one group of kids was regularly being redone by the next.
One of the things that I have come to not just appreciate but truly love about The Missouri Review is that we have the best of both worlds. Our internship program delivers a new crew three times a year, each of them eager to learn the inner workings of a successful literary magazine and all of them bubbling over with fresh ideas. At the same time we are lucky enough to have Speer Morgan, our now-Editor-in-Chief who has worked on the magazine since its inception in 1978 and Associate Editor Evelyn Somers who has been with TMR since 1986. This incredible—and I would argue, rare—combination of institutional memory, wealth of knowledge and vibrant rejuvenation is one of the things that makes The Missouri Review the journal it is today.
It is also one of the things that has made selecting material for inclusion in our (still new) online anthology, textBOX such a rewarding experience. We’ve written a couple of times recently about how work is selected for each of our issues: how each one comes together through a process that requires both collaboration and individual attention to detail. Reading our way through the slush pile is, in my opinion, still the best way to find the work that makes its way from hand to hand – you have to read this one, the way the pieces come together at the end is fantastic! – so that each story, essay and poem builds a loyal following before it is even officially selected for publication. But when it comes to choosing pieces for the textBOX anthology, the process is necessarily different.
As I wrote a few months ago when I was preparing the textBOX site for its January launch, many of the pieces included in our anthology have been those that stayed with Evelyn or Speer through the years. However, it’s not just Speer and Evelyn for whom these pieces have resonated. Many of them have also won awards or been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American and O. Henry. In our own offices each intern who has worked on the questions or introduction for a piece has fallen in love with it in the process. Each is remarkable in its own way, and it is with great pleasure that I am able to announce the addition of two remarkable pieces to textBOX:
“Eleven Beds” by William Harrison was included in his collection, Texas Heat and Other Stories, which won the 2005 Texas Review Fiction Prize. Beginning with a couple’s first sexual experience and following their relationship through the years, “Eleven Beds” uses an unconventional narrative structure to present eleven defining moments in the lives of Will and Myla, revealing deep truths about the power of human attraction.
“Big Jim” by Robert Kimber won our Editors’ Prize in 2007 and was included in the anthology A Place Called Maine: 24 Writers on the Maine Experience, a collection of works by authors living in Maine, edited by Wesley McNair. During the summers of his youth, Robert Kimber helped maintain his father’s dream, Big Jim Pond Camps in Maine; there he found an unlikely mentor in Don Yeaton, the caretaker. “Big Jim” is an elegy for a person, a place and an era now gone, by an essayist well-versed in the traditions of the nature essay.
I hope you enjoy these additions to the anthology as much as we have.
Nell McCabe is the Anthology Editor at The Missouri Review.
Introducing textBOX
After much editing and formatting and organizing and planning, our new online anthology is finally ready and everything (well, almost everything) is set. There are a few extra materials that still need to be reworked a bit, but all of the stories and essays scheduled to be a part of the initial launch are ready and posted.
Here it is:
textBOX: an anthology of exceptional fiction, essays and poetry originally published in The Missouri Review.
I owe a huge thank you to all of the amazing interns who have contributed to this project; it very literally could not have been done without them. We’ve been lucky to have such talented and dedicated students assist in transforming this project from an idea into a reality.
As with any new website, I’m sure there will be kinks to work out, but I hope you’ll both bear with us and also send us notes and suggestions for improvement as you explore the site. Our goal is to make textBOX not only a place to find some of the best work we’ve published over the years, but also a resource for teachers and students. In the coming months we will continue to add to both the collection of literature and the supplementary materials accompanying each piece. We will also be developing the poetry section of the site and hope to have at least a small collection of pieces ready by the end of the spring semester.
We would love to hear what you think of the new site! You can comment on this post, or email us directly at tmranthology@missouri.edu.
Peril and the Work of Fionn McCabe
The date of the launch party for the Spring issue is fast approaching, and while I realize there are a few more important things being discussed around the blogosphere today, I’d still like to take a moment to celebrate the incredible artwork donated for the event by Los Angeles artist Fionn McCabe.[1]
The vaguely creepy, yet visually satisfying feeling that I get from this illustration is a common in Fionn’s work. Since I am not at all versed in the language of art criticism, I’ll let another of Fionn’s illustrations do the talking for me:
This is What the People Want
In addition to his solo work, Fionn is also a co-founder of Oh Nancy, a collaborative project that serves as a vehicle for artists, providing an underlying narrative structure on top of which artists working in a variety of media have created—and continue to create—layer upon layer of parallel mythologies and fictional characters as a means of critiquing some of America’s most established and beloved institutions. Here’s one of my favorite images of the Corn Alliance football team starring quarterback Bill Oolie:
The Cookout
Fionn’s recent work has been featured on BOOOOOOOM!, Beautiful/Decay, the fashion press, and Emulsion Apparel, and can of course be found on his own site fionnmccabe.com, on which you can explore his many projects and subscribe to his blog.
In case you’re now saying to yourself, yes, fine, but what does Fionn look like, I will leave you with this portrait of the artist on vacation.
Portrait of the Artist on Vacation (left) / A Portrait of Vacation (right)
[1] (Full disclosure: yes, he’s my brother, as is Sean who has done some incredible work for the anthology project, including our beloved mascot, Humphrey. What can I say, when I need free art, I turn to family. Do they have a great sister, or what? Okay, I admit it; I’m the lucky one.)