The Missouri Review is excited to be attending AWP’s Conference in Chicago in just a few short weeks. We are doing our best to prepare for the Windy City, but could use some help. With Oprah out of the picture, I have little to contribute to a Chicagoan presence. Our resident Cubs fan also seems to have come to terms with what little value his fandom holds. There is one famed Chicago attribute that the TMR staff seems confident enough to take on: gourmet hot dogs. In honor of these mystery meat masterpieces and in an attempt to improve our AWP readiness, @Missouri_Review is holding its first Twitter contest.

We are asking our Twitter followers to send us your literary-themed hot dog recipes. Entries should include a name for your hot dog, a list of ingredients, and reference literature in some way, all under 140 characters. Let us know that you’ve entered by including the hashtag #TMRchicago at the end of your tweet. Vegetarian and vegan tofu dog entries will also be accepted. Judging will be primarily based on the giggling and stomach rumbling of our editors and staff. Your tweet entry might look something like this:

The winner will receive a handmade literary-hot-dog-themed craft, assembled by The Missouri Review office staff. To increase your chances of winning a (better?) prize, consider entering TMR’s other contests: Our Non-Contest or our 5th Annual Audio Contest. We look forward to eating your tweets!

*E-mail address: themissourireview@gmail.com (don’t send spam. We do not want a cheap hotel in Vietnam).

*Prizes: 1-year subscription to the online Missouri Review, complete with audio access (pop it into your car, listen to fine literature on your way to work instead of Top 40. Hear the sweet dulcet tones of our soon-to-be-published Editor’s Prize winners while you bench press 300 pounds)

*Rules: 1 entry per person, stick to the word/form limit. Judges’ (biased) decisions final. We’ll put up the winning entry on our Tumblr and Facebook pages.

Week 1:

“Ringo Starr’s interior monologue while playing drums at a sold out show”

250 Words.

Due by: 8PM EST, 2/9/12

Winners Announced: You know, after that

**Not to be confused with the money-awarding “Audio Contest,” entries to which must be postdated by March 15th–details of which (including the exciting sliding scale of contest entry fees) are available in Claire McQuerry’s post from a couple days ago. 

This year, for TMR’s 5th annual Audio Competition, we’ve decided to try an experiment. Ok, so it’s a little crazy, and we don’t really know what to expect: we’ve decided to leave the contest entry fee up to the entrants; if you decide to submit work to our Audio Contest, you choose what you feel is a fair reading fee. Your entry fee, regardless of what you pay, still gets you a one-year digital subscription to The Missouri Review.

In the past, we have always charged a $20 entry fee—an entry fee that’s fairly standard for literary-journal-run competitions these days. And while we feel that this fee is reasonable (it includes a one-year subscription to The Missouri Review, for which we normally charge $23), we also understand that the cost may be prohibitive for some very talented people—particularly in this difficult economy.

Before I give the false impression that our contest is now free to enter, however, let me be up-front about the fees associated with a literary competition and why they exist in the first place. Literary journals as big as The Missouri Review are quite expensive to run: among other things, we pay the salaries for our full- and part-time editorial staff; the salaries for the office staff; the costs of equipment, technology, and supplies; expenses for advertising and promotional events; the printing and distribution of the journal; and contributor payments (we are one of the few lit journals that pays its contributors).  Some of this money comes from grants and some from generous donors, but subscription fees and contest entry fees are another important source that we rely on to meet our costs. When writers pay to enter a journal’s contest, they are acting as patrons of the literary arts, providing the journal with some of the important funding it needs to continue to exist–and ultimately supporting themselves and others in the field.

Of course, there are also costs associated with running a contest: advertising, prize money, staff hours, etc. After receiving as many as several hundred entries, a contest like our Audio Competition might just barely break even; there are years, in fact, when TMR hasn’t broken even on the Audio Contest. Which is why making the entry fee “pay-by-donation” is a bit of a risk. But it’s a risk that we feel is one worth taking: We would like you to be able to enter our Audio Contest regardless of your ability to pay. If you feel that you can afford the standard $20 or even a little beyond that, know that we very much appreciate your support. But if $5 or $10 is all that you can pay at this point in time, we will still be grateful for your donation and happy to consider your work. And rest assured that the entries are blind; the amount that each entrant pays will not be recorded anywhere in connection with his/her payment.

Please spread the word and help make our experiment a success!

What you may not have known is that three of the nominees have had work or interviews appear in our pages.

Jeffrey Eugenides, a fiction nominee, was interviewed by James Schiff in our Fall 2006 issue (29.3).  You can hear an audio clip from his nominated novel, The Marriage Plot, via our tumblr page.

Jonathan Lethem, a nominee in criticism, was interviewed in our Spring 2006 issue (29.1), also by James Schiff.

Laura Kasischke‘s poems have appeared in our pages twice, in 1993 and 2007. She is, suitably, a nominee in poetry.

If you’d like to read these poems and interviews, backissues are available.

Congratulations to these writers, and to all nominees.

In fact, congratulations to everyone everywhere – you’re doing a great job!

Fiction

Winner: Yuko Sakata of Madison, WI for “Unintended”

Finalists:

Jessica F. Kane of New York, NY, for “The Essentials of Acceleration”

Thomas Pierce of Charlottesville, VA, for “Grasshopper Kings”

Bart Skarzynski of Columbus, OH for “Project X”

Poetry

Winner: David Kirby of Tallahassee, FL

Finalists:

Steve Gehrke of Reno, NV

Cynthia Marie Hoffman of Madison, WI

Mark Wunderlich of Catskill, NY.

Essay

Winner: Peter Selgin of Winter Park, FL, for “The Kuhreihen Melody”

Finalists:

May-Lee Chai of San Francisco, CA, for “The Blue Boot”

Mako Yoshikawa of Cambridge, MA, for “My Father’s Women”

Dave Zoby of Casper, WY, for “Leftovers, 1993”

We received over 2500 manuscripts this year, and the overall quality was extraordinarily good, making our decision a difficult one.  This is of course a good thing: selecting winners of a contest should never be easy, and it certainly wasn’t for us.  We’re very thankful to all the writers who entered this year. TMR is only as good as the work we publish, and we are grateful that so many writers sent us their very best work.

We were particularly thrilled to find out, after we accepted her work, that “Unintended” will be Yuko Sakata’s first published story!

I also want to say “Thanks!” to our staff. Promotion of the Editors’ Prize began in May, months before we get the chance to even start reading the submissions. Also, there is the never-ending amount of administrative work that goes into promoting the contest. Then we had to make the tough decisions on semi-finalists, finalists, and making the recommendations for our winners. And, we pulled it off! All of this was done successfully only because of our contest editor, Claire McQuerry, who did all the hard work behind the scenes to make our contest a huge success. Her staff was once again tremendous this year. Thank you to all the editors, advisors, and interns who made it happen.

We’re making plans right now for our Editors’ Prize weekend, our annual spring reception and reading honoring the winners of the contest. Details will be forthcoming as soon as we lock down the date. The 2012 Editors’ Prize issue will be out in April. I’m positive you’ll find these stories, poems, and essays as engaging and memorable as we did.

Congratulations to Yuko, David, and Peter!

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

Rachel Yoder: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Prose)

Greg Brownderville: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Poetry)

Ken Cormier: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Self-Recorded Documentary)

Anna Pinkert: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Professionally Recorded Documentary)

We’re excited about many of the new developments with our audio content here at The Missouri Review. We’re excited, for instance, that the opening of our 2012 audio competition follows closely on the heals of the addition of our (free) podcast feed to iTunes. If you’d like to have our weekly podcasts delivered to you, please sign up. And please, if you enjoy what you hear, give us a good rating on the iTunes site. Our podcast feed is so new that it hasn’t yet been rated.

As I already shared in a recent post, Julie Shapiro of the Third Coast International Audio Festival has agreed to serve as a guest consultant for our 2012 Audio Competition, joining TMR’s editors in the final judging round. This year, we’ve also streamlined the competition to three, simple categories–prose, poetry, and audio documentary—in an attempt to eliminate any confusion entrants experienced last year. And, we’ve improved the contest entry process. For your convenience, we now take MP3 recordings by email and accept online payments. (Submissions by mail are still acceptable as well). This should make the competition more economical to enter, especially for those submitting entries from overseas.

We wanted the renaming of our categories to convey that they are fairly open: in each we accept entries with multiple voice tracks, or with other tracks of sound or music, or simply good, clean recordings of entrants’ pieces. Any of these things are acceptable. The “prose” category includes any prose piece: fiction or nonfiction. “Audio documentary” is now open to professionally and non-professionally recorded pieces. Please see our audio contest site for full guidelines.

If you would like to check out previous contest winners and get a sense of the range of work our judges responded to favorably, you can find them in our recent podcasts. We’ve posted our four first-place winners from last year’s competition and plan to post entries from our first-runners up in the coming weeks. (So check back)!

Robin Hemley will read from his book Do-Over! on September 24th at the University of Missouri.

Just like Robin Hemley, I think we all have moments we wish we could fix. I find his work particularly inspiring because there are a few events from the past I would try again, especially when it comes to finding the source of my current bad habits–specifically my procrastination infestation. Every few weeks at five minutes before midnight, I sling my backpack onto the table in my go-to coffee shop, six books spilling out of my bag. I start flipping through the books with one hand as I pull out my computer with the other. The busboy wiping down tables is staring, gripping his dishtowel in petrified amazement as, ten seconds after bursting through the door, my fingers begin to fly across the keyboard of my Mac. I barely glance over my glasses as I bark, “Listen, I don’t know how many espresso shots you can put in a cup of coffee before it’s illegal, but that’s exactly how many I want; got it?”

This is my average night before a paper is due. The coffee shop, the sleep-deprivation, the lonesome table peppered with highlighted texts and empty cups of espresso—it’s all part of my perfected monthly procrastination ritual. I can tell you how many hours it will take to write five pages, double-spaced, APA style, give or take a few absentminded Facebook distractions. I’ve been an expert procrastinator for years. In high school, if I hadn’t studied for my Biology exam, I would draw an intricate small intestine for “points for creativity.” For my junior high book reports, I would make up whole novels, designing the plots from my own imagination. Of course, I wasn’t born finding ways to take “short cuts.” There was a time where I labored over homework like the rest of my young peers—but that was an age before I discovered White Out.

My addiction to procrastination started in fifth grade. Each week, we had to do a set of times tables through 12 times 12. It was extremely boring, and math never was my strong subject, so I started putting them off. At first, I decided that I just wouldn’t hand them in. Well, that didn’t work, that just made my parents take away the TV. With no afternoon cartoons, I came up with a new plan. I quickly copied out last week’s assignment each time it was handed back; sure it was tedious, but not nearly as frustrating. Weeks later, I found the mother lode of all shortcuts: my dad’s White Out. At the time, I was convinced that teachers didn’t actually check each individual assignment (a theory proven in tenth grade when I included a recipe for venison steak in the middle of a short paper). With a quick flick of the brush, there was a small chance my teacher could recognize the hasty “OK” he had scribbled on the previous week’s times table. I had found an ultimate solution for multiplication. I could put off learning about math as long as I wanted.  I was a genius. At least, I thought I was—but my teacher? Not so much. He quickly caught onto my plot and silently handed me a pencil to rewrite the entire set of multiplicative monstrosities. A graceful loser, I surrendered and rewrote my times tables with my teacher looming over me. As I stumbled through seven times eight, I failed to mention to him that I had handed in that very same times table for the previous three weeks.

At the time, I thought I was cheating the system, but I’ve learned that once you get to college, there is no cheating the system. There’s just an empty coffee shop, Microsoft Word, and your own ingenuity. Maybe I would have never discovered procrastination and taking short cuts if I had written out the tables; maybe I’d have even discovered a love for math; maybe I’d be able to multiply by nines without counting on my fingers. One day I may just face my problems like Robin Hemley. I’ll stride right back into the fifth grade classroom at North Mercer Elementary, take my pencil, and write out every single times table from one to twelve right there. Still, I just made it through College Algebra, and I can barely remember the rules for addition, let alone multiplication. Oh, well. I have no problem leaving my do-over for another day—after all, procrastination is my best subject.

I have to admit that when I joined the staff here last year and learned that TMR offers subscriptions in digital format (and has for some time) I was a bit skeptical. I love to hold a book in my hands—love the texture and heft of it and the aesthetic pleasure of simply flipping through the pages of a well-laid out journal. Sure, I appreciated the fact that we offered our subscribers the choice of a more environmentally friendly format, but environmental concerns aside, I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose digital over the pleasures of print. I was perplexed, therefore, to learn that over one fourth of the entrants to our contests do go digital when choosing their subscription and that that number climbs a little every year.

Then, about six months ago, a digital subscription to the journal mysteriously appeared in my inbox one day. I don’t actually know where it came from—a gift from the gods of cyberspace, I guess. Or maybe someone here at TMR decided to give all of us on staff free digital access; I never really looked into it. What I did do, though, was open the link and begin to browse TMR in its digital manifestation—or should I say, glory. I’m not kidding. The online version of the journal is gorgeous; the images are crisp, the layout (in which you are able to view two facing pages at once) is no different than in the print version, and if anything, the colors appear deeper and more vibrant on the screen than on paper. What really won me over, however, was the audio component: the clean, articulate vocals and the clear quality of the recording add a new dimension of aesthetic richness. Whether I want to hear a beautiful reading of one of my favorite poems in an issue, or whether I want to experience the entire journal (which I don’t always have time to read) while cleaning my house or walking to work, I can.

So yes, I confess, I’m a believer: a digital journal subscription can be a wonderful thing. While I still prefer to own a book in hard copy than the Kindle version or some other variety of e-book, I think that when it comes to literary journals, digital is actually a nice compromise. I’ll hold onto my favorite books, but eventually, journals, newspapers, and magazines all go.

While many TMR readers may still very well be skeptical about the beauty of a digital subscription, they don’t have to take my word for it. I hereby invoke the gods of cyberspace to grant you free access, if you follow this link, to the digital version of our Spring 2011 issue. Magic. You can browse it, download it to your desktop, and listen to the audio to your heart’s content.

This issue also happens to be the one in which last year’s Editor’s Prize winners appear. If you’re thinking of submitting to our contest this year, you can check out this contest issue to get a sense of the kind of work that has won in the past. Finally, don’t forget that your submission fee to the contest gets you a one-year subscription to TMR at a discounted rate and that that subscription is available in print or digital.

Our event kicks off at 7 pm, and runs until The Bridge throws us out. Technically, our launch will be “over” at 9 pm, but like our fabulous spring launch, we really just stay hanging out until the doors are closed and the bright lights are thrown on. The Jazz Odyssey hits the stage at 9 pm, and there is a great patio where you can come and meet our entire staff (and, of course, former staff members who are certain to show up and say “Yo!”)

The summer issue has just shipped this week, and should be in your hands soon. The issue includes fiction by Amin Ahma, Tom Barbash, Arna Bontemps Hemenway (yes, that’s his real name, and his story is, believe it or not, even better than his name!), A.R. Rea, and Elisabeth Fairchild’s first published story; nonfiction by Daniel Anderson, Anthony Aycock, and John “Let’s Play Two!” W. Evans; poetry by Diane Seuss, Steve Gehrke, and Peter Jay Shippy; and Patrick Hicks sits down with Brian Turner to talk about the poetry of war.

You can snag copies of the issue at the summer launch. More important is that you come to the launch and have a good time. Like spring. Remember?

The first of many bands. We're just warming up...

We had lots of music. Like seventy five bands. Okay, not that many. But we did have music from Shoreside, Andre and the Giants, Mary and the Giant, and Belligerent, to name just a few. We kept it cool to start off the evening and then got progressive louder. Which is always a good thing.

We're always happy when people we like show up.

People rolled in at all times, which is the idea. Show up early, show up fashionably late, it doesn’t matter. You will get this kind of delighted greeting no matter what. And as long as you stay and hang out for a bit, well, what more can we ask?

The conversations at the bar can get pretty deep.

Here, I’m talking basketball with Jesse Garcia, the owner of Sideshow. I’m a Celtics fan, he’s a Bulls fan. We both had a rough 2011 NBA Playoffs (though on this evening, his Bulls were looking pretty good). Not that this dampened our spirits one iota.

We're toasting the evening. Not ourselves. Really.

I was asked to get on stage and say something. I have no idea what I said. Basically, it was something like “You guys are the best!” and You Guys all agreed with that sentiment and held their beverages high in the air. Good call.

See? We throw a good party! More photos from our Spring Launch: PERIL are available on our Facebook page; come check ‘em out. And don’t forget to come to our Summer Launch. The Bridge, July 28th, 7 pm. We’d love to see you there!

Thanks!

The TMR Webteam