The Missouri Review

We don’t usually say much about our covers, which needs to change because we’ve been using the work of some exciting contemporary artists. The cover of our current issue, Crash, is a photograph by Kerry Skarbakka, a stuntman who for the sake of the camera jumps off bridges, freefalls from skyscrapers, tumbles from stepladders, trips [...]

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With Jonathan Franzen’s new novel out this week, there have been reviews and articles considering if it tops The Corrections, which I first read as an undergraduate at Ohio State.  It is a brilliant book, and I was a little jealous and a little dismayed that someone else had written the sort of book I [...]

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Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog featured a note today from R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah, a journal many back issues of which are on a shelf behind me, concerning the expansion of its digital presence and the end of its sixty-year run as a print journal. This is old news, but news to me, and my immediate [...]

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Which leads me to the reason for this post—to lay out what I’ve come to see as a key difference between playing the drums and writing fiction.

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There has been talk, elsewhere in the literary hemisphere of the blogosphere, of what the consequences would be if libraries started charging their patrons a subscription fee in order to access their collections.  The talk I heard/read was prompted by an article in the Guardian this summer that addressed the London Library’s speculation that it [...]

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Recently, we were having a quiet day in The Missouri Review offices.  It was one of those Missouri days in August when your vision gets hazy from the heat rising off the concrete and once inside, you still don’t stop sweating for at least an hour.  With a stack of manuscripts in front of us, [...]

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But I especially love how what looks at first like a relatively straightforward paragraph of summary is actually a series of small mysteries that raise key questions in the reader’s mind, questions that make us want to keep reading.

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I’m not the kind of person that tends to remember dreams. I had one a few weeks back, however, that has really stuck. In the dream I was reading an old book (the kind with heavy, leather binding and yellowed pages that smell a little musty) in the library, and the book began to fall [...]

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Trend #2: The world of short fiction is populated with shoe salesmen.

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This weekend on The Huffington Post, writer and critic Anis Shivani posted a piece called “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary Writers.”  Some of the authors declared overrated are Amy Tan, Michael Cunningham, William T. Vollman, and Antonya Nelson.  Why have these authors been inappropriately “rated”?  According to Shivani, it’s because of the lack of good [...]

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In yesterday’s New York Times, there’s an interesting essay under the “The Way We Live Now” section by Walter Kirn, a frequent Times contributor and author of many awesome books.  His article describes a modern phenomenon called “procedural voyeurism,” which he defines as the focus on the business of creating a spectacle rather than the [...]

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Brevity, the awesome online journal of (very) short non-fiction, has been around for over a decade, publishing, in 750-words or less, wonderful work that has been anthologized in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and Utne Reader, among others.  Heavy hitters published by Brevity include Sherman Alexie, Terese Svoboda, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robin Hemley, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, [...]

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Saw Georgeanne Nixon and Governor Nixon at the movies yesterday. Georgeanne is a serious and involved supporter of the arts. Didn’t get a chance to talk to them after the show but wonder what they thought of Winter’s Bone, which might be interpreted as a “negative” portrait of drug dealers in the Missouri Ozarks. At [...]

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We’ve enjoyed the long weekend: any excuse for a three-day weekend that includes barbecue, fireworks, baseball, and parades is okay with us. So, when I returned to the TMR office today, there was a large pile of unread emails in my Inbox, including a lengthy thread from literary journal editors about this annoucement via GalleyCat. [...]

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Sometimes I think of my graduate student stipend like a miniskirt: something that just covers the essentials, and pretty much restricts free movement.  This is why, when I was earning my MFA degree, I never used to submit my poetry to contests that cost money.  Do I want to send off a check to this [...]

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Thanks to everyone who commented or sent an email about my post last week about The Missouri Review‘s submission process and how to interpret (or not) our rejection letters.  A few writers sent me a follow up question (or two) or posted a comment about what I wrote.  You can find some of this good [...]

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Rejection is a significant part of a writer’s life.  Everyone gets rejected.  This is simply the way it is for writers, whether you are an emerging writer or A Very Famous Writer.  You can read a list here of 30 famous authors who were turned down by various publishers (tip o’the cap to Nathan Bransford [...]

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Approximately two years ago, ten gunmen executed a three-day assault in Mumbai, India, attacking hotels, a railway station, a restaurants, and a Jewish center. Today in India, Mohammed Ajmal Amir Qasab, a Pakistani citizen aged 22, was found guilty on Monday of many charges, including murder and waging war on India. He was the only [...]

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A big “thank you” to everyone that came out to our annual Murry’s Dinner last night.  We had a full house, terrific music, and a great reading by Tom Larson.  Tom came to our rescue when Richard Bausch was unable to make it to Columbia (can’t decide if I should post what exactly happened, and [...]

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For the next three weeks, we celebrate the arrival of our Editor’s Prize issue with poems from 33.1: Uncharted.  First up is “Into your pocket,” from the winner of our 2010 Editor’s Prize in Poetry, Christina Hutchins. Her work appears in Alehouse, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, the [...]

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We’re back and pleasantly exhausted from our four days at the AWP Conference.  Thanks to everyone who was there for coming by our table, saying hello, all the great conversations and panels, and overall wonderful time during these last couple of days.  My messenger bag is filled with business cards, magazines, signed books, receipts, and [...]

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This week, we are pleased to present Lisa Lewis’s “Where, Oh, Where.” Her books are The Unbeliever (Brittingham Prize), Silent Treatment (National Poetry Series), Burned House with Swimming Pool, forthcoming from Dream Horse Press, and Vivisect, forthcoming from New Issues Press.  New work appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, American Literary Review, Washington [...]

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This week we are excited to present “Love Letter to Flavor Flav,” new work from Marcus Wicker. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Harpur Palate, Rattle, Ninth Letter, Sou’Wester, DIAGRAM, and Anti-, among other journals. He is an Ann Arbor, Michigan native who holds fellowships from [...]

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Last week, as I edited one of the final audio recordings of the current issue of TMR, I remembered why I love audio so much. Usually, I contact the vocal talent, I’m at the recording session, or I’m editing some portion of the piece myself. When I was out of town in December, one of [...]

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“My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her,” says Esther in The Bell Jar. 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 [...]

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This week at TMR Dedra and the office workers decorated for Christmas. Charles and Lisa and Lindsay plugged in my old Target-bought fiber-optic tree and decorated it with colorful chrome ornaments hung with paperclips. They wrapped a passel of fake presents to put under its light-pulsing plastic branches. And they placed Santa paraphernalia about our [...]

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When the choreographer Twyla Tharp is developing a new work, she keeps what she calls a scratching box. She buys a simple cardboard file holder from an office supply store and fills it with bits and pieces that relate to the dance she is working on. All sorts of artifacts go into the box: video [...]

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There are only a few months left in the semester, and sadly, (for me, anyway) the blog posts left has chopped down to only a few. I find this time of year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, almost surreal. It seems to me that it is never remembered for long. Characterized by grinding out to finish [...]

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For the past several weeks, I have felt particularly thankful not to be a parent. Here’s why: This semester I have been teaching creative nonfiction at a small college in Columbia. For their second essay, the students are asked to write about a memorable person. As model essays I use several examples from TMR’s archives. [...]

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This blog entry by Barrelhouse, made me sad because it is true. The post, which talked about a film and how utterly disappointing the film was, got me thinking about the films I see these days. How very few have anything of a good plot! Under my nostalgia lens I lament, have we forsaken good [...]

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