The Missouri Review

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 the [...]

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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 stories [...]

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Check out this cool little article over at The Millions that talks about the newest issue of the Best American Short Story Series. I’ve read this series, along with the Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best American Comics lines, for the past few years, and I always look forward to its release. This post also [...]

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During the ‘08 summer, when politics was happening, but I wasn’t really paying attention, I grew enamored with Obama. Not because I was at all informed on his view of political topics, but because I read Obama’s book, “Dreams of my Father”.
Politics aside, I loved that book, I found his writing easy and enjoyable, and [...]

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SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS is an interesting project that pairs thrifted, seemingly insignificant objects with creative writers.  The participating writers then invent fictional stories about the objects, and the objects and stories are sold together on ebay.  The stories suddenly give these discarded objects significance and value, and the stories that are basically pulled out of thin [...]

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Today in my Introduction to Creative Writing class I showed my students a catalog for women’s clothing called Poetry. Most of them are would-be poets so I wanted them to see how they were expected to dress.
Poetry’s merchandize is distinctly understated, classic and elegant. A lot of cashmere sweaters, velvet [...]

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Only a brief post today, we’re very busy here reading contest entries and planning for another on. I wanted to call your attention to this interview with Jonathan Lethem over at the LA Times. I’ve been a fan of Lethem’s since I read his Motherless Brooklyn a few years ago, and his new novel, Chronic [...]

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So Publisher’s Weekly came out with their 2009 top ten list and at first look I thought the list was interesting. Some I had already wanted to read, and others caught my eye (particularly Stitches by David Small).
Then I reached the bottom, and what really caught my eye was the user comments, which made me [...]

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The image of the struggling writer hunched over a desk with an overflowing ash tray and multiple cups of coffee is  a common stereotype seen in T.V and movies.  Blame it on the deadlines, the writer’s block, the late nights that facilitate creativity, or just the roasted aromatic goodness that seems to appeal to everyone, [...]

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Okay, so this post isn’t really about peas, I’ve actually always liked peas. But had I said suddenly I like poems, well, that would have been boring.
But before I get to that, I have to say its pretty crazy over here. As we are cracking into these contest submissions, we’ve got another contest that is [...]

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Take a look at these two similar articles; one from The Huffington Post and one from Quarterly West’s website, written by George Saunders. Both deal with the trials and tribulations of being an aspiring writer; Mostly the constant chorus of “what do you plan to do as a writer?” and also the long waiting periods [...]

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I’ve noticed around several literary blogs, and information sources in general, that everyone is talking about  the movie, Where the Wild Things Are. I’ve gotten pretty sick of everyone either talking about how much they liked it, or how much they didn’t, and how much different it is from the children’s book.
So instead of saying [...]

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As a senior at The university of Missouri my time to say “Oh the economy will improve before I start looking for a job” is quickly coming to an end.  The reality being of course that the economy has not drastically improved and that jobs for new college graduates are more difficult than ever to [...]

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Just Google it. The Millions, The Book Bench, Drawn and Quaterly, The New York Times, they’re everywhere, and, personally, I love it.I’m not sure if my parents would corroborate this or not, but I fondly remember Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are as being one of my favorite books as a child. I don’t remember [...]

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I’d actually like to follow up on my post last week, “There’s an app for that?”. Another literary group doing something for the ipod is an author named Andrew Foster Altschul. I’m not sure if this is an actual app, or something else, but the brief blog entry at the One Story blog explains Altschul [...]

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Did anything eventful happen this week? Oh yeah the Nobel Prize for literature was announced!  And the winner is…  Herta Müller for her works depicting the ‘landscape of the dispossessed’ with “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose.”  I’d like to give a celebratory high five to Müller for becoming only the 12th [...]

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Eddie’s post sparked my interest in the new wave of electronic reading devices and I stumbled across this hilarious piece over at McSweeney’s. Whenever I see an ad for a new reading device, whether it’s the iPhone or the Kindle or Sony’s new model, I always wonder the same thing: why is it necessary to improve on [...]

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I’d like to talk with uneducated speculation about market theory. This is outside my beat, but take a moment to read this Wired article. Yeah, someone is making a literary journal app for the I-phone/I-touch. Will it work? Depends how you put it.
Millions of people now own an I-phone/touch. Apps are new, and everyone is [...]

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Just a short post for today. If anyone is sitting at home on this windy and cool Friday night, you should check out www.wefeelfine.org. While it’s not exactly literary related, wefeelfine is a site that explores feelings and thoughts and all of those other crazy things that some might say are important to [...]

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Give this article from The Wall Street Journal a quick glance. I found it very intriguing and almost humorous at some points. It’s hard for me to imagine the publishing world without posthumously published books. After the cloud of Obits and retrospectives settles, one of the first questions that everyone asks is what the author [...]

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In our first meeting at TMR this semester, Speer Morgan, the editor here, had us read a couple stories. One of them was titled “Careful”, and it was by Ruth Hamel. We do these readings each week and Speer gets us to answer questions- what’s good about this writing and why. With Hamel’s story, which [...]

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September 26 through October 3 kicks off The American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, a week dedicated to “celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment.”  The BannedBooksWeek.org site features a new book censorship map that reveals the locations of book challenges that have been made between 2007 and 2009.
Whenever I hear the term [...]

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Is it really possible that we already have a best books of the Millennium less than ten years after the Y2K scare? Yes, yes it is. Keep an eye out on The Millions as the post their top twenty of the past nine years. So far, my personal favorites of this list are Jonathan Lethem’s [...]

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