There was more. I was going to write about book reviewing, and my general sense of discomfort with book reviewing, which stems almost entirely from a lack of confidence to write reviews in a coherent and intelligible manner that would be useful or interesting to anyone. I was going to write about James Frey, and teaching undergraduates, and the difference between reading a single essay and a collection of essays, and probably some other subjects that would all tie together neatly for a pretty good Friday read for you, our blog reader.

Here’s the thing. I couldn’t finish it. Or, I could, I guess – did, in fact – but I wasn’t pleased with the result. It was a colossal mess of tangents and half-baked thoughts, and it seemed like a disservice to publish it the way it turned out.

It’s warm here – frighteningly warm for Missouri in February – and I have my windows open, again. All morning yesterday I read manuscripts. I haven’t done that in a while. Downstairs, on the third floor, TMR has a few couches and a coffee maker, and I put my feet up on a table, tucked a pen behind my ear, and read fiction submissions. Away from my desk, away from my computer, away from my phone (both office and mobile, which I wisely left upstairs). Felt fantastic. Felt really great to spend the morning just looking for stuff for the summer issue, reading other writers’ work, stories about Russian dancers or out of work truck drivers or the daughters of war veterans and such, and not really thinking about our audience, our budget, our expenses and income, advertising, none of the other stuff that is often pinballing through my mind in the course of the day.

I felt all right, reading like that.

Someone close to me recently remarked that I never say anything personal in my blog posts. Note, even, how carefully I phrased that previous sentence. Of course, that’s now what my site is for. But this person was right: I’m careful about this blog. It’s been one of the most successful things we’ve done since I started at The Missouri Review—our staff has written several thoughtful, smart, engaging essays on this site in the past two years, and our mantra has basically been to not be negative; remain about publishing, editing, writing; and be interesting. Writing about Sullivan’s work, I worried that I was getting increasingly negative and incoherent, upset about who knows what about his work, and that my post would be the kind of vitriol that our readers don’t want. Morever, the kind of vitriol I don’t like to write.

I bring this up because for almost a year and a half now, my personal life, especially this past month, has been a bit tumultuous (to put it mildly) and sitting in a chair reading this morning, I became aware of how much better I felt. Just in general. No grand epiphanies or realizations or anything like that; dark clouds will certainly move in later in the day (or tomorrow, soon, etc.). Writing about creative nonfiction and its ticks and whirls and wearing a cultural critic hat—it just didn’t feel right. No, it was more than that: it was a recognizable state of discord, both in head and heart, that I wanted nothing to do with. I just wanted to read.

When I was at River Styx, our rejection letters all started the same way: “Look. We’re all writers too, so we know how it feels.” That’s true, of course. But, what was making me a boiling cauldron of frustration yesterday afternoon was writing: not just the act of writing, but the criticism of writing and the Big Ideas behind criticism and interpretation and connectivity. What made me feel calm was reading,  just reading, nothing more. And, really, why did any of us start writing in the first place? Because we read. And liked it. A lot.

It would be silly, of course, to have a rejection letter say “Look. We’re all readers too” because that seems pretty obvious, ironic in a hipster way or something, and perhaps even a little snide. Nonetheless, it might be more true to what unifies as, editors and submitters alike, than calling ourselves writers.

If I was clever, if I had my writing cap on, I’d be able to come up with a really snazzy close here. But I don’t. Moreover, I don’t want to attempt to tack this together neatly. The messiness of this post is what’s most interesting to me, and how, by taking a little time to not think, to read without thinking beyond the story in my hands. And, for today, I think that’s all I really want to focus on. I’ll leave it at that.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

Before I took over as editor of textBOX, The Missouri Review’s absolutely free online anthology of exceptional fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from its archives, I used the site for a few semesters in the fiction workshops I teach at the University of Missouri. It was a great accompaniment to a craft manual, which was, in my case, Janet Burroway’s excellent Writing Fiction. Burroway divides her book into chapters that cover big topics like plot, point of view, setting, and theme. Each chapter features two or three stories that serve as examples of each topic in action, but for especially sticky topics, I wanted more examples. For instance, to supplement the chapter on point of view, I gave students Seth Fried’s “Loeka Discovered,” which is written in collective first person.

I also found textBOX useful for troubling the conventions of the undergraduate workshop story. While it is generally easier for a student to write a successful short story that takes place over the course of a day or a few hours, there are many fine stories that unreel over months or years, moving characters across counties, countries, and continents. I gave students “Eleven Beds” by William Harrison to show them one way a story can cover vast temporal and literal ground. My students and I had a good time (well, I know I did) mapping the shifts in time and place and tracing the subtle way Harrison renders the shifting dynamics of the central romantic relationship.

Though I have not yet had the chance to use textBOX this way myself, I can envision it as fodder for a workshop organized thematically. Before textBOX’s inception, I taught an intermediate workshop on the literary fantastic. If the site had been available, I could have augmented my story selections with “The Rememberer” by Aimee Bender (a devolving boyfriend!), “Drowned Edward Tug” by Mary Bucci Bush (ghosts!), and “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed” by Robert Olen Butler (just how it sounds!). There are twelve short stories on textBOX with more to come, and I can already see other thematic groupings: stories that have strong settings, stories that take place in a specific historical moment.

Interested in trying textBOX in your classroom? You could assign a textBOX piece to fill a spare day in your schedule. Each piece has accompanying discussion questions and writing prompts, reducing your prep time. Send your students a link to the piece, have them print out and bring to class the PDF that includes the piece and accompanying study materials, and you’re ready to go. Or you could use a textBOX piece to introduce students to another genre. Maybe you feel your fiction students could benefit from a discussion of a textBOX poem’s close attention to language or you’d like to get your poetry students thinking about the construction of narrative in nonfiction. TextBOX is an easy way to do so.

Have you used textBOX in your fiction, nonfiction, or poetry class? Can you think of other ways textBOX might be helpful to instructors?

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!

While I missed many books this year, I went to a ton of author readings. Last semester alone, I attended about seven events at the University of Missouri (new PhD student readings and visiting writers), probably three more at Orr Street Studios, and another, oh, let’s call it five at Get Lost Bookstore in Columbia. Over the last five months, I probably went to an average of a reading per week. If I sit and think about it for a while, there are also all the readings from this past summer and this past spring, which would then include readings I went to in St. Louis and Washington, D.C., where the AWP Conference was in February.

Believe me, all semester long, I bitched and moaned about going to readings. We all did. Hey, people like to complain. There was definitely a time this semester when I looked at my calendar, and there was something like seven readings in ten days. I tried to make all of them, too. But why? Why did I want to go to all these things? Especially when, as you probably can guess from this, more than once, I had the sinking feeling I didn’t want to go at all.

But readings aren’t just about me. They are about my literary community, my arts community, and even when I’m cranky, it was always the right decision to get myself in gear and attend.

Readings are, in many ways, just like editing a magazine journal. To paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates, editing is a we, and one can get somewhat tired of an I. She was talking, of course, about the difference between being an editor and being a writer, and why being a magazine editor is an attractive vocation. But the same idea – being involved and being for other people rather than just yourself – applies to readings.

Writers, when writing, spend their time alone. The solitude is essential for deep thinking and the process of creation. Loneliness, of course, goes hand-in-hand with this quiet, and after spending years working on something – poems, a novel, stories – getting in front of an audience of people and sharing that work can be a welcome shift.

It can also be a disaster. Many of us, I’m sure, have been to readings that were … well, lackluster. We’ve also been to readings where people are trying a wee bit too hard to be “entertaining.” There are plenty of these stories. This makes the readings that are really and truly an amazing experience. For me, hearing Edward P. Jones read his work is still one of the most incredible things I’ve ever heard.

Readings are the chance for writers to be outgoing, extroverted, friendly, celebratory. Listeners, often writers and avid readers too, are warm and gregarious. Alcohol is (hopefully) involved. We gossip. Laugh. Shake hands. We crave remarks and thoughts about the work, discover what other people are working on, what we’re reading: we want to know who and what is being read not just published. We’re eager to talk.

Here in Columbia, there are three regular spots for readings: any event our English Department holds, the Hearing Voices series at Orr Street Studios, and at Get Lost Bookshop down on Ninth Street. I attend as many as I can, and hope that wherever you’re reading this from, you’re doing the same in your part of the world.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

Meyhem Lauren is hungry

Though I didn’t read many new books in 2011, I did listen to a lot of new rap music. 2011 wasn’t the best year for it. Tha Carter IV was not memorable; Action Bronson, while interesting, doesn’t deserve far more media attention than his Outdoorsmen comrade Meyhem Lauren; XXX grated after a few listens; and Drake is always terrible. Still, good music happened. Here in no special order are eleven rap LPs/mixtapes I liked in 2011 and still like in 2012:

1. Meek Mill: Dreamchaser
2. Main Attrakionz: 808s and Dark Grapes II
3. Starlito & Don Trip: Stepbrothers
4. Jay-Z and Kanye West: Watch the Throne
5. Killa Kyleon: Candy Paint N Texas Plates II
6. Juicy J: Rubba Band Business 2
7. ASAP Rocky: LiveLoveA$AP
8. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up
9. Clams Casino: Instrumental Mixtape
10. 2 Chainz: T.R.U. Realigion
11. Meyhem Lauren: Self-Induced Illness

What are yours? You have to choose eleven.

U and I brings up questions about brains and texts: What stays with the reader when the book is done? What determines what remains? What does it mean to write about the “anxiety of influence” while (as Baker does) aggressively refusing to read Harold Bloom, the guy who popularized the term? To what degree do we warp the memory of what we love to our own image? How do people enact texts with their bodies?

Like Baker, Billy-Billy Jump, the narrator of Rudy Wilson’s 1987 novel The Red Truck, wants to know how the intangible carves itself into the tangible. He thinks, at one point, “Our brains have lines on them from what we do…Probably born smooth and then the ditches began” (108).

I learned about Rudy Wilson only a couple of years ago. My MFA thesis advisor told me about Rudy, with whom she went to MFA school. Her writing professors would praise Rudy’s stories so highly that other student-writers started to feel jealous of what he could do.

When I found out that Ravenna Press had reprinted The Red Truck, I ordered it online. I read it and I read it again. I ordered Sonja’s Blue. I searched Abebooks.com for literary journals with more stories of his. I tried to find his novella A Girl Named Jesus but I couldn’t. I wrote a short note about Sonja’s Blue on Goodreads, the only review of Sonja’s Blue on Goodreads (which is ridiculous).  Rudy saw it and he emailed me a message to say hello, and we emailed each other a few times, and I felt happy.

Now I am going to write about The Red Truck without looking back at the book.

I remember the narrator Billy-Billy, as a child, remembering an old merry-go-round. He thinks about it, sitting there in the dark, shiny, and then this sentence happens (I think): “Wind blew on it.” When I first read that, I couldn’t believe a sentence had been used just to say, “Wind blew on it.” It is amazing! Later, Billy-Billy is being held in the air by his father (I think) against a sky full of light, and Billy-Billy says (I think), “He held me. He looked at me.” It’s heartbreaking in its simplicity, but the precision is vital to the meaning–the act of father holding son and the act of father seeing son are miraculous enough alone; to inflate the language into anything more would clutter the import of the action. I remember a sex scene between Teddianne and Billy-Billy, built mostly (I think) with prepositions and uncertain objects and lines like (I think) “She was naked underneath,” and somehow through its surgical omission the scene grows so deeply and embarrassingly private that I recognize its truth, unfettered. I remember the color yellow, Teddianne painting herself yellow and painting Billy-Billy yellow, all the color, everywhere, and the light, and the hands of people, touching each other. I remember how Billy-Billy’s little brother Ned falls purple and dead out of the icebox that the two children get trapped in for too long and afterward Billy-Billy says (I think), “I was still alive; my lungs were bigger.” I remember how I called my little brother on the phone soon after I read that. I remember how I cried at the end of the book at the last line (I think), “Sometimes I lift my eyes to look out the window at the sea.”

I rarely read books more than once, but I’ve read The Red Truck so many times. Rudy Wilson’s writing is tangible. It’s big and bright, and fever-like. I don’t exactly put The Red Truck down; it’s more like I wake up from it.

What stays with you after you’ve finished a book? Which books have you read more than once, and what does it take for you to read a book again, and again?

I don’t know when I will teach fiction writing again. This is not by choice. I requested English 1510 this semester, was lucky enough to snag it, and was told even then to not expect to receive this course ever again. This is not about because of my ineptitude as a teacher (I hope) but because typically the managing editor teaches English 1000, a freshman composition class. I was told that I was given creative writing only because of how many people were on sabbatical and unavailable. Don’t expect to get again, they said. Well, then!

Since this might be it with teaching creative writing for a while, here are a few things I took away from my class this semester:

–I haven’t read Harry Potter and they haven’t read Moby Dick. Perhaps the one thing that can be guaranteed in a writing class is that the instructor has read more than the students (digression: some of you are thinking “Actually, I know that’s not true” and I’m nodding along glumly). When I was an undergraduate, I often felt embarrassed because my teachers all referred to novels and stories and poems that I had never heard of, and because of this, I not only missed crucial points of their lectures but also felt that I was unqualified to be in their class. Insecurity, and all that. This semester, I’ve usually found that talking about films is the best way of proving a point: there’s a better chance of my students having seen a particular film, and since films are generally narrative like novels and stories, an easy-to-understand analogy could often be drawn between movies and stories when I was trying to demonstrate a point about characterization, point of view, framing, dialogue, setting, and so forth.

In class, I’ve lamented the fact that we need movies to teach us about writing fiction, but perhaps seeing these links isn’t a bad thing at all. We make do with what we got—what good, really, does it do to expound on A Separate Peace or Revolutionary Road or Underworld if my students haven’t read those books?—and it also might, I hope, make us all realize that writing doesn’t live in a vacuum. We’re shaped and formed by our greater culture, not just pop culture, but film, music, painting, sculpture, dance, and the like.

–Be honest about what they write and what they read. This might seem obvious, but too often I’ve had and heard about creative writing teachers cheerleading more than teaching. Hey, if the work isn’t good, how does it benefit the student to think otherwise?

–Style and ideas worry students more than substance. Style is, of course, significantly easier to mimic than substance. Mimicking a minimalist story is pretty easy. Having a surprise ending is pretty straightforward—withhold one crucial bit of information until the last page. This is how we all learn, though, isn’t it? I used to copy Fitzgerald stories in order to learn how he made his sentences dance; I wrote an entire book in response to a Charles Baxter novel. It’s a terrific way to discover that one doesn’t really sound like anyone else: I sound like me, my students sound like themselves.

More than once this semester, a student said “I have an idea for a story! *insert idea here* Do you think that would work?” To which I always answered, “It could. You should write it and find out.” In time, I think they’ll learn that all the bells and whistles on the page can’t cover a story that wholly lacks an emotional core. Perhaps they too already knew it. By now, I hope they definitely know it.

–Grading stories helps. I’ve gone back and forth on this over the years, but I think that I’m generally on the side of putting grades on student stories. I hear you: how can you tell this story is a B+ rather than a C-? My first response to that question is: really? In conversation with every colleague about writing workshops, we know which students are the best writers. This does indicate that there is some criteria, however difficult it might be to articulate, as to why something is “better.”

Students at a university receive these things called grades, and grades, more than anything, get their attention. I wrote a criteria for story grades on my syllabus, explaining why grades are given on their work, and, no, an A story is not perfect or necessarily complete. Grading gives the students an understanding that those elements of fiction I lectured about way back in September are not suggestions, but things that must be considered seriously when constructing a story.

–Stories may not change, but I do. I used a mixture of stories each semester, combining stories I’ve read before and stories I haven’t. Fresh eyes, and fresh stories, are often beneficial to everyone. One good example is Dan Chaon’s “Big Me.” To be honest, I’ve always assigned it because it’s in the textbook and students seem to like it. I’ve always thought the story was competent, just not for me. But this time, for whatever reason, the story really hit me: the duality of the characters, the non-linear construction, the haunting of memory, the way Andy forgets large chunks of his past. What once struck me as pretty straightforward now seemed remarkably complex, tenuously but perfectly held together, sad and funny and strange all at once. None of this would have struck me if I hadn’t assigned it again.

There are others I’ve always thought were good for teaching but I’m not crazy about, and there are others that I adore that never seem to win over my students. And there is always at least one surprise story each semester that resonates with my students when I had expected they would dislike it. Which is always sorta fun to discover.

–Be generous. Two weeks ago, one of my first writing teachers, Melanie Rae Thon, was visiting MU, and I was asked to give the introduction to her reading. I thought of her teaching first, even before her books, since that’s how I first knew her. And what she gave us, always, was her time, her spirit, her belief that our work was worth reading. She was generous. This quality is not easy: there are too many constraints on our time, too many people and tasks pulling at us from all sides. To really be patient with a student’s story, to remember that the writer is still learning, can be easy to forget. Having a visit from one of the teachers who gently nudged me in the direction of the writing life was a nice reminder that beginning writers need, perhaps more than anything, an attentive reader and a pat on the back.

I hope I provided a little bit of both this semester.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye 

I’m writing this blog post from a literature class that I described as “completely pointless” over my plate of mashed potatoes. There’s no gimmick to this class and the professor is Old Age in more ways than one. Our class has a book, tests, and we sit in chairs, but I have the same complaint as my brothers; I don’t feel like I’m learning anything. We discussed our best and our worst teachers for most of dinner and we all recognized that crossed-legs, textbooks, or not, there was a distinguishable divide of good and bad. What seemed blurrier was how to measure the distinction and what exactly could make a student feel like they weren’t learning anything.

Before I misrepresent myself as an overly critical student in an end of semester slump, I’ll go ahead and reveal that I’m actually a terrified senior reaching post-graduate paranoia. I don’t want to attend graduate school and I don’t want to spend a couple of years backpacking. I want to be productive and engaged somewhere between these poles. I think I want to be a teacher. This has made hearing my little brother groan at his young teacher’s tactics make me want to just go get my MFA (no offense), something easier than being at the front of a classroom while a student rolls her eyes and continues typing a blog post.

I have had national teaching programs bookmarked on my computer for months and I have only mustered the courage to apply to a job writing copy for a clothing company in Los Angeles. I have no desire to go to Los Angeles. I only thought to apply after I read over the application to teach and felt too unqualified to do anything but online shop. I can participate easily in a conversation about the United States’ failing model for education, where systems lack in providing adequate degrees for teachers, how a student like my little brother is considered successful as long as he keeps his test scores up, but still leave his classroom wondering what the point was. When it comes to articulating a 200-400 word response on an application about what I would do in a hypothetical situation where inner-city middle schoolers won’t turn off their Ipods or sit up in their chairs, I remember that I don’t know what I would do.

Obviously there are legitimate reasons for asking a potential teacher about classroom distractions, but these hypothetical situations have Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, white savior connotations, which I want no part in. Both women played problematic roles in movies where they inspired classrooms of inner-city youth until they were obedient. I understand the important job of a teacher, but it’s not the most intimidating or enticing part of my desire to become one. I’m both a twenty-one-year-old and a Creative Nonfiction writer. I’m expected to be self-centered and it’s an expectation I don’t reject. I know how to get excited about reading and writing and learning. I want to be a teacher because I think it will be selfishly satisfying. As far as I could discern after three glasses of wine at Thanksgiving dinner, this want for self-fulfillment seems to be an indicator of a good teacher.

A selfish teacher isn’t distracted with being noble. I am more qualified and happier than most to talk about the fun, nuance, art, language, history etc. of storytelling. I want to impose my excitement on a classroom of students because this is what I want to talk about and what I believe is important. I will be obnoxious or weird, but as long as I don’t leave a day of school feeling empty, I don’t think that my students could either. I still haven’t completed an application, but if a student is listening to an Ipod, I guess I’ll tell them to turn it off.

The site I mean is Goodreads, which I’ve been returning to often in the last week or so, because I’ve just recently finished – temporarily – writing a big project, and I have time for such things as reading books and clicking on the Internet.  I have been keeping close track of the books I’ve been reading, as Goodreads permits me to do.  When I start one, I tell Goodreads that I’ve done this.  When I’m through, I make sure that Goodreads knows about it.  This is despite my wariness toward volunteering such information about myself for the potential use of just anybody.

I have been asking myself why I do this – why it is that it’s not enough anymore to simply read a book, and apparently I also have to check in with the Internet.  I think I do this thing in part because reading is lonely – even lonelier than writing – and while I don’t need a web site to help me get motivated to read, it’s nice to know that I’m not the only person in the world who’s currently reading Colin Dickey’s Cranioklepty, or who intends to read the recently published journals of Spalding Gray.

It’s something like how helpful I hear it is, when writing 50,000 words in a single month, to know that lots of other people are doing the same thing in that same month; you could do this on your own without them, but it helps to know those other people are out there.

Similarly, I will never forget what a thrill it was, when I was twenty, to visit a friend of my then-girlfriend in Charleston, West Virginia, and feel lost, as the two of them spoke with each other about people they both knew but I’d never met, until I finally began talking with this young man’s mother and learned that she had read Plato’s Republic, which I was then reading.  We had a really nice conversation about it, and while I can’t say exactly why this was, it made me feel better to know that there was someone nearby who had read this thing I was reading.  Goodreads comes close to hitting the same nerves as that conversation did.

The site, of course, has plenty of drawbacks.  It has ads on it.  It’s ugly.  I would add to this list my opinion that the discussions had on its discussion boards could be smarter, but I would risk sounding like a snob and I wouldn’t really mean it; I love those conversations.  Last month, somebody asked why there was a big, blue eye on the cover of his edition of 1984.  Someone suggested it was supposed to be Big Brother’s eye.  Someone else countered by pointing out that nowhere in the book does it say that Big Brother had blue eyes.  So who’s eye was it supposed to be?  It was suggested that perhaps it belonged to no one in particular; perhaps the jacket designer chose blue because it’s the most common eye color.  But then, as yet another person argued, that isn’t true at all.

Soon after I saw that conversation, a discussion of Into the Wild caught my giant blue eye.  In it, someone stated she was worried about this book by Jon Krakauer, because it presented Christopher McCandless as a Thoreauvian hero, when in fact his story is a tragedy and the example he sets is a dangerous one.  I thought this person must be crazy; Krakauer spends as much time in his book upbraiding McCandless for his reckless foray into dangerous Alaska as he does demonstrating his fascination with the young man, and the book is as interesting as it is, I think, because of the complicated relationship its author has with the story he’s telling.

Two thoughts came out of this reaction I had.  One is that I rarely resort to my brain like this, in order to respond to something I see on the Internet.  The other is that this person making the observation concerning Into the Wild might very well have not finished reading the book; it would be easy to come away from it thinking Krakauer makes a hero of his subject if you stopped reading after page 100 or so, if I remember the book right.

I wonder, then, if having “read” something on Goodreads is, or will soon be, equivalent to “liking” something on Facebook, in that it doesn’t necessarily have to mean a whole lot.  I don’t “know.”

I’m no social media theorist, and if I considered myself to be one it’s the kind of information I wouldn’t volunteer for the potential use of just anybody, but my hope is that a site like Goodreads is the next phase of social media sites.  I started with Friendster, then moved to Myspace, and have been spinning my wheels in Facebook for years.  Twitter is just something else altogether, so perhaps the shiny thing that will finally draw my attention from the other shiny thing that is Facebook will be Goodreads, or something like it – a site that has a very specific focus, one that I have a real interest in.  Most of the things I learn about my friends on Facebook – many of whom I don’t even know – don’t really interest me.  The information they offer usually doesn’t really tell me anything about them.  I always, though, want to know what people are reading.

Since I’m “listening” to Pete Seeger, I’ll close by referring to him.  I heard him on the radio once, years ago, talking about how, when he was growing up, great importance was place not only on reading books but on talking about them once he was finished with them.  He considered both activities equally important, and immediately I agreed with him.  You have to do something with all the stuff you’ve drawn from that book you’ve just read; you have to take what you’ve gained in solitude and share it.  At the time, I didn’t have a lot of people in my life to talk about books with; this is where something like Goodreads could be very useful.

One of the things worth recognizing is that the cost of submitting to a magazine is a fixed prospective cost: a cost that will be incurred and cannot be recovered. Submissions have never really been free. It’s simply that the cost (paper, envelopes, postage, etc.) has been paid to the post office, not the magazine. And I’m not saying that it necessarily should have. Freed up from (some) of the costs of submitting to literary magazines, has there been an increase in subscriptions? Has there been an increase in financial support of literary journals from writers?

No. Not at all.

Because of this, supporters of online submission fees, like me, tend to take a more realistic and business-centric approach: there is a revenue stream that we need to capture. It is, however, a pretty small revenue stream; we earn significantly more through subscriptions. There isn’t a print literary magazine that can be sustainable—even in the most basic sense of covering its printing and mailing costs (let alone paying its staff)—solely through online submission fees. Opponents of submission fees feel that it’s a tremendous burden on writers, who are overwhelming described as poor, noble, honorable (and so forth)(and, yes, I’m a writer, too), and that the practice is unethical and unlike any other business model. Further, opponents believe that it is an easy system to rig – solicit work from writers that the editors know, then charge writers we don’t know to submit – and that because of a greater need for transparency in our community, we shouldn’t do this.

Fair enough. I’m a big believer in transparency. So. Here’s what editors ask fellow editors when discussing charging online submission fees: Will this mean I get fewer submissions? Editors don’t even look at as a revenue stream. Editors look at it as a way of slowing down submissions.

In fact, submissions increase significantly. This varies from magazine to magazine, but the increase in submissions is somewhere between twenty to thirty-five percent.

Maybe editors are looking at this all wrong. Maybe writers have done the mental math that I’ve done above and said You know what, I support literary journals when I submit online and pay a submission fee so I don’t need to subscribe to journals if I spend $60 a year on submissions. Now, that would be really rational, so the thought appeals to me (I’m Mr. Roboto like that) but it would make sense.

Why, then, don’t we avoid the dreaded “slush pile” and just solicit work from writers we know? Good question. And it really gets to the heart of why literary magazines exist and why writers want to publish in them. It is all about discovering a new voice from a new writer. It’s about finding that one really amazing story or poem from a writer we have never heard of before, and then delivering that writer’s work to a larger audience. We can’t do that if we solicit work because, of course, we don’t know who that new voice is. That’s what we – and I mean all literary journals, not just TMR – are most proud of. Literary magazines are all about discovery. The response to online submission fees is that we receive more work to read and consider, but also more possibilities of finding a new, unpublished writer.

So, then: are writers doing the calculations of going to the post office and deciding online submissions are fine? Is it just way too easy to click a button? Do writers view paying online submission fees as “supporting” the journal, adding to our revenue stream, and therefore, they don’t need to subscribe to us? I don’t know. What I do know is that as a magazine editor, the initial idea of online submission fees was not to increase revenue but to decrease submissions. That hasn’t happened, and since submissions have increased, it is reasonable to conclude that writers clearly have no problem with submitting work to us this way.

It is also important to recognize that TMR continues to accept paper submissions. If a writer does not believe online submissions are ethical or fair, then he/she can mail work to us. We continue to, and will continue to, receive paper submissions. I think it’s crucial that we leave that option open.

So, yes, TMR charges for online submission fees. No writer has to pay this fee if he or she chooses not to. What’s important about is two-fold: 1. To be fully transparent with our audience and 2. Remain open to new ideas as to how to strengthen our magazine, which includes our relationship with our audience and the biz-side of publishing TMR. Through a slightly different lens – communicating with an unseen readership, and being open to trying new things – writers are working on the same problems. It’s the same struggle for all of us—how do I create something true and authentic while also bringing it to the widest audience possible?

When you’re ready, send us your work, online or hard copy. Either one works for us. We want to read it. We want lots of submissions. It’s what all of us are here to do: read, discover, then, finally, publish.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye