TMR Editors’ Prize
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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”
Category Archives: Commentaries
The Moth Doesn’t Matter, or, Some Obvious Statements about an Essay
I didn’t want to say or write anything, ever, about this perpetual conversation about John D’Agata, but I’ve decided to write something for this blog this morning and while I’d love to tell you about how much I like the excellent book I’m reading I’m not far enough into it to really say anything about it.
I don’t have much to add to this big conversation being had about John D’Agata, facts, nonfiction, and John D’Agata – a conversation that I’m very worried will only make it harder for certain people, who have written nonfiction book manuscripts with all the attention to detail and facts that their work called for, to publish those books. I would, though, like to write briefly about “The Death of the Moth,” which I think is pertinent to the discussion. D’Agata included it in his essay anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay, but that’s not what makes it relevant. It is, rather, a great example of something some people don’t seem to have made room for in their personal mental genre maps, a thing I’ll call The Essay in Which Facts Don’t Matter Very Much.
As everyone knows, not much happens in “The Death of the Moth.” A moth starts to die, tries not to, but dies anyway. That’s it, essentially. All of the real importance is in Woolf’s depiction of that death, the significance she grants it, the way she makes the narrative into something much more than the tale of a fading insect.
There is, I suppose, a kind of reportage in the essay, as Woolf relays to us the news of a moth’s windowsill death and her sympathy for it. But if news broke that Woolf never actually watched that moth die, never nudged it with her pencil, or didn’t care about the moth the way she claims she did, it would make absolutely no difference at all. The moth is not important. The moth’s death is not important. What is important is everything else happening in the essay, of which there is a lot, all of which is confined to the space between Woolf’s ears where the thinking happened.
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Right there.
There are those who would claim that if I am right, and Woolf’s essay is not marinated in facts, if it does not adhere to objective truthfulness that we tend to demand of essays, then it is a work of fiction and we should call it a short story. I don’t see it that way; I think we have to live with The Essay in Which Facts Don’t Matter Very Much because there are many of them and to pretend they’re short stories, or poems, or other things that aren’t essays, is to live in an unnecessary kind of denial.
I know that others still would argue that everything in The Death of the Moth does indeed hinge on the reality of that dying moth, on its having actually died on the windowsill with Woolf watching. I don’t think so. But they might be right; I am merely one person, one who flutters back and forth between one opinion and another like a moth dying on a windowsill. I only want to advocate on behalf of a certain kind of essay where facts aren’t especially relevant, where to get upset about the verifiability of its details is to be truly pedantic. While I am convinced – not having read About a Mountain - that it doesn’t belong in that category, I think this Woolf essay is one of them, and is worth a few minutes of our attention once every couple of years or so.
It is interesting to me that prior to About a Mountain, D’Agata did something like what it sounds like he does in About a Mountain, which is to blend literary journalism, or the appearance of it, with this kind of sheer contemplative writing. I am thinking of his essay “Round Trip,” in which he describes, among other things, meeting a twelve-year-old on a bus to the Hoover Dam. There’s a memorable point in that essay where D’Agata inserts a monologue on the computer game Civilization, in quotation marks, offset from the rest of the essay’s text. It is given as if it were the kid’s transcribed rambling. When I first read that long paragraph, I was struck by how inaccurate a description it was of Civilization, which I’ve spent more hours of my life playing than I’ll ever admit. Having spent time listening to kids describe computer games, I couldn’t believe that any twelve-year-old would describe Civilization the way D’Agata says this one did. I questioned whether that kid ever said these things at all. But if you look, he doesn’t really claim that the kid was talking about the game like this; it’s a quotation not attributed to anyone, ostensibly. It’s a description of the game, perhaps based on something this twelve-year-old said, that’s been sent through the meat grinder of whatever D’Agata wanted to do with it.
I don’t doubt that About a Mountain has all of the problems with it that have been identified by the good people I admire who’ve identified problems with it. But although it’s taken me a little while to come around to this, I also think it’s worth pointing out that D’Agata’s whole project is not illegitimate, and that at times it works rather well.
But you don’t have to take my word for it.
A Conversation with My Mother (by Michael Downs)
The Missouri Review published Michael Downs’ story, “At the Beach,” in the September 2006 issue. That story is now part of Downs’s recently published collection, The Greatest Show (LSU Press, March 2012). Here, Downs writes about how the story was his response to a personal challenge: be happy.
Looking down on the Earth they saw it explode. With it, exploded the atmosphere.
– from “The Day the World Went Poof,” by Michael Downs, fourth grade
Once, my mother wondered aloud why my stories were always so sad. I had always sent them to my parents as they appeared in literary journals, and in part I measured their success by whether they made my mother cry. Admittedly, that was a low threshold; she’s a soft touch. But apparently she had begun to see something in my stories—and not in a good way. Childless couples. Marriages without love. Marriages with an excess of love. Strokes. Was I so unhappy? she wondered aloud to me and my father. Was it her fault? The conversation that followed went something like this:
Me: —–
Dad: “The stories aren’t all sad, Jude.” (My mother’s name is Judy) “There’s always something hopeful at the end. They’re hopeful stories.”
Me: —-
Mom: “They are sad. The people are so unhappy.”
Dad: “People are unhappy. But in his stories, there’s always a hopeful note.”
Me: ?
Recently, I asked a friend, whose father had spent his life as a professor teaching Shakespeare, “Is your Dad tragic or comic?” He looked startled, thought a moment, then said, “Tragic.” He seemed sad to have to say so. I think I would like his dad.
My favorite Shakespeare plays are the tragedies, yes, but because I find tragedy beautiful does that mean I’m sad? Most of the time my mood is good. I look for the loveliness of the glass no matter how much water it holds, so long as that water is drinkable, and clean, and it catches the light. I am not so gloomy as Tifty in John Cheever’s “Goodbye My Brother” whose unrelentingly dour realism leads the narrator to hit him with a tree root while proclaiming “Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand…?” Nor am I like Grace Paley’s dying father character in “Conversations with My Father,” insisting that his daughter is frivolous for taking the comic view. “Tragedy!” he yells at her. “When will you look it in the face?”
Author Michael Downs
I try at all times to see what Cheever calls “the harsh surface beauty of life.” But his words, as always, are careful. The beauty is “harsh,” and it is on the “surface.” Even to see beauty (or comedy) means you might be aware of the tragedy it conceals. As a sports reporter fresh out of college my job was often to visit the loser’s locker room, on deadline, notebook in hand, trying to convince some some guy with a towel over his head to answer questions about committing the wrong foul at the wrong time. I found such moments to contain beauty. Like the speaker in Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” I’ve long understood that “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”
Go back even further, and you’ll see me in fourth grade, scribbling out a 12-page opus called “The Day the World Went Poof,” a story that won third-place in my elementary school’s writing contest, and which my long-suffering mother typed.
“He brought the ship down toward the sun. Mercury was gone and so was Venus. Not to mention that the Earth was gone too. … Soon the whole Solar System would be destroyed.”
No surprise, then, that twenty years later when I turned to short stories, a great disaster would be my inspiration. The 1944 Hartford Circus fire killed 168 people when the Big Top canvas burned during a matinee, and it is the inciting event in my book, The Greatest Show. As a fourth-grader I might have titled it “The Day the Circus Went Poof.”
We have our tendencies. My governing impulse, mirroring that of many writers, is toward violence, grief, and all things dolorous. Some writers tell those stories with a sense of humor, and we call them tragic-comic. I’m serious as granite. I once told Buddy Nordan, who is appreciated by many but not by enough, that I wanted to write as he does, to make my readers cry sorrow-tears from the left eye as the right shed tears of laughter. I can’t remember exactly how he answered, but the gist was that it is so awfully hard to write like ourselves, why torture ourselves by trying to write like someone else?
Okay. But I did once read a story Buddy wrote that wasn’t funny. And one of my favorite George Saunders’ tales is “The Red Bow”, a story he wrote post-9/11 that has not one whit of his brand of humor. Clearly, writers can succeed against their tendencies. Especially if by doing so a writer might make his mother happy. Or make a better book. There has to be some relief in a book of sad stories, right? A little light by which to see the darkness more clearly?
So I challenged myself: Write a happy story. And I added another hurdle: keep it short (by short I mean fewer than 3,000 words; my stories average about 6,500).
The new collection!
Thus, the story “At the Beach,” which The Missouri Review printed and which sits now at the center of my book of sad circus stories, a fulcrum story, in which love and good will triumph.
You are asking yourself, perhaps, how does he know it is a happy story? What is happiness anyway?
Well, you’re right. I don’t know it’s a happy story. But I know that at the end nothing terrible has happened. My characters are happy. Their lives aren’t perfect. One suffers from a vodka hangover, which I gave her to temper the happy feeling and avoid schmaltz. Likewise, I made a point-of-view switch in the last sentence that, I hope, undercuts the tra-la-la just a bit.
The story came out of me quickly, in three weeks. The final draft isn’t much different from the first draft. I’m not often so fortunate, and so you might think that I’d try to write a happy story again, given how quickly this one wrote and that it had some publication success.
But no. I was back immediately to writing sad tales. In my next one, I killed a dog on the second page. After that, things got worse.
Oh, what can you do with a writer like that? What can you do?
Michael Downs is the author of The Greatest Show (LSU Press, 2012) and House of Good Hope, winner of the 2007 River Teeth prize for nonfiction. Visit him online at greatestshow.blogspot.com
A Short Note on Trauma
The desire to write the traumatized character or the traumatizing scene is rather tempting, if only because it immediately and lazily charges our narratives with tension and conflict. How often, in beginning workshops, do we see stories of murder, of rape, of the dissolution of a relationship, of the breakdown of family functionality? These stories from these beginning writers often fail if only because of a lack of experience on the part of the writer; they know that those events are emotionally charged, but they do not know how to define or deal with those emotions. But rarely do I see the story of a man or a woman, even in submissions coming in for publication or already in print, about traumatized man or woman who is defined beyond their abuse.
In Charles Baxter’s “Dysfunctional Narratives: or: ‘Mistakes Were Made’” he briefly uses poor Rose from A Thousand Acres to explain the victimized character: passive and existing in the “shadow of thought”, she is “unaccountable, even to herself, by virtue of having been molested by her father”. Not only is she unaccountable to herself and to her family, she is unaccountable to the reader. Rose need not ever make an attempt to be fully human because we do not expect it of her. After distress and pain she can gracefully bow out of becoming or remaining human and exist only in a place of quiet; we allow her this easy road because we feel sorry for her.
I wonder, as in our life outside of books and words as well as in, we make the mistake of handling the traumatized with kid gloves, allowing them inhuman passivity because we are consumed with pity and do not know how to heal them or even where to begin. Our narratives of these characters are stunted often as our memories of real people are cut into a binary, before and after suffering. I am deeply troubled that in the larger narrative of published work we seem incapable, as a whole, of moving our characters and ourselves past trauma and even past healing into a place of fully realized humanness.
Sometimes we cannot even get our characters past their moment of trauma and leave them asleep in it, like William Gay’s (rest his soul) female protagonist in The Paperhanger, left clutching her dead child, asleep, frozen in time, unable to awake into her pain. Or in Salman Rushdie’s Fury, the only Rushdie I have read, where the child and mother lay sleeping below their victimizer, poised over their bed with a knife, wondering if he should murder them.
This is the problem with the victimized character: they are defined by their traumas as if, when they are made black and blue, when they are penetrated, when they cry no, no or weep in the dark recess of their minds, they cease to be fully realized as human but are ugly stains upon the narrative. They halt action and make us self conscious of ourselves as victim and victimizer. This is not a bad thing, by any means, but it becomes repetitive, a constant bludgeon of agony and stillness.
Their traumas are relived and revisited by the reader, we too victimize them again and again each time our eyes tear them apart word by word. And if they refuse to be victimized they become equally inhuman. The best image I can think of that readily shows us this victim-made-monster is Meir Zarchi’s protagonist from the shock film, I Spit On Your Grave. Having been cruelly, viciously raped the heroine becomes the rapist and brutally revenges herself on the men who victimized her yet, even on the cover of the movie, she is beheaded, her clothes torn so that we see the beautiful curve of her ass, those white bloody cheeks, marked forever as a victim, the human made un-whole. For more examples, see anything by Tarantino, read anything by De Sade, listen to anything by The Insane Clown Posse.
I see this as a problem that is not limited to the page but a cultural reaction to our preservation of innocence. I will not speak for other cultures because I am not remotely capable of doing so, but in America our innocence is hyperbolically prized with a passion unlike any other. Again and again we lose it, after 9/11, after the World Wars, after JFK had his brains spilled across his 1961 Lincoln Continental, after Britney Spears grew up and shaved her blond mane off, and each time we are forever changed, left cold in the wilderness, until the next great tragedy when we lose all over again. I make this connection because it is an important one not only as writers but as readers to our ideas about trauma; it stunts us to a point that the only way to emerge from the trauma is to be stunted by it again. This is satisfying only in the individualized narrative but in the larger narrative of the canon it leaves me damned cold. That I cannot even imagine how a story could accomplish healing past trauma is equally unsettling, but here is one that tries:
In Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, the modern Red Riding Hood is told the wolf’s teeth are “the better to eat you with” and instead of sitting passively frightened awaiting to enter that gaping maw, the girl laughs because she know “she [is] nobody’s meat”. Constantly in Carter’s narratives we see protagonists who refuse to be traumatized, who rise above, and yet, perhaps that too is inhuman, just a fairy story.
Our characters are sadly defined by their trauma, just as we define our friends, our mothers and fathers, our siblings, our spouses and our enemies by it as well. We see it radiated on our televisions, the constant coverage of murder and rape in poor neighborhoods, the reality shows of drugged out women and men snorting crack, poor Snooki getting punched in the face because someone tried to take her shot of alcohol, even the benign divorce special of Kim Kardashian and that nameless man she married is a type of trauma, a dissolution of the dreamy fairy tale wedding. But we are writers, and I posit that we have a duty to destroy, certainly, but we have a duty to heal again as well, and to make these characters three-dimensional, breathing, full formed men and women again. That’s what art must be about, I hope, reforming the alien back into the human.
Dean Young and Elizabeth Bishop Battle It Out
My girlfriend likes to joke about poets—Dickinson vs. Whitman, say—battling it out in a Celebrity Deathmatch. This is funny not the least because it implies poets are celebrities. Yet I think it rings true, in that sometimes we pit those writers we look up to against each other. In our minds, that is. And so it happens that in my head just now Elizabeth Bishop is matched up against Dean Young. And what they’re battling over—and I suspect this battle will rage on maybe forever—is the phenomenon of Creative Writing.
Young opens his provocative Art of Recklessness with the assertion that all the many thousands of people writing poems in Creative Writing programs right now are “a sign of great health.”
POETRY CAN’T BE HARMED BY PEOPLE TRYING TO WRITE IT!
He calls poets a tribe and their communal activity a sort of drum circle and dance around the primal fire of the Imagination. This makes me think of Wallace Stevens:
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun
Only, Young would include women I’m sure.
I’m trying to square all that with Bishop’s delightful, late interview with Elizabeth Spires for the Paris Review. “I don’t think I believe in writing courses at all,” she admits. Yet it’s “what they want one to do.” “You see so many poems every week, you just lose all sense of judgment,” she says. A skeptic to Young’s optimist, she relates, “some classes were so prolific I had to declare a moratorium. I’d say, ‘please, nobody write a poem for two weeks!’”
Of course these things were said, and in Young’s case written, under vastly different circumstances, in vastly different worlds—not to mention worlds of Creative Writing. To some degree, too, Bishop is demurring. She’s having fun with us, because that’s what she does (especially when we’re guests in her house): she entertains. She’s also being humble, characteristically downplaying everything. When word of her Pulitzer Prize finally reaches her on her mountain in Brazil, she tells us, after finally being convinced it’s true, she feels (at a loss) the thing to do is to celebrate with someone. Only no one’s around. She goes in her neighbor’s house looking for someone and, coming up short, settles for Oreos she finds in the kitchen. Which of course she describes as ghastly. And that’s how she celebrated her prize!
But there’s a troubling truth to her disavowals. A kind of undeniable unspokenness that puts me in mind of Marianne Moore’s “I too dislike it.” Or of Berryman, in a slightly altered context: “we must not say so.” Certainly Dean Young must not say so! It’s his field. Why bother to write a book about how it’s no use?
The kids wanna write, sure. That you can count on.
Fir’d at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts.
Other pedagogical questions aside, one of Bishop’s concerns would seem to be the drop in reading literature that coincides with the rise in Creative Writing. You know the truism: everyone writes but no one reads. Anything other than their own poetry. But surely Bishop goes too far, and must be taken with a grain of salt, when she quips that young artists should be “discouraged.”
Or is some discouragement a necessary part of progress? Is that kind of tough-em-up, weed-em-out, coach-mentality a thing of the past? Like disciplining by punishment instead of reward. Interestingly, “discipline” is a poetry word Young reviles.
Young, in his democracy tights, clotheslines Bishop the Gatekeeper. Sweat pops off her laureled brow like Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.
Young’s tribal metaphor reminds me of my first AWP conference (which is itself a kind Battle Royale or orgy). Second year of my MFA, I had driven fifteen hours to Austin from Atlanta. I made it to the Hilton the first morning just after the first panels started. The hallways emptied. Microphones mumbled. I ducked into the first door I saw.
It was a panel on small presses. Check the Chicago schedule. Thursday, 9 am. I bet there’s an Indie Press panel. The little curtained room felt fittingly underground. Night Boat, Action Books, Ugly Duckling Press. A small but involved crowd. It was early. The marginalized first slot of the weekend.
I’ll never forget this guy from Night Boat standing up to testify. He said complaining that too much poetry is being written and published is like complaining that too many people are dancing. What’s poetry but expression? Who would fault expression? Maybe you think all the dancing isn’t great, but it’s still dancing. Just dancing.
We live in an old chaos of the sun…
O happy accident! To this day it remains my most interesting AWP experience. There was something at stake in that room. The real power of a real cause. The ethos that art is for the making. The memory of that magnanimous conviction keeps my heart’s door open—at least a crack.
Indulging in a Stevenian orgy of the Imagination, Young sticks to his tribal metaphor in part, I think, to emphasize community over the individual. To counter-act our canonized, commodified notions of big-nameness, of greatness and majorness of authors and presses. Even Young’s good buddy Tony Hoagland banks on such notions in a recent Writer’s Chronicle article. In questioning poetry he characterizes as the contemporary New York School—poetry which he associates with certain small presses, some of whom, perhaps, were attending that panel—Hoagland asks, by way of dismissal, what “major” poets have emerged from this “school” in recent memory. Fed up with the monotonous, underwhelming chanting of the tribe, Hoagland calls for more stand-out voices, more assertion and proclamation.
I want greatness as much as the next elitist. But in a contemporary context, “majorness” is meaningless—Young’s dance party becoming a schmooze-fest of “networking” and glad-handing. But that’s how it’s always been. It’s also always been the case, as Pope’s couplet attests, that new writers leap in out of their depth. Great art DOES require hard work, I think. But it also can’t forget its roots in PLEASURE. Though asserting that doesn’t make one any more likely to actually have something to say! As Bishop mentions in her interview, it took her twenty years to get the middle of “The Moose” right. Twenty years! Of course, you don’t see Dean Young quibbling with “The Moose”—though he lambasts the painstaking labors of Flaubert’s le mot juste. Why should it be painful? Good writing, he says. That’s easy. It’s risking being bad that’s difficult…
I’m not sure Bishop would fully agree. She probably read all of Flaubert and his letters multiple times in her life. But then again, who knows. I’m sure a great many things I do (or don’t) and believe in (or don’t) would embarrass her to the point of tears. But I’ll say this: I think she was too sensitive to marginalized groups, and had too much of a social and political conscience—as evidenced in her writing, which in the interview she asserts is political—to condone Young’s intentionally reckless (ab)use of the tribal metaphor. Nor can I imagine her writing a book telling people how to write better poems. And never, ever by using her own poems as example.
The fighters fly off the ropes at each other, slam mid-air, and landing on their backs, writhe, like Flaubert on his couch, in pain.
A Personal Blueprint for AWP Chicago
Next week is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference and bookfair. Which is a mouthful. Most people just say AWP. It’s in Chicago this year, and sadly for those of us here in Columbia, it’s at the exact same time as the True/False film festival. But duty calls, so our entire senior staff, graduate editors, and a health dose of our office staff and interns are all headed north. At our table, we will be giving a way issues of The Missouri Review (that’s right: for free!), rolling out our new iPad app, subscription deals, offering the chance to meet three of our favorite authors, and generally talking about any and every thing that you might want to know about our magazine and writing in general. Please come by and say “Yo!”
In this space, we’ve written about AWP before. Michael Kardos wrote about how overwhelming it can feel. Michael Petrik wrote about last year’s conference in Washington D.C. before we went, and I did a roundup after we got back. The year before, I wrote about AWP Denver. And if you keep picking through our blog archives, you’ll find that everyone has different responses: former managing editor Richard Sowienski wrote about AWP 2007 (held in Atlanta). Officially, AWP has its own useful series of questions and answers, and the good folks at Tin House can help you identify poets.
The other day, I ran into one of my friends who is a first year MFA candidate at a Big University. He said that he too was headed up to Chicago, and asked what it was like and what he should do up there. Which got me thinking about my last couple of AWP experiences and how they’ve shaped my current plans. Here’s a quick rundown:
2004: Chicago. I went with my graduate program. Our program didn’t have a table at the book fair for the program or our literary journal, so we went as a wandering pack of about two dozen people. The first year I went to a lot of panels and picked up a ton of free merchandise and cheap sample copies. Back home, I dumped my back of thirty some odd journals and a weird mixture of Things I Do Not Need (rulers, bookmarks, shot glasses, pens, etc.) on the floor of my apartment and wondered what I was supposed to do with all of this stuff.
2009: Chicago. Went representing River Styx, though we couldn’t afford a table. Out of graduate school, none of my old workshop buddies were there. Went to less panels. Spent more time at the book fair and at the bars. Randomly ran into Richard Bausch again (I’d met him in St. Louis the year before), and he actually remembered me! Brought home less stuff.
2010: Denver. My first year with The Missouri Review. Nice to be behind a table. Went looking for, and found, lots of other editors to ask them questions about their magazines and what made them great. Wonk-ier. Lots more off-site readings. Saw many old friends this time. Warmer weather. “It’s the altitude!” was the running not so funny joke. Bummed I missed the Nuggets game.
2011. Washington D.C. Nightmare trying to get there due to 20 inches of snow (!!!) in Missouri. Half our staff didn’t make it. On a panel about print journals with online content. Otherwise, didn’t go to any panels. Tons of friends to see for catchup drinks and dinner (read: more drinks). Hotel room was awesome. Refused all free gifts at tables. Missed about a hundred people that I wanted to talk to. Exhausted by Saturday night. Did not bother seeing if there was a Wizards game.
Based on this experience, here’s my current loose rules of thumbs—subject to change at any time—for this year’s AWP.
Skip the panels. Controversal advice, I’m sure. A regular criticism of AWP panels is that they are not particularly good and poorly organized, and that panels are selected for name recognition rather than the quality of the presentation. I wish I could disagree. Most of the panels were far more interesting to me as a grad student than they were once I was working at a literary journal, but even then, the rooms were cramped, the panels started late, and mostly, I wanted to have a conversation with a particular panelist rather than hear what all of them had to say. I usually just looked for said panelists over the course of four days. Remember, everyone wears badges.
Hit the bookfair hard. The bookfair, to me, is where it’s at. I’m completely and totally biased: I work on a literary magazine, and love it. So, of course, I go to the tables and want to hear about what they are doing and what they are up to. I love talking shop. And when you find a table, and the editors are really interesting? You learn a ton about publishing. I highly recommend it.
Do not drink at the hotel bar. Last time I was in Chicago, I ordered two mixed drinks: whiskey and Coke, and a gin and tonic. This cost me $22. Really. And I waited fifteen minutes to get these drinks. You’re in Chicago. Go find another place to hang out.
Do not plan to go to any readings. This will make people mad, but, so be it. If you ask me about a reading, I will say “I’ll do my best.” And I really will. But I go to a lot of readings already. Readings are cool. But I can do that anywhere. There are sixty billion readings in Columbia alone. What’s another reading? This does not mean that I don’t go to readings; in Denver, Christina Hutchins said “Have you ever heard Forrest Gander read?” with such awe that I thought: Gotta go. Plus, I got to hang out with Christina Hutchins. Sold! But that wasn’t planned. My reading attendance is more of the standing in a pack of people variety, someone asks what we’re up to, someone else answers “There’s a reading across the street!” and we say, “All right, let’s do that!” So, I go to readings. I just don’t pre-plan to go.
Smart Water. When I get to town, I find a convenience store and buy as much Smart Water as I can. I drink an entire liter before I go out, and when I come back, I drink an entire liter before I go to bed. You really should not need an explanation why.
Eyes up. It’s aggravating how people look at your lanyard before deciding whether or not you are worth talking to. Remember that you are with other writers, and we’re all really eager to say Hello to a wide-range of people: politeness and dignity can go a long way in making good impressions. Don’t be that person (though, at AWP, we are all that person). Keep your eyes above the neck. It’s much appreciated by all.
Above all, enjoy it. That’s the biggest thing. It sounds like the kind of advice your parents give you, but AWP is really what you make of it. It really is a wonderful time. Do come talk to us: we’d love put a face to a name, see old friends again, and make lots of new ones.
Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye
An Attempt at a Definition of a “MFA Story”
This question comes from a tweet sent by Union Station, an online magazine based in Brooklyn. They actually phrased the question “MFA-styled,” so I’m adjusting the phrasing a bit, but it’s a really good question. I instantly had a few phrases that came to mind. I’m thinking only of fiction here, not poetry or nonfiction. These words and phrases include:
–Strong Prose. This isn’t, obviously, a bad thing. Perhaps that’s what I’m starting with this one. Stories that have good rhythm, sentence variety, proper grammar and syntax (with the rules “broken” when needed), and a rich vocabulary suggest a writer who has spent time on his or her craft.
–Static. This might be what is really meant by “MFA story”: the claim that “nothing happens.” The idea of a static story usually means the lack of an exterior plot because MFA programs, and writers from these programs, do their damnedest to avoid cinematic plots, turning away from guns and violence and melodrama for a stronger sense of a character’s interior life.
Case in point: In my MFA program, during our second year, our visiting professor gave us an article that involved (and I’m piecing this together from memory) a shooting. Something about, I think, a pizza delivery and a discovery of physical abuse, I’m fuzzy on the details, but there was a shooting and a killing. We were asked to write a short scene about this incident. Out of twelve students, only one of us wrote directly about the most dramatic moment: the killing. We just avoided it. Our professor was stunned by this. Why would we avoid the hard moment? Why would we avoid what is most dramatic?
–Interior. MFA stories tend to focus on thought. No other art form can really get inside a character’s thoughts. Movies use voiceover, but that technique is hackneyed and lazy. The exploration of a character’s consciousness, all those messy thoughts, is a response, a moving away from cinema and television. There is so much “action” that seems devoid of any true emotion that it seems natural for a writer to focus on characterization in a way that is seen in literary writing.
–Opaque. MFA stories seem to be pretty straight-forward. But more often than not, when reading a MFA story for a third or fourth time, editors will often wonder “What is this story actually about?” You’d be surprised how often the story’s purpose isn’t really clear. It’s usually a feeling that the writer is the one who isn’t quite sure. Either there is too much thrown in (and by this I mean possibilities or feelings, not events like car chases and crashing blimps and a talking sea lion battalion armed with flamethrowers)(digression: I’d like to read that sea lion story) or what is presented as the conflict is too weak and not truly explored.
–Character Driven, Not Plot Driven. Those five words should be pretty clear. MFA stories can sometimes feel like character sketches more than stories.
To summarize, a MFA story is a well-written, character-driven story that is awfully interior, very little happens, and the ending feels like not much has happened.The question Union Station posed, though, has a pretty clear connotation: it’s negative. Not that Union Station is trying to be negative, but the phrasing, the actually saying that you have a “MFA story” is not considered a good thing.
Does this mean that Missouri Review, Union Station, and other journals won’t publish writing by MFA students? Of course not. Our track record, and the track record of many other fine journals, proves that very good stories are not just written and published by MFA graduates, but by emerging writers currently in MFA programs. I’d even say that the idea of a “MFA story” is probably a holdover from ten or fifteen years ago. Most emerging writers are savvier now.
But many of the techniques learned in the programs are just that: a series of tools, a series of styles, but the story will be, should be, greater than the sum of its parts. To extend the metaphor, all magazine publishers are looking for that magnificent and curious house, not the cookie cutters with the two-car garage wholly indistinguishable from the other homes in the development. We haven’t, won’ t, and will not disparage the programs. We just want to the houses that let us know—despite having walls and windows and roofs and gutters and all the other basic qualities—that we’ve set foot in place unlike any other.
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