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Taking Us Back To Good Ol’ 1961
Awards are a wonderful thing. 86FRVS4HAV4C We can be delighted when we receive them, and we can scorn them as being political and phony when we don’t. It’s the ultimate “have your cake and eat it, too”. What reader hasn’t bemoaned the work in the Best American series, or complained about who received the Pulitzer Prize? This year, the LA Times announced that Jennifer Egan won the National Book Critics Circle award and ran a picture not of Egan, but of Jonathan Franzen. Philip Roth won the Man Booker International Prize, and in response one of the judges quit and then blasted Roth’s writing in the press. Awards can get our blood boiling. Awards–particularly in the moment when they are given and fully absorbed in the present culture, and under the heavy influence of politics–might not always acknowledge the work that will be the most enduring.
Ultimately, I’m not sure that it really matters who won. Besides, how can anyone know, in the here and now, what book will have staying power for decades or centuries. It’s really an impossible goal. The winners and nominees are, probably, all very good books. But isn’t it interesting to take a look back and see how these books hold up?
That’s exactly what the editors of The Cincinnati Review have done in their summer 2011 issue. They have reassessed the winners of the National Book Award in 1961, and asked, who is the deserving award now? It’s a fun and interesting exercise. Check it out: the winner that year was The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter. Did you read that one? No? Maybe? But chances are you probably read Rabbit, Run or A Separate Peace (a book I once wrote about rediscovering) or The Violent Bear It Away. Regardless, you can go to the National Book Foundation’s site and look at any year your wish and then head to your local library and do some catching up.
Forty years seems like a good time for a retrospective. The writers participating include Alexander Chee, Leah Stewart, John McNally, Justin Tussing, and Keith Lee Morris, five writers who know quite a bit about writing and reading. None of the writers had read all ten nominees before, but all had read at least a few, providing the symposium with a mixture of old memories and fresh eyes.
On Updike, Alexander Chee wrote:
I’ve scoffed before at our culture’s new cult of the sympathetic character–good fiction is often about awful people, I say at those times–but this book turned out to be the test of my feelings on the matter.
On O’Connor, John McNally wrote:
The Violent Bear It Away is really Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, and it suffers from many of the same problems that first novels (unpublished first novels) often suffer from.
There’s more. A lot more. But I wouldn’t ruin it for you. It’ll make you nod at times, make you frown in disagreement, and hopefully, send you back to your bookshelves to pluck some of these classics down and read them again. After all, literary journals aren’t supposed to be in our own little vacuum, and this is one of those terrific features that stretches beyond what is typically expected of the “little” magazines.
And maybe what’s most fun about the project is this: it’s about reading. That’s all. Reading each short essay about what the experience of reading has been like for each of these writers might be the most enjoyable part of the feature. It might be the most interesting thing I’ve read this summer, in part because of the way it connects so many things – current writers, literary journals, writers in the past, books with a legacy – and makes me think, and feel moved, and re-read those novels.
But wait: this feature didn’t begin this year. This was a cooperative project with Ninth Letter and Mid-American Review. Last year, Ninth Letter looked at the National Book Award in Fiction for 1960; you can order a copy of the issue here. And next year, Mid-American Review will revisit 1962. Unless you have a DeLorean and a flux capacitor, you can’t get that issue yet, but you can visit MAR now and read what they are currently publishing. And, of course, you can get the current copy of the Cincinnati Review now. Kudos to the editors of Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, and Ninth Letter for coming up with such a smart and fun feature.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review.
Building a Library For Writers
It's not easy finding The Missouri Review on the shelves. But he will!
One of the things that literary magazines and literary editors will frequently tell prospective contributors is that a writer should read our magazine before submitting work to us. I heard this advice when I was graduate school and first became interested in publishing my stories. Outside the offices of Natural Bridge, the literary magazine of Missouri-St. Louis, there was a small bookshelf filled with literary journals. Being new to literary publishing, most of the names were unfamiliar to me. Best I can remember, the shelves didn’t hold many of the big names like Ploughshares and Tin House. Mostly, the shelves were filled with journals run by graduate students, same as Natural Bridge. I distinctly remember reading several issues of Meridian, the literary journal out of the University of Virginia.
Point is, getting to know the journals is not easy. Journal editors, like ourselves, typically say vague things, such as we like “good writing.” We don’t want to say we do this or do that, because it might close us off to work that will surprise and delight our readers. Yet, magazines do seem to have certain aesthetics and taste – I can think of a handful of journals I love to read that I would never submit my work to – and when a writer is asked to read a couple of back issues, it can be overwhelming.
Poet Gary Hanna feels the same way. So, he decided to do something about it. In cooperation with the Lewes Public Library in Delaware, Hanna has created The Writer’s Library, a room free and open to the public where writers can read the literary journals that are best for their work. And, the Writer’s Library could use some donations. So if you have any copies of literary journals that you could donate, please do so! All information on how to reach Hanna is on their website, but in case you just feel the need to rush right off to UPS, here it is:
The Writer’s Library at Lewes Public Library, 111 Adams Avenue, Lewis, DE 19958. Or you can visit www.leweslibrary.org
Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review.
The State of the Union
Tip of the cap to TMR pals Kyle Minor and Lincoln Michel for this one. The Faster Times has a new piece up by Chloe Cooper Jones on the state of MFA programs, a freewheeling conversation between her, George Saunders, and Deb Olin Unferth. One of the concerns with any discussion of contemporary literature and the effect of creative writing programs is that the dialog tends to fall into an either/or shouting match: they are good, they are bad; you are with us or you are against us. And this piece is a nice and welcome shift from such static thinking. Here’s an appetizer:
I think it’s easy to stand outside of or at the edge of a community and call it dull. That is, I think it’s easy for people not involved in an active, engaged MFA program to look at it from afar and see monotony and repetition. This is because we see dullness everywhere—all landscapes, all communities. You can look at any space, at any group of people, and see dreariness, self-absorption, the long trod to death. Or you can look at the same space and people and see longing, hope, heroism, and disappointment that will break your heart. If you squint just right at an MFA program, you see both.
Read the entire article here.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.
The Tom Waits Highway
Every morning, I write for a couple of hours, working on various projects: stories, essays, a novel. I don’ t have a particular good reason why I choose one over the other on any given day, but usually, I stick with one thing for a few weeks (or, with a novel, a few months) and then, for no clear reason, I turn to something different, re-reading with a bit of surprise, like seeing an old friend in an unexpected place.
The wonder of what I’m working on, or why I’m working on it, doesn’t concern me a great deal. The important thing to me is that I do it everyday. On weekdays, I have less time, of course, because I need to head over to The Missouri Review offices and get to work. Weekends provide me more time, but I don’t have different plans for Saturdays or Sundays. I just write. There are many, many pieces of advice on how to write, whole books, (thousands of books, actually) but for me it’s just a matter of writing everyda. No big mystery.
This doesn’t work for everyone. Other needs something to get them going, a way of contextualizing the work so that it makes sense. A way to nurture creativity.
So, here’s this interesting video of Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, discussing creativity and Tom Waits (the title of this post does have some relevance), among other things. At the beginning of this short talk, Elizabeth acknowledges something a bit scary: she’s probably already had the biggest success she’s going to ever have as a writer. So, now what?
It’s definitely worth your time to watch and found out.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review
An Incomplete Narrative (Or, Mutiny On The Bounty)
In the literary world, the past few weeks have been filled with stories about Virginia Quarterly Review and the suicide of its managing editor, Kevin Morrissey. Not only has there been a flurry of inaccuracies, but also a damning indictment of the University of Virginia, VQR, and its editor, Ted Genoways. Our marketing director, Kris Somerville, printed out the original story published in The Hook, and even in small type, the pages were the size of a phone book. You also might have seen that this story reached The Today Show (who oddly called VQR a “campus magazine.” Um, actually, no, it’s a wee bit more than that …)
Tom Bissell, a regular contributor to VQR and author of several books, has a different and thoughtful response to the entire situation:
“Here is a different narrative of the VQR tragedy: Mr. Genoways, in elevating what had previously been a respected but quiet literary journal into one of America’s best magazines, revealed the basic incompatibility of the sinecure model of university employment with the high-pressure, emotionally tempestuous imperatives of commercial publishing. Mr. Genoways’ staff, including Morrissey, did not agree with the direction in which the magazine was going and moreover believed Mr. Genoways was spending too much money. Crucially, Mr. Genoways was bound by one extraordinary quirk of a university- and taxpayer-funded literary magazine. Morrissey, along with the rest of Mr. Genoways’ staff, were state employees first, VQR employees second. While Mr. Genoways could hire staff, he could not easily fire staff, which is the right and prerogative of, say, the editors of The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic, against whom VQR was attempting to compete in terms of content (if not circulation).
“Mr. Genoways was thus forced to run his magazine in what were essentially and increasingly mutinous circumstances. Paradoxically, as the magazine pulled in National Magazine Award nominations and critical acclaim, Mr. Genoways’ relationship to his staff became increasingly toxic. Job productivity suffered and resentments accumulated, even though Mr. Genoways, Morrissey and Waldo Jacquith (the former Web editor of VQR, who told The Today Show that “Ted’s treatment of Kevin in the last two weeks of his life was just egregious”) were drawing a combined compensation of $320,000.”
Read Tom’s entire piece here, and if you haven’t, The Hook’s original story is here. Also, lots of interesting comments at HTML Giant, too. Tip o’ the cap to TMR pal Tayari Jones for the link to Tom’s story.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.