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Audio on fire
Rachel Yoder: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Prose)
Greg Brownderville: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Poetry)
Ken Cormier: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Self-Recorded Documentary)
Anna Pinkert: 2011 Audio Contest winner (Professionally Recorded Documentary)
We’re excited about many of the new developments with our audio content here at The Missouri Review. We’re excited, for instance, that the opening of our 2012 audio competition follows closely on the heals of the addition of our (free) podcast feed to iTunes. If you’d like to have our weekly podcasts delivered to you, please sign up. And please, if you enjoy what you hear, give us a good rating on the iTunes site. Our podcast feed is so new that it hasn’t yet been rated.
As I already shared in a recent post, Julie Shapiro of the Third Coast International Audio Festival has agreed to serve as a guest consultant for our 2012 Audio Competition, joining TMR’s editors in the final judging round. This year, we’ve also streamlined the competition to three, simple categories–prose, poetry, and audio documentary—in an attempt to eliminate any confusion entrants experienced last year. And, we’ve improved the contest entry process. For your convenience, we now take MP3 recordings by email and accept online payments. (Submissions by mail are still acceptable as well). This should make the competition more economical to enter, especially for those submitting entries from overseas.
We wanted the renaming of our categories to convey that they are fairly open: in each we accept entries with multiple voice tracks, or with other tracks of sound or music, or simply good, clean recordings of entrants’ pieces. Any of these things are acceptable. The “prose” category includes any prose piece: fiction or nonfiction. “Audio documentary” is now open to professionally and non-professionally recorded pieces. Please see our audio contest site for full guidelines.
If you would like to check out previous contest winners and get a sense of the range of work our judges responded to favorably, you can find them in our recent podcasts. We’ve posted our four first-place winners from last year’s competition and plan to post entries from our first-runners up in the coming weeks. (So check back)!
Word Missouri: Eliot, St. Louis and the river
Word Missouri is a series in partnership with KBIA, Columbia’s NPR affiliate. It examines Missouri’s literary heritage, present and future. KBIA’s Davis Dunavin is the series creator and reporter.
I’m a die-hard fan of Modernism. More specifically, I’m a die-hard Thomas Stearns Eliot-head. Not always a popular stance; he’s certainly got his detractors these days. Which is why I was so thrilled to meet Frances Dickey, a professor and Eliot scholar at the University of Missouri, who speaks about Prufrock’s creator with the same excitement I still feel when I pick up Four Quartets or his fabulous criticism. (For you other Eliot-heads – I know you’re out there! – go pick up Eliot’s letters, recently published by Yale University Press.)
But Eliot just isn’t seen as a Missourian. Did he see himself as one? Fans like me know he read his poetry in a crisp, patrician accent that hung somewhere between New England and Old England. References to his home state in his writings are sparse – as are tributes to the man here. I think it’s time we change that. Dr. Dickey and I spoke about Eliot’s connections to Missouri. Have a listen to the interview as it ran on KBIA.
(By the way, the photo above was taken in St. Louis’s Central West End; busts of Eliot and fellow St. Louisian Tennessee Williams represent the first half of a project neighborhood groups call Writers Corner. More on that soon…)
This interview originally aired on September 26, T. S. Eliot’s birthday, on KBIA.
Peril: The Movie
We recently had a launch party for our most recent issue – something we have not, to my knowledge, tried before. Held at an establishment called Sideshow, here in Columbia, MO, the event featured bands, popcorn, our editor, our managing editor, bands, our interns, other people, and a pervasive spirit of goodwill that I hope comes through in the below film. It was produced by Logan Lemmon, who has a series of excellent films available online.
The Missouri Review – Spring Launch Party from Logan Lemmon on Vimeo.
Cereal Box Serial Fiction
Growing up (and no, that picture isn’t of me), I spent most mornings before school sitting at the kitchen table facing a wall of cereal boxes. They were useful as a Great Wall of sorts from my barbarian little brother on the other side, but more than that, they were something to do.
Now, as documented in The Telegraph, British supermarket Asda has had a bright idea–putting fiction on the backs of boxes, rather than the usual jumble of word searches, mazes, and the like. They are starting with excerpts from Roald Dahl–which seems to me an excellent mix of entertainment with quality writing. What a novel idea!
Puffin, the publisher collaborating with Asda seems to be on to something. There is undoubtedly much more demand on our attention, particularly for young people, so why not slip them a bit of literature when they are still bleary-eyed enough to be easy targets. And someone must be reading these boxes if the big brands are bothering to print them (on the back, I am sure, of oodles market research).
As of now, Puffin is planning to use punchy excerpts from Dahl’s more popular novels, but who’s to say they won’t turn the Asda brand box-backs into a cereal-serial,maybe even one featuring new work. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if children were waiting as impatiently for the new box of Count Chocula as they are for the next episode of Phineas and Ferb or the release of the new Pokemon game (word on the street is it’s pretty good).
Would the same thing work for adults? Would anyone ever say by the water-cooler, “You’ve got to check out the latest Special-K. It’s the chapter of Don Quixote where Sancho Panza throws up all over Don Quixote.” (Ok, maybe not that chapter, it is a bit too well-rendered for breakfast reading). Maybe this isn’t the right media for adults, but the idea isn’t too far out there. Dickens serialized most of what he wrote, as did many of his contemporaries. There may be an opportunity for a resurgence of serialized fiction, even if it doesn’t happen in newspapers or magazines.
There are novels now being published on tweet at a time, so why not. Perhaps the adult equivalent to the cereal boxes would be serial fiction on Starbucks cups or desktop tear-off calendars, let alone all the various electronic media.
It’s early and I’m bleary-eyed and I haven’t had my cereal yet. So give me a hand, where else could we slip in some literature, be it for the kiddies or the grown-ups? I’m off to see what my generic frosted mini-wheats box has to offer.
Mike Petrik is an intern at the Missouri Review, and a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri.
The Story of the Story
The latest addition to textBOX is not a new story or essay, but a very brief piece written for the anthology by Mimi Schwartz to accompany “Off the Record”—a chapter from her prize-winning memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village. In the note that now accompanies her essay in the anthology, Schwartz writes that she discovered her task was “less about finding THE RIGHT ANSWER about the goodness or badness of Germans in my father’s village and more about the complexities of finding out.” In other words, the truth she thought she was looking for turned out to be only part of the whole story, a story that included the process of discovery as well as the journey of its author.
Despite being just three paragraphs long, this mini-essay has gotten me thinking about the evolution of writing projects—how they can grow out of one thing and into something else and how that transformation can be such a frustrating and productive part of the writing process. The novel I’m currently working on began life as a screenplay over a decade ago: one with quite a bit of expository dialogue explaining the character’s extensive back-stories and more than a few larger-than-life coincidences carrying the overly intricate plot. Since its inception ten years ago I’ve put it down and returned to it more times than I can count. I’ve also earned a BA and an MA, had two children, written two short screenplays, a dozen or so short stories, an equal number of academic essays, moved halfway across the country, and, most recently, discovered Scrivener (with which I am madly in love – more about that in another post).
Process can be anything from the basic act of putting pen to paper to traveling across the Atlantic to uncover the complexities of your family’s past. What was once an amateur screenplay is now an almost finished novel. Thinking about the long, sometimes painful, sometimes incredibly rewarding process reminds me just how much perseverance is required to keep working on a project that quite frequently just doesn’t seem like it is ever going to work. My novel no longer bears anything more than a superficial resemblance to its former self and despite the fact that I was arguably a very different writer when I began the project, I am more committed to it now than ever. It’s the many changes that have taken place in both my life and my manuscript that have shaped what it has become. Whether it ends up being a part of the story itself or is the invisible scaffolding beneath the story, process is an essential part of the finished product and it’s good to be reminded of that every now and then, especially when the process is long and hard.
Not all of my writing is this way. I’ve written stories that came to me in a flash and were written and rewritten in a matter of days. This story is different. For this story the process has influenced every character, every scene, every scrap of dialogue. How does process affect your work? Is there a piece of your own writing for which process has been particularly integral?
On a completely unrelated note, if you’ve got three minutes and twenty-nine seconds to spare, I recommend watching the animated video interview I did with TMR’s social media editor Rob Foreman.
Nell McCabe is the Anthology Editor for The Missouri Review.