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)!

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.

The Missouri Review – Spring Launch Party from Logan Lemmon on Vimeo.

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.

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 attacks on Laura Miller are pretty good examples from Logic and Rhetoric 101 about how NOT to make an argument. Miller’s essay comes down to this:

Cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.

If you believe she’s right, well, the comments she has been receiving only help to support her claim. Please read her entire column and all the comments here.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

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

“If we don’t understand bad writing, we can’t understand good writing.  Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance.  Good writing is exactly the opposite.  Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself.  These writers have betrayed the legacy of modernism, not to mention postmodernism.”

Well, okay.

Shivani’s post has received quite a bit of attention: there are over 1100 comments on his article, and a quick trip around the literary blogosphere will have all sorts of response about what one commenter called a “drive by shooting of criticism.”  From reading other criticism by Shivani – he’s a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post and the literary journal Boulevard – he has always struck me as a smart, well-read critic.  Which is why his post is so disappointing.

The goal of good criticism is, in part, to show you something you haven’t seen before.  Agreeing or disagreeing isn’t the point at all.  Whether or not I agree with Shivani isn’t relevant if he can get me, or any other reader, to experience the reading of these books in a different and interesting way.  Here are just a couple of his passages that were interesting and worth more exploration:

On John Ashberry: “Mixes low and high levels of language, low and high culture, every available postmodern artifact and text, from media jargon to comic books, to recreate a reality ordered only by language itself.  When reality=language (as his carping cousins, the language poets, have it, just like him), politics becomes vacuous, and any usurper can and will step in.”

On Antonya Nelson: “She can stuff in two or three similes in a single sentence she won’t do with only one.  Has engineered a peculiarly depthless style, evoking sitcom scripts, where narrative moves by accumulation of insults and incomprehension.”

On Junot Diaz: “Replaces plot in stories and novel with pumped-up “voice.”

Whether or not Shivani is correct, none of the ideas gets any additional thought or consideration (wouldn’t, say, an example or two of the writer’s work be really helpful here?); further, they are often surrounded by a foaming rage at how connected these people are to the world of publishing.  With it’s bullet-point sentence style and unexplored ideas, it’s difficult to read his post as anything other than the sour grapes of a writer with a bully pulpit and a microphone on the outside of the publishing world.  The ideas are always suggested – again, Shivani isn’t dumb – but there isn’t any exploration of them in a way that might be the type of thoughtful criticism that he claims doesn’t exist anymore.

The construction of the column itself is an excellent example of exactly what Shivani complains is wrong with modern literature.  Is there any easier column to write (or conversation to have) than overrated/underrated?  Sportswriters have been using those for years, and at least have statistics to back them up.  Overrated compared to what, exactly?  It’s the type of word that stops thought, like any cliche, and strips away meaning.  The title is inflammatory and the column is a rabid attack, which is what it is supposed to be.  Check out the way the post is designed: pictures of all the authors, with a box to the side so you the reader can vote on the author’s “true” rating, all in a slideshow that we must click-thru to generate revenue and load new ads (see those on the side of the author photos?) for The Huff.  Everything about Shivani’s post – the title, the writing style, its “criticism,” the construct of the text – is designed to kill thought and generate clicks.

Too often that’s what writers are doing now: saying things very loudly and with tremendous emotion, like a talking head on the news, with only one or two talking points to generate all the noise.  That’s not what we need from our books, our authors, or its critics.  What we need is Shivani to explore those ideas that are only touched upon in his post – and there are compelling thoughts that could be fascinating – rather than savage famous writers with the kind of personal attacks that are far too common nowadays.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

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