This year, for TMR’s 5th annual Audio Competition, we’ve decided to try an experiment. Ok, so it’s a little crazy, and we don’t really know what to expect: we’ve decided to leave the contest entry fee up to the entrants; if you decide to submit work to our Audio Contest, you choose what you feel is a fair reading fee. Your entry fee, regardless of what you pay, still gets you a one-year digital subscription to The Missouri Review.

In the past, we have always charged a $20 entry fee—an entry fee that’s fairly standard for literary-journal-run competitions these days. And while we feel that this fee is reasonable (it includes a one-year subscription to The Missouri Review, for which we normally charge $23), we also understand that the cost may be prohibitive for some very talented people—particularly in this difficult economy.

Before I give the false impression that our contest is now free to enter, however, let me be up-front about the fees associated with a literary competition and why they exist in the first place. Literary journals as big as The Missouri Review are quite expensive to run: among other things, we pay the salaries for our full- and part-time editorial staff; the salaries for the office staff; the costs of equipment, technology, and supplies; expenses for advertising and promotional events; the printing and distribution of the journal; and contributor payments (we are one of the few lit journals that pays its contributors).  Some of this money comes from grants and some from generous donors, but subscription fees and contest entry fees are another important source that we rely on to meet our costs. When writers pay to enter a journal’s contest, they are acting as patrons of the literary arts, providing the journal with some of the important funding it needs to continue to exist–and ultimately supporting themselves and others in the field.

Of course, there are also costs associated with running a contest: advertising, prize money, staff hours, etc. After receiving as many as several hundred entries, a contest like our Audio Competition might just barely break even; there are years, in fact, when TMR hasn’t broken even on the Audio Contest. Which is why making the entry fee “pay-by-donation” is a bit of a risk. But it’s a risk that we feel is one worth taking: We would like you to be able to enter our Audio Contest regardless of your ability to pay. If you feel that you can afford the standard $20 or even a little beyond that, know that we very much appreciate your support. But if $5 or $10 is all that you can pay at this point in time, we will still be grateful for your donation and happy to consider your work. And rest assured that the entries are blind; the amount that each entrant pays will not be recorded anywhere in connection with his/her payment.

Please spread the word and help make our experiment a success!

Being editors, we also took time to talk about the challenges our magazines have that were above and beyond the focus of the panel. Lots to talk about there. As always for, well, any business, revenue and funding were big concerns. The number of manuscripts we receive and how to read them all in a timely manner. Subscriptions, and how to get more. And so forth. We also talked about problems with staff. High turnover, low pay, consistency of the work, all those things. I was pretty quiet this entire time, and when someone, I forgot who, noticed I wasn’t saying much and asked how things were with TMR, I think I started with something like, “Well, we’re actually pretty lucky …”

And we are. And we’re lucky because of the people we’ve had working with us.

Any organization is going to have turnover, and since TMR is based at a university, that turnover tends to happen, oh, right about now. It’s actually been spread out a little bit, so the blow to us has been lightened a bit; nonetheless, summer is always a transitional period for our magazine. This change – expected, normal, inevitable – doesn’t get any easier when you aren’t just saying goodbye to colleagues, but saying goodbye to your friends.

Scott Scheese, our audio editor, actually left us in June. This dude’s crazy: he works all the way up to the last day of May, moves all his stuff the next day, and then hits the ground running when he gets to Phoenix. Scott has joined Teach for America down in Arizona and is in the middle of working about 70 hours a week (really) in preparation for his upcoming school year. Scott has made our audio production seamless. Our recordings were well-organized, thorough, and efficient; the sound quality sharp and clear; his mentorship kind and respectful; and overall left us in a much better place. He’s helped to lay the foundation for this coming year when our audio content gets rolled and presented on the bigger stage that it justly deserves. And, over these last few minutes, Scott and I have knocked back a few drinks and played a lot of basketball (though not enough!), and if there is anything more important than art and literature, well, it’s basketball (that’s what we call “hyperbole”). I’m really, really happy with the work Scott has done this year. But, more important, I’m happy to now be able to call him my friend.

Katy Didden, our poetry editor, is still glowing from having her dissertation finished. She hasn’t actually left Missouri: she just took an appointment at Saint Louis University, so she’s right down the highway from us. Katy was actually our poetry editor not once, but twice, both in this past year and in 2008-09. Yup, twice. Begged her to come back. I’m not sure if anything else can speak to how much we trust and value the work she has done in selecting the poetry we publish. She’s a painstakingly patient and generous reader, and has worked hard to make the Poem of the Week feature as great as it has been this past year, let alone the terrific content we’ve had for the past four issues. Oh, and she pulls it all off while writing this and this and this and this and this. Are we gonna miss her? Actually, we kinda already do.

Nell McCabe, our anthology editor, has been making textBOX, our online anthology, something other than an idea. For two years, we’ve been kicking around a way to present our back content in a way that is insightful, useful, and fun for a while now, and Nell actually got it off the ground. Now, textBOX is a fully functional site that will have stories, poems, essays, author interviews, audio content, all that good stuff, for both use in the classroom and enhancement for all readers. Nell has also caught me in my worst Monday mornings (not that I have any other kind, but you know what I’m saying), and has been a patient listener (for me) and a terrific mentor (for our students). A travel buddy on a cold February morning when the bus’s heater didn’t work and a helping set of hands when I moved, she’s made all things here at TMR better. But it’s our morning talks I will miss the most.

As for TMR, well, we don’t rebuild, we reload, to snag a little lexicon fun from college football folks. So, with Kevin McFillen, Austin Segrest, and Kate McIntyre joining us this month to batten down the hatches in, respectively, audio, poetry, and textBOX, our magazine remains in great shape. We just wanted to take a moment to publicly thank Scott, Katy, and Nell for their work these last twelve months, work that was exceptional. We miss you. I miss you. I’ll say Good Luck, though you guys don’t really need it since I know you’re going to great in your new homes. I just hope I’ll see all of you again real soon.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

Our event kicks off at 7 pm, and runs until The Bridge throws us out. Technically, our launch will be “over” at 9 pm, but like our fabulous spring launch, we really just stay hanging out until the doors are closed and the bright lights are thrown on. The Jazz Odyssey hits the stage at 9 pm, and there is a great patio where you can come and meet our entire staff (and, of course, former staff members who are certain to show up and say “Yo!”)

The summer issue has just shipped this week, and should be in your hands soon. The issue includes fiction by Amin Ahma, Tom Barbash, Arna Bontemps Hemenway (yes, that’s his real name, and his story is, believe it or not, even better than his name!), A.R. Rea, and Elisabeth Fairchild’s first published story; nonfiction by Daniel Anderson, Anthony Aycock, and John “Let’s Play Two!” W. Evans; poetry by Diane Seuss, Steve Gehrke, and Peter Jay Shippy; and Patrick Hicks sits down with Brian Turner to talk about the poetry of war.

You can snag copies of the issue at the summer launch. More important is that you come to the launch and have a good time. Like spring. Remember?

The first of many bands. We're just warming up...

We had lots of music. Like seventy five bands. Okay, not that many. But we did have music from Shoreside, Andre and the Giants, Mary and the Giant, and Belligerent, to name just a few. We kept it cool to start off the evening and then got progressive louder. Which is always a good thing.

We're always happy when people we like show up.

People rolled in at all times, which is the idea. Show up early, show up fashionably late, it doesn’t matter. You will get this kind of delighted greeting no matter what. And as long as you stay and hang out for a bit, well, what more can we ask?

The conversations at the bar can get pretty deep.

Here, I’m talking basketball with Jesse Garcia, the owner of Sideshow. I’m a Celtics fan, he’s a Bulls fan. We both had a rough 2011 NBA Playoffs (though on this evening, his Bulls were looking pretty good). Not that this dampened our spirits one iota.

We're toasting the evening. Not ourselves. Really.

I was asked to get on stage and say something. I have no idea what I said. Basically, it was something like “You guys are the best!” and You Guys all agreed with that sentiment and held their beverages high in the air. Good call.

See? We throw a good party! More photos from our Spring Launch: PERIL are available on our Facebook page; come check ‘em out. And don’t forget to come to our Summer Launch. The Bridge, July 28th, 7 pm. We’d love to see you there!

The poet Dean Young, ready to drop knowledge and drink ice water.

This past Friday, my friend Marc McKee organized a benefit at Orr Street Studios here in downtown Columbia in order to raise money for Dean Young. In case you haven’t heard the good news, Dean received a transplant last week, and thus far, all news has been good about his body accepting the new ticker. More news on his progress is here. All of us feel tremendous relief at this news. Despite the circumstances, the benefit was more of a celebration, a social event that honors both Dean’s spirit by being as lively, funny, encouraging and deeply benevolent as the man is,  as well as his poetry’s zany and antic cartwheels in the service of art and beauty.

However …

The good fight isn’t over. Surgery is expensive. Heart surgery is really expensive. And this isn’t the time or place for political discourse, but health insurance is only going to get Dean so far. We need your help. Marc, knowing this, asked for a little help. Gabe Fried, a terrific poet himself, helped Marc round up poets to give their time and energy; and Allison Smythe was instrumental in securing the space at Orr Street Studios on such short notice. The three of them put on a terrific and fun benefit last week in the hope of raising whatever amount they could to help with the medical costs. Dean’s friend Joe DiPrisco has been the mastermind behind several national events that have been created in order to help out. Here‘s where you can get the good word.  Joe wrote:

Dean’s expenses will be sky high and relentless for as long as he lives–which is going to be a long time if we can help it. Yes, he has “good” insurance, but insurance does not pay for everything, and we estimate his out-of-pocket expenses to be in the area of $50,000 to $100,000 a year—going forward for many years to come.

At the benefit, Marc let us know that over $170,000 has been raised by nearly a thousand contributors thus far. Eight poets affiliated with the University of Missouri, Stephens College, and the local arts community came together to celebrate Dean’s work; each poet read at least one (often two of Dean’s poems) as well as one of their own. The readers included Marc, Gabe, and Allison, as well as poets were Katy Didden, Jessica Starr, Melissa Range, Austin Segrest, and Sara Strong.

Dean Young is a close, dear friend of Marc’s, and hearing Marc talk about what Dean meant to him, what his poetry has meant to him, and to so many others, was one of the highlights of the evening. Katy Didden shared her story of meeting Dean at Bread Loaf, his pure delight at being there, in open fields under a clear sky, meeting fellow writers with his characteristic joy and good humor.

Marc McKee captivating the audience through lyrical hypnosis.

Here’s something to acknowledge: several poets admitted they have never Dean. I thought this was a brave and marvelous thing.  They only knew Dean through his poetry, just from what they’ve discovered about him through his work, his influence on Marc, and the impact he’s made on “Dean-iacs” over his many years of teaching. His accomplishments are numerous: ten books of poetry, Pulitzer Prize finalist, the Griffin Prize, the Lenore Marshall prize, and the winner of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and so on. But the accolades really don’t matter: something about his poetry has moved us.

It’s strange to hear the cadence of eight different poets reading Dean’s work. I’ve read another writer’s work aloud before, and it is an incredible challenge: the inflections, pauses, rhythms, all of it, is so different when it isn’t the work that you spent months working on. Yet every single poet read Dean’s poems magnificently. We laughed a lot Friday night – how can you not when hearing Dean’s best work? – but there were also moments that also brought us to tears, like the final stanza in “Elegy for a Toy Piano“:

When something becomes ash,
there’s nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie.

We also heard “Changing Genres”, ”Red Glove Thrown in Thorn Bush“, ”Commencement Address“, ”Bay Arena“, ”Centrifuge“, ”One Story”, and “How I Get My Ideas.” It was a terrific, successful, fantastic evening, and we all have Marc McKee, Gabe Fried, and Allison Smythe to thank (along with all the other poets) for such a great event.

One thing I always tell my writing students is “be generous.” Sounds simple, but as we all know, it really is incredibly hard to be a giving and kind person, not just in a workshop, but with our writing, with ourselves, and throughout our lives. And, so, my request to all of you out there in the TMR audience, is just that: be generous. We need your generosity. It would be an incredible gift if you would.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review. Donations for Dean can be made at the National Transplants website, Transplants.org, can be made by clicking here. Remember that any size donation, even just a buck or two, is greatly appreciated and goes a long way towards helping. Thank you!

First, a bit of a summary for those who haven’t read it: A Visit from the Goon Squad is what might be called a novel in stories or linked short stories or a short story cycle.  Semantically these all mean slightly different things, and I’m not sure exactly where Egan’s novel falls, but that doesn’t seem all that important.  What is important is that the stories in A Visit jump through a large cast of interrelated characters and a large expanse of time.  They are connected not only through their relationships, but also through the music industry.  It is a book, though not chronological itself, that is largely concerned with time and with the way people rise and fall along the course of their lives.

Now, why it deserves it: It seems that the best novels in stories are able to collectively characterize a time and a place and an atmosphere.  An iconic example is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which not only represents a small town in a rapidly urbanizing America.  Egan takes this form, and lets it play out on a much larger scale.  A Visit isn’t geographically confined.  It spends a great deal of time in San Francisco and NYC, but also moves to a safari in Africa and a visit to an unnamed dictator in an unnamed out of the way country.  It also isn’t constrained to depicting a sliver of time, rather an era–within which whole lives are lived and characters rise and fall and rise again.

Another cue Egan takes from writers of this form such as Anderson is the use of a central character around which the others seem to revolve.  For Anderson it was the young journalist George Willard; for Egan, it is Sasha, who is everything from a runaway teen to a kleptomaniac assistant for a music mogul to a mother.  Many of the characters recur and many of the characters are protagonists at one point or another. Egan’s skill in organizing the narrative  is such that at times I could guess whose story we’d get next, because a special attention was given to some peripheral character lurking at the edge of the narrative, waiting for his/her chance to speak.  But Sasha seemed the heart of this overarching narrative, and she was certainly a compelling one.

Egan expands or elaborates on the form in other ways as well.  She plays with point of view, voice, narrative style, and even structure.  The latter occurs most significantly on the books B-side (a clever divide Egan sets up to reflect the sides of a record), in the story “Great Rock and Roll Pauses By Alison Blake.”  This story is in fact a sequence of powerpoint slides constructed by a young girl in the near future.  I was hesitant and worried the structure might become a conceit or a gimmick when I saw this story, but after reading it, I am convinced it is the books finest moment.  In the end it doesn’t feel all that experimental because Egan so deftly creates narrative in the unusual form.  It is the most effecting and complete short story I have read in quite some time, though I believe that is brought about by perhaps Egan’s greatest success.

In my opinion, this greatest success is that the stories in A Visit work together and build something much greater than the separate parts.  Taken alone, more than a few stories were well realized, interesting, and, finally, not all that compelling.  However, when stories such as “Safari” or the aforementioned “Great Rock and Roll Pauses…” came along, they brought the book to a new and much more significant level, and similarly granted significance to everything around them.  If this book was the record it imitates, these stories would be the singles.  However, as with the best records, experiencing those singles alone can’t elevate them to the level they reach as a part of a whole when experienced with the entire work.  A Visit From the Goon Squad‘s success is brought about by the deftness with which characters and times and places and conflicts and narratives are interwoven.

I was happy to see it justly recognized with a Pulitzer. A big congratulations to Jennifer Egan and to all the other Pulitzer recipients.

Mike Petrik is an intern at The Missouri Review, and a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Missouri.

I met Jeanne twice, both at AWP, and both times, as is common at big conferences, we only had a few minutes to talk. Listening to her and Lucy Ferris talk, nonstop, for ten minutes about new books, criticism, publishing, and editing, was breathtaking and delightful.  When speaking with her, Jeanne struck me as a fiercely intelligent, funny, and kind person who was dedicated to her magazine, her staff, and her friends. She fought hard for her TSR, and was deeply respected by the writers she published and the staff that worked with her. And I’m a bit stunned by how much this news has hurt. Maybe we don’t realize the imprint people leave on us until their gone.

All of our thoughts, prayers, and good wishes are being sent to Jeanne’s family and friends today.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of 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.

Interesting news from the Telegraph: “Jane Austen’s famous prose may not be hers after all.”

Prof Kathryn Sutherland said analysis of Austen’s handwritten letters and manuscripts reveal that her finished novels owed as much to the intervention of her editor as to the genius of the author.

[...]

“The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on the issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation. But in reading the manuscripts it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing.

“This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book,” Prof Sutherland said.

Prof. Sutherland proposes that one William Gifford was this very editor, Austen’s own Gordon Lish.

At The Missouri Review, we take literary editing very seriously, and our senior staff have many personal anecdotes of the very forms of magic they’ve seen editors work that transform good stories into great stories. But our conception of authorship still looks askance at the editor. I had a writing professor who was became nearly to apoplectic when describing how he felt Gordon Lish had exerted his editorial tyranny over Raymond Carver — and it is hard not to feel a stab of pain when one reads of Carver’s plea to Lish to stop cutting his drafts by as much as 70%. As yet, it doesn’t appear that Austen’s relationship with Gifford was anything near as fraught, but I expect idea of Gifford’s possible role in shaping the “voice” of Austen is deeply troubling to many Austen fans.

So what do you think about authors and editors? Is an author diminished by being the recipient of an editor’s polishing blue pencil? Are editors the writer’s friend or foe?

This puzzled me.  My first thought was “Really?  Doesn’t everyone read the introduction first?  Isn’t that why it’s called an “introduction” and appears before all the collected stuff?”  I tend to think in a linear fashion about these things, much to the amusement, delight, and teasing of my friends.  But when I was an undergraduate and first introduced to the Best American series, still struggling with the idea of what makes literature “good”, the introduction was insight into what was chosen, why it was chosen, and what the anthology, on the whole, aimed to achieve.  I still find the introductions to be a fascinating look into what engages the guest editor, often a writer I admire, and one that has achieved great success over many years of hard work.

Here’s hoping Russo’s introduction is as delightful as his novels.

In the back of the Best Ams’, you’ll find each writer’s comments on her/his story (except for William Trevor, who never comments), a list of magazines that submitted work to Best American for consideration, and a list of the 100 Distinguished or Notable pieces in each given anthology.  From The Missouri Review:

Andrew Cohen, “Television Days,” Vol 32.4 (essay)

Cheryl Strayed, “Munro County,” Vol 32.4 (essay)

Deborah Thompson, “What’s the Matter with Houdini,” Vol 32.1 (essay)

Elise Juska, “The Way I Saw The World Then,” Vol 32.4 (story)

Eleanor Lerman, “Persistent Views of the Unknown,” Vol 32.3 (story)

All wonderful pieces you should read (re-read?).  And, of course, a big thanks to these wonderful authors for giving us the opportunity to publish their work.  We were delighted to do so!  Also, friend of TMR and weekly blogger, Michael Kardos, was also shortlisted for his terrific story “Metamorphosis”, which originally appeared in Prairie Schooner.  Congrats!

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review