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: News
Jane Austen gets the Raymond Carver treatment?
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?
Nobody's Fooling The Editor
The newest additions to the Best American series - Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, Best American (fill in the blank here) – hit bookstores tomorrow. Richard Russo is this year’s editor for BASS. In 2006, David Foster Wallace was the guest editor for BAE (um: Best American Essays, but, you knew that already …) and emphasized in his introduction that he was the Decider, not an editor, as Robert Atwan, the series editor, actually forward David all the essays he could select. It was a fascinating essay – what essays by Wallace aren’t? – in part because Wallace figured that most people don’t read the introductions at all, and if they do, they read the introduction after they’ve read some, if not all, of the anthologized work.
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
Shenandigital
Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog featured a note today from R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah, a journal many back issues of which are on a shelf behind me, concerning the expansion of its digital presence and the end of its sixty-year run as a print journal.
This is old news, but news to me, and my immediate impulse, for what it’s worth, is to voice my support for print, because despite Egon Spengler’s insistence as long ago as 1984 that “Print is dead,” I still believe in it, for reasons that have been articulated many times over across the blogosphere and even outside of it, nowhere more memorably (to me) than in Nicholson Baker’s 2001 book Double Fold, which addresses the ’ tendency among libraries to throw out their print collections in favor of digitization.
The soberer approach, however, might be to see a move like Shenandoah’s – as many others do – as a natural step in the progression of a literary journal that intends to be accessible and relevant in an increasingly digital literary world. And there are advantages to a move like this one; as Smith’s note reads,
“While many of us harbor divided minds about the dwindling of the physical print medium, I’m enthusiastic about the possibilities – from audio presentations to ease of access and extended audience and more frequent updates – presented by this brave new world of the Internet.”
This is a subject worth discussion far beyond what I can conjure up on my own this Monday afternoon, but I can agree with the above-quoted sentiment wholeheartedly, and not a little because of the nature of my current affiliation with TMR.
Robert Foreman is The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor.
Off They Go
The end of July also means the end of our summer internship class. We’ve had a wonderful group that was with us for eight weeks – way too short – and they’ve done a tremendous job on putting the finishing touches on the new issue out now and the autumn issue, which will be arriving in September. In this space, over the course of the next few weeks, you’ll read interviews our interns have conducted with previous contributors to TMR, the first of which was Olivia’s conversation with Tom Ireland. As always, we hope that a few interns will get the opportunity to return in autumn or spring.
Every few weeks, our intern staff turns over. But this time of year also brings massive turnover with the departure of key graduate editors and staff. After several years with TMR, Lania Knight accepted a position with Eastern Illinois University and hotfooted it out of CoMo. The inclusion of audio recordings of each and every piece we publish was the brain child of Lania and our previous managing editor, Richard Sowienski, sparked by a random “Hey, did you ever consider …?” conversation in the hallway years ago. She helped write the grant, build the studio (which is in room 54 of our building. yes, it is Studio 54. yes, really!), master the software, discovered the voice talent, conducted print interviews with writers like David Sedaris and Paul Eggers, worked with NPR affiliated across the country, and made our audio recordings what is today. She’s left a massive imprint on us all here, and we’re grateful for all her time here. Check out her fiction here.
This year, Stephanie Carpenter often appeared in our offices at odd hours with a large stack of essays sitting haphazard on the coffee table. She’s been gracious with her time as a senior reader for us as another set of smart, critical eyes for the prose we consider. She also worked as our contest editor back in 2007-08. You can read one of her stories here. She’s headed back to her home state of Michigan where she’ll start at UM-Flint in the fall and teach Tom Izzo how to run the motion offense.
Dan Stahl has been “editorial assistant” with us for almost two years, but that title doesn’t do justice to what he has meant to us. Dan has done just about every project conceivable here, from manuscript reading and editing, research projects, and even filling in as our office manager for six weeks with just a moment’s notice. As the Swiss Army knife of TMR, he’ll be terribly missed.
Finally, our poetry editor, Marc McKee, has accepted a one-year appointment down at Warrensburg. He’ll have the chance to leave his fingerprints on Pleiades, another fine journal from deepinthehearta, and educate the youngsters on how to write awesome poetry. Speaking of fine poetry, remember that Marc’s first full-length collection, Fuse, will be out from Black Lawrence Press in 2011. As poetry editor, he’s championed a wide-range of wonderful poets that have appeared in the last four issues and had their work appear on our website as our Poem of The Week feature. Or to use an analogy that Marc and I will enjoy, he’s been vintage Dominique Wilkens to my Doc Rivers the past six months.
So, bon voyage, y’all. A short blog post won’t be enough to tell Marc, Stephanie, Dan, Lania, and our entire intern staff how much they’ve meant to us. Their work and friendship has made my transition into TMR easy. For our readers, their influence over the last several years is in the pages of TMR and the great interviews, stories, essays, and poems you’ve read – and, yes, listened to! – for years. Good organizations are only as strong as the people that work there, and because of them, we’ve been fortunate enough to have not been not good but great. Thank you!
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.
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.