Category Archives: Uncategorized

Art of Omission Contest Winners

March 30, 2012 by Kate McIntyre | 1 Comment

The Missouri Review and textBOX are delighted to announce the winners of the Art of Omission contest. We asked entrants to compose a short short or poem of 50 words or fewer using only the words contained in an excerpt from Reesa Grushka’s essay “Arieh.” From the 68 entries received, we selected the top five, all of whom will receive a one-year subscription to the Missouri Review. Caryn Suhr, the grand prize winner, will also get a free entry in the 2012 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Thank you to everyone who entered!

Grand prize winner: Caryn Suhr

White People and The Wire

You turn to the girl and boy beside you and connect over black city streets and meaningless pay-phones. I understand that recorded language unwinds the blueprint, but are you aware that you are a white girl? And, regardless of the black friend you lost, you are a white girl.

Caryn Suhr is currently an MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She normally resides in Georgia, but, for the time being, is located in Delray Beach. Currently, she is working on a short story collection and a novel.

Winner: Husnah Khan

Because Jerusalem is a garden,
there sprouts a child’s shoe,
olive trees, and a donkey.
Recorded prayers that cross air
unwind like the tissue of brain.

Cross a street, turn a corner.
Choke on gasoline and smoke.
Tall soldiers circling.
To understand is meaningless.
Banal laws become a new language.

Husnah Khan is a 2010 graduate of The University of Michigan (Go Blue!) and is currently studying for the LSAT so that she can pursue both human and animal rights law. Her passion for poetry can be explored online at husnahkhan.blog.com and husnahkhan.tumblr.com, where you can read all 365 poems from 2011 as well as poems from 2012. During her free time, she likes to raise money for various causes (crowdrise.com/husnahkhan) and spend time with family, friends, and her orange cat, Houdini.

Winner: Dan Souder

I understand, a blueprint is like a chain. It is there, flat on the
street, a measure of narrow functions, orderly and banal. Crossing it
is an intrusion. Soldiers are protecting you from me. I dream into the
past. Broken pay phone, connect me to my friend.

Dan Souder lives with his wife on an intersection near the police, two hospitals, and a fire station. He is using software to learn Brazilian Portuguese. Obrigado.
ds-litjournal.tumblr.com

Winner: Jenn Hollmeyer

You are busy. I understand. I smoke prayers in the corner, burning my dreams. The weeks twist and choke, and time becomes a tomb. You circumscribe my language, and it breaks me. There. The argument crowns. The moon reveals a new road. I will turn. You will pay.

Jenn Hollmeyer is a founding editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal and holds an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Post Road, Salamander, Meridian, Etchings, and other publications. Jenn works as an advertising copywriter and paints architectural portraits. She and her husband live near Chicago in a blue house with a white dog named Red.

Winner: Erika Dreifus

Jerusalem Dream

In Jerusalem,
……………you dream of soldiers, effective
……………and tall, protecting the city,
……………the streets, and the olive trees.

Suddenly,
……………the orderly chain unwinds
……………and becomes a Sabbath dance,
……………circling over old, flat stones.

The moon is like milk,
……………the prayers, like bells.
……………You understand the language
……………of heaven and God.

Erika Dreifus is the author of Quiet Americans: Stories, which is a 2012 ALA Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title for outstanding Jewish literature. She lives in New York, where she writes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews. Web: www.erikadreifus.com.

The excerpt from “Arieh”:

“Jerusalem is a dream city because there is no blueprint, no draft against which to measure or understand it. The streets are not orderly but twist, as a friend suggested, like the tissue of a brain. And certainly in my first weeks there I felt that Jerusalem was aware of my intrusion and was willfully protecting itself from me. The city undercut reason and the forward flow of time, as well as the functions of a compass—banal laws that I had taken for granted as effective regardless of borders. But to measure and to understand in dreams is meaningless—a busy street becomes a garden. A garden suddenly sprouts a tomb. A tomb reveals a child’s lost shoe, a patent-leather shoe with a broken buckle. Beside a bank of pay phones, an argument breaks out about the number that will really, truly, connect you with heaven. Crossing a street leads you to a new language, a new currency, a new god. Bells, sirens and recorded prayers circumscribe and cross the air. You choke on gasoline and smoke from burning trash, but turn a corner and you smell the dry, gentle olive trees, the aromatic grass. The hawking of wares unwinds past a stand of tall soldiers into a circling Sabbath dance, a white chain of song twisting over flat, old stones, and a girl and a boy with black eyes leading a donkey down a narrow road, the moon in their hair like milk, like silver beads, like crowns.”

Gendered Reading and Discomfort in the “Man Cave”

March 15, 2012 by Molly Pozel | 10 Comments

Here is a generic man cave, maybe in somebody's basement. This is not a picture of the cave in the school library.

Last weekend I learned that my relatively progressive, moderately diverse and reasonably funded, suburban, hometown school district was going to allow a self-described “man cave” reading area in a school library. Before I was able to comprehend the dangerous consequences of what gender-assigned reading would mean for literature and education and what kind of political norm my suburb was representing for the rest of the nation, I had to get past “man cave.”

I hate the term when it is used on HGTV, TLC, E!, any sitcom, by a friend’s mom or in an elementary school library. The purpose of the cave, besides reiterating the tired stereotype that men are comparable to cavemen, is to provide the man of the house a separate leisure space. Man caves have pool tables and the kind of leather couches that always look menacing or sad or obese. Sports memorabilia, animals innocently lumped in with that previous categorization and stuff from a garage floor (i.e. license plates and street signs) are nailed to the walls. These are the decorating generalizations that appear over and over even in a Google Image search of “man cave” and reflect an outdated image of masculinity. The decor does not (always) offend me; if a stop sign would look best above the fireplace, level it out and nail it up. I take issue with two components of “man cave,” the “man” part and the “cave” part, especially when implemented by a school library.

For the reading space itself to be likened to a cave is symbolic of the confining, backwards nature of the concept. The reading spaces I remember in elementary school were designed to be areas of comfort and it was a privilege to read in a corner of pillows our teachers probably brought from home. In Kindergarten our classroom designated this space to a loft, lifting us higher as we read. A girl named Annie and a boy I forget supposedly French kissed up there, but that kind of gender interaction wasn’t the fault of the loft.

I remember getting some flack when I read The Pleasure of My Company in seventh grade. My oversexed peers wanted to know what a girl like me was doing with that “racy” cover and maybe what a girl like me was doing later. I carried the book around cover-up and read it wherever I felt because no librarian had ever told me that I wasn’t adult enough, funny enough or man enough to read this book or any other. By the time a child has entered the education system, they have been bombarded with society’s gender expectations. Boys are supposed to like blood and bugs and baseball while girls remain equally confined to categories where what little sexuality is present in Steve Martin’s book cover image is taboo. To condone such arbitrary divisiveness in a library misses the point of literature and education. Students will be turned off of reading before they learn that the best books are about human experience. It has been hard enough to begin to undo the notion that writing is a boys club or that teaching is a woman’s job. That we wonder what it means when a girl relates to a science fiction book and question the validity of feminized book covers speaks to the hazy categorizations of genre versus gender that remain engrained even in book lovers. I hope that the term “chick lit” disappears with “man cave,” but it certainly won’t happen if we’re keeping our next generation confined to the same deer-decorated walls we’ve built for ourselves.

No Offense, Shakespeare…

March 14, 2012 by Hannah Baxter | 2 Comments

Sometimes I like to think that I lead a double life. I’ve got one toe dipped in the English Department pond, the other in the whirlpool of theatre, drama and, more specifically, playwriting. Those in the former look at me as some sort of outsider, a literary interloper that fails to fit inside the fiction, non-fiction, and poetry boundaries. Those in the latter, after automatically assuming I’m an actor (to which I respond with a mortified objection) reply with a rather crestfallen “Oh… so then what do you do?” Um, I, like, write the plays, man.

To be clear, I am first and foremost a playwright. I am the unloved, underappreciated minority with thick glasses and no stage presence. I confound writers and actors alike. I enjoy hyperbole. So how do I straddle the threshold between my English roots and theatrical ambitions? As a college student stuck, er, grounded in the Midwest, I don’t always have the best outlets for getting my work produced. Aside from the Mizzou New Play Series, and the highly unlikely possibility of being accepted as a student to a professional theater’s production season, there are few options. As a current employee and former intern of The Missouri Review, my mind automatically thinks literary magazine. It seems like such an obvious solution, right?

Wrong.

Of NewPages.com’s extensive list of literary magazines, less than a dozen state that they actually accept drama submissions. Google searches for “drama literary magazines” come up with only a few results of publications that include plays. DRAMA, a magazine I thought would for sure include new dramatic work, is actually a forum for emerging costume designers. This noticeable lack of literary dramatic venues is shocking not only as a young playwright and creative writer, but also as general literary consumer. People involved in this expanding community should feel concerned over the almost complete lack of public access to theatre and drama outside of local and Broadway playhouses. It prompts the question: What happened to the value of theatre as a literary genre?

o

Thirty years ago, according to my sources who are in fact over my 22 years of age, college English curricula regularly included the great American playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neil.  Mentioning Strindberg then was not met with looks of confusion, and Arthur Miller was known for something other than that one guy in the Marilyn Monroe film with Michelle Williams. Now, unless you are a part of a theatre department, it is unlikely that you will study any playwright besides Shakespeare, maybe Marlowe – definitely no one outside of the 16th and 17th centuries. With no disrespect to Shakespeare, I cannot fathom why plays, especially classic American works like “A Streetcar Named Desire” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Glass Menagerie” are not a fundamental part of students’ literary education. Plays have just as much technical skill and creative value as novels, poetry, and essays, and should be taught alongside such works in modern curricula.

A few years ago, I was sitting in an Intro to Theatre class, one of those cattle call lecture monstrosities that freshmen take because all the other Humanities credits were filled with upperclassmen. Our professor asked the class to name just a single contemporary playwright they knew without hurrying to Google it on their precursor to the iPhone (this being 2008). No one raised a hand. I couldn’t believe it. Even as a relatively new member of MU’s theatre department, I had at least heard of Edward Albee, Williams, and O’Neil, but of course my paralyzing fear of hearing my voice amongst a crowd of 400 (remember I said I’m not an actor) prevented me from spouting this diminutive list of names.  When I think about it now, I cling to my hope that there were a few other shy freshmen who simply didn’t want to speak up, but in reality I know that the vast majority of those kids did not and could not name a major playwright from the 20th century. This frightens me, both as a student and as a young theatre artist. The best solution I can see, other than writing an angry letter to a long list of deans and superintendents, is to create a flourishing community of dramatic literature magazines.

I will say one thing about playwrights: we are a lazy bunch. My theatre friends and I constantly moan about our deadlines and requirements. We complain that people don’t care enough about theatre, and then we do little to contribute to its canon. I admit this freely and openly as someone who has yet to start the character worksheets that are due in my Playwriting capstone next week. This being said, I cannot think of a more tightly knit community within a specific major at the University of Missouri. Theatre students and professionals unfailingly support one another, offering advice, contacts, and productive criticism, which is why I cannot help but roll my eyes when I hear or read some expert exclaim about the slow death of the American theatre.

The art form is undoubtedly changing. It has to. The average person can’t just drop $150-$300 on a ticket to see Wit on Broadway (open through March 17 starring Cynthia Nixon!) Local playhouses are doing their best to produce theatre for the masses, but it is not always the most supportive venue for emerging playwrights. Financial and artistic choices often prevent adequate development for new plays, and subsequently limit the general and literary community’s exposure to new work. That is why this conspicuous lack of drama in the creative writing/publishing world continues to baffle me. Theatre is all about the shared experience, but when the forums are closed to dramatic growth, there is a real danger of endless recycling of old works. We must allow theatre to evolve in the same manner as fiction, poetry, and essays, so that young artists like myself and other undergraduates around the world can have the same opportunities as their literary cohorts. We must remind people that theatre is educational, theatre is entertaining, theatre is valuable. Theatre matters.


Little Literature

March 7, 2012 by Molly Pozel | Comments Off

Recent trailers for the animated film The Secret World of Arriety based on the children’s novel The Borrowers reminded me of another series I read as a child, The Littles. The entirely unappealing and disturbing concept of both of these books is that I may be the biggest threat in a reality where small, proportionate humans survive on my crumbs. I do not want to read a book or watch a movie that makes me wonder if a tiny family has run off with a turkey leg. If I drop a pea, could I hurt one? I would feel responsible, but I also don’t really want them living here. I donated the series over Thanksgiving break (I had a hard time forgetting this cover over dinner) and was surprised by the discrepancy between my childhood and adult feelings for the books. I had sought out and read the entire Little’s series at some point in my life, but could now barely stand the sight of a cover.

I spent last weekend at AWP with a Hilton hotel full of adults, where adult is synonymous with professional, successful, tall or married. I didn’t feel like I was going to be crushed by a pea, but the distinction between feeling big and small was on my mind. The conference was open and welcoming despite my intimidation. There is though a level of cynicism, elitism and doubt that acts as a rite of passage to feeling big that does not only apply to writers or artists, but to adults. It is a made-up pressure that I have put on myself in situations like AWP to separate myself from the naiveté of smallness. It is the pressure that makes me nod along when fellow writers claim that children’s and young adult literature have no merit and it is probably the same pressure that convinces them to make such claims in the first place. More often than not, I think these generalizations are meant for Stephenie Meyer, but their broadness reaches Lois Lowry, Maurice Sendak, Ezra Jack Keats, Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis and all of the littles checking out books.

The purpose of children’s literature to me was to prepare a young generation that will one day grow big and read real literature. My stance has changed and I know that it began when my high school French teacher assigned Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The Little Prince is marketed as a children’s book, but the themes are about bigness and smallness. Our French class spent a semester on what is still one of the most in-depth book analyses I have ever taken part in discussing adulthood, innocence and human worth. It is a book about being small and having merit.

Writing literature for children is a daunting task that I will probably never face as a writer. Knowing your audience, understanding the nuances of literature and believing in imagination are essential for holding the attention of children, but not necessarily for writing a novel that becomes a good book club read.  The challenge for an adult writing children’s literature has to be remembering that they are writing for an audience who still believes in original ideas. Writing children’s or young adult literature seems like the smallest, most confining space, but not in a claustrophobic way. I can combat the land mines of an intellectual adult mind because education and adulthood have prepared me to question, but in a systematic way. Navigating a child’s mind is like squeezing through a maze that is constantly being built and redirected with “why?” and “how?” in the places that adults don’t know to ask.

Even Saint-Exupéry’s seemingly simple sentences need unraveling: ”Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” I take my steps a little bit more carefully and can combat the pressures of intimidation if I remember that I might be living with French royalty.

Twitter Trash

February 29, 2012 by Molly Pozel | Comments Off

I made a Twitter account and pierced my nose the last time (first time?) I was pseudo-dumped. As far as post-relationship “I’m going to make a change that I can control” attitudes, it was a tame change especially compared to the considerations I made for a tattoo and an asymmetrical bob, but Twitter was just as uncharacteristic and seemingly ill fitting. I resisted the website with a long list of reasons, although pointless and obnoxious summed them up. These are the same sentiments that keep a lot of people from making an account, or more often among my peers, keep them from using already made accounts.

I have had a Twitter for nearly a year now and think that I am getting better at explaining its purpose. I try to think beyond the timely updates I receive via Twitter from politicians, local businesses, my favorite bands, news headlines and the university, because what people grapple with and what I resisted was the short format and immediacy in a personal account. The question “Who cares what I’m doing all the time?” came up a lot for me and the answer is definitely, nobody. I have been successful at Twitter, and success is only defined here in that I have maintained one, because I treat the site as a thought trash can.

As soon as I send a 140 character tweet into the internet, a place where I assume everything is lost forever never to be found by future employers, it’s out of my head. I do not use the medium to recount my day because breakfast in the morning, work in the afternoon and homework in the evening aren’t the kind of thoughts that get stuck. Wondering what my Gouda cheese would say to me is the kind of thought that will be lodged for days and it will have nowhere to go because I could never talk about it aloud. When I send “‘How much do you think I’m worth?’ -Gouda cheese” to Twitter, the thought isn’t weird or consuming, it’s just gone. For a writer who has never been able to maintain a journal, having a record of short, immediate observations that are composed without the stifling context of an essay or even a blog and that receive some form of feedback, is valuable.

I don’t mean to get hung up on personifying cheese, but the notion that my cheese tweet is not odd and is drowned immediately in tweets from around the world speaks to the paradox of Twitter. On their own, my tweets are valueless, passing thoughts that don’t deserve a second glance and that is how I treat them. My narrowed audience of followers finds some value because they read them. It’s not until I look back on a week or month of tweets that I can find any real worth outside of my own entertainment.

I am able to see trends in my own thoughts that would have been filtered out in a different medium. For a couple of weeks it seemed that I had a lot to say about babies and teeth.  The nights that I’m up trying to write first drafts or blog posts or second drafts, my tweets are progressively more aggressive. I retweet @SpringsteenSays, an account that only tweets quotes from Springsteen songs, approximately every two weeks. I think about outfits, food and television a lot. I see these trends the same way that I think about dreams; I won’t analyze them, but if my mom wants to, I won’t stop her. For the most part, everything I say on Twitter is still trash, but to know my own thought process and be able to revise a 140 character tweet into a real sentence (the first sentence of this post) is worth maintaining.

Speaking of the value of Twitter, don’t forget to participate in TMR’s first Twitter contest. Send us your literary hot dog recipes as a final sendoff to our staff visiting AWP in Chicago this weekend and follow us @Missouri_Review. Follow me @MollyPuzzle for AWP baby updates.

The Art of Omission Contest

February 28, 2012 by robertlongforeman | 3 Comments

The Missouri Review’s TextBOX Presents:

The Art of Omission Contest!

Rules:

Using only the words in the excerpt from Reesha Grushka’s essay “Arieh,” available on textBOX at http://www.missourireview.com/anthology/contest, write a short short story or a poem. Please feel free to rearrange and repeat the words at your pleasure, but NO OUTSIDE WORDS ARE ALLOWED.

Each entry must be 50 words or fewer.

Enter as many times as you like.

Two ways to enter:

1. Email your entry to: tmranthology@missouri.edu. Please put “contest” in the subject line and paste your entry text in the body of the e-mail.

OR

2. Drop off your entry in person at The Missouri Review’s table at AWP.

Contest Deadline: Midnight on Friday, March 9th, 2012.

The winning entrant will receive a free entry in the 2013 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize contest in the genre of his or her choice (a $20 value!) and a free one-year subscription to The Missouri Review (a $24 value!). Four additional finalists will receive a one-year subscription. The winning entry and possibly some finalists will appear on The Missouri Review’s Tumblr page and blog (invaluable!).

You should enter!