The meaning of the suffix “-ate.”  Yes, that’s right.  Riding my magic bicycle at the perfect hour of the perfect day of the year, I was thinking not about love, not about vacations, not about the price of real estate, but about suffixes, particularly the one deriving from the Latin that means to cause to happen-expectorate, recreate, congregate, stimulate, cogitate, fornicate, mediate, associate–one could go on forever with the -ates.

What a wonderful thing the mind is.  It is as free flowing and unpredictable as the weather.  If a hundred experts sat in a room working hard for a week, they could never guess what I was thinking about on my ride.  Or if they did, they could certainly never guess both that and what I thought about next.  And to guess three successive thoughts?  No way, except with the help of Borges’s infinite library.

I think that’s why fiction and poetry are potentially more amazing than every other art form. It’s not a single moment, not a work of static art or of the awkwardness of moving pictures, powerful or not, but an unpredictable process of unfolding which a good story or poem can follow with the ease and naturalness of the miraculous weather of the mind.

We’re also looking for good, sharp essays that deal with current trends in literature to complement our recently revamped book review feature. No scholarship, please—but smart essays that take on literary issues or controversies are very welcome. You can submit online with a note to my attention, or query me at mutmrquestion@missouri.edu

People misremember books as well.  We often have ideas about novels that have little basis in reality.  Three obvious examples come to mind. 

The first is On the Road.  Because of its obvious association with the Beats, one might assume that it’s a road book more on par with Natural Born Killers than Going My Way.  But rather than being about sociopathic hoodlums joy-riding across America wrecking havoc wherever they alight, it is a novel about a group of sensitive, well-meaning kids who occasionally nick a tank of gas and a loaf of bread to keep on moving.  They’re not criminals but spiritual cultural seekers.  The book has a sad, sweet generous spirit, and the narrator Sal Paradise is certainly more angel than devil.

Bright Lights, Big City is reputed to be about sex, drugs and rock and roll.  Yet, the novel has three brief references to rock, despite a title borrowed from a Jimmy Reed blues song.  And as for sex, the narrator is all talk and no action.  Depressed over the desertion of his wife and the death of his mother, he lets his promising career at a New Yorkeresque magazine flat line and his sense of self-worth plummet.  The McInerney of Bright Lights is a precursor to today’s metro sexual.

And why does everyone think that Holden Caulfield is crazy?  Some fifty years ago, a rumor was spread that Holden tells his story from a mental hospital because he’s cracked up.  I guess that’s flashier than being in a sanitarium for TB.  Holden is certainly sad, alienated, and, at times, a real bummer, but he’s not mental.  Like the narrator in Bright Lights, he has a bad attitude because life has recently dealt him a harsh blow.  His younger brother, Allie, who he loved and admired, has died of leukemia. 

Perhaps, these mistaken reputations have done these books some good.  Selling a novel as a quiet, thoughtful meditation on loss and loneliness is certainly not going to get a lot of dates with readers.

But mean, brooding and sexy?  We’ll go out with that.

Full guidelines and the entry form are available here.

And check out last year’s winners in our archived podcasts.

My first semester of teaching, I was a graduate student in my early twenties at the University of Colorado. I’d arrived, I was certain, entirely prepared to teach.  I had articles and short stories — and an arsenal of exercises.  Exercises on objective detail.  Exercises on dialogue.  Exercises for free writing.

But, the second week of classes, a student surprised me at my office hours. She was a “nontraditional” student, in her forties, returning to school to work on her writing after raising a family. She was talented.  She was also crying. 

“Everything I write is awful,” she said. “I can’t get myself to turn it in.”

I was prepared with writing exercises.  Terrific exercises. There’s this one where you sit your class in front of the window and have them jot down observations of passersby.  It helps with description. But here was this woman, who’d had kids, spent years writing, older and wiser, asking me what to do. I was suddenly at a loss. Everything I write is awful. I’d been there so many times myself.

            And then, just as suddenly, I was transported.

            “Make it terrible,” I told her.

            She stopped crying and squinted. “What?”

            “Your next assignment.  Make it crappy.”

            She laughed at me.

            “I’m serious,” I said, and tried to look, if not older, than at least taller. ” If it’s good, I’m going to give it back and ask you to do it again.”

            It wasn’t an original suggestion. Many writing teachers use it. I got it from one of my earliest mentors. In fact, as my student stood there, red-eyed and confused in my cubicle, I could hear my teacher telling our class: Dare to be awful. Just get something down. All writers have shitty first drafts.

A moment of support, a small suggestion-and enormously freeing.

I’ve been fortunate. I’ve had wonderful writing mentors throughout my life-first my parents (my mother always had a book in her hand and my father read poetry to me), and then through high school and college and graduate school. At UVa, my professors read the manuscript for After Hours at the Almost Home almost as many times as I did.  They guided and coached and coaxed me as I (somehow) extracted a novel from a jumble of character and idea. And there wasn’t just the writing itself that I needed help with. There was finding an agent, navigating the publishing process.  Figuring out how to make a living. Just reminding me it was possible.

My own mentoring has helped me enormously-certainly in the immediate sense that I’m reminding myself of new approaches, different things to try, but also in that it puts me outside myself, it give me another lens on the world. In addition to teaching, some years back, I helped run a mentoring program for middle school girls, and I was astounded by the difference just a few hours with a kid can make — for everyone involved.  Teachers can inspire and be inspired. In the best situations, it becomes a symbiotic relationship.

We no longer live in a world that automatically fosters young writers — instead we have dazzling, delicious pre-processed entertainment.  So, more than ever, I think, we have to create that world.

That student, we’re still in touch.  She has since coached me at least as much as I’ve coached her. And, as for that class, she’d been able to turn in her next assignment, after all — though it wasn’t crappy. It was actually pretty good. But, no, I didn’t make her redo it.  Dare to be good, I thought, and I felt it: both taller and older.

Photo: Editors’ Prize winners with Jeffrey E. Smith at the Editors’ Prize Reading (4/12/2008): (from left to right) Otis Haschemeyer, Jude Nutter, Jeffrey E. Smith, & Robert Kimber.

On the sleety evening of Saturday, April 12, we had the pleasure of hosting the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Reading and Reception. Despite rampant flight cancelations leading into the weekend, Robert, Jude and Otis were all able to join us. We had an incredible pool of submissions for last year’s contest, but our winners’ readings demonstrated the qualities of freshness and heart that won for them these prizes.

Many thanks to the prizewinners for traveling to Columbia to share their work with us. Thanks, too, to the prize’s benefactor, Jeffrey Smith, and to our local friends for braving the unseasonable elements in the name of literature – and mini-quiches.

Those of you who weren’t able to attend the reading can discover the prizewinners’ work in issue 31:1, now available (those of you who did attend have undoubtedly already secured your copies).

Photo: An excited audience at the Editors’ Prize Reading (4/12/2008).

Visit our MySpace page to see more photos from this and other Missouri Review events.

Thinking him arrogant and too casual with his criticism, Anderson wrote Hecht a letter telling him that his behavior was unbecoming for such a talented man: 

Consider just for a moment that you aren’t as specialized a thing as you think.  You and I for example are friends.  Try the experiment of saying to yourself that there aren’t any smart thoughts I may have that Anderson may not have them too.

Anderson went on to say that friendship for him wasn’t based on looking either up or down at someone, but eye to eye.  He advised that Hecht give up the bluff of being “so energetic, smart and fast” and try to be himself for a change.  

I recently came across the quote, “It’s none of your business what others think of you,” which is true.  Yet, there are rare times when one needs a friend to tell him what he least wants to hear. 

Unfortunately, Hecht didn’t appreciate Anderson’s candor and accused him of a Pollyanna complex.  They did not talk or see each other again for twenty years.  Their literary “Bromance” took a final tumble. 

There have been times in my own life when fellow writers have given me advice that I didn’t fully appreciate until years later.   

One friend warned that I tried too hard to be cute and clever in my fiction.  “Just tell a good story,” he counseled.

Some of the moments I enjoy most in fiction are when a friend sees in another flaws that they share.  In Christopher Isherwood’s “Sally Bowles” from The Berlin Stories, Chris accuses Sally of always trying to shock people with her flamboyant style of dress and sexual escapades.

“You’re naturally shy with strangers, I think: so you’ve got into this trick of trying to bounce them into approving or disapproving of you, violently,” he tells her, as she stretches out languidly on the sofa powdering her nose, obviously not enjoying his analysis.

Sometimes friends can go too far, mistaking cruelty for candor.  In the movie Margo at the Wedding, Margo-played skillfully by a dressed-down, almost mousy-looking Nicole Kidman-ambushes her sister and her own son with endless debilitating insights and observations in the name of “being honest.”  Her unchecked behavior points out that we don’t have to drag our friends to the alter of truth on every count.

Yet the fact is that most of life’s meaningful lessons don’t come from parents, teachers or preachers but from peers delivered not as a sermon or lecture but as a whisper for our ears only.

Part I:

Part 2:

I paged through a tattered Smithsonian and tried in vain to ignore the insistently pleasant sounding “doctor” as she explained what I’m looking for each month when I plumb the very shallow depths of my breasts for what in her words might feel like “a marble in a tube sock.”

She went on to explain that other women, perhaps a bit more demure and loathsome of tube socks, described the lump as a raisin beneath a linen napkin.

She saved her best description for last.

“Others say it’s more like a peanut in a bowl of Gummi bears.”

Yes, I just hate when I find a peanut in my Gummi bears.

Years ago, I had a less verbose doctor ask if I knew what a lump might feel like.

“No idea,” I said.

She folded my hand into a fist and had me feel the knuckle of my index finger.

Remembering this, once again I made a fist and shook it at the video screen, which had looped around for a second showing.

Watching these women model self exams I was reminded that some have a lot more real estate than I do. I have postage stamp-sized lots compared to rolling acres.

The doctor advised that when you lie on your back, if your breasts fall to the side, get them sitting upright so that the “nipples float on top like lily pads.”

And the self exam? The pie slice technique is out. Pretend you are mowing the lawn, moving your hand to and fro in long even rows. I prefer my lawn to have a checker-board pattern, but hey that’s just me.

As I was about to rip the tape off the concealed on/off switch, a firm rap on the door signaled that it was my turn to step into the silent, semi-dark room and have my breasts, one little shy bit of flesh at a time, placed into a rotating vice grip and photographed by a machine that evoked medieval torture rather than modern medicine.

But better that than one more lousy simile or metaphor, I thought, until my technician took me in hand and said, “Now, this is going to feel like…”.

We still have some other features in development which we’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks, so check back in later and find out what’s new!

–Patrick Lane
   TMR Webmaster