I was not insulting my friend or commenting on her ineptitude in any way. If I wanted to do that I would have mentioned the chapstick. I wanted to know how she could stand to get through any book trying to compare it to her own writing. I had a moment that I have often as a creative writing student where I wonder if what I’m saying is not a thing that good writers say. It seemed like I should be in trouble or that maybe I had missed the point of four years of English assignments for suggesting that a writer read other literature without considering their own. I said, “You can’t read a book like that. It will drive you insane” to a backpack with limbs.

I never thought too in depth about how I manage, or think I manage, to appreciate the craft of a work without allowing it to get in my head or interrupt the development of what I hope will be a distinct voice. I have always attributed any initial talent I had for writing to the osmosis of reading all the time and eating family dinners with some good storytellers. I knew that the value of assigned readings in school was to hone critical thinking and motivate new art. I could see where my own desires to be a writer fit into a larger literary world, but I never wondered how I measured up. I tried to think of an analogy to describe the way that I read–a comparison to explain why I don’t compare my writing to real authors.

Mila Kunis on a Saturday, I think.

I think “real authors” hints at my psyche when I read. My warped view of celebrity has become a useful way to describe the unattainable, don’t-even-think-about-it attitude I have toward published, bound, essay collections versus my own Microsoft Word printouts. Mary Gaitskill is famous and I know that she is famous because she has written a book and she must be really famous if that book is assigned in school. Fame is odd and mostly fictional, but it is a separation. There is reality where I am and then there is a cloud of celebrity that I can wander around in when E! News is on or when I read a Sarah Vowell book. She’s been on Conan and the radio. I can’t aim for Conan or the radio when I write an essay. It’s with this same reasoning that I don’t end up rolling on the floor with shoes on my hands and a clutch in my mouth every time I try to get dressed and realize I won’t be able to do it as well as Mila Kunis.

It’s probably an unhealthy, somewhat destructive, and a very un-The Secret way of living life to suggest not shooting for the moon. So aim for your personal best or whatever, but everyone already knows that. From what I can tell, a writer spends the rest of their life developing a style and a voice that is distinct. I want my distinctions to remain fresh, not end up muddied by taking every good work of prose as a suggestion.

We’re starting what will hopefully be a series of brief introductions to other literarily-minded blogs (that means blogs that take everything literally), and thought we’d bring you the first one on this gorgeous Tuesday afternoon in Columbia, Missouri.

We (along with the rest of the publishing industry) have been worried about the impact of the online world on the physicality of buying books, storing them, treasuring them, and (sometimes, late at night) leaving your spousal bed and creeping down the creaky stairs to canoodle with your favorite one; perhaps a signed first edition of Berryman’s Dream Songs, or a trade paperback of The DaVinci Code. Okay, we’re kidding. No one canoodles that book. It’s terrible.

There is however a group of people that venerate the actual physical presence of the book, and we’re going to try to speak to a lot of them over the next few months. We are starting  with Lew Jaffe, a self-described Bookplate Junkie, who has been running his blog for well-on six years now (or in other words, the internet time equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire), collecting, displaying, and writing about the surprisingly interesting world of bookplates. He has also been (and continues to be) an avid collector for over thirty years. It’s a life dedicated to how beautiful books are, and a life we whole-heartedly admire and wish was ours. Mr. Jaffe also (unlike, say, Andy Garcia in Ocean’s 11) does not keep his collection entirely to himself, choosing to share it with the World Wide Web and giving us all the chance to look into his collection. Living as we do in the age of the Kindle, it’s easy to forget sometimes how fantastically beautiful book plates used to be, how much artistic and aesthetic pleasure there lies in creating or gazing at one of the many book plates available on the website. We sat down with Mr. Jaffe and asked a few desultory questions about the Internet, book-collecting, and the Chinese market for Rockwell Kent;

Bookplate!

Q. Given how much your website depends on the physicality of the book, the actual physical presence of it, how do you feel about what the publishing industry assures us is an unstoppable march towards the e-book. We’re thinking primarily of what happened to the music industry–the gorgeous, lavish covers of the 60s and 70s have given way to small pixelated images on our iPod. Are books, and the art that goes into them, going the same way as records–unimportant on the larger scale, strictly the purview of individual enthusiasts?

Q. What do you think is the central philosophy of this website? In other words, what makes it tick–both for you, the content producer, and the readers, the consumers? Why do people return (we have), and what do you think makes this blog as interesting as it is?

Your question is thought provoking. I have no philosophy.What makes it tick is my interest and enthusiasm for the hobby.

I suppose it is somewhat contagious. 

Q. Returning to an earlier question, you’ve been a collector for many years. How has the Internet affected the industry?

The internet has been a double edged sword. It has enabled me to purchase bookplates from all over the world but it has also made it more expensive to buy choice items. For example,Rockwell Kent is a cultural icon in China.When his prints and bookplates are offered on Ebay there is a strong likelihood the high bidder will be in China.

The Chinese know what they are doing.

Q. Have websites like, say, eBay helped you personally, or do you still depend on older models of collecting i.e. rooting around bookstores.

This also means we also have a new batch of interns joining us who haven’t read manuscripts for us before. The vast majority of manuscripts we receive, even the really good ones, are returned to the author, unaccepted. That’s just the nature of literary magazines: we receive far more manuscripts than we can possibly publish.

How we handle rejection is a delicate thing. It’s very easy to think of it as just another mindless task when there is always a fresh stack of manuscripts that have just rolled in and need to be read. In our first production meeting of each semester, our associate editor, Evelyn Somers, always emphazies the same critical point: we read looking to accept, not to reject. It’s a tremendous difference in your frame of mind not to say “What’s wrong with this piece?” but to say “What do I love about this piece?” In class, I regularly remind our interns that the writer spent weeks (and, really, more like months or even years) writing the story that they just read and that we need to treat each manuscript with the same amount of respect and patience that went into creating it.

We’re two weeks from AWP, and this will be my third spin with The Missouri Review staff. When writers come and visit us at our table, they tell us how much they appreciate our rejection letters: I’ve heard that “you send the nicest rejection letters” and “you give the best responses.” To be fair, usually, people do not come up and curse us out and tell us our rejections are cruel and unfeeling. AWP tends to be friendly. Still, saying, essentially “That was nicest refusal, like, ever!” used to strike me as a very odd thing to say.

However, the more I write, and consequently the more work I send to other journals, the more rejections I receive. I get it. I really do. How we handle your work matters. I’ve brought up specific things every single week to my class—compliment or comment but not critique, keep it professional but friendly, don’t make assumptions, etc.—and our staff takes this task very seriously.

This past week, I received three rejections on the same story that bothered me a little bit. And a taste of my own editorial medicine is a good reminder that there is someone, always, who receives those SASEs from us and that even with the best intentions, can get pissed off. Including me.

The point of this post is not to point fingers or be angered that they turned down my work. Hey, I wanted my story to appear in their magazine because I know they publish terrific fiction. They turned down the work, not me, and that’s just how it works. I know that better than anyone. No, what bugged me were the comments. Each editor gave comments that were, I believe, intended to be helpful. Instead, their comments made me question their judgment, that they misread the story in such a fundamental way that I wondered how on earth they had read the same story I wrote.

In one of his essay collections (I’m afraid I can’t recall which essay), Charles Baxter wrote about receiving a rejection letter from an editor. I remember being stunned that Baxter’s stories still got rejected (his are probably from the New Yorker. But, still) but also how he viewed the rejections: he understood the editor’s position but also believed the editor was wrong about the work. The editor had seen so much of a certain type of story that his exhaustion immediately turned him off to Baxter’s story, making him believe Baxter was attempting something that, in fact, he wasn’t.

All three editors focused on a particular part of my story that, I knew, was the most challenging, both for me and the reader, and that if the story fails or succeeds, it’s probably right there. I’ve never received such a length response to my work from an editor (unless the editor was accepting it), and so I know, from writing such lengthy responses myself, that these editors were genuinely trying to be helpful. But the commentary turned into criticism, and suggested that I do something that I am less and less interested in fiction: explanation. One editor suggested nothing happened in the story up to this particular scene, which is about two-thirds of the way through the story. Another editor asserted that all the events in the story should be explained, all the connections drawn clearly, scene by scene, so that the reader could completely understand exactly what the story was trying to say.

Well.  This sounds awfully didactic to me. I don’t quite see why any work of fiction (or any other form of creative writing) needs such a clear explanation. The more things get explained in fiction, to me, the more the story feels less imaginative, less engaging, less true (in whatever sense of that word you want to go with). This is a fine line to be sure; stories have to make sense within the milieu they exist in. But, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the reader of my story hadn’t experienced heartbreak before. I made a judgment on the editor, as a person, and that’s absolutely the wrong way to view editorial comments. It’s just about my story. That’s all.

Maybe my story needs more work. Maybe it gets accepted today. The point is that even though the comments I received felt off to me, they were written with genuine belief that the story deserved a detailed response. These editors were being generous, and despite my initial annoyance, I understand that. All of us at TMR know how awful rejection is. We all do. Every single person on our staff that has had stories, poems, and essays rejected knows it all too well, and we know that our work will be rejected again in the future. It’s not pleasant. And if we screw up and send you one of these rejections, one of these notes that angers or annoys you, believe me, it was not done with any malice. We’re doing our best, whatever failing that might bring. Keep having faith in the work we do. Because we’re definitely keeping our faith in yours.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

Soon after I learned of Hill’s forthcoming book, I heard news – also on Twitter – that comedian Michael Ian Black’s newest book will be released at the end of this month.  From his Twitter feed I wheeled over to comedian Michael Showalter’s, and learned that his memoir, Mister Funny Pants, is doing well in Amazon sales.

I find none of this surprising or disturbing – a rare turn for me, because usually when I mention something vocally or in writing it’s because I find it disturbing and/or surprising.  As proof of my lack of frustration, were I dismayed at the apparent proliferation of books by comedians, I wouldn’t mention any of these authors by name.  To do so serves as a kind of free, offhand promotion on their behalf, which they don’t need because they have substantial, if not enormous, followings.

Books by comedians are nothing new – see Lenny Bruce’s 1965 autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.  W. C. Fields wrote books, and so did Groucho Marx.  This Christmas I was given a book by Patton Oswalt, and I know that another generous handful of comedians are planning to write books or have written them; they say so on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, on which Maron himself has mentioned several times (I think) that he’s working on a book, which will not be his first.

There are times when I find this trend frustrating and it makes me angry.  Why, I ask myself, do so many comedians write books?

For the same reasons, I answer myself, that so many other people write books.

Why, I then ask, do they seem to get published so readily?  Why are there so many of them?

Self-answer:  It probably isn’t so easy for them to find publishers, and if they do it’s because they have built-in audiences, as is indicated by the numbers of their Twitter followers.

But as easily answered as those questions are, I am interested in the fact that they come up, and that they take the shapes that they do; it’s the kind of thing I generally describe as “telling.”  They are, in short, the same questions that frustrate me when they’re raised with respect to the genre that I tend to work in, which is the memoir.  People harass me constantly with the same questions I have asked of the comedians; it happens at least a few times a year.

Not coincidentally, a number of these comedian books are memoirs; from the Amazon description of Michael Ian Black’s book:

Darkly humorous and told with raw honesty, Michael takes on his childhood, his marriage, his children, and his career with unexpected candor and deadpan wit in this funny-because-it’s-true essay collection. He shares the neuroses that have plagued him since childhood and how they shaped him into the man he is today.

They call it an essay collection, but it sounds like a memoir to me, and it’s subtitled Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death and Other Humiliations.  Michael Showalter’s book, Funny Pants, is subtitled A Memoir of False Starts.

When I started writing this post, I thought I was headed in a profound direction, but really this is a post about how easily certain anxieties can be put to rest, with the aid of genre knowledge.  What kinds of memoirs have an intrinsic advantage, in terms of their chances of getting published and sold and given as gifts, because of how easily their authors are recognized?  Celebrity memoirs, of course, and while I’m loath to put anything by Michaels Showalter and Ian Black, and Patton Oswalt (and surely female and non-white comedians write books, too – somebody name some please) into the same category as more overt and probably less memorable celebrity memoirs like Dennis Rodman’s long-forgotten Bad As I Wanna Be, I’m tempted to think of the comedian memoir as a kind of offshoot of the celebrity memoir.

Perhaps it is the celebrity memoir at its best – self-conscious and funny, not self-absorbed and probably boring.  I don’t know, I haven’t gotten to read them yet, and Bad As I Wanna Be has been at the bottom of my reading list since it came out.  It will always be at the very bottom of my reading list.

——

Meanwhile, I recently interviewed Marc McKee, poet and former poetry editor of The Missouri Review.  You can hear audio from it here.

——

Also, don’t forget our Audio Contest.  Deadline in less than a month!  You choose the entry fee!  Amateurs welcome!

On the coffee table in our meeting/conference/hangout room, there are several back issues of Ploughshares scattered about. One of these issues was Jean Valentine’s issue, the Winter 2008-09 issue, which was one of the last issues with Ploughshares old look, two issues before their redesign. I picked it up and flipped through the table of contents, and remembered that I had read the stories by Andrew Altschul and Fan Wu before, but that I hadn’t read the Megan Staffel story “Salt.” While waiting for coffee to brew, I sat down and read the story.

A few days later, one of our office assistant’s was flipping through the same issue. I told him he should read the Staffel story.

“You can tell it’s by a mature writer,” I said.

“How?”

I frowned. “You just can. There’s a richness to the narrative. Just something about the first two pages screams Confidence. You know?”

He nodded. I nodded. Neither of us really knew what I was talking about.

2.

I don’t know where I first heard the phrase “in the doghouse.” When my friend asked me where I got the phrase, I had no idea. I wanted to say, who doesn’t know what that means? But, obviously, she didn’t know where it came from, and trying to answer her question, it was pretty clear I didn’t either.

I said my parents. I said my grandparents. I’m sure we’ve all said “You’re in the doghouse” to suggest that someone is in trouble. No, not just in trouble: it’s not for something immediate, something that just happened, like catching a child who has just accidentailly thrown a baseball through your living room window. “In the doghouse” suggests a state that you’ve been in for a while and will remain in for the foreseeable future. Doghouse stats has been earned over the course of days, weeks, even, and a current doghouse resident is not getting out of there anytime soon.

Where did that phrase come from? I asked our audio editor, Kevin McFillen, about this. Had he heard the phrase “in the doghouse”? He said, sure. When I asked where it came from, he didn’t know either. He said he remembers seeing a couple of old black and white cartoons from the 1930s where people were finding their tents occupied by dogs, and that, maybe, he wasn’t sure, the etymology of the phrase had something to do with Tent Cities all across the country, when people found that had to literally live in the doghouse.

With Kevin’s help, I looked up the cartoonist A.B. Frost and found these images, which when you think about it, are pretty vicious: teasing the homeless, the downtrodden, literally sending the dogs after them.

More searching. One website suggested this was from the old custom of banishing a bad dog outside to is doghouse, which probably is, for words, fairly new: once we started living mainly in cities, we brought our pets indoors with us. Banned to the doghouse, then, is a bit bougy!

Two more from this website, which I’m just going to go ahead and fully crib here:

Alternative: The story of Peter Pan – in which Mr. Darling treats the beloved pet dog badly and his children fly off with Peter Pan. Mr. Darling feels so guilty that he lives in the doghouse until his children return home.

Alternative: This expression is a railroad term dating back to the era of steam locomotives. The railroad unions mandated that a head-end (front of the train) brakeman be so positioned. However, there was no room for another person in the engine cab (which housed the engineer and fireman). The railroads then built a small windowed shelter on top of the engine tender (where the coal and water was stored) behind the engine. It was called a doghouse since it was small, cramped, smoky, cold and generally miserable. Thus, the expression ‘he’s in the doghouse’ referred to the brakeman in his uncomfortable moving shack.

3.

I was re-reading one of my student’s stories, and came across a description of a cafe that was troubling me. The narrative was describing the way the waitstaff was moving from the kitchen to the front room. The word “room” came up three times in two sentences. The phrasing, while struggling to be clear, lost its rhythm.

From working in bars and restaurtants, I knew that restaurant staffs referred to being up front—where the customers are, rather than in back, which is the kitchen—as being “on the floor.” But, of course, the entire restaurant is on a floor: it doesn’t float in space or something (digression: I would love to go a restaurant where everything floats). Floor has many conotations, but the right one, for the scene, can be a bit confusing. You can’t say the staff is moving from “the kitchen to the floor” because it sounds then like the entire staff is diving to the ground to avoid machine-gun fire.

Of course, one could call the front room “the floor.” It’s not just a matter of the word choice. It’s a matter of all the sentences and images and actions and characters around the word “floor.” What the story lacks, what the writer is still working out, is how to sink fully into the world of the story with words that make it seem effortless. Any arresting phrase or image or moment needs to make the reader dig deeper into the story, not instantly claw one’s way out.

But how do I explain all that?

4.

Recently, a writer-friend posted on Facebook, asking all of us—that old collective “we”—about a dispute she was having with her editor. She wanted to know what we thought of the word “tweaker” and what it means. We were asked to not look it up. Just post what we instantly thought of the word. I thought “Meth!” (hey, I live in Missouri …) which is what, for the most part, everyone else said, with one or two exceptions. At least one person, perhaps several, pointed out that it entirely depended on the context.

This is true! And not. The word is loaded. Full clip and one in the chamber. If you sat and thought about it, there are dozens, hundreds probably, of words divorced from their original meaning to become something entirely unintended. Maybe because we’re all pals on Facebook, all of us were too like-minded to give a fair response, for all of us to represent the Intended Reader.

Let me try now to bring this altogether. I’m going to fail. Which is, actually, the point that I’m after. How does the full awareness that I’m reading a confident storyteller like Megan Staffel, the etymology of phrases that doesn’t seem to have any clear genesis, and consideration of how to use the words “floor” and “tweeker” all come together? Looks, to me, like I went from big (story) to medium (phrases) to small (word choice).

Focusing on choosing the right word is not a mistake. Looking for the specific word, tearing through the dictionary and thesaurus, pondering the syllables, the rhythm of the word, what images the word conjures for the reader: yeah, that’s what writers do. However, there is something else here that is bigger than examination of a single word.

There is also that larger quality of the work that seems to absorb everything else the writer has seen or heard, osmosis I guess, and sponged it into the story. You tend to know when you are reading a Southern writer, right? Same thing here. We can learn from other writers about how to make shapely fiction, the art of fiction, how burn down the house, bring the devil to his knees, all that good stuff, but in the end, we can’t mimic someone else entirely. “What’s the word” starts becoming “What’s my vision”—and that small change of possession makes all the difference.

Other than on weird celebrity reality shows, doghouses are quite small. Their closed off, contained. No one likes being there. Outside, though: that’s your world. Our world. Taking ownership of that vision, and speaking of it with the kind of confidence that blends the best word with the distinct phrasing of your vision is what takes the work from pretty good to unforgettable.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

The Devil

We’re a little behind the times here at the Missouri Review Blogging Center, because this whole controversy took place a couple of weeks ago and has already been forgotten by everyone. But, I’m hoping that having given it a little time to settle might help in seeing if I changed my mind about the argument regarding Salman Rushdie’s presence at India’s premier literary festival, the Jaipur Literary Festival earlier this year. 

Now, I’m an Indian of a certain age who grew up reading Rushdie, and especially his magnum opus, Midnight’s Children. All artsy kids who have few friends and no romantic prospects in India kind of have to. For those of you who haven’t read the book, I recommend it highly. Perhaps not as highly as the Booker Committee, who keep inventing new awards to give it (Booker of Bookers, Booker of the Last 30 Years, Booker of the Last 40 Years, Booker of Bearded Authors etc.), but it’s a fairly substantial work, and even if you don’t like it, it’s an important book because of Rushdie’s use of the English language, his insertion of vernacular phrases, references, names, and puns, that all come together to create a particularly Indian-English that shows us that literature and language need not be restricted to just one nation or people, but can adapt anywhere. It’s double jeopardy: a book that screams out India’s post-colonial angst while delighting in the language that those angst-inducing colonizers left us. In other words, not to push it too far (since he’s still alive and we should only be sincerely and totally nice to dead people), it’s India’s version of Huck Finn or Moby Dick—a novel that does more than just capture a story, it explores how a people are.

The sad thing is that Midnight isn’t Rushdie’s most famous book. This one is. And it’s not the most famous because it’s his best work—as a matter of fact it probably doesn’t rank in the top 3. It’s famous because the Ayatollah put a fatwa on Rushdie for the book, and because Rushdie spent the next decade under constant Secret Service protection, moved from safe-house to safe-house, his life as he knew it completely upended.

Given what we know of Ayatollahs, one would assume that Salman Rushdie, his book, and the completely misinterpreted and taken-out-of-context passages would still be Enemy #1—religious fanatics, one might have noticed, have long memories. The only purpose of the Ayatollah’s continued anger at Rushdie would be because it reminds us that literature can still be taken seriously, that it’s our strongest resistance against authoritarianism and narrow-mindedness. It’ll make us feel better about never being rich (or even moderately well-off), because as writers we have our morals. Even if those morals lead to crazy people promising to kill us because there’s a bounty on our head.

Probably how Rushdie felt

The 10-year outrage, the constant calls for assassination, the daily threats on his life were put away in 1998 when the Iranians decided they wanted to restart diplomatic relations with Britain, which shows you how seriously those clowns took the whole thing anyway.* But, on the plus side, Rushdie could go back to being a writer. No longer would he have to worry about  offending political sensitivities. The job of the writer is to speak out against injustice, or at least examine how it functions, and without threats to his life Rushdie could return to fulfilling his duties to his profession, could go back to attempting to understand how people work.

This is probably from a different protest, but we have a lot of spare protesters in India

Here’s the thing: Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, writer of what’s been declared the as-close-to-consensus-as-possible “Great Indian Novel” (this one is not), officially the best novel written in the Commonwealth in the last half-century, the writer who put Anglo-Indian writers on the world’s literary map, cannot have his homeland read his most famous work because Satanic Verses is still banned in India. I’ll repeat that: 14 years after the Ayatollah said “well, no harm, no foul,” the Indian government has still not lifted the ban on Satanic Verses. Which puts the Indian government somewhere to the right of the Ayatollah on religious expression. Let’s put it another way: they could have re-enacted the entire Trojan War in the meanwhile. That’s how slow the Indian bureaucracy is.

Of course, most normal people had entirely forgotten about this, because, well who pays attention to crazy people 25 years after they’ve been crazy? You’d think no one. So, the literary festival in Jaipur invited Rushdie. Then, India’s largest Islamic seminary objected. That would be the Darul Uloom, Deoband. They demanded Rushdie not be allowed in. Rushdie, being a push-over, told them he was coming anyway. Problem solved, right? “Courageous Author Tells Off Protestors.”

Nope.

They invented a death threat.

They also promised that “rivers of blood would flow” if Rushdie showed up. Which is not only an unnecessary threat, but also worded entirely in cliches. These people need writers to show them the possibilities of narrative and language. What happened next, you ask? Well, obviously, everyone freaked out. Imagine if you were going to have to wade through rivers of flowing blood to go to AWP? I’m not even willing to handle the line at the open bars. Clearly someone would stop the madness and talk sense into somebody.

William Dalrymple, who is a brilliant writer with several good books and was organizing the festival, didn’t think Rushdie should show up, an attitude he later explained. Rushdie didn’t show up. Other writers got mad about this—notably Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar. Their plan was to protest this theocratic turn in India’s attitude towards governing by reading aloud from Satanic Verses when it was their turn to speak. Because the book is still banned in India, they had to download it off the Internet. And then when they read aloud, they were threatened with arrest. For the crime of reading out loud from a book.

(By the way, the protest—at the festival itself—was not about Rushdie even being there. It was about a video-link interview in which he would get to speak. Let me make that clear: He was not in the country. He was in a different country. A country in a different continent. He was Skyping in. Basically what we do when we don’t want to get out of our pajamas and go to a meeting.)

After being threatened with arrest, the four authors were forced to flee Jaipur and then India. The same night. Because what they did was apparently a crime. Hari Kunzru, who is notably bad-tempered, nevertheless wrote this scary account of the events. The organizers then attempted to explain themselves here and here.

One of these guys hates being told he's wrong

The man in charge of these protests, Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani (pictured above), told the protesters that dying during this protest (at a freakin’ literary festival) would make them martyrs. If one follows his train of logic, one must believe that it’s worth dying over a 15-minute Skype interview.

Police, of course, being as good at their job as they are, demanded tapes of the authors reading out aloud from Satanic Verses. 

There are a million things wrong with this whole saga. Primary among them, of course, is the forcible state-sponsored editing of the individual artist. There is also, in what has become a worrying trend, a refusal to countenance any viewpoint that differs from one. This leads to what has been a lengthy Indian struggle of refusing to look carefully at the ugliness present within itself. The attitude is, “We’re perfect. If you say we’re not, we will kill you. Or at least burn an effigy, and a couple of public buses while we’re at it.” This is not an isolated incident either. While I’m fairly miffed at the good Maulana, there’s a pattern of this behavior, a pattern that is growing in  a complaint about a Shivaji biography that led to the Oxford University Press having to apologize, a protest about a Gandhi book, a protest against Taslima Nasrin (ostensibly because she happens to be a woman). Please look at the dates attached to these news stories, as well as the geographical variety in these protests.

Things got so bad, Rushdie had to go back to Med School

Because what the Rushdie fiasco is doing is basically proving that for all of India’s bluster, for all the 10% GDP growth and the rapidly-increasing middle-class, for all the skyscrapers planned and the millions of dollars spent on making the capital city’s airport “world class,” for all the half billion dollar houses built, there’s still the world’s largest slum in direct view of the world’s most expensive house. And instead of attempting to get rid of that mind-numbing poverty, we will protest Slumdog Millionaire. Not because it is a bad movie, but because it “shows India in a poor light.” The Rushdie Affair (dare I say it, Rushdie-gate) only emphasizes that when it comes to self-examination, the Indian government’s attitude is— “if we don’t let anyone talk about it, it’ll go away.”

But we as a country cannot claim to stay true to the principles that govern us if we do not even allow artists the freedom to express themselves, the freedom to question and critique, the freedom to point out when the emperors have lost their clothes. Our most celebrated contemporary painter was driven out of the country for painting Hindu goddesses and had to die in England.

This is not about religion, or religious sentiment, or a demand for unrestricted free speech. What is shameful about these events is that a country touting itself for its economic growth, for its large-scale democracy, for its new-found social mobility, is attempting to silence any opinion that threatens to upset the status quo. It is shameful because those who shout the loudest are stopping a billion people from examining what is still wrong and attempting to fix it. And if we do not allow our faults to be picked out, our feelings to be hurt, our complacency to be disturbed, then we will continue to move towards untenable gender ratios as we continue to systematically eliminate our female populace. We will continue to boast 400 million people unable to feed themselves even a 1000 calories a day. We will have 600 million people with no access to clean water or sanitation.

A long time ago, I had a professor who told me, “writers know what’s wrong while it’s happening. Historians find out twenty years later. And the poor politicians never figure it out at all.” If our leaders do not defend our rights, do not assuage our hurts, do not heal our schisms, then it is writers like Rushdie, Kunzru, and Amitava Kumar to whom we must look. For a country that refuses to deal with what is worst about itself is doomed to lose what are their greatest strengths. We must allow our writers and artists to speak, we must allow them to disagree, we must gaze into the ugliness that is around us and we must not flinch. For otherwise we are merely a country that has suddenly discovered it has muscles and insists on flexing them constantly, at everybody. We must let Rushdie speak—even if we disagree with him—because he will tell us something no one else seems to be willing to.

Only Madonna gets me.

*You might have guessed: I’m trying to get banned in at least two continents before I turn 30. Controversy = Monster Advance On As Yet Unwritten Novel!

*Hey, guess who showed up to the same festival in 2007 without bodyguards and just hung out? It was Salman Rushdie. I guess people weren’t paying attention. It’s easier when you don’t really have to believe what you’re saying.

*I’d like to point out that a lot of the links in this post were lifted from the Complete Review’s coverage of the event (which, as it that website’s wont, was excellent. Principled, comprehensive, and smart. I really like that website. You guys should check it out).

The Missouri Review is excited to be attending AWP’s Conference in Chicago in just a few short weeks. We are doing our best to prepare for the Windy City, but could use some help. With Oprah out of the picture, I have little to contribute to a Chicagoan presence. Our resident Cubs fan also seems to have come to terms with what little value his fandom holds. There is one famed Chicago attribute that the TMR staff seems confident enough to take on: gourmet hot dogs. In honor of these mystery meat masterpieces and in an attempt to improve our AWP readiness, @Missouri_Review is holding its first Twitter contest.

We are asking our Twitter followers to send us your literary-themed hot dog recipes. Entries should include a name for your hot dog, a list of ingredients, and reference literature in some way, all under 140 characters. Let us know that you’ve entered by including the hashtag #TMRchicago at the end of your tweet. Vegetarian and vegan tofu dog entries will also be accepted. Judging will be primarily based on the giggling and stomach rumbling of our editors and staff. Your tweet entry might look something like this:

The winner will receive a handmade literary-hot-dog-themed craft, assembled by The Missouri Review office staff. To increase your chances of winning a (better?) prize, consider entering TMR’s other contests: Our Non-Contest or our 5th Annual Audio Contest. We look forward to eating your tweets!

China Mieville - photo by Chris Close

David Naimon interviews  China Mieville in our Winter issue. He sent us these comments on the experience:

I felt nervous before meeting China Miéville.  He cut an imposing figure on the internet.–shaved head,  multiple piercings,  a prominent brow over eyes that I imagined didn’t blink.  He often sported a tight black t-shirt shaped by the contours of his muscles, a shirt that only partially hid the huge skull tattoo spilling tentacles across his bicep.  He did not look like any geek I knew, nor how I imagined a science fiction and fantasy writer.   A mixed martial arts fighter, a bodyguard, a bouncer—yes—or like someone who would have beaten me up in Junior High School, the last time I was rolling ten-sided die, crushing out on Princess Leia chained to Jabba in her gold bikini, and regularly reading science fiction and fantasy.

We met in the studio of KBOO 90.7 FM, on an unseasonably cold spring day in Portland, Oregon, and to my relief, his in-person persona was much softer.  Personable and polite he immediately put me at ease.  When he spoke, he considered his words with a measured, gracious, almost formal tone, much as one might expect from an academic.  And indeed Miéville studied social anthropology at Cambridge, received a PhD in Marxism and international law at the London School of Economics, was a fellow at Harvard, and even ran for the British House of Commons as the Socialist Alliance candidate in 2001.   This dissonance, this defiance of categorization carries over into Miéville’s career in a big way.  At the forefront of the New Weird movement, China Miéville is a self-professed geek, a lover of cephalopods, and someone who cites Dungeons and Dragons and comics (along with Jane Eyre) as influences.   Miéville has risen to the top of the genre having won nearly every prestigious award in the field—some two or an unprecedented three times—along the way.    Yet due to the depth of his imagination and the height of his erudition, his prose has caught the attention of non-genre publications from the New York Times to the Guardian, heralding him as a writer who has transcended the genre from which he arose.  But unabashedly proud of his field, Miéville doesn’t what to transcend.  He believes Weird Fiction holds distinct advantages over literary fiction, which to Miéville, is merely a genre like any other.  He prefers to see himself as a conduit to a world of writing that, in his mind, is best equipped to address the issues of the day.

If China Miéville were to pick one of his books for someone who doesn’t read sci-fi he would choose his Hugo Award winning novel, The City and The City.   And by chance, my first exposure to China Miéville’s work was this very book. I was hooked by the spare noirish prose,  a style the Los Angeles Times described so wonderfully as if written by a love child of Philip K .Dick and Raymond Chandler who was raised by Franz Kafka.  Just as Miéville would have hoped, The City & The City led me deeper into the genre, to his latest book Embassytown, a work both more fantastical and more philosophical, one that grapples with the nature of language, the power of stories, and starring a species who literally become addicted to words.  Just like these creatures, I have become hooked on this Miévillian cocktail of philosophical insight and intergalactic adventure, as insightful and thought provoking as any literary fiction.

David Naimon

One way to read the interview is to subscribe digitally or in print.  Order a two- or three-year subscription for a free bonus t-shirt!

*E-mail address: themissourireview@gmail.com (don’t send spam. We do not want a cheap hotel in Vietnam).

*Prizes: 1-year subscription to the online Missouri Review, complete with audio access (pop it into your car, listen to fine literature on your way to work instead of Top 40. Hear the sweet dulcet tones of our soon-to-be-published Editor’s Prize winners while you bench press 300 pounds)

*Rules: 1 entry per person, stick to the word/form limit. Judges’ (biased) decisions final. We’ll put up the winning entry on our Tumblr and Facebook pages.

Week 1:

“Ringo Starr’s interior monologue while playing drums at a sold out show”

250 Words.

Due by: 8PM EST, 2/9/12

Winners Announced: You know, after that

**Not to be confused with the money-awarding “Audio Contest,” entries to which must be postdated by March 15th–details of which (including the exciting sliding scale of contest entry fees) are available in Claire McQuerry’s post from a couple days ago. 

There was more. I was going to write about book reviewing, and my general sense of discomfort with book reviewing, which stems almost entirely from a lack of confidence to write reviews in a coherent and intelligible manner that would be useful or interesting to anyone. I was going to write about James Frey, and teaching undergraduates, and the difference between reading a single essay and a collection of essays, and probably some other subjects that would all tie together neatly for a pretty good Friday read for you, our blog reader.

Here’s the thing. I couldn’t finish it. Or, I could, I guess – did, in fact – but I wasn’t pleased with the result. It was a colossal mess of tangents and half-baked thoughts, and it seemed like a disservice to publish it the way it turned out.

It’s warm here – frighteningly warm for Missouri in February – and I have my windows open, again. All morning yesterday I read manuscripts. I haven’t done that in a while. Downstairs, on the third floor, TMR has a few couches and a coffee maker, and I put my feet up on a table, tucked a pen behind my ear, and read fiction submissions. Away from my desk, away from my computer, away from my phone (both office and mobile, which I wisely left upstairs). Felt fantastic. Felt really great to spend the morning just looking for stuff for the summer issue, reading other writers’ work, stories about Russian dancers or out of work truck drivers or the daughters of war veterans and such, and not really thinking about our audience, our budget, our expenses and income, advertising, none of the other stuff that is often pinballing through my mind in the course of the day.

I felt all right, reading like that.

Someone close to me recently remarked that I never say anything personal in my blog posts. Note, even, how carefully I phrased that previous sentence. Of course, that’s now what my site is for. But this person was right: I’m careful about this blog. It’s been one of the most successful things we’ve done since I started at The Missouri Review—our staff has written several thoughtful, smart, engaging essays on this site in the past two years, and our mantra has basically been to not be negative; remain about publishing, editing, writing; and be interesting. Writing about Sullivan’s work, I worried that I was getting increasingly negative and incoherent, upset about who knows what about his work, and that my post would be the kind of vitriol that our readers don’t want. Morever, the kind of vitriol I don’t like to write.

I bring this up because for almost a year and a half now, my personal life, especially this past month, has been a bit tumultuous (to put it mildly) and sitting in a chair reading this morning, I became aware of how much better I felt. Just in general. No grand epiphanies or realizations or anything like that; dark clouds will certainly move in later in the day (or tomorrow, soon, etc.). Writing about creative nonfiction and its ticks and whirls and wearing a cultural critic hat—it just didn’t feel right. No, it was more than that: it was a recognizable state of discord, both in head and heart, that I wanted nothing to do with. I just wanted to read.

When I was at River Styx, our rejection letters all started the same way: “Look. We’re all writers too, so we know how it feels.” That’s true, of course. But, what was making me a boiling cauldron of frustration yesterday afternoon was writing: not just the act of writing, but the criticism of writing and the Big Ideas behind criticism and interpretation and connectivity. What made me feel calm was reading,  just reading, nothing more. And, really, why did any of us start writing in the first place? Because we read. And liked it. A lot.

It would be silly, of course, to have a rejection letter say “Look. We’re all readers too” because that seems pretty obvious, ironic in a hipster way or something, and perhaps even a little snide. Nonetheless, it might be more true to what unifies as, editors and submitters alike, than calling ourselves writers.

If I was clever, if I had my writing cap on, I’d be able to come up with a really snazzy close here. But I don’t. Moreover, I don’t want to attempt to tack this together neatly. The messiness of this post is what’s most interesting to me, and how, by taking a little time to not think, to read without thinking beyond the story in my hands. And, for today, I think that’s all I really want to focus on. I’ll leave it at that.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye