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Cover 34.4 (WInter 2011)
TMR’s Audio Contest
Poem of the Week
Hot Dog! TMR Goes to Chicago Twitter Contest
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!
Notes from an Interview: David Naimon on China Mieville
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!
Non-Contest Contest #2
Guys and gals of The Missouri Review online world. Given the success of our “48 Hour Poetry Non-Contest Contest” last semester, we’re starting a series of brief online writing prompts. We’ll give you a topic every other week, and a week to turn your entries in.**
*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.
Turned off by unaffordable entry fees? Hopefully not anymore…
This year, for TMR’s 5th annual Audio Competition, we’ve decided to try an experiment. Ok, so it’s a little crazy, and we don’t really know what to expect: we’ve decided to leave the contest entry fee up to the entrants; if you decide to submit work to our Audio Contest, you choose what you feel is a fair reading fee. Your entry fee, regardless of what you pay, still gets you a one-year digital subscription to The Missouri Review.
In the past, we have always charged a $20 entry fee—an entry fee that’s fairly standard for literary-journal-run competitions these days. And while we feel that this fee is reasonable (it includes a one-year subscription to The Missouri Review, for which we normally charge $23), we also understand that the cost may be prohibitive for some very talented people—particularly in this difficult economy.
Before I give the false impression that our contest is now free to enter, however, let me be up-front about the fees associated with a literary competition and why they exist in the first place. Literary journals as big as The Missouri Review are quite expensive to run: among other things, we pay the salaries for our full- and part-time editorial staff; the salaries for the office staff; the costs of equipment, technology, and supplies; expenses for advertising and promotional events; the printing and distribution of the journal; and contributor payments (we are one of the few lit journals that pays its contributors). Some of this money comes from grants and some from generous donors, but subscription fees and contest entry fees are another important source that we rely on to meet our costs. When writers pay to enter a journal’s contest, they are acting as patrons of the literary arts, providing the journal with some of the important funding it needs to continue to exist–and ultimately supporting themselves and others in the field.
Of course, there are also costs associated with running a contest: advertising, prize money, staff hours, etc. After receiving as many as several hundred entries, a contest like our Audio Competition might just barely break even; there are years, in fact, when TMR hasn’t broken even on the Audio Contest. Which is why making the entry fee “pay-by-donation” is a bit of a risk. But it’s a risk that we feel is one worth taking: We would like you to be able to enter our Audio Contest regardless of your ability to pay. If you feel that you can afford the standard $20 or even a little beyond that, know that we very much appreciate your support. But if $5 or $10 is all that you can pay at this point in time, we will still be grateful for your donation and happy to consider your work. And rest assured that the entries are blind; the amount that each entrant pays will not be recorded anywhere in connection with his/her payment.
Please spread the word and help make our experiment a success!
Naming Babies v. Naming “Babies”
In the past I have told people that I feel bad for them when they don’t know of any songs that mention their first names. I feel bad that they never feel pseudo-famous the way that I do when Sinead O’Connor sings about a Molly who dies of a fever, but is so committed to pushing a wheelbarrow through Dublin that she continues the task postmortem. I try to downplay how special I feel when The Vaseline’s sing, “kiss kiss Molly’s lips” over and over in a chorus sometimes interrupted by a bicycle horn. I grew up with children’s books where bears and dolls and a girl who likes strawberries all shared my name and the only Molly’s I encountered in real life were usually dogs. My most basic identifier is distinct enough, but has also always loosely attached me to these characters with their own narratives. I’m lucky to like the associations with my name, but wonder about the actual task of naming.
Recently I came up blank when potential baby names were discussed among my peers, but with that daunting reality a far possibility, I found myself thinking about the more immediate choices my fiction friends make when they invent a character and choose its name. Had it occurred to them that naming a character Molly would contribute to some universal Molly narrative? Is there a purposeful distinction between a Brittany and a Britney? Do they consider articles like these or are the implications of Freakonomics moot in fictional story? Are the names associated with time period, ethnicity, class, and gender so engrained that the integration of an appropriate name in a narrative is natural and subtle? I have never made it very far trying to write fiction.
I recognize that consideration for a character’s name varies in importance. Lolita and Romeo are so loaded with an established identity that their use in a story is likely to be a purposeful evocation of those other Lolitas and Romeos. Most of my fiction friends said that character names just come to them and that their only stipulation is that they never use names that they like. This one rule seemed to be the only middle ground between a shoulder shrug concerning a character’s name and using a name like Lolita. When we started discussing possible real life baby names there were rules about the sound and syllables of a name, associations with acquaintances by certain names that could make us groan, and the unspoken desire that our kids would stand out just a little bit on their school roster.
For people who have once or twice referred to their stories and plays as their “babies,” I thought the contrasting name consideration was interesting. Of course I expected that naming a real baby would be more arduous than a fictional character because babies tend to be that way. I like the contrast of inventing an identity for a character with a name that an author doesn’t really like with my own obsession to find a Molly identity in fictional characters. I remember the first time I considered a name for my future offspring. In first grade, after reading the story of a mouse named Chrysanthemum who is teased for her name, I chose it for my future daughter. The beginning of my naming insecurities may be traced back to this moment where I thought I had achieved the perfect balance of distinctiveness and pseudo-celebrity. Chrysanthemum would never have to tack on the the first initial of her last name in class and she could tell everyone she was named after a book. My parents revealed that the mouse in the story was named for a flower and suddenly the teasing seemed justified.
I have never been allowed to name a human baby, but when I do I will obsess over the literary, lyrical, high school nemeses, and nineteenth-century verbs associated with it (Molly once meant “to do women’s work”). I will wonder if it is possible to name a baby after a literary character without invoking a tragic existence or at least requiring that they live out the namesake’s narrative. I would be disappointed in a Walden who couldn’t tear himself away from video games or a Flannery who isn’t even a little bit interested in amputation. I will want a baby that grows up to invent its own identity, but still feels like some bedtime stories were written about them and Little Richard is singing that loudly for them.
Violence of the Lambs; Or Why I Didn’t Write About That
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