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The Summer Launch!
We’re delighted to announce our summer launch party! In celebration of the release of our Summer 2011 issue, Significant Others, we’d like to invite you to join us in sunny downtown Columbia on July 28th at The Bridge, the new live music venue featuring local, regional and national music acts and located within the Columbia Academy of Music. For those of you who like maps and directions and such, The Bridge is at 1020 East Walnut Street. For those of you who don’t like maps, it’s right across the street from Ernie’s. This event is free and open to the public. Get after it!
Our event kicks off at 7 pm, and runs until The Bridge throws us out. Technically, our launch will be “over” at 9 pm, but like our fabulous spring launch, we really just stay hanging out until the doors are closed and the bright lights are thrown on. The Jazz Odyssey hits the stage at 9 pm, and there is a great patio where you can come and meet our entire staff (and, of course, former staff members who are certain to show up and say “Yo!”)
The summer issue has just shipped this week, and should be in your hands soon. The issue includes fiction by Amin Ahma, Tom Barbash, Arna Bontemps Hemenway (yes, that’s his real name, and his story is, believe it or not, even better than his name!), A.R. Rea, and Elisabeth Fairchild’s first published story; nonfiction by Daniel Anderson, Anthony Aycock, and John “Let’s Play Two!” W. Evans; poetry by Diane Seuss, Steve Gehrke, and Peter Jay Shippy; and Patrick Hicks sits down with Brian Turner to talk about the poetry of war.
You can snag copies of the issue at the summer launch. More important is that you come to the launch and have a good time. Like spring. Remember?
The first of many bands. We're just warming up...
We had lots of music. Like seventy five bands. Okay, not that many. But we did have music from Shoreside, Andre and the Giants, Mary and the Giant, and Belligerent, to name just a few. We kept it cool to start off the evening and then got progressive louder. Which is always a good thing.
We're always happy when people we like show up.
People rolled in at all times, which is the idea. Show up early, show up fashionably late, it doesn’t matter. You will get this kind of delighted greeting no matter what. And as long as you stay and hang out for a bit, well, what more can we ask?
The conversations at the bar can get pretty deep.
Here, I’m talking basketball with Jesse Garcia, the owner of Sideshow. I’m a Celtics fan, he’s a Bulls fan. We both had a rough 2011 NBA Playoffs (though on this evening, his Bulls were looking pretty good). Not that this dampened our spirits one iota.
We're toasting the evening. Not ourselves. Really.
I was asked to get on stage and say something. I have no idea what I said. Basically, it was something like “You guys are the best!” and You Guys all agreed with that sentiment and held their beverages high in the air. Good call.
See? We throw a good party! More photos from our Spring Launch: PERIL are available on our Facebook page; come check ‘em out. And don’t forget to come to our Summer Launch. The Bridge, July 28th, 7 pm. We’d love to see you there!
The Writing Strategy
Picking up on this week’s theme of “strategy” as started by new contributor Sara Strong (okay, I’m not sure how the fantastic video of the PERIL launch fits the theme, but, meh, you know …), my sense of planning and organization has been thrown for a bit of a loop. A recent basketball injury has, quite literally, hobbled me, but a major frustration for me has been a sense of my writing schedule being fractured and unfocused.
This is not the same as writer’s block. As I alluded to in previous posts, I do not believe in writer’s block. To me, saying “I’m blocked” is already a failure, a vertiginous spiral of self-loathing and excuses. I have never sat down and thought “I can’t write.” Sure I can. Novel isn’t working? Write a novella. Novella isn’t working? Write a short story. Or a poem. Or a good sentence. Write drivel about what I ate for breakfast that morning. Yesterday I received an email from the good folks at One Story, introducing me to Karl Taro Greenfeld (well, not really “introduced”: TMR has already published two stories by Karl), whose new story “Partisans” is One Story #149. In the email, Karl writes about the best writing advice he ever received, which came from his father:
He told me: all writing makes you a better writer, even writing you don’t want to do or don’t think you should do. He’s a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, journalist who spent much of his life writing movie scripts for money and magazine articles for the checks, and realized that he learned a lot about writing even when he didn’t much like the work he was doing. Sometimes that unwanted work is what makes you better. I’ve found that to be true as well.
I couldn’t agree more. Write something down. The rest follows.
But …
I’m somewhere else right now. I’ve finished my novel, which is in the hands of my agent. After that, I wrote a novella, which is in the disinterested hands of small press editors. After that, I revised some stories. After that, well, that’s where I am now. And I’m working: a new novel, new stories, an essay about basketball that seems to literally have no ending, and the occasional bad limerick. Writing isn’t the problem. The problem for me is that, right now, I feel like I’m not writing anything particular good, even after several weeks of working on, and sticking with, the same piece. The writing just seems to be mediocre at best, as if I’m simply churning out work for the sake of doing so. If I’m not interested in what I’m writing, why would anyone else be interested in it?
This worry has plagued our blog contributors all year long. It’s really quite easy to post a blog; the difficulty is its content and making your words worthy of an audience. In large part, the purpose of a blog is the immediacy of delivery (“publication”?) and efficiency and speed are not qualities to be lightly dismissed. Quality of content, however, is important too, and stressing the need for balance has been a challenge for us all year long. Like all the other contributors to TMR’s blog, I have always leaned pretty heavily on quality over speed, which is only natural for those who call themselves “literary writers” (whatever that means) and rarely, if ever, have a rabid audience waiting with baited breath for our nest post.
(Though, to be fair, if you want to designate yourself our rabid audience, we’re good with that …)
What I’m trying to appreciate is what Karl stressed: all your writing is significant, all of it matters. In last week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the power of borrowed ideas in his essay “Creation Myth.” About two thirds through the essay, he nicely blends psychologist Dean Simonton and the Rolling Stones (really) into ideas about how creativity actually works. “Quality,” Simonton said, “is a probabilistic function of quantity.” Or, as Keith Richards said, the band had so much creativity that they had to slosh their way through so much mediocre work in order to get to the great music that became “Exile on Main Street.”
I love this idea, difficult as it is for me to fully embrace it. Hard work will get our poems, stories, and essays there. More writing will lead to better writing. This is going to be quite a task for me, letting go the question of whether or not my sentences – as I’m writing them down – are good or not, and simply focusing on getting it all down. Not even, really, a question of first or second or third drafts, but believing in the process of writing for the sake of doing the work. Writer’s block? Forget it. Building blocks? Yeah, something like that …
Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review.
Imagination Failed To Get Me A Job
During a recent round of friendly drinks here in downtown Columbia, a friend of mine was lamenting the fact that he didn’t finish college. Or, more accurately, he was upset about the way he is labeled and stereotyped by some people. This is the way he is identified: he is seen as a person that didn’t graduate from college. A dropout, a restless soul, indecisive, or some other dismissive way of viewing his life.
I said, that goes away. Once you get a little bit older, no one really cares how much education you have. Many people I know work in fields that have nothing to do with their college degree. Instead, when I meet someone for the first time, I eventually ask “What do you do?”
What someone does for a living is not, of course, the end all and be all of a person’s character. You don’t get into all the good stuff that makes a person unique in the first five minutes of a conversation (unless you’re talking with one of those people who asks far too personal questions the moment they meet you, but those people freak me out so why talk to them?). Asking about a job is polite. And, a person’s work can be quite revealing.
When you think about it, most of us spend a large chunk of our day working. Five days a week – and more for many of us (or less days but longer hours) – we go somewhere and work. Characters in most novels have jobs, but literature actually about work is not commonplace, though some examples like Joshua Ferris and Ed Park spring to mind. And yet, a large number of stories I’ve recently read coming into TMR make more than just a passing reference to the protagonist’s job, often in a way that seems to be ill-considered. The number one job for protagonists in these not-quite-fully-imagined stories is teacher. Specifically, English teacher at a university.
A quick glance through our archives or work published in many other good literary journals will show that we’ve published plenty of stories and essays about being a teacher. Giving a character such a job doesn’t inherently make the story bad. On the other hand, seeing lines like “Carol’s morning survey class was full of sleepy freshman” makes me stop every single time.
A few years ago, when I was still working at River Styx, we received a ton of stories about the Lazarus. Not the department store or some sort of symbolic narrative (though, this too, would be odd), but stories about the actual Lazarus. Not tons, ultimately – eight or nine at the most – but it came up so frequently that I wondered if I had missed a contemporary literary trend in ironic response to the recycled popularity of vampires and zombies.
These trends come and go; Lazarus didn’t come back the next year (sorry – couldn’t help it). But I still read enough manuscripts that certain choices writers made began to seem very familiar. And the number of stories with a main character working (unhappily, always) as a university English teacher seems to be increasing.
So too does my resistance to these stories.
Usually the professor-protagonist is bitter about his/her indifference to the job, and these are moments that are, I suppose, intended to be something the reader can relate to. I tend to roll my eyes. Everything here becomes familiar, banal, dull. The protagonist becomes paper-thin. A teaching job never makes the protagonist any richer, deeper. It seems to be a default, as if there is no other job that the writer can think of. Rarely do these classroom scenes or lonely office hours of grading bad essays have any true relevance in the story: it simply reinforces the idea that the character is unhappy, which the reader knew from the moment the protagonist’s job was told.
So the protagonist remains flat, lacking depth or complexity, and becoming a type, a wholly expected and overdone cliché. The assumption, it seems, is that this job is universally known to be miserable and unpromising. It is, then, exactly what the reader expects. No surprise or tension here: personally, I stop actively reading and struggle to not skim. This is a terrible feeling, one that I try to resist. But I’ve yet to come across a recent submission with the professor-protagonist that doesn’t make me cringe.
Here’s a leap. Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants” is many things: perfection of his minimalist style; an example of excellent dialogue; a snapshot of two people that reveals their entire lifetime; imagery that resonates in its depth and emotion; and of course, being a “teachable” story that often requires an explanation that the young couple is talking about an abortion. But the story’s staying power is in its tragedy: it’s a story about not being able to see the world in metaphor, a story about the crushing of a woman’s imagination.
The failure of imagination should deeply trouble all of us. Looking around the world, seeing the news, it’s hard not to feel as if the dullness of celebrity culture and fame has permeated all aspects of our lives. Lazy mimicry is the default mode not just for political discourse, but in our art as well. In fiction, something feels missing to me in the story of a professor-protagonist: a lack of insight, maturity, feeling, inspiration, I don’t know, something. Usually, as in most things in these stories that don’t quite work, there are still characters, moments, sentences, perhaps even just a clause, that are so striking and so good that I can’t imagine why the author defaulted to such a one-dimensional character like the professor-protagonist. There is something optimistic about creating art, writing stories. So the apparent laziness puzzles me to no end.
I’m sure that not every story needs to get into the protagonist’s job; in fact, I’m positive that isn’t the case. So when employment comes up, I expect it to do quite a bit. In fiction, an architect and a zoologist aren’t the same character; neither are the names Kathryn, Katherine, Kathy, or Kate. Small choices matter tremendously. Simple statements of a job – white collar, blue collar, corporate attorney, truck driver, auto mechanic, house painter, and so on – have meaning. There are no simple statements. There can be no missteps. The professor-protagonist often gets “proven” in these stories with characters and scenes that are so familiar and unimaginative that they become wholly meaningless.
This is not to say that it can’t be done, that the professor-protagonist might have a compelling story. My good friend, the poet Richard Newman, was in a classroom, being told a series of Do’s and Don’ts about writing. He wrote his poem “The Briefcase of Sorrow” (later anthologized in the Best American Poetry series) after coming across this quote from Frances Mayes:
Some writers get into the habit of letting of name a metaphor without really showing the image to the reader: sea of life, mattress of the soul, river of death … or (perhaps worst of all) briefcase of sorrow.
So, I’m playing the curmudgeon role here: no more professor-protagonist stories! Or maybe I’m asking aloud (sorta) for something else: a new, imaginative look at the professor-protagonist. Either way, readers and writers will resist any sort of Do and Don’t list from me. Which, in one way or the other, is exactly what we’re looking for in great fiction.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review
Another Kind of Writing Prompt
As Rob Foreman noted in his excellent post yesterday, National Novel Writing Month – often known as NaNoWriMo – has kicked off. The goal? Finish 50,000 words in thirty days. November seems like a pretty brutal month to pull this off with Thanksgiving thrown in the mix, but there’s probably a road block in every month. And, the idea behind NaNoWriMo is to stop making excuses, such as holiday road blocks involving turkey, family, and football, and just find the energy to write your novel, inspired by a large group of people doing the same thing.
Part of me has a “Who cares?” feeling here. If someone wants to write a novel and needs a contest to get going, well, what difference does that make? On the flip side, this seems to say something insidious about publishing and writing and, perhaps even bigger and messier, the character of the American artist/wannabe celebrity. Many of my thoughts are exactly the same as Nathan Ihara’s, which can be found at MobyLives, the terrific blog by the good folks at Melville House Publishing. The entire post, including the comments are worth reading, but here’s the slam dunk:
Art, in [founder Chris Baty's] strange formulation, is not something that has much intrinsic value. Rather, it is merely the byproduct of an activity that makes you feel good–the activity known as art-making.
There are similar concerns about the well-known Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, the guts of which have been detailed by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington on N+1, a thoughtful examination of how the whole process works and what it all means. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not good.
Most novelists, I would guess, will tell you that writing a novel is hard. Most “winners” of NaNoWriMo will probably tell you the book isn’t done, that it’s just a first draft. And getting from draft one, to two, to three, and on down the line to whatever draft completes the novel is a difficult task, let alone the next steps: finding an agent and/or a publisher, making sure your novel is published rather than merely printed, then promoting your book so that you can get what you want: readers of the hunk of writing that you believe deserves, maybe even demands, to be read in a world filled with endless noise and distraction. Taking the long view, the task is daunting, perhaps even paralyzing to the point of leaving a would-be writer feeling blocked.
I don’t believe in writer’s block. But that’s perhaps a post for another day. Instead, what I take from all the discussion about novel writing month is this: a craving for community.
Writing is a lonely business. If you’re truly devoted to it, you spend several hours every week, and ideally every day, by yourself, working through your story or essay or poem in your head, and writing and rewriting the words, trying to get them just right. This process can be maddening. It can also be misunderstood, mocked, and emotionally wrenching. All that time alone is so that you can find readers, find community, for your work. When you think about it, the whole process of writing, of creating anything in such an isolated way, is a bit strange. Does that mean NaNoWriMo is somehow a better way to write? I doubt it. I think that isolation, regardless of the kind of art you are creating, is a necessary part of the process, one of silence and hard work and time (with large sprinklings of frustration and agony mixed in for flavor). But I do understand why chasing a goal with the help of a large supportive community has such great appeal. So to all those who are trying to write a novel this November, I wish you way more than luck.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.
The Tom Waits Highway
Every morning, I write for a couple of hours, working on various projects: stories, essays, a novel. I don’ t have a particular good reason why I choose one over the other on any given day, but usually, I stick with one thing for a few weeks (or, with a novel, a few months) and then, for no clear reason, I turn to something different, re-reading with a bit of surprise, like seeing an old friend in an unexpected place.
The wonder of what I’m working on, or why I’m working on it, doesn’t concern me a great deal. The important thing to me is that I do it everyday. On weekdays, I have less time, of course, because I need to head over to The Missouri Review offices and get to work. Weekends provide me more time, but I don’t have different plans for Saturdays or Sundays. I just write. There are many, many pieces of advice on how to write, whole books, (thousands of books, actually) but for me it’s just a matter of writing everyda. No big mystery.
This doesn’t work for everyone. Other needs something to get them going, a way of contextualizing the work so that it makes sense. A way to nurture creativity.
So, here’s this interesting video of Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, discussing creativity and Tom Waits (the title of this post does have some relevance), among other things. At the beginning of this short talk, Elizabeth acknowledges something a bit scary: she’s probably already had the biggest success she’s going to ever have as a writer. So, now what?
It’s definitely worth your time to watch and found out.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review
On The Recent Semester Teaching Creative Writing
I don’t know when I will teach fiction writing again. This is not by choice. I requested English 1510 this semester, was lucky enough to snag it, and was told even then to not expect to receive this course ever again. This is not about because of my ineptitude as a teacher (I hope) but because typically the managing editor teaches English 1000, a freshman composition class. I was told that I was given creative writing only because of how many people were on sabbatical and unavailable. Don’t expect to get again, they said. Well, then!
Since this might be it with teaching creative writing for a while, here are a few things I took away from my class this semester:
–I haven’t read Harry Potter and they haven’t read Moby Dick. Perhaps the one thing that can be guaranteed in a writing class is that the instructor has read more than the students (digression: some of you are thinking “Actually, I know that’s not true” and I’m nodding along glumly). When I was an undergraduate, I often felt embarrassed because my teachers all referred to novels and stories and poems that I had never heard of, and because of this, I not only missed crucial points of their lectures but also felt that I was unqualified to be in their class. Insecurity, and all that. This semester, I’ve usually found that talking about films is the best way of proving a point: there’s a better chance of my students having seen a particular film, and since films are generally narrative like novels and stories, an easy-to-understand analogy could often be drawn between movies and stories when I was trying to demonstrate a point about characterization, point of view, framing, dialogue, setting, and so forth.
In class, I’ve lamented the fact that we need movies to teach us about writing fiction, but perhaps seeing these links isn’t a bad thing at all. We make do with what we got—what good, really, does it do to expound on A Separate Peace or Revolutionary Road or Underworld if my students haven’t read those books?—and it also might, I hope, make us all realize that writing doesn’t live in a vacuum. We’re shaped and formed by our greater culture, not just pop culture, but film, music, painting, sculpture, dance, and the like.
–Be honest about what they write and what they read. This might seem obvious, but too often I’ve had and heard about creative writing teachers cheerleading more than teaching. Hey, if the work isn’t good, how does it benefit the student to think otherwise?
–Style and ideas worry students more than substance. Style is, of course, significantly easier to mimic than substance. Mimicking a minimalist story is pretty easy. Having a surprise ending is pretty straightforward—withhold one crucial bit of information until the last page. This is how we all learn, though, isn’t it? I used to copy Fitzgerald stories in order to learn how he made his sentences dance; I wrote an entire book in response to a Charles Baxter novel. It’s a terrific way to discover that one doesn’t really sound like anyone else: I sound like me, my students sound like themselves.
More than once this semester, a student said “I have an idea for a story! *insert idea here* Do you think that would work?” To which I always answered, “It could. You should write it and find out.” In time, I think they’ll learn that all the bells and whistles on the page can’t cover a story that wholly lacks an emotional core. Perhaps they too already knew it. By now, I hope they definitely know it.
–Grading stories helps. I’ve gone back and forth on this over the years, but I think that I’m generally on the side of putting grades on student stories. I hear you: how can you tell this story is a B+ rather than a C-? My first response to that question is: really? In conversation with every colleague about writing workshops, we know which students are the best writers. This does indicate that there is some criteria, however difficult it might be to articulate, as to why something is “better.”
Students at a university receive these things called grades, and grades, more than anything, get their attention. I wrote a criteria for story grades on my syllabus, explaining why grades are given on their work, and, no, an A story is not perfect or necessarily complete. Grading gives the students an understanding that those elements of fiction I lectured about way back in September are not suggestions, but things that must be considered seriously when constructing a story.
–Stories may not change, but I do. I used a mixture of stories each semester, combining stories I’ve read before and stories I haven’t. Fresh eyes, and fresh stories, are often beneficial to everyone. One good example is Dan Chaon’s “Big Me.” To be honest, I’ve always assigned it because it’s in the textbook and students seem to like it. I’ve always thought the story was competent, just not for me. But this time, for whatever reason, the story really hit me: the duality of the characters, the non-linear construction, the haunting of memory, the way Andy forgets large chunks of his past. What once struck me as pretty straightforward now seemed remarkably complex, tenuously but perfectly held together, sad and funny and strange all at once. None of this would have struck me if I hadn’t assigned it again.
There are others I’ve always thought were good for teaching but I’m not crazy about, and there are others that I adore that never seem to win over my students. And there is always at least one surprise story each semester that resonates with my students when I had expected they would dislike it. Which is always sorta fun to discover.
–Be generous. Two weeks ago, one of my first writing teachers, Melanie Rae Thon, was visiting MU, and I was asked to give the introduction to her reading. I thought of her teaching first, even before her books, since that’s how I first knew her. And what she gave us, always, was her time, her spirit, her belief that our work was worth reading. She was generous. This quality is not easy: there are too many constraints on our time, too many people and tasks pulling at us from all sides. To really be patient with a student’s story, to remember that the writer is still learning, can be easy to forget. Having a visit from one of the teachers who gently nudged me in the direction of the writing life was a nice reminder that beginning writers need, perhaps more than anything, an attentive reader and a pat on the back.
I hope I provided a little bit of both this semester.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye