Rural mailbox photograph by Mark McGee

In the note that accompanied the essay when it was first published in TMR, Coffel describes her motivation, saying, “I wanted, in my essay, to honor the generous impulse of my twenties—working to help all those poor people, trying to make our country better—and I also wanted to treat that impulse lightly, to admit that it was mixed up with arrogance and exuberance and naiveté. I also wanted to honor my friendship with the man I’ve called David. I think that kind of friendship is one you can only have at a certain point in your life.” Understanding the author’s intent can have a profound impact on a reader’s approach and while intent may not be everything, in this case Coffel’s explanation simply clarifies the tender, yet honest evaluation of her own past that is evident throughout “Letters to David.”

L. E. Miller’s short story “Kind,” is also about a woman reflecting on the life she led in her early twenties, although of course this story is fiction and its protagonist, Ann, a fictional character. In addition to adding our usual introduction, questions and writing prompts, I am pleased to announce that “Kind” is the first textBOX piece to be presented with a full audio version. Recorded along with the first-ever audiobook edition of TMR in early 2007, “Kind” is read by Mark Kelty and you can listen via the toolbox in the right sidebar of all the pages on which “Kind” and its additional materials appear.

There is a special kind of magic in listening to stories read aloud. More than once over the past decade I’ve found myself sitting in a parking lot, transfixed by PRI’s Selected Shorts, unable to complete whatever errand I intended to run until I’ve heard how the story ends. At AWP a few years back, I attended a Selected Shorts performance of B. D. Wong reading Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” and remember feeling as though the other thousand or so audience members simply weren’t there. It’s as if being read to can hold me perfectly in the present by reminding some part of my subconscious of the pleasure of being read to as a child.

(I admit this resembles my childhood not at all, but I like the photograph.)

Adding full audio versions of the stories, essays (and eventually poems – more on that soon, I promise) on textBOX has been something we’ve been thinking about for a while. This summer we are going to make it happen. “Kind” is just the first of many. William Harrison’s short story “Eleven Beds” has been recorded and will be edited soon, and our new team of anthology interns are already hard at work selecting which essays and stories will be next.

In the meantime, if reading “Letters to David” along with Cynthia Miller Coffel’s commentary, and listening to “Kind,” leave you wanting more, you can always listen to all of the pieces from The Missouri Review’s first audiobook issue (30.4, Winter 2007) here. Of course if you like that, you can always subscribe to our digital issue, which comes complete with a full audio version four times a year. And if that’s just not enough storytelling for you, maybe my favorite fiction podcasts (here, here, and here) can tide you over until we can get back down to the studio and start making more magic.

Nell McCabe is The Missouri Review’s Anthology Editor.

It’s Thursday Think Day again, and I’m excited to tell you what I’ve been thinking about.

I attended a meeting last night, in which I was to pitch my genre – creative nonfiction – to some undergraduate students who were interested in hearing about it, possibly even writing it.  I knew I couldn’t do this alone – or, I was too tired to do it without help from some pieces of paper with writing on them – so I turned to Brevity, the journal of concise literary nonfiction that lends itself so well to this purpose.  It is readily accessed, and its content is conducive to presentation in a limited time, as it is all remarkably short.

To demonstrate the virtues of creative nonfiction – and of the essay in particular – I turned to Lia Purpura’s “On Being a Trucker.”  It begins with speculation as to the language used by truckers to describe their cargoes, and then follows a quick series of associations to reach a conclusion that is utterly astonishing, given the sweep of its implications, its apparent distance from the opening lines, and the celerity with which its author leads us to them.  You don’t need me to tell you this; I urge you to follow the link and read it, which is something that requires so little effort I sometimes feel guilty for not giving thanks to the Internet more often, it makes some tasks so easy for us.

Purpura’s essay is like a precisely landed punch to the chest, and it makes plain several of the things I value in the essay, or in creative nonfiction generally.  One is obvious:  Purpura’s relationship to her reader is a rather unique one, one by which she may offer her simulated train of thought in a more or less straightforward fashion, directly from writer to reader.  The essay as a genre is also known, I explained to my very small audience, for precisely the sort of movements Purpura makes, as an essay follows a series of unlikely associations, often to their equally unlikely conclusion.  Not only does the piece demonstrate – and very briefly – the virtues of the essay; it is simply a great piece of writing.

So what have I been thinking about this today?  Well, whenever I come across an essay that warrants great enthusiasm – which isn’t rare – like an entomologist, I want to catalogue it, and decide what kind of essay it is.  I don’t think Purpura’s is a personal essay, though I couldn’t rule it out; it reasons things out a little to explicitly to be a lyric essay – a conclusion I suspect many would disagree with; and I would have a hard time calling it a familiar essay.  Rather, I have been interested, more and more lately, in the moral essay, an essay subgenre you don’t hear much about anymore, but which I think might be in for some recognition, and which I think this might be an example of.  Because it’s Thursday Think Day, and not Explain Yourself Sunday, I’m going to leave it at that.

Robert Long Foreman is The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor.

As the lights dimmed and Sedaris emerged, bobbing towards the podium and glancing timidly at the anxious gallery awaiting him, I leaned back and prepared for that pleasant belly ache like everyone else.

And, in case you had any doubt, he did deliver. 

After starting off with a piece from his latest collection, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, Sedaris jumped from earlier stories, to unpublished journal entries, and lastly, to jokes he’d been told on earlier readings.  Also interspersed was more general oration that proved as entertaining as his writings, including a reading of a book title in what was to Sedaris an unknown language.  When he asked the audience if anyone knew the language, and someone yelled “Croatian,” Sedaris replied, “Come see me after the show.  The book’s yours.” Needless to say, it was a great show; but it was what followed the show that most impressed me. 

The moment Sedaris said, “I’ll be in the lobby afterwards if any of you would like me to sign a book,” I began to make my move.  I was clapping as I did so, sure, but I was more so concentrating on limiting was sure to be a significant wait.   As I rose, made my way out of the row, I saw masses of people flooding towards the exits like there was a fire. 

After standing in line for twenty minutes, two friends approached me with signed books.  On one, Sedaris had sharpied a crying Jesus with the words “Why did you kill me?” above his signature.  On the other, were the words, “I’m glad you can joke.”  My friend had told her best one, upon Sedaris’ earlier request. I guess it hadn’t landed so well, as he’d also crossed out the word “joke” and underneath written “walk.”  I laughed, impressed that Sedaris had taken the time to personalize their signings.  My friends left, and I resigned myself to the long wait ahead. 

Almost two hours later, a story for my fiction class as well as the university concert series pamphlet read, I was next in line to get my book signed.  At this point, I thought, stealing glances at a slumped David Sedaris, I’m sure he’s just signing them.  No way he’s still personalizing each signing.  The person in front of me cleared out, and I stepped forward.

“Hello,” Sedaris said, smiling wide-eyed, as if I was first person to ever ask him for an autograph. 

I said hello and thanked him for coming.  “And thanks for your patience,” I said, “You must be exhausted.”

He paused, pen poised above the title, and looked up.

“I like signing books,” he said, and smiled.

After a moment, “It’s Owen, is it?  O-W-E-N.  Are you a student here, Owen?” Then, following a nod, “What are you studying?”

I told him English-Creative Writing with a fiction emphasis, and he perked up. 

“Do you write short stories?”

A couple minutes and a couple questions later, he handed me my book.  “Thank you for waiting,” he said, still smiling. 

While he talked with my girlfriend, and asked her to tell him about her latest non-fiction piece, I flipped to the title page of Me Talk Pretty One Day.

“It was about my love for Bruce Springsteen,” she said.

He laughed.  “Have you ever met him?”

She told him about the time she touched his sweaty arm and vest at a concert in Chicago. 

“Oh wow,” he said. “Was it everything you’d imagined?”   

As a young writer, I often feel intimated by the literary world.  It is a place of grim prospect.  Spend your whole life in front a computer or notebook, working to communicate something worthwhile and original in a worthwhile and original way.  Sure, there are literary journals to strive towards, as well as grants and fellowships and other awards, but who cares about these things besides other writers?  It’s even worse if you write primarily literary prose or poetry.  Romance or crime, you’ve got a chance, but if you plan on writing anything else for a living, you better start playing the lottery. 

Because of these truths, it’s easy to grow bitter. Many writers work and struggle and eventually prosper while this bitterness consumes them.  I’m sure David Sedaris wouldn’t say he’s never had a bitter moment, but last night I saw no evidence of one.   For at least three hours –we weren’t even close to the end— he made an effort to connect with every single person in that line.  And he’s going to do the same thing every night for the next month.  How does a writer, especially a well-respected literary writer, do this?  Maybe if this was his first book tour, then maybe I could understand his insatiable desire to engage fans, but he’s been publishing books for over fifteen years.  And not only that, but he reads his work, over and over again, with a zeal as noteworthy as his actual prose. 

            This baffles and inspires me.  If David Sedaris can work and struggle and prosper with such an impressive character intact, I have to believe that so too can anyone.  I hope I always will. 

We thanked him and left.  Outside Jesse, we opened our books to the title page.  On mine, he’d drawn an owl perched on the publisher’s name. It looked at me, wide-eyed, patient, still.  And on hers, he’d written “Your story has touched my heart.”

I am perhaps the only person who pursued a keen interest in the work of Ted Hughes as a result of watching the film The Iron Giant.  I was one of the few who saw it at a movie theater, for that matter, but I did, and I loved it, so I read the book it was based on – Hughes’s Iron Giant – thought it was weird, and “Devoured his work whole,” as Hughes himself describes his early consumption of the poetry of W. B. Yeats.  By my second year of college, I had made my way through Crow, The Hawk in the Rain, and Gaudete, to Winter Pollen.

I worried that when I dug Winter Pollen out of my Missouri library, as I did at a West Virginia library ten years ago, and read it, I would learn only that I am a more skeptical reader than I ever was before, that I would be stubbornly unmoved by the essays of Ted Hughes – even disdainful, for having been taken in by them so completely in my vulnerable youth.  And I am, sort of, to the extent that since rereading his essays my eyes have stayed relatively dry.

Winter Pollen, I understand as I did not when I was younger, is a loose collection of essays consisting largely of introductions Hughes wrote to collections of other people’s poems, and to Leonard Baskin’s sketches, plus other very short pieces which are, as the book’s subtitle indicates, occasional.  Most of its content, then, is not exactly tearjerking material.  Even in his essay on the journals of Sylvia Plath, his tone is distant, as he writes, “The motive in publishing these journals will be questioned.  The argument against is still strong.  A decisive factor has been certain evident confusions.”  When he references himself in this essay, he does it in the third person:  “The second of these two books [of her journals] her husband destroyed.”  It’s more eerie than moving, I think today, more likely to provoke bewilderment than to draw tears.

In my search for the essay that made me cry, I reread the introduction he wrote in 1968 to a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems.  On the early editorial decision to alter the dashes in her manuscripts and make them into semicolons and periods, he writes that this cannot be done “without deadening the wonderfully naked voltage of her poems.”  It was far from a new observation by then, and I know much more about Dickinson’s dashes now than I did when I first heard of them from Hughes, but these still strike me, as they did then, as a lovely and truthful sequence of nine words.

I think, having looked over many of the essays again, that it must have been “The Burnt Fox” that exploited my tear ducts, ten years ago.  Two pages long, it consists largely of Hughes’s account of a dream he had when a student at Cambridge.  At the time he had it, he writes, “Students of English were expected to produce a weekly essay,” and while he had no conscious problem with the assignment, “I soon became aware of an inexplicable resistance, in myself, against writing these essays.”  The resistance mounts:  “it had a distressful quality, like a fiercely fought defence.  In the end, it brought me to a halt.”

I was, at nineteen, a sucker for testimonies by other people in which they claimed to have as much of a problem with schoolwork as I did.  As disdainful toward that impulse as I am now (I should have better appreciated how good and relatively easy my life was then), Hughes’s resistance to school immediately won me over.

Hughes describes working on one of the last required essays until two in the morning, “exhausted,” until he finally had to go to sleep.  It was then, he explains, that he had a dream in which a humanoid fox – a creature “at the same time a skinny man and a fox walking erect on its hind legs” – entered the room.  “Every inch,” he explains,

was roasted, smouldering, black-charred, split and bleeding.  Its eyes, which were level with mine where I sat, dazzled with the intensity of the pain.  It came up until it stood beside me.  Then it spread its hand – a human hand as I now saw, but burned and bleeding like the rest of him – flat palm down on the blank space of my page.  At the same time it said:  “Stop this – you are destroying us.”

Today, again, I am unmoved by this – more skeptical toward the veracity of the description of this dream (though it could just as easily be a perfectly faithful account of his dream than not) than astounded by its accuracy to anything I feel today.  But I know, more or less, what I was responding to in this essay.  I knew, at nineteen, that I wanted to do something more substantial than what I was up to then; I wanted to do something more memorable than to sit and weep on college campuses.  Eventually I took up writing, and decided it would do for a more compelling avocation, but at nineteen I was terrified of writing, so I didn’t do it, and when I read Hughes’s story of being ordered by his mind, or subconscious, or whatever a humanoid fox is qualified to serve as a mouthpiece for, to give up his busy assignments for the greater creative work he would ultimately do, crying was the only response I could muster.

Robert Long Foreman is The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor.

In our the most recent issue of The Missouri Review, Tom Ireland tries to understand what makes a man like Mohammed Qasab turn to terrorism. Read it here.  It’s an engaging piece driven by curiosity to discover more about a region that, as Americans, we rarely experience beyond the thirty-second news clip. Given the recent terrorism attack in Times Square, Tom’se ssay is a good reminder of how complex and dangerous our world can be.

Re-read her essay here or purchase the whole daggum issue here.

Congratulations, Cheryl!

The sensation of a shared small-town coming of age is the connection that leaves Strayed feeling powerfully linked to Alice Munro. Follow along as Strayed learns the balance between embracing this link to her past and following her own path to the future.

The details of ERAs vary widely, limited only by the number of ways going to the bathroom can go horribly wrong. Still, almost all ERAs follow the same basic trajectory: narrator enters restroom and gets comfortable; narrator notices that something isn’t quite right (the door won’t lock, the toilet paper’s gone, etc.); someone else shows up and suddenly there’s a big, embarrassing mess; narrator cleans it up, vowing to avoid similar situations in the future.

If one were to bust into the mail room of any literary journal that accepts essays, steal all the submissions, scatter them randomly over a five-acre plot, and stroll back across it blindfolded, guaranteed that person would step in a couple ERAs. I’ve been a reader for three literary journals, TMR included, and I can report that ERAs show up pretty often — about as often as essays about losing a pet or experimenting with sex or illegal drugs, but not quite as often as essays about cheating on a spouse, living with a debilitating illness, or attempting to finally reconcile things with mom or dad.  

The impulse to commit the ERA to paper is easy to understand, but hard to resist. They are stories told to make our close friends laugh, and in that sense they’re practically failsafe. If ERAs were employees in a corporate workplace, they would be low-level sales reps, the funny, jokey kind that bristle with personality and form quick rapports with others — and they’re great at their jobs. So great, in fact, that it will be suggested by others that they be promoted. “That’s a hilarious story, dude,” friends will say of the ERA. “You should totally write it down!” And in a move familiar to anyone who’s ever done corporate work, this promotion will remove the low-level ERA employee from a position where it almost can’t fail and install it in a higher position where it almost can’t succeed. 

In an ERA, the speaker assumes a position where there’s trouble but not danger, where taboo is flirted with but not violated, and where the audience is invited to laugh and sympathize but isn’t called upon to reevaluate or challenge. The subject matter’s universality makes it immediately accessible, so very little setup is required to contextualize the story up front besides where and how long ago it occurred. An ERA provides ample opportunity for the use of awesome literary devices like narrative suspense and colorful exaggeration, which are tricky to pull off in other personal writing endeavors.   

What’s really tricky, though, is making a case for an ERA’s literary value. While the story might be immediately accessible, there are also a lot of readers who will immediately choose not to access it. The purpose — to entertain — could be misinterpreted as an attempt to shock. Humor takes a privileged position, making insight and reflection secondary, and pretty soon the reader questions whether the piece should have been written at all. 

Then there’s the fact that there are so many ERAs floating around, and I admit I’m personally to blame for some of that. My Masters thesis is clogged with ERAs. I dropped an ERA on my creative writing workshop just last year. I can no more explain why I wrote so many — surely was aware I wasn’t breaking new ground — than I can explain why going to the bathroom without incident is hard.  

I still cheer for just about every ERA manuscript I get, and I pass my share of ERAs up the chain. However, take note: No ERA I’ve passed has ever been accepted for publication. Likewise, none of the ERAs I’ve sent out have ever been published.

Therefore, my advice to anyone planning to write an ERA is this:

Make it very good. Make the language captivating and the scenes vivid, but don’t be gross. Don’t let it even approach shock value. Don’t cuss. Make it so funny that it validates its own existence, but not so funny that the humor overshadows whatever insight it arrives at — which, incidentally, had better be more breathtaking than “…and that’s why I’ll make sure and go at my house next time.” Make it somehow touching but not emotionally gooey. Make it bigger than the confines of its situation without allegorically implying that life itself is a toilet.

Most importantly — and I think this goes for all essays — make the engine behind it be powered by something other than just the circumstances, because circumstances can seldom ever be unique, but with some careful thought, accounts of them can.