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Building a Library For Writers
It's not easy finding The Missouri Review on the shelves. But he will!
One of the things that literary magazines and literary editors will frequently tell prospective contributors is that a writer should read our magazine before submitting work to us. I heard this advice when I was graduate school and first became interested in publishing my stories. Outside the offices of Natural Bridge, the literary magazine of Missouri-St. Louis, there was a small bookshelf filled with literary journals. Being new to literary publishing, most of the names were unfamiliar to me. Best I can remember, the shelves didn’t hold many of the big names like Ploughshares and Tin House. Mostly, the shelves were filled with journals run by graduate students, same as Natural Bridge. I distinctly remember reading several issues of Meridian, the literary journal out of the University of Virginia.
Point is, getting to know the journals is not easy. Journal editors, like ourselves, typically say vague things, such as we like “good writing.” We don’t want to say we do this or do that, because it might close us off to work that will surprise and delight our readers. Yet, magazines do seem to have certain aesthetics and taste – I can think of a handful of journals I love to read that I would never submit my work to – and when a writer is asked to read a couple of back issues, it can be overwhelming.
Poet Gary Hanna feels the same way. So, he decided to do something about it. In cooperation with the Lewes Public Library in Delaware, Hanna has created The Writer’s Library, a room free and open to the public where writers can read the literary journals that are best for their work. And, the Writer’s Library could use some donations. So if you have any copies of literary journals that you could donate, please do so! All information on how to reach Hanna is on their website, but in case you just feel the need to rush right off to UPS, here it is:
The Writer’s Library at Lewes Public Library, 111 Adams Avenue, Lewis, DE 19958. Or you can visit www.leweslibrary.org
Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review.
The Algorithm Inside
Last Friday, on the New Yorker‘s excellent daily blog, The Book Bench, there was a brief post on Goodreads acquiring Discovereads, “a site that uses an algorithm to recommend books to people based on their preferences and on the preferences of users with similar tastes.” It sounds like a more mathematical version of Goodreads, a better “system” for selecting books. More from the New Yorker on this:
What I like about it is the updates I get telling me what my buddies are reading. The recommendations (and the ads) don’t matter so much to me, but if they are going to be there, I would like them to be the result of the best algorithmic cocktail known to mankind.
It all got me thinking about how book and movie recommendations work in the offline world. I have one buddy whose taste in movies I trust completely, because in twelve years of friendship he has never once failed me; and I have one buddy whose taste in books I trust completely, for a similar reason. Whatever algorithm God put inside these two people is the right algorithm for me … I wonder … about my dimwitted Netflix buddy and the new-and-improved Goodreads buddy I’m about to meet: Will they one day grow so good at reading my mind that they’ll be interchangeable with my real-life friends?
This is probably supposed to be funny, but this makes me feel a little cold. Ratings and lists are everywhere now. Overrated. Underrated. Top ten. Top five. Etc. Driven by the need for revenue, websites have gotten very good at trying to determine our preferences and giving us ads that we want. This is good: you get information relevant to you, the advertiser gets the audience it wants, costs are more efficient, we’re all happy. And we all get to participate. This is good. I guess.
Over on Ploughshares, the poets Weston Cutter and Bob Hicok (who we love!) discussed the word “random” and its use, often poorly, in workshops and the classroom. Cutter quotes cultural critic (and hoops fan) Chuck Klosterman:
People are answering questions not because they’re flattered by the attention but because they feel as if they deserve to be asked.
Which is sorta how I’m feeling about this rating system game that Amazon, Huffington Post, Facebook, ESPN, and every other company (frankly, some conversations with real live people, too) under the sun has decided to play. I’m not sure I really want my book choices, or others, fully automated, an algorithm. Even tongue in cheek, I don’t like thinking of my friend’s as a math formula (aren’t we all water? neurons? souls? I have no idea). Sure, it’s nice to have recommendations for a book. But I’m not sure I’ve ever read and loved a book that Amazon or Powell’s or whatever recommended to me because of my buying history. The books I love are not products. The recommendations of friends matter to me, at least in part, because they can be wrong. They can be intimate, vulnerable, widely off the mark. And that’s why it means so much.
Step back: it’s rare, but sometimes, a person I don’t know well has asked to read my work. This someone, whoever it is, cares enough to want to experience what I do and take my writing seriously. Phrases like “I write literary realism” or “I’m like Richard Yates, only I don’t make you want to kill yourself” don’t really do justice to my fiction. The best way to know what my stories are about is to, well, read my stories. Sure, I want readers. Who doesn’t? But the anonymous reader is not the same as a person, probably a new acquaintance or friend, who I know on some personal level, asking to read my work. That’s a different connection and it is, in many ways, one of the most important things someone can ask of me.
Recommending a book to a friend is not, to me, a small gesture. It probably isn’t a small gesture to passionate readers either. Passing a book I love is one more thing in this world I don’t want to “outsource” to a company. I’d rather have someone showing me why he/she loves a book to mean something. Really mean something.
Two friends have recently been kind enough to mail me books. It wasn’t so much the books that matter – though both were terrific – but that the books came from friends. These were small gifts, unsolicited, unexpected, and totally loved.
One of the books was South of the Big Four, the first novel by Don Kurtz. I was delighted to received a hardcover book, the dust jacket laminated; for a wonderful moment, I hoped my friend had actually stolen this from a library in some sort of maniac desire to share. Kurtz writes with a prose style that reminded me of William Maxwell, and even had the same qualities of isolation and buried loss. The narrator, Arthur, has returned home to live on his deceased father’s old farm, and begins to work for this new businessman/farmer, Gerry Maars. It’s a patient, moving, skillful novel of the farming community in the modern world. But it has extra meaning to me because of who it came from, and that it came with a handwritten letter tucked into the pages.
The other book is a chapbook published by Catenary Press: “Houses” by Elizabeth Benjamin. It’s a series of short stories that are loosely linked as images of people and place in various stages of movement and waiting, images that became clearer and stronger the more I reread it. One of my favorites followed a man walking through the woods, and stumbling into a hunter, who warns him to be more careful. After the hunter leaves him, the man follows by stepping in her footprints. And these stories, even with all their movement, have a strong sense of physical possession. I’d never have heard of it Benjamin without my friend mailing me the book, and this mailing too had a small personal note inside.
The letter/inscription combined with the slightly battered text that was read slowly, maybe even with some margin scrawls, pages stained by wine or coffee, rounded corners, cracked spines, all of which gets sent to me as something much greater than its individual parts: there’s no algorithm in this. Instead, there is something else, not so much a recommendation but a gift. And for that, I’ll always be grateful.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review
Interpreting the "Not Quites"
Over the years we’ve occasionally had writers who took offense at being rejected by TMR. Some never submitted again. What more often happens is that after three or four tries here, a writer stops submitting on the grounds that we must not like their work. Others hang in there and keep sending, up to twenty, thirty or more times. This year, both Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize winners in prose have, in the past, come right up to the brink of being published in TMR and then been let down. For at least six years I’ve been reading work by Anna Solomon, our fiction winner, inviting her to send revisions in a couple of instances—and yet we’ve finally said no, until now. John Hales, the nonfiction winner, has been faithfully sending us near misses for probably fifteen years, perhaps more. Patience and a degree of forgiveness of our past rejections has paid off this year for both of them.
“Blog about some manuscripts that came close recently that you almost accepted but didn’t,” someone suggested. People want to know why their manuscripts were rejected.”
I know they do. So do I.
Experience tells me, though, that the reasons a capable manuscript is rejected may be difficult to articulate. “Not quite” is a euphemism for a lot of serious problems. But it can also mean precisely “not quite.”
Here are some of the problems with pieces that crossed my desk in the past week. These were pieces that had been looked at and passed along by more than just one or two readers:
I saw—we often see—a couple of pieces with great verbal dexterity—marvelous lines but not much emotional impact. High concept that fails to engage readers’ sympathy is a related problem, and we saw that.
In one concept-driven story we read, the conceit was outright silly, though the writing was nice, and the writer had obviously worked hard. Also, characters who don’t feel or behave in plausible ways are everywhere. Readers respond to characters based on their own individual experience, so this is partly a matter of familiarity and opinion; but if more than a couple of us have the same reaction, then the problem is really there. Unfortunately, it’s common.
Finally, several pieces were imitating current or recent trends or writers: one in collective voice, one with footnotes that made up quite a bit of the story.
Writing is hard, and none of the “misses” I’ve mentioned were terrible. They just weren’t working, not for the TMR editors, right now. If there were a magic formula for immunity to literary rejection, I’d be selling it online. Read, write, revise, submit, try again. There it is.
Evelyn Somers is the assistant editor of The Missouri Review.
They Want Books They Might Actually Read
This is a fascinating article that appeared in the New York Times last week. It took me about four paragraphs to shake off the name of this guy – Thatcher Wine – whose company, Juniper Books, designs customs book covers and libraries for (very) wealthy clients. But, once I did, (I mean, really – “Thatcher Wine”?), this article was both intriguing and revolting all at once.
There has been a tremendous amount written about what digital publishing and e-readers means to the book publishing business. Most take the “doom-and-gloom” approach. There are some that feel it is environmental conscious and good for the planet (is that actually true?) or that it is a matter of convenience. The general feeling is that is the death of books and we will all be reading on a large or small computer screen one day.
One of the most popular comparisons for books nowadays is music. At one time, local radio deejays had influence on the taste of listeners. Then came cassette tapes, CD’s, and Napster, along with the FCC loosening regulation so that conglomerates could own hundreds of stations across the country, and everything changed for the music industry. Now, say what you will about the state of corporate music publishing, but right now, things are pretty good for music. Sure, the top 20 or so might be banal pop music, but hasn’t it always been? Finding a diverse range of hip-hop, or jazz, or folk-punk-Appalachian-etc, is incredibly easy to do. The cost of recording has dropped, live shows are often inexpensive, and bands use the ‘net to send their music out to everyone. Do they earn a profit on CD’s and record sales? Of course not. But shows, concert t-shirts, b-sides available at shows, all that good stuff: those make it worthwhile.
Not the same for author. No one wants a Margaret Atwood TYPE Books Toronto ’97 t-shirt, or a rare recording of a reading she did in Tulsa (perhaps, maybe, there are one or two of you, but, you know…). For musicians, the album is just a way to get you to experience everything else. For authors, the book is the whole shebang.
Juniper Books and other companies like that believe the reading experience is merely home decor. Thinking about what Thatcher Wine and others do is amazing: some clients demand that the books are in English, just in case, you know, one day they want to read one of the books. Imagine! Others, of course, prefer books written English - German leatherbounds are apparently easy to find – so that it at least looks like they could read the book, you know, if they wanted to (they don’t). The entire article is quotable – I could fill the rest of this post with the sentences that made me shake my head, from thinking of books as props or room filler, the astronomical cost of this service (billed per foot!), or the square footage of these homes.
When discussing the future of publishing and “the death of books” and all that, the actual experience of reading is often ignored. The focus is on the delivery system, which makes sense if you are a publisher, right? After all, a publisher can’t force you to read by stretching your legs out on the couch, curling up into a chair and dangling your legs over the arm, or posting up at a coffee shop and hunkering down with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. If they can’t sell it, why consider it?
Like every author, I’d love for my books to be released in hardcover. As an editor, too, I’ve become much more conscious of the physical objects of books, the range of formats, the quality of the binding, typography, the weight of paper. When I bought Richard Bausch’s new story collection earlier this year, I was amazed at the how much care had gone into its production. Forget that it’s a hardcover release of a story collection: just the texture of the dust jacket and the pages was startling. Clearly somebody over at Knopf decided to throw a few dollars around for the deckle-edging.
And yet, as much as I love the idea of hardcovers, they aren’t as enjoyable to read as a paperback. They are heavier to carry around. They don’t bend. They are beautiful things I don’t want to damage too much: I like my hardcovers to be in good shape. Crazy as the Times article was to me, distantly, I understand the sense of wanting books to look a certain way, to fill a room, to suggest as much about its reader as a family photo album.
On my bookshelves, whether at home or at TMR, there are a mixture of hardcovers and paperbacks. Some of these books I have little memory of, a vague sense of whether or not I enjoyed it, if it was a gift, how long ago I first read it. And the ones that seem to stand out are the paperbacks. At home, I have Nicole Krauss’s Man Walks Into A Room. I actually have two copies: one in hardcover, one in paperback. The latter was a desk copy I used when I taught her book a few years ago. On the first day, I told my class to read actively, take notes, and mark up the page with a pen or a pencil. Eyebrows rose, and sick looks crossed their faces. Mark up the book? Really? Oh, you betcha! And, of course, we did. Mark this paragraph. Mark that sentence. Cross that image out. Toss an exclamation mark there. Note the spot where you’ve lost the narrative; note where you pick it up again. The paperback version is a history of reading, the memory of that class and those students, my history of experiencing.
I own four copies of So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. No, really: four copies. The first one is from college, one was a gift, and the other two, honestly, I’m not sure how I got them. My original, the one from college, has all kinds of marks: sentences underlined in red, margin notes (many of which are illegible), page numbers circle, full sentences written at the bottom of the page at the end of chapters. Even now, seeing the first chapter again – I mean, I marked almost every word, somehow – I appreciate, years removed from the first time I made those marks, how much Maxwell put into each and every word, understanding the care he took in a way that I couldn’t have conceive twelve years ago.
My copy of Snow Falling on Cedars is nicely warped; the top right corner bends down, the lower left bends forward. Always, the book’s weight has helped it to rest on a table, making it easy to lay flat. My copy is used, and in pencil, two previous owners have marked the pages late in the book where they want Guterson to “get it over with” (pages 387 and 421, if you’re curious).
My favorite though is my collection of Raymond Carver stories. You know the one: with that intense stare, his head jutted out, almost disembodied, waiting for you to throw a punch. I’ve had this collection for years. The pages are faded now, and there aren’t many marks in this book, just checkmarks and circles around the page numbers in the table of contents. All the corners are rounded; it has that lovely smell of dust that you find in old library books. Despite the number of times I’ve read these stories, the pages remain tightly together and compact, and the spine is clean and unmarked. Recently, I lent it out; it’s back now, on the shelf, waiting. Before that, I had yanked it off the shelf to reread “Where I’m Calling From.” I had just had a long conversation with an intern here about how I think it’s his best story (really) and why; talking about the story, I could picture the pages of my copy, mentally walking through the last scenes, when the narrator sees Venturini on the ladder outside his bedroom, when he’s standing at the pay phone and making the phone call.
There are other paperbacks, of course, many that I could rattle off. In the future, there are going to be new ones too, or old ones that become revisited so much they develop into those books that linger like the hint of a memory. The Kindle and the Thatcher Wines of the world can’t sell that, can’t reproduce that, can’t measure our experiences in square footage. That’s for us and our books that we bend, batter, reread, mark up, becoming as distinct to us as our fingerprints. For that, we should all be happy.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.
Your Audience Does Not Exist
Last week, Chad Harbach of N+1, a literary magazine based in New York, posted an excerpt of his forthcoming essay. Harbach’s excerpt, posted on Slate, posits the provocative suggestion that contemporary prose writers have two publishing options: MFA or NYC. The former is the university circuit which has a heavy focus on the short story, and an emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism that one would expect to find in academia. The latter is the New York publishing world of big social realist novels of middlebrow art, written mostly by older white males, with a production philosophy similar to the Hollywood blockbuster. I am paraphrasing a bit (a lot?) but it’s a fascinating article because, unlike most discussions of MFA programs and publishing, it is rational, thoughtful, curious, and engaging.
Recently, our blog discussed why MFA programs struggle to teach good novel writing, and Harbach’s article has expanded the discussion to examine the “systems” that create novels, and makes two distinct classifications. Naturally, as with any “either/or” choice, this is a little reductive and there are natural outliers that will spring to your mind. That’s okay. The premise, though, seems relatively sound, if a bit simplistic. The article nods to the excellent book by Mark McGurl that examines the “program era” of fiction writing. McGurl’s book—which you should read if you haven’t already—narrows things down significantly in order to explore the influence of programs; McGurl examines only American fiction in the academy after World War II. Most criticism of McGurl’s book often ignores this, which McGurl states clearly in his epilogue.
Anyway, the point is that when Harbach, McGurl, and others try to identify what is happening in contemporary literature, there is a quick and enraged group of voices who are incensed that they aren’t writing a withering attack on writing programs (see: Shivani, Anis). Harbach and McGurl are not, though, interested in taking polemic sides. Rather, they are simply trying to identify what they see and say “Isn’t that interesting?”
Okay, sure. But it needs more than that. Now that we’ve identified this distinction, what does it mean?
Let’s stick with that pretty simple “either/or” and say that there are two groups of people that are interested in this: readers and writers.
One of my good friends recently wrote me and explained her interest in writing a “young adult” novel. I’m a bit of an elitist, and I think she was just making sure I wouldn’t fold my arms and look down my nose in disdain at her. Of course I wouldn’t: she’s an awesome writer, a dear friend, and we have to write the stories we are compelled to write. But here’s the thing that puzzles me about YA—or any other genre of fiction, even any category of books—that doesn’t seem to get discussed much: I don’t know if people read only one category of writing.
That’s probably not entirely true. Market research indicates that people that buy one self-help book tend to buy many more self-help books. They are hooked. Certainly, some readers devour all of Elmore Leonard or lots of crime fiction or whatever. Most readers I know, however, are diverse. The categories that publishing house or bookstores put on books doesn’t really matter to readers: we want to read good work, we want to read often, and we tend to resist being told what to read. We—the modern reader, the person who not only does still read, but reads widely—doesn’t really care what tags we put on things.
Did this book come out on Knopf? Random House? Akashic? Dzanc? Flatman Crooked? I’m suggesting the modern reader doesn’t really care. This conversation, MFA or NYC, doesn’t matter to a reader in the least. Thanks to the internet, it’s pretty easy to find unusual or strange or off-beat titles: the long tail of publishing means nothing is out of print or inaccessible. Harbach’s article isn’t really for readers. It’s for writers and reaching an audience.
Am I obsessed with the idea of audience? It seems to me that if you are creating art, whatever your medium is, you must have an audience in mind. We don’t create art solely for our own satisfaction; that strikes me as solipsistic and narcissistic, and good art communicates (unless you want to say you are communicating with yourself, but you know, that’s the kind of circular late-night bar argument that gives me a whiskey headache, and makes me close my tab and head home earlier than I’d like).
What Harbach is pointing out then is that as a prose writer, you have a choice. To me, he doesn’t present a very compelling choice: the NYC option seems to be pretty rough unless you have an AARP card and plan on writing a very particular novel. One of the elements that Harbach generally ignores, genre fiction, strikes me as having a similar if less explicit problem: by tagging yourself a particular genre, you have to give yourself over to particular conventions and techniques (“tricks”?) that are expected of your predetermined style of choice.
The question of audience seems to be a problem particular to the novelist. Poets and short story writers live in a vacuum (I know, I know; but c’mon, this needs to be a short-ish post, okay?) that novelists do not. The novel is a choice implicitly accepting the constraints of audience.
And yet, as a writer, I think perhaps the best approach is to ignore audience.
For those of you who know me well, you are probably laughing and shaking your head. I think way too hard about everything. Everything! And the idea that I would suggest a “Don’t worry, be happy” attitude (digression for Marc McKee: “…was the number one jam/Damned if I said you could slap me right here!”) towards your audience seems as out of character as I could possibly get. I won’t disagree.
But writing is often about paradoxes. Take a real basic one: we all want to be happy, but when it comes to fiction, we don’t want to read about happiness. We want drama, in whatever capacity the writer presents it, because only trouble is interesting. Happy in life, miserable on the page. That’s weird, right? Hey, that’s being human. And, maybe, being a writer.
Thinking about audience, or what publishing market or house or category your work fits in, can become paralyzing. It’s like muscle memory in sports: you do the same thing over and over again, painstakingly working on the mechanics of a movement—jump shot, backstroke, whatever—until you aren’t thinking about it at all. Same thing here. You read and read and read, digesting all those novels, stories, poems, and essays, until your sense of audience is second nature, a thing that you respond to subconsciously.
The audience will be there for good work. I really believe that. Hold those two opposing ideas in your mind—who is my audience, there is no audience—and you might discover something freeing about letting it all go. A little touchy-feely? Yeah, maybe. But those of who rage against the dying light are, I think, in the end, optimistic. We think it matters. And what publishing house, academic machine, or cultural critic can really tell us otherwise?
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.
Illuminating The Numbers Game
The organization for women in the arts, VIDA, recently released their examination of the gender breakdown in the Best American anthologies. Their findings, which can be found here, takes a look at the three major anthologies in the series – Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Poetry – dating back to 1978 for BASS and 1986 for the other two. Along with examining the gender of the work in the anthology, VIDA counted the number of “notable” or “distinguished” pieces that are shortlisted in the back of each book. The numbers are not encouraging.
Here is the percentage of women who were either published or short-listed in each anthology from 1986 to 2010:
Best American Essays: 32%
Best American Poetry: 39%
Best American Short Stories: 46%
BAP does not have a short-list: either you are anthologized in Best American Poetry or you aren’t. The numbers above are the percentage of women recognized, in any fashion, reprinted or short-listed. Because there is the subjective taste of each guest editor to consider, the short-list recognition should be acknowledged because the pool of candidates strikes me as a critical aspect of this discussion.
What I remember of my stats classes in college (classes in which I probably earned a C-minus) is that there is usually a statistical error of three percent, plus and minus. Think of presidential polls: that 50% could really be anywhere from 53% to 47%. Continuing my rudimentary understanding of stats and numbers, I don’t think that applies here. There isn’t any dispute about whether or not John Updike is a dude or not. There isn’t a matter of how the poll question is phrased: John Updike is a dude.
VIDA has also worked this year to show more transparency, which was a criticism of their evaluation of the gender ratio of publications and reviews in major publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and others. VIDA has taken their figures and pie charts and put it all on their website. When VIDA wrote about the major magazines and their publishing record, our web editor Patrick Lane took the time to look at our previous year’s numbers.
What VIDA has not done is really evaluated these numbers and provided context and meaning. There are lies, damn lies, and there are statistics. This is not to say, at all, that VIDA is somehow rigging the books, but just providing statistics without intelligent and thoughtful evaluation of those numbers simply isn’t good enough.
One of the things worth noting here is that over the time period examined, BASS has always had a female series editor. Should we be surprised, then, that BASS has published and acknowledged more women compared to the other two Best American series? The same (male) series editors have been running Poetry and Essays for twenty five years. But do remember, the decision ultimately lies with each year’s guest editor: if we point to the series editor’s gender, we also, then, need to look at the gender of the guest editor. What’s the breakdown there?
Best American Essays: 12 women, 13 men
Best American Poetry: 7 women, 18 men
Best American Short Stories: 16 women, 17 men
Here, Best American Poetry looks quite bad. Again, it is also the only one that doesn’t have a short-list. But look at Best American Essays: plenty of women have been the guest editor. During that time period, only once has the guest editor selected more women than man (Joyce Carol Oates in 1991), and most years, it isn’t even close. Does that seem odd?
At The Missouri Review, and presumably at the other literary journals and magazines that first publish the work appearing in the Best American series, the sole criteria for publication is whether or not the writing is good (digression: I realize calling the work “good” or even discussing our criteria for “goodness” can become tangential, but I’ll try to stay on topic). Last year was my first year working on our Editors Prize. We read and re-read and discussed and argued and questioned. Including our winner, we published three stories that were originally Editors Prize submission. All three are written by women. Our prize winner in the essay is male; we published two other essays (non-contest) in our recent issue, both by women. Did the gender of the writers ever come up? No. At no time, not once, was the gender of the author mentioned. That’s not our criteria. In the same way that we don’t care about the race or ethnicity or MFA program of the author, gender is one of those things that, as literary editors, we don’t worry about.
On the flip side, there is an essay we published a year ago, Rachel Riederer’s essay “Patient.” This essay is about a young woman who gets her foot run over by a bus, and the excruciating recovery process that she goes through. Evelyn, our assistant editor, told me that Riederer’s essay is the piece that she has heard about more than any other this past year. Women readers, Evelyn said, have really responded to that essay, one that is as much about Riederer’s sense of self, her appearance, how the world will view her if she remains crippled, as it is about surgery and medicine.
This October, Riederer’s essay is being reprinted in Best American Essays 2011.
Now, this is anecdotal. This is just one office, one literary journal. I can tell you we receive lots of terrific work by women, and I can tell you that our editorial staff doesn’t care about the writer’s gender, and I can tell you we pick based on artistic criteria, and I can tell you that in one specific insistence we published an essay by a woman that will be republished in the Best American series. I can tell you all sorts of things like that, all indicating that literary journals, or at least ours, are on the level.
But VIDA’s numbers remain troubling. Something looks wrong, feels wrong. As an arts community, we are told that women are overwhelmingly the ones buying books. We are told that women are writing quality work. Yet even when magazines like The Missouri Review claim to be gender neutral (our senior staff, by the way, is made up of 2 men and 3 women), and even when the guest editors of Best American anthologies are women (who are chosen, obviously, because they are successful writers themselves), it does seem like women are published less often than men, and that it is a trend that is simply not improving.
Could either of these explanations be plausible:
1. Women submit work less often than men; consequently, there is less work by women to choose from.
2. Women are not writing work that is as good as men.
The latter is obviously not true. The awards, recognition, and readership earned by Dorothy Allison, Rae Armantrout, Rita Dove, Jennifer Egan, Nadine Gordimer, Barbara Kingsolver, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, ZZ Packer, Julie Orringer, Sandra Cisneros, Annie Dillard, Zadie Smith, Cynthia Ozick, Tayari Jones, Nicole Krauss, Eula Biss, Leslie Silko, Jayne Anne Phillips, Toni Morrison, Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Strout – and I could go on for a very long time here – indicates that #2 is false.
Let’s try the other: are women not submitting enough work to literary journals and major magazines?
I pulled a portion of our submissions from 2011 for an incredibly unscientific look at work we’ve received in the last six months. Here is where that “take this with a grain of salt” caveat about stats seems apropos. I took a random sampling of 750 submissions we’ve received since November 2010, looking at both postal and electronic submissions. Be warned – this is approximately 6% of the submissions we receive each year. And there enough holes in my methodology that you could probably drive a truck through it. Nonetheless:
Poetry Submissions by Women: 36%
Story Submissions by Women: 37%
Essay Submissions by Women: 50%
Surprised? Me, too. Purely an educated guess, but I would say we don’t receive nearly as many nonfiction submissions as we do anything else. Let’s say 15% are nonfiction, 25% poetry, and 60% fiction. The majority of the work we receive, of course, gets rejected, the publishing reality of receiving nearly 14,000 submissions and publish maybe 60 each year. I have not looked to see how many people are serial submitters, writers who receive a rejection from us and then instantly send us something new. But it seems that we simply are receiving less work from women than from men.
Am I, then, putting the responsibility of weak publication numbers (quantity, not quality) back on women writers?
Yes. Let’s call it a partnership. As Roxane Gay pointed out, this conversation about women in the arts often falls back to talking points and conventional wisdom. What we need to do, as editors and publishers, is let women writers know their writing is welcome here and we want to read more of it. After all, if you see VIDA’s figures on the New Yorker, and you’re a woman, doesn’t it seem like your work is inherently already at a disadvantage with their editors? Our record indicates that we publish terrific writing by women all the time; our submission record indicates that we aren’t getting enough work from women to consider.
What else is our responsibility? To acknowledge this issue. VIDA published their findings last week. The response to this has been, well, a little quiet, not nearly the same amount of interest that their February study of major magazine publications generated. Why so quiet? Just one more question that I’m curious about. Maybe the problem is that no one really wants to take a shot at Best American. After all, all writers still want to be published in Best American. As mentioned in VIDA’s conversation with women published in Best American, everyone wants to be a part of Best American, though often the reason seems to be for career reasons, not for aesthetic reasons.
If people like me – young writers and editors – are silent on this issue because I want someone to scratch my back down the road, some fear of upsetting the wrong person in the right position, then the problem is simply perpetuated. You get morons like V.S. Naipaul rather than “Hey, Jill Abramson is the new executive editor of the New York Times.” That’s unacceptable. Adrienne Su wrote that magazines shouldn’t solicit and publish women writers just because they’re women, and that women don’t send as often as men for a complex range of reasons. I couldn’t agree more.
What we are probably looking at are the symptoms of how women are viewed and treated in American culture, and that publishing figures found by VIDA are indicative of a cultural problem, not the problem itself. Still. We want to say and do something meaningful rather than recycle the same old rhetoric. Let’s make that simple effort.
So: women writers: send us your stories, poems, and essays! Your work is always wanted here.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review.