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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This is a question we’ve been tossing around like a football at a tailgate (oh, does this remind you that Gameday is coming to CoMo?): flipping the rhetorical pigskin back and forth, enjoying the exercise, but no one is examining our throwing motion.  So to speak.  Patrick Lane explored the role of publishers in a digital age, and on our Facebook page, Rob Foreman asked why anyone would publish in an electronic format.  What’s the benefit of all this?

Rick Moody wrote his story “Some Contemporary Characters” on Twitter, each sentence in 140 characters, for several weeks.  I didn’t read the story on his feed but in the pages of Electric Literature, one of the best new literary journals.  Moody’s story wasn’t very good: the story was reprinted with each tweet as its own paragraph and the experience of reading it in a hard copy was, at best, choppy.  Did the EL editors or Moody consider editing the piece, pushing the tweets into paragraphs, or adding anything to the original “text”?  I have no idea and I would guess not, but I’m not sure how much it would have helped.  The story read like what it was: a series of short feeds conjured day-by-day.  It didn’t have much coherence or rhythm.  The reading experience was like reading someone’s experimental writing exercise: one can see the ideas at work but that doesn’t make it greater (better) than the sum of its parts.

In writing, form and meaning are always closely linked.  To oversimplify my answer to Rob’s question, I like electronic publishing for writing that I need to digest quickly: news and such. Literature?  Not so much.  The form doesn’t, to me, help the meaning, the experience.  But that’s me.

Let’s bring this back to good old fashioned hard copy.  I was recently chatting with writer Nicholas Ripatrazone about basketball and literature.  Baseball and boxing have been long time staples of American literature.  Football?  Basketball?  Not so much.  Searching for something basketball related, I came across John Edgar Wideman’s book Hoops Roots, which is a “genre-defying” book that is sparked by Wideman having to, at the age of 59, end his pickup basketball days.  The book is a series of meditations that go from memoir to non-fiction to fiction to who-knows-what-else, comparing basketball with writing, memories of his Pittsburgh childhood; his marriage and his children; African-American music, a little bit of everything.  I’m not exactly sure what “genre” the book is, or even if it matters what we call it.  And I’m not sure if it even works: I’ve only read the first “section” (not that reading the whole book has ever stopped me before from commenting on it).  But it’s definitely not just a sports book (which, as a rule, generally aren’t very good).

And in the opening section, Wideman writes:

Different pieces come from different places–read them in sequence or improvise.

I’m guessing this book isn’t like Cortazar’s Hopscotch (what is?) or even that the form chosen here is necessarily meant to be a pleasurable challenge for the reader.  I could be wrong.  I’m often wrong.  Wideman is a writer who has shown a willingness to experiment and play with form, not just as a writer, but as a publisher, too.

Wideman experiments on the micro level, too.  In the first twenty pages or so, I’ve noticed that Wideman eschews questions marks at the end of his interrogative sentences.  Why does he do this?  I have no idea.  But I find it frustrating.  I don’t know if there is a good reason, or even any reason, behind this choice, but reading Hoop Roots, I remembered that I’ve noticed this in Wideman’s stories before, and never quite understood the point.  Best guess?  The lack of the question mark forces a pause and consideration of the sentence by, strangely, not using the question mark at all.

Recently, in my composition class, we read George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.”  Orwell writes:

Correct grammar and syntax … are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear

I disagree.  I disagreed loudly until my students nodded their heads in agreement.  Form and meaning: the lack of correct grammar and syntax, deliberate or not, has meaning, has suggestion, and one that the writer (and, consequently, reader) should be paying attention to.  How the sentences are structured is what helps to make the meaning clear.  Done right, grammar and syntax can work seamlessly to make the reading experience smooth, rhythmic.  All of our choices as writer’s matter.  Even if that choice is one of style.

Which is what I think Wideman is after.  One of my favorite writers, Andre Dubus, used semi-colons.  Lots.  Probably too many.  Nonetheless, I dig semi-colons, and like using them.  Do I use them correctly: linking two “closely related” independent clauses?  Sometimes yes, sometimes no, I’m sure.  But I’m always using them for an intended effect, a purpose, not some random choice that I toss into my work just for the hell of it.  Whether it means the actual physical delivery of the work or the actual labor of putting our thoughts into our stories and poems, form and meaning are always going to be intertwined.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review

I always feel funny giving publishing advice to young people. This is in part because I am young myself, and I am nobody, to boot. It’s also because I’m wary of encouraging anyone to publish who hasn’t been writing for a while. Some people say that one should experience life and the world before writing and publishing – I say, forget life and the world, which will harass you and make you a reluctant part of it whatever you do; worry instead about sending a piece of writing out before it’s really finished – something I’ve done at least once, to my ultimate dismay. Years ago, I worked at a dog food company, wrote about it, published the resulting work, and looked at it again, months later, only to realize I could have written it much better with more time. Listen to me complain about something good happening to me – my signature move.

The Q&A was the part of this panel most worth blogging about, because the questions were all very good, and in most cases difficult to answer. Here are some: How do you know when something you’ve written is ready for publication? Is there a venue for publishing part of a screenplay? Is self-publishing a more viable option for an aspiring writer than it has been in the past? How does one negotiate the need to sometimes let a piece marinate in neglect, to be judged with fresher eyes later, with a pressing deadline, or the simple need or desire to publish sooner than marinating would allow for? We panelists struggled to do justice to these queries, and as we did I tried not to make a fool of myself, because everyone was watching.

My big question, in the wake of helping my fellow panelists field these questions, is, where does one go to have questions like the above ones answered, if one is not part of a writing program, or is not closely acquainted with an editor, or some such person, or does not have access to panels led by three graduate students, whose knowledge is inevitably limited? Surely there are resources – blogs, and publications like Poets and Writers, The Writers’ Chronicle, etc., to turn to, but what if you’ve never heard of those magazines, and a writing program is out of the question? What if you’re writing in a vacuum?

I suspect there is a very good and obvious answer to that question, but it’s not coming to me right now, and the other night I encountered a few people who appeared to be in the same boat.

Robert Long Foreman, The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor, is available for publication panels, social events, and weddings, though he has been busy with some things lately.

The part of Mentor that was most riveting to me was when Grimes and his agent Eric Ashworth, who worked in Candida Donadio’s agency (she represented Mario Puzo, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Stone, and Joseph Heller’s, to name but a few), sold Season’s End.  Grimes and Ashworth accept an offer from Little, Brown: $42,000 for the North American rights.  This happened while Grimes was still in the Workshop.  Season’s End was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, admittedly a mixed review, and a feature was done on Grimes in People.  Meanwhile, on the west coast, Grimes’s play, Spec, was going to be the first planned play in the revival of the Hollywood Met Theatre.

Oh, almost forgot: Grimes’s first novel A Stone of The Heart was reviewed by the New York Times Book Review and named a Notable Book of the Year.

So, approximately one month after the release of Season’s End, it’s strange to read that Grimes believed that he was a “proven failure.” He writes:

A year after Season’s End’s publication, its paperback edition was nonexistent. Twenty-two hundred hardcover copies had sold.  Thirteen thousand were remaindered. And Little, Brown had recouped only forty-four hundred dollars of my forty-two thousand dollar advance.

Does anyone else find this amazing?  This wasn’t that long ago: 1992.  How, exactly, did this happen?  Grimes explains.  Keep in mind that he’s from New York, lived for years in Florida, and was based in Iowa City:

Little, Brown arranged a brief, odd book “tour.”  I would read in Dayton, Columbus, and Toledo, Ohio. Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Iowa City, Iowa. And Madison, Wisconsin.  Also, the novel’s publication date coincided with major league baseball’s opening day, meaning it would be released with fifty other “baseball” books.  Little Brown’s marketing strategy seemed to involve keeping the book a secret in large cities, and confusing reviewers by having it arrive for reviews along with Timmy of the Little League.

Weird tour plan, isn’t it?  Here’s a big reason way: the editor that championed Grimes’s book, Pat Mulcahy, left Little, Brown shortly after Season’s End was acquired, leaving the book without a vocal supporter within the publishing, which can be a death knell for a writer.  But, along with all this, what really struck me, both with Grimes and Conroy a few years later, is how critical it was to get a glowing review from the New York Times.  The failure to get Season’s End review at all devastated Grimes, a fixation for both men that bordered on obsession.

Here’s the thing.  Reading all this, I kept thinking how quaint and old-fashioned all of this was.

Think of all things Grimes couldn’t do.  There was never any discussion in the book of hiring an independent publicist on commission.  Grimes didn’t do any other touring if Little, Brown wasn’t paying for it.  Grimes couldn’t use the Internet, still in its infancy, to generate buzz; this was even before AOL sent you discs to your that physical mailbox at the end of your driveway so you could dialup for $19.95 for a month.  He couldn’t engage his audience because he couldn’t find his audience.  Think about it: the hotshot rising star at the most prestigious writing program in the country, whose play attracted Ed Harris and Holly Hunter, whose first novel was a Notable Book of the Year, whose new book was on Little, Brown, could not find an audience.

That’s amazing.

I don’t know if the Internet could have saved Grimes’s novel (or that Grimes’s novel even needed to be “saved”).  After all, it’s not gone: you can find it on Amazon because, with online stores, books aren’t really out of print and unattainable anymore.  For all the hits publishing has taken the last two decades, for all the bad news that has been dumped atop the heads of editors and writers, let’s keep this in mind: some of these changes can be a tremendous benefit to us.  Living in today’s age, Grimes would have a great website, have a blog (and post to others), a Facebook page and a Twitter account, maybe Digg or ReddIt, too, along with, I dunno, a GoodReads account and Grimes could bang out a couple of podcasts with his Iowa buddies.  He’d have a pretty good email list, maybe even a physical mailing list, of people interested in his work.  Thanks to Google, he could find independent bookstores in any area of the country.  He could even make a book trailer.  This isn’t a good thing.  This is a great thing.

None of this completely replaces the fullcourt press from a major publishing house.  Nothing can or will, but unless you’re J.K. Rowling, those days are over.  The Hollywood hype machine has taken over publishing, and with all the books released each year, a number that increases exponentially, we get a gargantuan amount of noise about really mediocre—if not outright bad—books.  And distinguishing yourself as an author in all that noise is a big challenge.  As authors, though, we can do it.  If we can finish writing a good book (note: this is the most important thing), we absolutely can find an audience that wants to read our stories.

And the tools to do so our already literally right in front of you.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

I started to write a response in the Comment section, realized I had to go to teach class, bolted, and have been chewing it over ever since.  Usage of the present tense can be found in literature going back to the Greeks; it’s not a brand new phenomenon that has recently been unearthed in the Nevada desert (though that would have been really cool).  But the present-tense has become more commonplace in short fiction over the last couple of decades and gained popularity in the novel.  If nothing else, it is certainly a trend, and when writing moves in a generally accepted direction, we should take notice.

In fact, others in the literary world already have.  Subtropics, the literary journal out of the University of Florida run by the writer David Leavitt, has this on their submission page:

A preponderance of the stories coming our way are written in first-person present tense; we are starting to grow weary of this perspective. Please keep this in mind.

That’s been up there for at least two years now.  Why do we see so many of these present tense stories, and why are they making magazine editors cautious?

Let’s first get this out: it does matter.  In literature, form and meaning are intertwined, and the choices a writer makes are significant.  Everything in a story is the writer’s decision; nothing is preordained.  A story’s setting, point of view, protagonist’s gender, narrative voice, and any number of other nuts and bolts (or bricks and mortars) of a strong story should be chosen with deliberate intent.  All of it matters.

So it would be nice to be able to safely assume that present-tense, then, is a choice.  But in the present-tense stories coming across my desk, it rarely feels that way.  Instead, it often feels like a short cut.

In the fiction writing classes I’ve taught, present tense seems to be the default when the story lacks narrative drive.  Present tense, my students say, creates immediacy, makes the action more visceral, keeps the reader in the moment, and add tension because the narrator does not know how her/his story will end.

All true perhaps, but more often than not, present tense feels gimmicky.  Take the last example of the narrator’s knowledge of the story’s events: the idea is irrelevant in the third person (the third person narrator of course knows how things end) and second person is often nothing more than first person weakly disguised.  In the first person point-of-view, a character that knows the outcome has an amazing strength to focus on things that seemed irrelevant in the moment, but with hindsight, are quite significant.  Great memoirs seem built, at least in part, on this idea.  Instead, a present tense story makes me feel as if I’m reading a play.  And, fiction isn’t a screenplay: writing for the stage or film is an entirely different form, one that is interpreted by the actors and director, with minimal prose other than stage direction.  Why would fiction want to replicate this?

Present-tense seems to be a default mode for someone who isn’t carefully considering the style choices being made.  It flattens the story.  It flattens emotional and narrative distance and lacks the sense of shadowing, the illumination and darkening of a character’s world that strong narratives can create.  The narrative choice suggests that there is nothing to remember about the past (and the past, to badly paraphrase Faulkner, isn’t ever really in the past) and nothing to expect of the future.  There’s a smoothness to this flattening of time and distance that leaves whatever has transpired before page one of the story as wholly irrelevant.

Further, the present tense restricts the narration and, consequently, the writer.  This restriction is deliberate, I’d argue, constipation from tackling bigger and broader events by eliminating the possibility of there being anything else that the characters (and, consequently, the narrator or the writer) must be conscious of other than the Here and Now.  Opening up the story to the past takes courage and confidence, a writer’s willingness to chisel back into the past for the bones of the story.

Perhaps it’s indicative of our modern lives.  As Americans, we love saying “That’s history”, a ridiculous dismissal of knowledge and tradition because as an American, we know what we know, and don’t need all those books and all that schoolin’ (or something like that).  This modern age-ism also highlights what might be the biggest influence on writing: the silver screen, which might be one reason why the present tense has become the popular default.  Films taught us how to quick grasp shifts in time and place, leaping from one character to another, one era to another, experience non-linear events rapidly, and encouraged us to demand media to entertain us rather than engage us.

Can present-tense stories work?  Of course, they can.  The Missouri Review has published plenty of them.  Good editors can’t be dismissive of a story (or poem or essay) because of some preconceived notion of what stories should do or must do.  Breaking expectations is one of the aims of good art.  But when we choose a form, we must choose wisely.  Otherwise: well, here’s your silver screen moment.

(We really aren’t obsessed with Indiana Jones.  Honest!  We just dig his hat.)

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review