At The Missouri Review, we published Daniel Woodrell’s story “Woe to Live On” in 1983, before it was expanded into a novel and then turned into the movie Ride with the Devil by Ang Lee.  Daniel has been to visit and read for us, as well.

The movie is being hailed as the best of the year by many critics and is fascinating both in how melodramatic and sentimental it is.  Protect the Children in a Heartless World!  Fight Against All-Encroaching Evil!  Daddy’s Dead, What Will We Do?!  It’s a flick that could almost have been made in 1916 on a rooftop in New York.

That’s not to put it down.  On the contrary, Winter’s Bone is evidence of how primitive and get-back a good movie can be.  How with good detail and actors, with thoughtful choice and handling of a heroine (the movie makes her slightly purer than the book) and scenic veracity, one can tell a wonderfully compelling story.
Thematically, both the book and the movie rise above simple melodrama with one particularly interesting idea: the self-ordering of social groups—even a group of outsiders.  The druggies in Winter’s Bone finally resolve their own conflict because they really are the only ones for which it makes any difference.

It’s a dark story but oddly uplifting.  I recommend it.

Speer Morgan is the editor of The Missouri Review. His most recent novel, The Freshour Cylinders (1998), was awarded an American Book Award.

So: a big Congratulations to our iPad winner, Ember Johnson of Lake City, Minnesota!  The super awesome 3G + WiFi + Future of Digital Reading device is on the way and should be in Ember’s hands by the end of the week.

As the summer heats up and Missouri becomes brutally hot, we’re inside McReynolds Hall, reading carefully in search of new work for the Autumn issue.  Where’s the Summer issue, you ask?  At the printer!  Vol. 33.2 should be out right around the first week of July.  So that week, along with fliers for Fourth of July sales, you should also receive a new issue of TMR complete with new fiction by Becky Adnot Haynes, Nathan Hogan, Devin Murphy, and Wade Ostrowksi, new poetry by John Evans, Benjamin Grossberg, and Jonathan Johnson, essays by M.C. Armstrong and Sharon Solwitz,  and a new interview with a Marvelous and Very Awesome Famous Writer that you won’t want to miss.

The Missouri Review makes an effort to write comments on our rejection letters.  According to Duotrope, about one in three of our writers receives a personal note.  Sometimes, this is as simple as a little ink on the rejection slip (when I get rejected, which is often, I for one, absolutely count the “Sorry” scrawled on the rejection letter as “personal” even if, well, really, I’m being a wee bit optimistic counting that as a personal note).  Sometimes, there are acknowledgements of what is working in the poem or story, and sometimes, there is a little bit more, getting into the specifics of what didn’t quite work.

What does this mean?

To be pragmatic, it means that your work has been turned down.  It means No.  Nothing more or less than that.  This is one simple, rational, and perhaps mind-saving way of looking at the rejection process.  It doesn’t, ultimately, mean your work is good or bad.  It’s one subjective opinion from our staff.

So, why do we bother to write anything at all?  Because we’re writers, too.  And because we know what it means to the writer, somewhere, to get that response, however small, knowing that we simply can’t do it for everyone.  Why not?  Because we receive 14,000 submissions every year.  We simply can’t write back to every writer.  There is no way we could do so and still publish a quarterly literary journal.

How we decide who to write to and what to write is, like the submission process itself, a subjective response driven by experience.  I write the author back when the work deserves it.  I write back when the work has those moments that open your eyes and makes me feel I’m no longer reading something too familiar, too commonplace.  My comments are always sincere and encouraging, and however brief, when my name appears on a rejection, it should give the writer (I hope) encouragement that the story was engaging, worth reading, in fact, demands to be read.  So keep at it.  Write more.  Read more.  Send us your next poem, your next story, your next essay.  Be stubborn and be hopeful.  Don’t let our rejections, or anyone else’s, get you down.