There was more. I was going to write about book reviewing, and my general sense of discomfort with book reviewing, which stems almost entirely from a lack of confidence to write reviews in a coherent and intelligible manner that would be useful or interesting to anyone. I was going to write about James Frey, and teaching undergraduates, and the difference between reading a single essay and a collection of essays, and probably some other subjects that would all tie together neatly for a pretty good Friday read for you, our blog reader.

Here’s the thing. I couldn’t finish it. Or, I could, I guess – did, in fact – but I wasn’t pleased with the result. It was a colossal mess of tangents and half-baked thoughts, and it seemed like a disservice to publish it the way it turned out.

It’s warm here – frighteningly warm for Missouri in February – and I have my windows open, again. All morning yesterday I read manuscripts. I haven’t done that in a while. Downstairs, on the third floor, TMR has a few couches and a coffee maker, and I put my feet up on a table, tucked a pen behind my ear, and read fiction submissions. Away from my desk, away from my computer, away from my phone (both office and mobile, which I wisely left upstairs). Felt fantastic. Felt really great to spend the morning just looking for stuff for the summer issue, reading other writers’ work, stories about Russian dancers or out of work truck drivers or the daughters of war veterans and such, and not really thinking about our audience, our budget, our expenses and income, advertising, none of the other stuff that is often pinballing through my mind in the course of the day.

I felt all right, reading like that.

Someone close to me recently remarked that I never say anything personal in my blog posts. Note, even, how carefully I phrased that previous sentence. Of course, that’s now what my site is for. But this person was right: I’m careful about this blog. It’s been one of the most successful things we’ve done since I started at The Missouri Review—our staff has written several thoughtful, smart, engaging essays on this site in the past two years, and our mantra has basically been to not be negative; remain about publishing, editing, writing; and be interesting. Writing about Sullivan’s work, I worried that I was getting increasingly negative and incoherent, upset about who knows what about his work, and that my post would be the kind of vitriol that our readers don’t want. Morever, the kind of vitriol I don’t like to write.

I bring this up because for almost a year and a half now, my personal life, especially this past month, has been a bit tumultuous (to put it mildly) and sitting in a chair reading this morning, I became aware of how much better I felt. Just in general. No grand epiphanies or realizations or anything like that; dark clouds will certainly move in later in the day (or tomorrow, soon, etc.). Writing about creative nonfiction and its ticks and whirls and wearing a cultural critic hat—it just didn’t feel right. No, it was more than that: it was a recognizable state of discord, both in head and heart, that I wanted nothing to do with. I just wanted to read.

When I was at River Styx, our rejection letters all started the same way: “Look. We’re all writers too, so we know how it feels.” That’s true, of course. But, what was making me a boiling cauldron of frustration yesterday afternoon was writing: not just the act of writing, but the criticism of writing and the Big Ideas behind criticism and interpretation and connectivity. What made me feel calm was reading,  just reading, nothing more. And, really, why did any of us start writing in the first place? Because we read. And liked it. A lot.

It would be silly, of course, to have a rejection letter say “Look. We’re all readers too” because that seems pretty obvious, ironic in a hipster way or something, and perhaps even a little snide. Nonetheless, it might be more true to what unifies as, editors and submitters alike, than calling ourselves writers.

If I was clever, if I had my writing cap on, I’d be able to come up with a really snazzy close here. But I don’t. Moreover, I don’t want to attempt to tack this together neatly. The messiness of this post is what’s most interesting to me, and how, by taking a little time to not think, to read without thinking beyond the story in my hands. And, for today, I think that’s all I really want to focus on. I’ll leave it at that.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

One of the things worth recognizing is that the cost of submitting to a magazine is a fixed prospective cost: a cost that will be incurred and cannot be recovered. Submissions have never really been free. It’s simply that the cost (paper, envelopes, postage, etc.) has been paid to the post office, not the magazine. And I’m not saying that it necessarily should have. Freed up from (some) of the costs of submitting to literary magazines, has there been an increase in subscriptions? Has there been an increase in financial support of literary journals from writers?

No. Not at all.

Because of this, supporters of online submission fees, like me, tend to take a more realistic and business-centric approach: there is a revenue stream that we need to capture. It is, however, a pretty small revenue stream; we earn significantly more through subscriptions. There isn’t a print literary magazine that can be sustainable—even in the most basic sense of covering its printing and mailing costs (let alone paying its staff)—solely through online submission fees. Opponents of submission fees feel that it’s a tremendous burden on writers, who are overwhelming described as poor, noble, honorable (and so forth)(and, yes, I’m a writer, too), and that the practice is unethical and unlike any other business model. Further, opponents believe that it is an easy system to rig – solicit work from writers that the editors know, then charge writers we don’t know to submit – and that because of a greater need for transparency in our community, we shouldn’t do this.

Fair enough. I’m a big believer in transparency. So. Here’s what editors ask fellow editors when discussing charging online submission fees: Will this mean I get fewer submissions? Editors don’t even look at as a revenue stream. Editors look at it as a way of slowing down submissions.

In fact, submissions increase significantly. This varies from magazine to magazine, but the increase in submissions is somewhere between twenty to thirty-five percent.

Maybe editors are looking at this all wrong. Maybe writers have done the mental math that I’ve done above and said You know what, I support literary journals when I submit online and pay a submission fee so I don’t need to subscribe to journals if I spend $60 a year on submissions. Now, that would be really rational, so the thought appeals to me (I’m Mr. Roboto like that) but it would make sense.

Why, then, don’t we avoid the dreaded “slush pile” and just solicit work from writers we know? Good question. And it really gets to the heart of why literary magazines exist and why writers want to publish in them. It is all about discovering a new voice from a new writer. It’s about finding that one really amazing story or poem from a writer we have never heard of before, and then delivering that writer’s work to a larger audience. We can’t do that if we solicit work because, of course, we don’t know who that new voice is. That’s what we – and I mean all literary journals, not just TMR – are most proud of. Literary magazines are all about discovery. The response to online submission fees is that we receive more work to read and consider, but also more possibilities of finding a new, unpublished writer.

So, then: are writers doing the calculations of going to the post office and deciding online submissions are fine? Is it just way too easy to click a button? Do writers view paying online submission fees as “supporting” the journal, adding to our revenue stream, and therefore, they don’t need to subscribe to us? I don’t know. What I do know is that as a magazine editor, the initial idea of online submission fees was not to increase revenue but to decrease submissions. That hasn’t happened, and since submissions have increased, it is reasonable to conclude that writers clearly have no problem with submitting work to us this way.

It is also important to recognize that TMR continues to accept paper submissions. If a writer does not believe online submissions are ethical or fair, then he/she can mail work to us. We continue to, and will continue to, receive paper submissions. I think it’s crucial that we leave that option open.

So, yes, TMR charges for online submission fees. No writer has to pay this fee if he or she chooses not to. What’s important about is two-fold: 1. To be fully transparent with our audience and 2. Remain open to new ideas as to how to strengthen our magazine, which includes our relationship with our audience and the biz-side of publishing TMR. Through a slightly different lens – communicating with an unseen readership, and being open to trying new things – writers are working on the same problems. It’s the same struggle for all of us—how do I create something true and authentic while also bringing it to the widest audience possible?

When you’re ready, send us your work, online or hard copy. Either one works for us. We want to read it. We want lots of submissions. It’s what all of us are here to do: read, discover, then, finally, publish.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye 

After several weeks of discussion about craft and close readings of short stories and a series of increasingly bizarre short writing assignments, we’ve started workshopping stories. Before workshops began, I gave my students a handout, guidelines for both the writers and the readers. These guidelines explain how to approach giving and receiving criticism, manuscript handling and formatting, how long their written critiques should be (one page, single-spaced), and so forth.

As we closed in on the first day of workshop, several students would linger after class and ask to speak to me. They wanted to talk about their story. The story they haven’t written yet and the story I have not seen.

Usually, the question is about the plot, and whether or not this particular plot – which I’m only hearing about right then and there – will work. Now, at this point, there isn’t really much I can say. In the past, I have given restrictions. Once, I said simply “No guns.” Another time I suggested they avoid dramatic albeit often cliched situations, such as abortion. But over a couple of years of teaching fiction writing, I’ve found that this is unnecessary. Ultimately, the problems with stories that end in guns a-blazin’ are discussed in workshop by the students, not me, which does a better job of reinforcing the idea that violence needs careful and deliberate consideration than any finger-wagging that I can do. And, now, I can just give them the article that Ben Percy and Aaron Gwyn wrote in Poets and Writers this summer (sadly, this link doesn’t give you the article but if you haven’t read it, you should know it exists and find it).

How, though, to discuss an idea? Could it be a good idea? Sure. Could it be a bad idea? Sure. Asking me “Does that sound like a good idea?” is always going to get “Well, it could be a good story …” followed by several caveats, and that doesn’t seem like a very useful answer. Telling a student “Write the story and see what happens” is probably the best of bad advice I could give, but doesn’t leave me feeling like I’ve done a very good job.

Where does this anxiety about an idea come from? Thinking back to when I was an undergraduate, I don’t remember worrying so much about an idea. Mostly, I worried that my stories were boring. I worried that the emotions didn’t come out, that people wouldn’t get how much my characters (read: the author) are suffering. But I don’t remember fretting about whether the story ideas were good or bad.

My best guess is that new writers don’t trust their own experiences, and feel that if there is An Idea that holds it altogether, everything falls into place. From somewhere deep in my memories of Things Writers Told Me, there is this: to write fiction, we have all the experiences we need by the end of our childhood. It’s one of those phrases that if you think about it to hard, it seems false or incomplete (sex, marriage, divorce?), and if you don’t think about it too much, it seems true (all the emotions that come out in sex, marriage, and divorce). Of course, like any pithy one-liner, it’s a bit cute and simplistic. Easy to remember, though.

Perhaps, then, the worry my students have isn’t about the actual writing. It’s about themselves. It’s the fear that they aren’t good enough, that they don’t have anything to say through the story, that there isn’t anything unique or interesting about their own lives. And, this too, gets answered with a simple answer: When first starting out, every writer – under all that enthusiasm and late-night writing and wordplay and happiness at writing the climactic scene just perfectly – feels that he or she is not good enough to write. It doesn’t stop us from writing our stories.

Here’s the rub. The fear never goes away.

Really. Even the author with ten books has that gnawing anxiety that the next project can’t be tackled, that the scene doesn’t work, that the characters aren’t right. And, just like the beginning writer, that’s a fear of self, a fear that we aren’t smart enough or sensitive enough. Being a little bit afraid, always, is good. Being a little bit afraid creates risk. Literature that doesn’t take risks, whether they are emotional ones within the characters or experimentation in the form of the writing (or the thousands of other risks writing can take), isn’t literature. Writing that doesn’t take any risks is the kind of writing we very quickly forget about.

My class has several goals that are factored into their grade because, hey, it’s a class and grading needs a criteria. There are stories to read and stories to write, writing exercises, participation, criticism, and so forth. But I also remember that despite everything stated on the syllabus, my goal for my students is simple. Keep writing. That’s it. I say more than that on my syllabus, but in the end, that’s all I really want them to do. And that will always be a scary thing, no matter how far down the literary road my students travel. Don’t worry about ideas. Be scared. Be afraid. Because that fear is what gets every writer to take the risk of writing the story that will be read, admired, and remembered.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

The latest issue of Poets & Writers is out now, and the cover image is thirty-one people of a wide-range of ages and ethnicities. Titled “MFA Nation” this special issue of PW is chock full of information about MFA programs: Seth Abramson’s yearly MFA ranking system, complete with an explanation of his methodology; articles on the social value of these programs and life as a writer post-MFA; wise quotes from program directors and working writers on what to consider when choosing a program; and probably fifty pages of ads from writing programs throughout the country. There is even a small section on writers who never pursued an MFA, a list that includes Jonathan Lethem and Elizabeth Strout, and writing workshops outside of traditional programs.

Five years ago, I earned my MFA, and have since taught undergraduate and graduate courses in creative writing. I don’t believe MFA programs are inherently evil and have destroyed contemporary American literature. The majority of people teaching and taking creative writing classes are all trying to do good things. Nonetheless, I’ve begun to wonder if the MFA is, in fact, a bad decision.

The explosion of MFA programs in the last thirty years coincides with something else from about the same time period: US News & World Report’s annual survey of “America’s Best Colleges.” This survey is one of the most popular, influential, and powerful publications that comes out of this country every year. This isn’t really a hyperbolic statement. Given how important college is now to, well, everyone, and how much parents get involved in the decisions of the lives of their eighteen-year-olds, and how much money flows into universities, and how surveys like US News “measure intangibles,” and how much is at stake for everyone involved when it comes to money, education (where do our top doctors and attorneys and engineers go?), and, consequently, our overall economy, the US News annual report on colleges might be the most important document of our generation.

(Which kinda blows your mind, if you think about it too hard …)

One of the things that the US News rankings does not consider is MFA programs in creative writing. It’s a pretty glaring omission for our world, an omission that Seth Abramson and Tom Kealey have been working to fill. Abramson, through both his blog and Poets & Writers, is the dominant name; Kealey made a name for himself by criticizing underfunded programs, Columbia’s specifically. These two, and others, have done a tremendous amount of work to peel back the layers of MFA programs and get applicants to make informed decision about their decision.

The similarity between the US News and PW is striking: collegiate ranking systems that determine which program is “best.” It certainly suggests that MFA programs are about something much more than just “time to write.”

I’m sure we all want to say that any MFA program is for those two or three years where an emerging writer gets to focus on his or her craft. The MFA program is an arts degree. Time off from the world to focus on writing. The intrinsic value beyond the page. Making better readers. Etc. Still, one of the results of all these MFA degrees are, like it or not, the creation of an army of people that are asked to teach low-levels of composition, rocking four or five or six classes per semester for adjunct pay.

This post is not attempting to argue, at all, the merits of the creative work or the intentions of students, teachers, and administrators. MFA programs are academic programs and are not particularly difficult to graduate from – one would have to screw up to a remarkable degree to not graduate from a MFA program once you’re accepted. The writing workshop is still the foundation of MFA programs, even if there are programs that are much more rigorous about teaching pedagogy, literature and linguistics courses, innovative publishing technology and techniques. And I’m sure there are people that pursue an MFA in order to be just straight-up writers, or work as a literary agent, or some other publishing venue.

But let’s not fool ourselves about where program graduates end up. We cannot stick our head in the sand about the reality of the post-MFA world. If programs are aiming to work in universities – and while there are, of course, exceptions, that is what the bulk of graduates are aiming to do and encouraged to do – then programs need to be more realistic about what exactly they are preparing their graduates for. What if programs honestly told students that if they want to teach at universities, that MFA graduates are a dime-a-dozen? If MFA graduates truly want to work in a university, what if programs stressed the importance of a rigorous education in literature and all it encompasses – critical theory, comprehensive exams, a dissertation the size of a dictionary? What if we honestly ask ourselves: what does this degree actually prepare our graduates to do?

For a writer with the goal of teaching at a university, even teaching creative writing, a MFA might be a lousy choice. Most find that what MFA programs are really good at (besides time out from the working world, of course) is providing deadlines: workshop due dates, thesis or dissertation defense dates, and so forth. And being a writer has to come from within, from a need to write, a need to finish projects, a need to revise until the work is right. People pursuing a MFA probably know both of these things already – what, then, does the degree itself provide? Creative writing is rarely lucrative, in and of itself. Advice on what to do would, as always, depend on the person I’m talking to but I’m no longer so sure of the MFA is the best answer. Nowadays there are so many newly minted MFA graduates – and more every year, growing, it seems, at an exponential rate – competing for jobs in a bad economy where one or two books (which is hard enough to do) simply isn’t enough.

If a writer feels an advanced degree is the way to go, the MA/PhD track, then, might be the wiser way to go. Does it take longer? Sure: but one shouldn’t be paying for a liberal arts degree anyway; funding should be one of, if not the most, important criteria. Further, it is terrific exposure for anyone to study literature in its entire range, rather than the narrower focus on the last forty years that MFA programs typically focus on. This is good not just as a writer, but as a scholar and thinker as well. It also prepares the writer to teach a wide-range of courses that makes one a much more attractive candidate for a tenure-track position.

There are many excellent professors, brand spankin’ new and decades old veterans, who hold only MFA degrees. One could absolutely be a terrific professor and a write a dozen wonderful books: they exist now and probably always will. But if asked, I’d suggest taking a long, hard look at pursuing a doctorate at a program like Florida State, the University of Cincinnati, or any of the other thirty departments that offer creative writing doctorates. It might be the wave the next great shift in creative writing programs, and isn’t it better to be ahead of that curve?

Correction: As my mentor Mary Troy points out in the comments section, the MFA is offered in the UM system, one at Missouri-St. Louis and one at Missouri-Kansas City. It is not offered at Missouri-Columbia, the main campus, where I work. (added Sept 1st)

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

On most trips, I take at least two books: one to get me out there, and one to get me back. On the way to Boston, I read Inman Majors novel “Wonderdog.” The other book was “Candide.” Really. And after thirty pages of that, I decided I couldn’t read any more Voltaire, and headed off to the newsstand. I announced I was going to “buy trash.”

For me, trash translates into sports magazine or men’s magazine. Either one would be fine. Despite numerous pages of advertisements, GQ usually does have a couple of really good articles. Sports is sports, and I could read about the MLB trade deadline and a human interest story or three about an athlete from the 60’s who has fallen into obscurity, or drugs, or obscurity and drugs. No problem!

Instead, I bought Harper’s.

It was a long rectangular store, and the back wall was crowded from floor to ceiling with magazines. There were rows and rows of loud covers: half-dressed men and women, blurry photos of celebrities, ominous photographs of poverty or shadowy images of cities and highways, surrounded by bright packages of chocolate candy bars, bags of candy and pretzels and nuts and chips, coolers loaded with soda and fruit juice and water, a steady hum from the omnipresent televisions hovering in the corners.

My stomach growled and my back ached, and the thought of eating any of this food or reading any of these magazines frustrated me. Why did I have to consume – yup, consume, both my reading and my food – such garbage? There didn’t seem to be anyone else around me. And finally after ten minutes of dithering, I gave up trying to convince myself that there was nothing wrong with reading Sports Illustrated, shrugged and grabbed Harper’s, then reached the counter, and in the next second was back at my gate.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge I was tired and crabby: everyone is a little worn down by the end of a vacation, particularly a “vacation” that was a long weekend based on a wedding. Those aren’t relaxing. But I tend to have the same response when I hear the phrase “summer reading”: just sort of puts me on edge, for two reasons. One, it’s the idea of consumption (notice that the “summer reading” books all have basically the same three or four very similar cover images and layouts). Second, there is the feeling that the book industry believes that when it’s hot outside, no one can read anything other than The Help. Most summer reading isn’t as diverse and interesting and challenging as this guy’s vacation reads.

I’m in the middle of reading The Help right now (really) and I don’t think I have anything to say about that Roxane Gay hasn’t already said better. Maybe the film is okay. I wouldn’t know. In bookstores, there is often a section of “summer reading” that are the books assigned to local high schools. There are some duds in here too, of course (one year I saw “The Secret” was assigned), but on the whole, high school summer reading tends to be books that are sneakily better than you think. Or, maybe, more accurate, better than you remember. Last summer I re-read a pair of books that are often assigned to high school students, and found that they are much better than I realized, that there was in fact a pretty good reason why those books were read and taught and enjoyed every year.

We have to read what captivates us. Why wouldn’t we? Other than what might be assigned for classes – either classes we are teaching or classes we are taking – some writers will admit to feeling that they haven’t read enough. That they haven’t read enough “good” books or the classics or the canon and that, somehow, this makes their own writing ambitions premature, illegitimate. I understand that anxiety: I used to feel this way, too. But there is so much to read. So much great stuff to read. And once we let go of the worry about reading everything, we can take the summer to read one great big book, like Infinite Jest or Anna Karenina.

Summer has another month to go, but for those of us affiliated with a university, in many ways, summer ended this week with the beginning of the autumn semester. We all have enough worries: literary journals reopened for submissions, new students, new colleagues, why hasn’t my agent returned my phone call?, where’d the Borders go?, mailing costs, papers to grade, and so forth. Why worry about what you’re reading? Why follow a marketing trend?

Go ahead and grab that copy of Dostoevsky you haven’t read yet. Great books are worth reading regardless of the weather. And I’m sure Fyodor reads nicely with flip-flops and an umbrella drink.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

My Unfinished Novels shows that there is not one specific reason that comes up repeatedly as The Reason that novels are left incomplete on a hard drive or in a desk drawer. Some writers just found that they ran out of steam and couldn’t think of anything else to write. Some had life get in the way – a new job, a new relationship, a child. Others found structural flaws, or tried to get it published and couldn’t, or couldn’t stop tinkering and never quite got it done. One writer found her closest writer-friend actually killed her interest in writing. Another had the only copy of her novel eaten by her computer and couldn’t sustain the energy to write it again. How far did these various writers get? It varied from ten pages to one hundred thirty thousand words.

Two things initially intrigued me about the site. First, that people shared all the reasons that their work failed, which is a fairly open thing to do, given how secretive many writers can be about sharing unfinished or in-progress work. Second thing: unfinished novels are called “failures.”

Thinking about it, I feel like I’ve written three novels, but only two actually spring to mind: the one that is currently out wandering the publishing world and looking for a home, and the one that I wrote in graduate school. My grad school novel had an ugly title – Oscillations – and was three hundred forty(-ish) pages long. I turned it in for my thesis and my advisers read the whole thing and discussed it with me for two hours. The shortest summation of the book is that it was the story of two men, a father and his son, told over a period of twelve years, exploring how they ended up at the fractured point the reader meets them in: the first chapter is the chronological end, so the novel goes backwards in time.

I read Charles Baxter’s novel “First, Light” and really admired the mosaic quality of the story of two siblings. I wanted to do that, but in my own way. I wanted to write the book in a linear fashion, however, and going backwards in time was a way of making it unique (to me, at least). So the book was based on An Idea and, unfortunately, the idea wasn’t all that interesting and, perhaps more importantly, I couldn’t actually make it work, a fact that my thesis committee pointed out in the kindest terms they possibly could, advice that I resented at the time that I now am very grateful to have been told. I spent about fourteen months writing the novel, then another three after my thesis meeting, before putting it down and writing a completely different novel.

My grad school novel cannot be saved. It does not work. A few years ago, out of curiosity more than anything, I flipped through that grad school novel, and found that I had no interest in trying to make it work. The story struck me as having flaws and problems that are so inherent to what I created that there is no fixing it. Even if I wanted to fix them. Which I didn’t. Maybe that was the biggest thing in the end: not just paying lip service to my committee and acknowledging the book didn’t work, but being able to truly see why the book didn’t work on my own.

That’s a good thing, and why I wouldn’t necessarily call my unfinished novel a failure. In writing, there aren’t really failures. I don’t think so, at least. There are books and stories that get finished, and there are ones that don’t. This could just be a bit of sunny-side up optimism, but the foundation for the novel that I have now can be found in the grad school novel that I never completed to my satisfaction. My grad school novel does have a complete story, a good ol’ beginning and middle and end. I did finish the book. Yeah, second draft finished, but still, finished nonetheless.

Failure in writing is pretty simple to me: you stop writing. If a novel or poem or essay stops you from continuing work on it or preventing you from throwing it aside and working on the next new thing, well, that’s failure. But discovering that something you’ve worked on, no matter how long you’ve been at it, doesn’t work isn’t failure. That’s learning. That’s apprenticeship. That’s writing.

I’m nitpicking a bit: after all, the My Unfinished Novels website is supposed to be (I think) fun, and leaping all over the word “failure” is a bit over the top. Still, I worry that when it comes to our writing life, we are too quick to self-flagellation when maybe all we need to say is that the process of writing is years of work that is frustrating only if you choose to see it as frustrating. Unfinished isn’t bad. Especially if you’re always willing to sit down and right the next one.

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.

This week on the Washington Post, there is a puff piece about what colleges do as setting in popular culture. I was pretty content, part of my Monday morning reading in search of the weekend essays on writing and publishing that I had missed, all while I sipped my second cup of coffee. But I started taking the article more seriously when I came across these two paragraphs:

A citation in fiction means an institution’s brand is sufficiently familiar to help define a fictional character: Princeton preppy. Penn State party boy. MIT brainiac. Harvard kingmaker. Berkeley radical. Notre Dame jock.

Writers create collegiate identities for their characters for the same reason motorists affix alma mater bumper stickers to their cars — college can be central to our sense of social identity, as essential as home town, career or income bracket. A writer might just as easily peg a character as a Camel smoker or a Prius driver. But colleges are more richly evocative than cigarettes or cars.

For the last two years, I’ve had a break from teaching creative writing. This strikes me as neither good or bad, just the way my working life has gone. Zero complaints and all that. But this fall, I’m teaching Intro to Writing Fiction and the How Does This Work? of writing has crept back into the front of my mind. It has been more than two years since I taught a beginning class, and even there, the students aren’t all on the same level. Some of the students took creative writing classes in high school; some had never taken a class but had been writing for years. Some were poets who wanted to try something new. Some had never written a thing. Some, even, seemed to not even really enjoy reading.

(Yeah, that last group puzzled me, too …)

Point is that everyone comes in to that first class with a different background, different writing ability, and different expectations. One aspect of their writing, however, that is strikingly uniform is the heavy use of pop culture in their fiction. It’s probably the most prominent common denominator of beginning creative writing classes. This isn’t a surprise. Pop culture has permeated the 21st century to the point where we get our “reliable” news from The Daily Show. This isn’t the end of days – no, really, that was last Saturday (did you miss it?) – as some like to claim, but rather, how technology has made the kind of gossip that humans have always loved from way back when easier to find and access. For centuries, people have wanted to know what’s up with their neighbors, with their leaders (lords? dictators? shoguns?), with the British royals. We love spreading gossip at the pubs, out at the general store, in the airport lounge. That isn’t my complaint at all.

The worry is that popular culture has become so ubiquitous that rather than engaging your reading audience, its usage actually prevents and stops thought. Sounds weird, but if a character is described as appearing “like a young Michael Jackson” the reader can just glide over the description, maybe smile a bit if its quirky in context, maybe even get the reader to grab his or her nearest iPod and crank up Off The Wall. Michael Jackson or Sony or the thousands of Michael Jackson songs, stories, rumors, and what not have taken the story from the writer. There’s not likely any skill or technique there. It’s about as unimaginative as a writer can get.

There are, of course, plenty of good examples where specific use of brand names has an intended and important effect. The novels of Bret Easton Ellis are one clear example. There is nothing inherently wrong with using brands … if there is a point. For my beginning writers, however, it is rarely a decision made so thoughtfully. Instead, it seems as if they are falling into a convenient and lazy trap of giving their imaginative powers to the wizards of Hollywood and Times Square. Why say something unique and remarkable when the shortcut is already provided?

It’s interesting how this article highlights the gleeful way colleges and universities will play up their “brand.” Even the fact that higher learning institutions are so obsessed with their brand, that they even think of themselves as a product like Gillette or Pepsi or Rocawear, is disappointing. To wholly contradict the above quote, frankly, the university name dropping is never, never, enough to characterize anyone, fictional or real. I’ve thrown this at my students before and will certainly have to do it again: “You all go to school here. Are you all the same?”

Of course not. Name dropping, branding, pop culture references, however you want to tag it, can be a dangerous thing. Much more interesting in the article is this quote from John Gregory Brown, an English professor at Sweet Briar College, who says that specific universities “suggest the ghosts that might be lingering in a character’s life.”

Now that, I love.

There’s a story in there, one that compelled a character to attend a particular university, despite being haunted by something (perhaps unknown to the reader, perhaps unknown to the character) about his or her new stomping grounds for the next four years. The idea of ghosts gives us tension going forward (how does this haunting shape the story?) and digging into the character’s past (who is this person?) in a way that is, hopefully, explored in the story, book, essay, whatever form the writer is using. Naming a university might be a jumping off point, but it’s not a logo that can slapped on a character. It must be a detail as specific and exacting as anything else on the page.

I’m a sucker for campus novels and when it comes to TMR submissions, I love stories set at universities. But I love them the way I love Bruce Willis movies: I like seeing Bruce smirk, curse, shoot everybody, then smoke some cigarettes, but those flicks are visual junk food, not something I’m going to return to for that higher level that great film, music, or literature rises to. Name dropping a university is never sufficient enough to define a fictional character. Never. But when it comes to mining the ghosts of our characters, those formative four years of their lives are a great place for a little gravedigging.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review.

Picking up on this week’s theme of “strategy” as started by new contributor Sara Strong (okay, I’m not sure how the fantastic video of the PERIL launch fits the theme, but, meh, you know …), my sense of planning and organization has been thrown for a bit of a loop. A recent basketball injury has, quite literally, hobbled me, but a major frustration for me has been a sense of my writing schedule being fractured and unfocused.

This is not the same as writer’s block. As I alluded to in previous posts, I do not believe in writer’s block. To me, saying “I’m blocked” is already a failure, a vertiginous spiral of self-loathing and excuses. I have never sat down and thought “I can’t write.” Sure I can. Novel isn’t working? Write a novella. Novella isn’t working? Write a short story. Or a poem. Or a good sentence. Write drivel about what I ate for breakfast that morning. Yesterday I received an email from the good folks at One Story, introducing me to Karl Taro Greenfeld (well, not really “introduced”: TMR has already published two stories by Karl), whose new story “Partisans” is One Story #149. In the email, Karl writes about the best writing advice he ever received, which came from his father:

He told me: all writing makes you a better writer, even writing you don’t want to do or don’t think you should do. He’s a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, journalist who spent much of his life writing movie scripts for money and magazine articles for the checks, and realized that he learned a lot about writing even when he didn’t much like the work he was doing. Sometimes that unwanted work is what makes you better. I’ve found that to be true as well.

I couldn’t agree more. Write something down. The rest follows.

But …

I’m somewhere else right now. I’ve finished my novel, which is in the hands of my agent. After that, I wrote a novella, which is in the disinterested hands of small press editors. After that, I revised some stories. After that, well, that’s where I am now. And I’m working: a new novel, new stories, an essay about basketball that seems to literally have no ending, and the occasional bad limerick. Writing isn’t the problem. The problem for me is that, right now, I feel like I’m not writing anything particular good, even after several weeks of working on, and sticking with, the same piece. The writing just seems to be mediocre at best, as if I’m simply churning out work for the sake of doing so. If I’m not interested in what I’m writing, why would anyone else be interested in it?

This worry has plagued our blog contributors all year long. It’s really quite easy to post a blog; the difficulty is its content and making your words worthy of an audience. In large part, the purpose of a blog is the immediacy of delivery (“publication”?) and efficiency and speed are not qualities to be lightly dismissed. Quality of content, however, is important too, and stressing the need for balance has been a challenge for us all year long. Like all the other contributors to TMR’s blog, I have always leaned pretty heavily on quality over speed, which is only natural for those who call themselves “literary writers” (whatever that means) and rarely, if ever, have a rabid audience waiting with baited breath for our nest post.

(Though, to be fair, if you want to designate yourself our rabid audience, we’re good with that …)

What I’m trying to appreciate is what Karl stressed: all your writing is significant, all of it matters. In last week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the power of borrowed ideas in his essay “Creation Myth.” About two thirds through the essay, he nicely blends psychologist Dean Simonton and the Rolling Stones (really) into ideas about how creativity actually works. “Quality,” Simonton said, “is a probabilistic function of quantity.” Or, as Keith Richards said, the band had so much creativity that they had to slosh their way through so much mediocre work in order to get to the great music that became “Exile on Main Street.”

I love this idea, difficult as it is for me to fully embrace it. Hard work will get our poems, stories, and essays there. More writing will lead to better writing. This is going to be quite a task for me, letting go the question of whether or not my sentences – as I’m writing them down – are good or not, and simply focusing on getting it all down. Not even, really, a question of first or second or third drafts, but believing in the process of writing for the sake of doing the work. Writer’s block? Forget it. Building blocks? Yeah, something like that …

Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review.

Martha Graham in motion, as photographed by the legendary Barbara Morgan.

Yesterday, Google ran one of their patently cool images with their logo. Visitors to Google yesterday discovered their logo was animated by dancing figurines in honor of Martha Graham’s birthday. The animation was fantastic, and I clicked to find out who Martha Graham was, a name wholly unfamiliar to me. To put it too simply, Graham was the preeminent dancer of the 20th century, a massive influence in her field for generations, a woman who performed in the White House and was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

There is a tremendous amount to read and discover about this artist, but this quote is where I want to focus today:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

That’s a big quote, a block quote, the kind used for padding long essays. But, please, do read and think about it carefully. There’s so much going on there.

The four words I’m interested in here really needed to be read in their context to understand why it has been messing with me for the last 24 hours. It is this part: “No artist is pleased.” On its surface, that seems both true and awful at the same time.

Imagine never being pleased with the work that you’ve done. Regardless of whether you are a writer, dancer, or any other kind of artist; if you are a teacher, editor, web manager, store owner, market analyst, realtor, engineer, financial officer, it doesn’t matter – what if you are never, ever, pleased with what you’ve done?

That seems like the kind of thoughts that lead to heavy drinking and permanent despair. Or maybe it’s just a matter of how you look at things. I read “No artist is pleased” and I start thinking words like failure, discouraged, dismayed. But I’m not sure that’s what Graham meant; or, maybe more important, I’m not sure that’s the way we should take it. We don’t live in a black-and-white world: saying you aren’t happy doesn’t logically mean that you are sad. There are many, many, many emotions on the spectrum to get a person from one end to the other.

Graham goes on to call this a “blessed unrest.” (Digression: it is, by the way, very tempting to look at each word in this quote and overinflate it with meaning. “Marching”? Does marching make anyone else think of warfare, falling into conformity; or do you take it simply to mean “going forward”? Is there an arrogance in “being more alive than others”? Like I wrote a few paragraphs above, there’s so much in this quote…) While futzing around with what this could possibly mean, I’ve tried to take it as a certain drive to work again and again on one’s art, regardless of medium, and realize that there is always more to be done, more to be explored.

This has to be, must be, a positive. Any artist who treats this drive with despair has already failed. It’s an internal push to always do better, to always make something better. That can, of course, wreck the work: ask a painter about when he or she couldn’t stop tinkering with a painting, and you’ll likely hear a few stories about ruined canvases. Same, too, with writers. Not knowing when something is done, not knowing when the “blessed unrest” forces you to write something new rather than continuing to carve away at something old, is a maddening state to be in. It’s one that takes time, persistance, and a certain amount of stubbornness to not only but continue to push thorugh imte and time again.

Summer for me has always been a time to switch gears with my writing projects, usually moving from the novel that I’ve spent nine months to short stories that have been scraps of paper scribbled down during the winter. Schizophrenic of me? Or just a blessed unrest? I’m not sure. I’m not sure there is a clear and easy answer to that. But I do know that it’s good for us, with warm weather calling, to keep our art fresh, more blessed alive than all others.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.