TMR Editors’ Prize
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Current Issue: 35.1 (Spring 2012)
Poem of the Week- David Kirby: “If Any Man Have an Ear, Let Him Listen”
- Larry Levis: “Labyrinth as the Erasure of Cries Heard Once Within It or: (Mr. Bones I Succeeded. . .’ Later)”
- Amy Newman: “The Day After The Dean of Michigan State College Admits Him To Lansing Sparrow Hospital For Rest, A Naked Theodore Roethke Barricades Himself Behind A Hospital Mattress”
Tag Archives: writing
On The (Not So) Fine Art of Literary Rejection
Each semester, The Missouri Review gets new interns at our magazine. We also hope to have at least a few interns take the class for a second semester, and this semester, we do have six students who were with us in the fall. I don’t have to explain to anyone who has run a literary magazine (or, really, any business) how tremendously valuable it is to have good, reliable people working for you, and we’re very grateful to have them back with us again this year.
This also means we also have a new batch of interns joining us who haven’t read manuscripts for us before. The vast majority of manuscripts we receive, even the really good ones, are returned to the author, unaccepted. That’s just the nature of literary magazines: we receive far more manuscripts than we can possibly publish.
How we handle rejection is a delicate thing. It’s very easy to think of it as just another mindless task when there is always a fresh stack of manuscripts that have just rolled in and need to be read. In our first production meeting of each semester, our associate editor, Evelyn Somers, always emphazies the same critical point: we read looking to accept, not to reject. It’s a tremendous difference in your frame of mind not to say “What’s wrong with this piece?” but to say “What do I love about this piece?” In class, I regularly remind our interns that the writer spent weeks (and, really, more like months or even years) writing the story that they just read and that we need to treat each manuscript with the same amount of respect and patience that went into creating it.
We’re two weeks from AWP, and this will be my third spin with The Missouri Review staff. When writers come and visit us at our table, they tell us how much they appreciate our rejection letters: I’ve heard that “you send the nicest rejection letters” and “you give the best responses.” To be fair, usually, people do not come up and curse us out and tell us our rejections are cruel and unfeeling. AWP tends to be friendly. Still, saying, essentially “That was nicest refusal, like, ever!” used to strike me as a very odd thing to say.
However, the more I write, and consequently the more work I send to other journals, the more rejections I receive. I get it. I really do. How we handle your work matters. I’ve brought up specific things every single week to my class—compliment or comment but not critique, keep it professional but friendly, don’t make assumptions, etc.—and our staff takes this task very seriously.
This past week, I received three rejections on the same story that bothered me a little bit. And a taste of my own editorial medicine is a good reminder that there is someone, always, who receives those SASEs from us and that even with the best intentions, can get pissed off. Including me.
The point of this post is not to point fingers or be angered that they turned down my work. Hey, I wanted my story to appear in their magazine because I know they publish terrific fiction. They turned down the work, not me, and that’s just how it works. I know that better than anyone. No, what bugged me were the comments. Each editor gave comments that were, I believe, intended to be helpful. Instead, their comments made me question their judgment, that they misread the story in such a fundamental way that I wondered how on earth they had read the same story I wrote.
In one of his essay collections (I’m afraid I can’t recall which essay), Charles Baxter wrote about receiving a rejection letter from an editor. I remember being stunned that Baxter’s stories still got rejected (his are probably from the New Yorker. But, still) but also how he viewed the rejections: he understood the editor’s position but also believed the editor was wrong about the work. The editor had seen so much of a certain type of story that his exhaustion immediately turned him off to Baxter’s story, making him believe Baxter was attempting something that, in fact, he wasn’t.
All three editors focused on a particular part of my story that, I knew, was the most challenging, both for me and the reader, and that if the story fails or succeeds, it’s probably right there. I’ve never received such a length response to my work from an editor (unless the editor was accepting it), and so I know, from writing such lengthy responses myself, that these editors were genuinely trying to be helpful. But the commentary turned into criticism, and suggested that I do something that I am less and less interested in fiction: explanation. One editor suggested nothing happened in the story up to this particular scene, which is about two-thirds of the way through the story. Another editor asserted that all the events in the story should be explained, all the connections drawn clearly, scene by scene, so that the reader could completely understand exactly what the story was trying to say.
Well. This sounds awfully didactic to me. I don’t quite see why any work of fiction (or any other form of creative writing) needs such a clear explanation. The more things get explained in fiction, to me, the more the story feels less imaginative, less engaging, less true (in whatever sense of that word you want to go with). This is a fine line to be sure; stories have to make sense within the milieu they exist in. But, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the reader of my story hadn’t experienced heartbreak before. I made a judgment on the editor, as a person, and that’s absolutely the wrong way to view editorial comments. It’s just about my story. That’s all.
Maybe my story needs more work. Maybe it gets accepted today. The point is that even though the comments I received felt off to me, they were written with genuine belief that the story deserved a detailed response. These editors were being generous, and despite my initial annoyance, I understand that. All of us at TMR know how awful rejection is. We all do. Every single person on our staff that has had stories, poems, and essays rejected knows it all too well, and we know that our work will be rejected again in the future. It’s not pleasant. And if we screw up and send you one of these rejections, one of these notes that angers or annoys you, believe me, it was not done with any malice. We’re doing our best, whatever failing that might bring. Keep having faith in the work we do. Because we’re definitely keeping our faith in yours.
Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye
What In The Doghouse Really Means
1.
On the coffee table in our meeting/conference/hangout room, there are several back issues of Ploughshares scattered about. One of these issues was Jean Valentine’s issue, the Winter 2008-09 issue, which was one of the last issues with Ploughshares old look, two issues before their redesign. I picked it up and flipped through the table of contents, and remembered that I had read the stories by Andrew Altschul and Fan Wu before, but that I hadn’t read the Megan Staffel story “Salt.” While waiting for coffee to brew, I sat down and read the story.
A few days later, one of our office assistant’s was flipping through the same issue. I told him he should read the Staffel story.
“You can tell it’s by a mature writer,” I said.
“How?”
I frowned. “You just can. There’s a richness to the narrative. Just something about the first two pages screams Confidence. You know?”
He nodded. I nodded. Neither of us really knew what I was talking about.
2.
I don’t know where I first heard the phrase “in the doghouse.” When my friend asked me where I got the phrase, I had no idea. I wanted to say, who doesn’t know what that means? But, obviously, she didn’t know where it came from, and trying to answer her question, it was pretty clear I didn’t either.
I said my parents. I said my grandparents. I’m sure we’ve all said “You’re in the doghouse” to suggest that someone is in trouble. No, not just in trouble: it’s not for something immediate, something that just happened, like catching a child who has just accidentailly thrown a baseball through your living room window. “In the doghouse” suggests a state that you’ve been in for a while and will remain in for the foreseeable future. Doghouse stats has been earned over the course of days, weeks, even, and a current doghouse resident is not getting out of there anytime soon.
Where did that phrase come from? I asked our audio editor, Kevin McFillen, about this. Had he heard the phrase “in the doghouse”? He said, sure. When I asked where it came from, he didn’t know either. He said he remembers seeing a couple of old black and white cartoons from the 1930s where people were finding their tents occupied by dogs, and that, maybe, he wasn’t sure, the etymology of the phrase had something to do with Tent Cities all across the country, when people found that had to literally live in the doghouse.
With Kevin’s help, I looked up the cartoonist A.B. Frost and found these images, which when you think about it, are pretty vicious: teasing the homeless, the downtrodden, literally sending the dogs after them.
More searching. One website suggested this was from the old custom of banishing a bad dog outside to is doghouse, which probably is, for words, fairly new: once we started living mainly in cities, we brought our pets indoors with us. Banned to the doghouse, then, is a bit bougy!
Two more from this website, which I’m just going to go ahead and fully crib here:
Alternative: The story of Peter Pan – in which Mr. Darling treats the beloved pet dog badly and his children fly off with Peter Pan. Mr. Darling feels so guilty that he lives in the doghouse until his children return home.
Alternative: This expression is a railroad term dating back to the era of steam locomotives. The railroad unions mandated that a head-end (front of the train) brakeman be so positioned. However, there was no room for another person in the engine cab (which housed the engineer and fireman). The railroads then built a small windowed shelter on top of the engine tender (where the coal and water was stored) behind the engine. It was called a doghouse since it was small, cramped, smoky, cold and generally miserable. Thus, the expression ‘he’s in the doghouse’ referred to the brakeman in his uncomfortable moving shack.
3.
I was re-reading one of my student’s stories, and came across a description of a cafe that was troubling me. The narrative was describing the way the waitstaff was moving from the kitchen to the front room. The word “room” came up three times in two sentences. The phrasing, while struggling to be clear, lost its rhythm.
From working in bars and restaurtants, I knew that restaurant staffs referred to being up front—where the customers are, rather than in back, which is the kitchen—as being “on the floor.” But, of course, the entire restaurant is on a floor: it doesn’t float in space or something (digression: I would love to go a restaurant where everything floats). Floor has many conotations, but the right one, for the scene, can be a bit confusing. You can’t say the staff is moving from “the kitchen to the floor” because it sounds then like the entire staff is diving to the ground to avoid machine-gun fire.
Of course, one could call the front room “the floor.” It’s not just a matter of the word choice. It’s a matter of all the sentences and images and actions and characters around the word “floor.” What the story lacks, what the writer is still working out, is how to sink fully into the world of the story with words that make it seem effortless. Any arresting phrase or image or moment needs to make the reader dig deeper into the story, not instantly claw one’s way out.
But how do I explain all that?
4.
Recently, a writer-friend posted on Facebook, asking all of us—that old collective “we”—about a dispute she was having with her editor. She wanted to know what we thought of the word “tweaker” and what it means. We were asked to not look it up. Just post what we instantly thought of the word. I thought “Meth!” (hey, I live in Missouri …) which is what, for the most part, everyone else said, with one or two exceptions. At least one person, perhaps several, pointed out that it entirely depended on the context.
This is true! And not. The word is loaded. Full clip and one in the chamber. If you sat and thought about it, there are dozens, hundreds probably, of words divorced from their original meaning to become something entirely unintended. Maybe because we’re all pals on Facebook, all of us were too like-minded to give a fair response, for all of us to represent the Intended Reader.
Let me try now to bring this altogether. I’m going to fail. Which is, actually, the point that I’m after. How does the full awareness that I’m reading a confident storyteller like Megan Staffel, the etymology of phrases that doesn’t seem to have any clear genesis, and consideration of how to use the words “floor” and “tweeker” all come together? Looks, to me, like I went from big (story) to medium (phrases) to small (word choice).
Focusing on choosing the right word is not a mistake. Looking for the specific word, tearing through the dictionary and thesaurus, pondering the syllables, the rhythm of the word, what images the word conjures for the reader: yeah, that’s what writers do. However, there is something else here that is bigger than examination of a single word.
There is also that larger quality of the work that seems to absorb everything else the writer has seen or heard, osmosis I guess, and sponged it into the story. You tend to know when you are reading a Southern writer, right? Same thing here. We can learn from other writers about how to make shapely fiction, the art of fiction, how burn down the house, bring the devil to his knees, all that good stuff, but in the end, we can’t mimic someone else entirely. “What’s the word” starts becoming “What’s my vision”—and that small change of possession makes all the difference.
Other than on weird celebrity reality shows, doghouses are quite small. Their closed off, contained. No one likes being there. Outside, though: that’s your world. Our world. Taking ownership of that vision, and speaking of it with the kind of confidence that blends the best word with the distinct phrasing of your vision is what takes the work from pretty good to unforgettable.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
Violence of the Lambs; Or Why I Didn’t Write About That
Originally, this posted was going to be about John Jeremiah Sullivan’s new collection of essays, Pulphead, which I finished reading last week. I was going to write about how the book itself is really fantastic, but there is one essay “Violence of the Lambs” that I really didn’t like, at all, almost to the point of anger, because Sullivan’s makes most of it up, then says so, doing one of these not-so-clever clever things that seems to be happening in creative non-fiction lately: poking holes in the idea of “truth” in a way that is lazy and not particularly interesting.
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
Why Literary Journals Charge Online Submission Fees
Why does The Missouri Review charge $3.00 to receive online submissions? This practice is becoming more common among print journals that accept online submissions, including Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, American Short Fiction, Southwest Review, just to name a few. TMR has had an online submission fee in place for many years, but the latest Poets & Writers (Nov/Dec) has just been released, and there are several articles on literary magazines, small presses, and what we’re doing to build community. Included in this issue is Laura Maylene Walter’s essay “Price of Submission” about why literary magazines charge for online submissions. It’s a good article – go read it! But there are a couple additional thoughts we’d like to add, some specific to TMR and some broader about our literary community.
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
The Dangerous Idea of Your Story
This semester, I’m teaching an introduction to fiction writing class, the first time I’ve taught an intro class in four years. Thanks to the popularity of creative writing classes, several sections of intro to writing fiction (or poetry or nonfiction) are made available, and this keeps the classes small: my enrollment is limited to fifteen, which I’m very lucky to have – I’ve heard of creative writing classes with an enrollment as high as thirty-two students. Yikes.
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
Not Measuring Up
I have not read Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, but it’s been recommended to me twice, once by Slate and once by a friend who used a less convincing method than Slate’s accolades. The week that she was assigned Veronica by her fiction teacher, my friend would come to my apartment, sit on the hardwood floor with her backpack over her head, ask for a protein bar, weep, eat her own chapstick, and shout, “I will never be as good as Mary!” I would say, “I don’t have protein bars. Do you want popcorn? Who is Mary?” She would respond, “Veronica!” I searched for snacks while our Abbott and Costello misunderstanding continued until she exhausted herself or found her way out of her backpack. When I finally understood that her distress stemmed from the feeling that she would “never be able to write like Mary,” I responded without hesitation, “Well, yeah.”
I never thought too in depth about how I manage, or think I manage, to appreciate the craft of a work without allowing it to get in my head or interrupt the development of what I hope will be a distinct voice. I have always attributed any initial talent I had for writing to the osmosis of reading all the time and eating family dinners with some good storytellers. I knew that the value of assigned readings in school was to hone critical thinking and motivate new art. I could see where my own desires to be a writer fit into a larger literary world, but I never wondered how I measured up. I tried to think of an analogy to describe the way that I read–a comparison to explain why I don’t compare my writing to real authors.
Mila Kunis on a Saturday, I think.
I think “real authors” hints at my psyche when I read. My warped view of celebrity has become a useful way to describe the unattainable, don’t-even-think-about-it attitude I have toward published, bound, essay collections versus my own Microsoft Word printouts. Mary Gaitskill is famous and I know that she is famous because she has written a book and she must be really famous if that book is assigned in school. Fame is odd and mostly fictional, but it is a separation. There is reality where I am and then there is a cloud of celebrity that I can wander around in when E! News is on or when I read a Sarah Vowell book. She’s been on Conan and the radio. I can’t aim for Conan or the radio when I write an essay. It’s with this same reasoning that I don’t end up rolling on the floor with shoes on my hands and a clutch in my mouth every time I try to get dressed and realize I won’t be able to do it as well as Mila Kunis.
It’s probably an unhealthy, somewhat destructive, and a very un-The Secret way of living life to suggest not shooting for the moon. So aim for your personal best or whatever, but everyone already knows that. From what I can tell, a writer spends the rest of their life developing a style and a voice that is distinct. I want my distinctions to remain fresh, not end up muddied by taking every good work of prose as a suggestion.