The Missouri Review

As a grad student intern at The Missouri Review, one of my duties besides reading manuscripts is to blog. But what? After a few false starts it finally hit me: keep it simple, stupid. Write what you know, or at least what you’re learning. Blog the day-to-day at TMR. Blog the bundle.

Now I imagine this endeavor could get boring, but I think it will serve at least one useful end: to demystify what goes on at McReynolds Hall, the place where many thousands of manila envelopes are delivered each year. Perhaps one is yours. This summer I will bike to McReynolds every Tuesday afternoon to meet with the other students enrolled in “Internship in Publishing” and then again on Wednesday to put in my office hours.

The first place we interns learned about was the mailroom, number 357 of a nondescript brick building on the northwestern edge of campus. Submissions to the magazine are delivered here and sorted by genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry). They are then logged into the computer and bundled with rubber bands into groups of ten. A packing list is included with each bundle of submissions. The intern/reader writes a brief note about each manuscript on this sheet of paper. More lengthy critique can also be written on the submission’s envelope. At any time In the mailroom there are stacks and stacks of bundles piled a foot high and sometimes six feet long. Scores of bundles, hundreds of submissions, all waiting to be read. When a bundle is checked out by a reader, he/she makes a copy of the packing list, signs it, and drops it into a bin. This indicates he/she has taken possession of the bundle.

You’re probably thinking this all sounds very bureaucratic and inartistic. I agree, but I guess banal systems are the only way to deal with mounds and mounds of paper without fast becoming overwhelmed. The eureka moment requires a lot of patient sifting - probably why they call it the “slush pile.” When a reader finds a good story, essay, or poem, he/she passes it off to another reader for a second opinion. This process continues until either a consensus is reached that the piece isn’t up to par or until it’s passed up the editorial chain to the senior editor, Speer Morgan, who has ultimate say over everything we publish.  One of the goals of TMR is to discover new writers, and we do read everything you send us, whether or not you have an agent or a beefy list of publishing credits to your name.

But don’t fret too much if you get a rejection letter. We receive so many submissions, even superior pieces are bound to get rejected. I know this is easy for me as an intern to say; as a writer, I know the feeling of rejection, like someone has looked into my soul and said, “No thanks.” It’s really not that bad, though. Think of it more like a lottery. The stronger your writing, the more tickets you have, but your odds of winning are never going to be great. At any rate, you can’t catch a fish if your hook ain’t in the water.

That’s what I like about my work here so far: the off-hand chance that the next story I pull from a bundle will be an undiscovered gem, a new classic. The process makes me feel like a prospector. The bundle becomes my claim, my mountain stream, my sluiceful of ore. Send us some gold, people.

During an early scene in Roberto Rossellini’s 1953 film Voyage to Italy, Katherine Joyce sits in a canvas sling chair on a sundrenched veranda, eyes obscured behind stylish shades.  Tempestuous Mt. Vesuvius looms in the distance as she tells her remote, work driven English husband Alex (George Sanders) about Charles Lewington, a former lover and poet who died two years before.  The stark, romantic landscape evokes memories of Charles, though Katherine’s sad, rapturous voice suggests that his ghost has been with her all along. 

“We got on terribly well together,” she says and then goes on to describe how the weak, frail man braved a high fever to be with her.  

Her husband, languid and blasé, calls her dead lover a fool.

Rossellini re-tailors Gretta’s mournful reverie from the close of “The Dead” to suit Katherine’s sophistication and Europe’s post-war ennui.  Still there are so many echoes that it stirs one’s passion for Joyce’s classic short story.

Katherine’s confession further irritates the couple’s troubles as does her spiritual pilgrimage to find Charles’ presence in the locations of his poetry.  What if Gretta had had gone back to Galway in search of Michael Furey?

Gabriel transcends his jealousy to empathize with his wife’s loss, while Alex remains resentful and bitter.  In the end, Rossellini reunites his couple during a scene so sudden and abbreviated that the viewer is left nervously off-balance while Joyce’s reader is awed by his hypnotic closing intimation of universal mortality.

Voyage to Italy’s themes, the miscomprehension that can happen between couples and the continued presence of the dead among the living, takes the reader back to the original text as does a much truer adaptation, John Huston’s The Dead (1987).

In the hands of an artist, literary borrowing is an exciting, creative endeavor.  Updike was able to retell Hamlet from Gertrude’s and Claudius’ points of view.  (In Updike’s tale, Hamlet is what my students would call a “girl-pants wearing emo boy” whose pathological recklessness leads to the downfall of the kingdom.).  In Kate Moses’ Wintering , the last days of Sylvia Plath’s life are creatively imagined as she struggled in a cramped flat with two young children, her husband’s betrayal and one of London’s worst winters while writing the poems that would make her name.  And, of course, Jean Rhys 1966 post colonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea tells the tale of the first Mrs. Rochester, a white Creole woman who is transported from the Caribbean to England only to endure an unhappy marriage.

In the film adaptation of Brian Morton’s novel Starting Out in the Evening,retired professor Leonard Schiller’s (Frank Langella) monastic life is interrupted when Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious graduate student from Brown, wants to write her senior thesis about him and his out-of-print novels. He’s flattered but politely declines. He’s recently survived a heart attack. Time is precious and the writing is coming slowly. His fifth novel refuses to take shape. The characters, he says, don’t seem to want to do anything interesting.

I was so intrigued by this movie and its depiction of a mid-list writer in the twilight of his career that I showed it to my creative writing students, thinking that they might identify with, or at least admire, Heather’s boldness and tenaciousness as she efficiently bates and nets her prey. Not only does Leonard let her into his home, he also submits to her fierce personal questioning, an affront to his high decorum and his belief in New Formalism.

After an hour, I released the students who had “real” finals to study for and dorm rooms to pack, but I kept the movie playing for the four who stayed.

As Leonard and Heather’s relationship develops into a quirky, fragile May-December romance, one young woman I know to be squeamish about sex started fidgeting in her seat.

She erupted into a loud, barbaric “yuck” when Heather dips her fingers into a jar of honey and touches them to Leonard’s lips.

An argument about the appropriateness of the relationship was ignited. Two of the students were all for it. “It’s mostly just brain sex,” one said.

But all of them felt that Leonard was being manipulated. Though Heather has only published a brief essay on Stanley Elkin in a small literary journal, youth has conferred her with power. The old, too-long-ignored writer is putty in her hands. When he gives her a key to his apartment, my students groaned “oh no,” as if he’d signed his own death warrant.

Heather’s youthful arrogance angered me, too. Over tea, she accuses Leonard of using age as an excuse for not getting on with his work. She also wants to know whether sacrificing his personal life for his art has been worth it; after all, who is reading his books?

I’ve heard that during World War I when military men were given a few days furlough, they found the business-as-usual bustle of the Parisian streets befuddling. To them the city seemed untouched by war and they found few who could relate to their experiences on the battlefield. Writers feel a similar lack of empathy for what goes in their own private artistic trenches.

Writers are hard on each other. Even worse, they are hard on themselves and seldom feel the pride they deserve for confronting the blank page.

Few people worry themselves with the struggles of the imagination. I was reminded of this when I read Roddy Doyle’s story “The Bullfighter” recently published in The New Yorker. The protagonist is perfectly content with his life of nine-to-five work, wife and children, and weekly drinking buddies. Or perhaps this is simply a writer’s idealized depiction of the easy joy of a life more spectacularly ordinary than his own.

Lisa K. Buchanan, who was our first runner-up in the voice-only creative non-fiction category of our 2007 Audio Competition, can currently be heard on the KQED’s “The Writers’ Block” reading her winning entry to Opium Magazine’s 2007 “Bookmark Contest” in which authors had to submit a 250-word story that could be printed on a bookmark. You can listen to this episode of “The Writer’s Block” here.

You can also listen to Lisa’s winning entry in our audio competition on our podcast.

I was riding my electric bike through the neighborhood last evening at the quiet hour.  No wind, no traffic, no hard pumping up the hills. A few people gardening in their front yards looked up and smiled as I tooled by.   And what was I thinking about?

The meaning of the suffix “-ate.”  Yes, that’s right.  Riding my magic bicycle at the perfect hour of the perfect day of the year, I was thinking not about love, not about vacations, not about the price of real estate, but about suffixes, particularly the one deriving from the Latin that means to cause to happen-expectorate, recreate, congregate, stimulate, cogitate, fornicate, mediate, associate–one could go on forever with the -ates.

What a wonderful thing the mind is.  It is as free flowing and unpredictable as the weather.  If a hundred experts sat in a room working hard for a week, they could never guess what I was thinking about on my ride.  Or if they did, they could certainly never guess both that and what I thought about next.  And to guess three successive thoughts?  No way, except with the help of Borges’s infinite library.

I think that’s why fiction and poetry are potentially more amazing than every other art form. It’s not a single moment, not a work of static art or of the awkwardness of moving pictures, powerful or not, but an unpredictable process of unfolding which a good story or poem can follow with the ease and naturalness of the miraculous weather of the mind.

While we have stacks of submissions waiting to be read, we’re once again short in the interview department. If you have an unpublished interview with an established author, please query me at mutmrquestion@missouri.edu. Past interview subjects include Richard Powers, Antonya Nelson, A.M. Homes, Julian Barnes, Charles Baxter and Stuart Dybek.

We’re also looking for good, sharp essays that deal with current trends in literature to complement our recently revamped book review feature. No scholarship, please—but smart essays that take on literary issues or controversies are very welcome. You can submit online with a note to my attention, or query me at mutmrquestion@missouri.edu

I remember myself as a shy, soft spoken little girl, but the kid that appears in the home movies I recently inherited is anything but bashful.  My father filmed my dance recitals, a riot of miniature ballerinas dressed as pink shrimps, lightening bugs and yellow birds.  Clumsy and uncoordinated, my place was in the back row, but by the end of each number, I was center stage.  During curtain call, I bowed with broad, flourishing gestures.  Dancing, turning cartwheels, generally vamping for the camera, as a little girl I came across as a future sexpot not a book worm.     

People misremember books as well.  We often have ideas about novels that have little basis in reality.  Three obvious examples come to mind. 

The first is On the Road.  Because of its obvious association with the Beats, one might assume that it’s a road book more on par with Natural Born Killers than Going My Way.  But rather than being about sociopathic hoodlums joy-riding across America wrecking havoc wherever they alight, it is a novel about a group of sensitive, well-meaning kids who occasionally nick a tank of gas and a loaf of bread to keep on moving.  They’re not criminals but spiritual cultural seekers.  The book has a sad, sweet generous spirit, and the narrator Sal Paradise is certainly more angel than devil.

Bright Lights, Big City is reputed to be about sex, drugs and rock and roll.  Yet, the novel has three brief references to rock, despite a title borrowed from a Jimmy Reed blues song.  And as for sex, the narrator is all talk and no action.  Depressed over the desertion of his wife and the death of his mother, he lets his promising career at a New Yorkeresque magazine flat line and his sense of self-worth plummet.  The McInerney of Bright Lights is a precursor to today’s metro sexual.

And why does everyone think that Holden Caulfield is crazy?  Some fifty years ago, a rumor was spread that Holden tells his story from a mental hospital because he’s cracked up.  I guess that’s flashier than being in a sanitarium for TB.  Holden is certainly sad, alienated, and, at times, a real bummer, but he’s not mental.  Like the narrator in Bright Lights, he has a bad attitude because life has recently dealt him a harsh blow.  His younger brother, Allie, who he loved and admired, has died of leukemia. 

Perhaps, these mistaken reputations have done these books some good.  Selling a novel as a quiet, thoughtful meditation on loss and loneliness is certainly not going to get a lot of dates with readers.

But mean, brooding and sexy?  We’ll go out with that.

We’re pleased to announce that the second ever Missouri Review Audio & Video Competition is now open and accepting your submissions. You might notice something a little different from last year: the new video category. We’re very excited to see what you can do with this new option. We are also continuing the Narrative Essay, Documentary, and Voice-Only Literature (Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction) from last year.

Full guidelines and the entry form are available here.

And check out last year’s winners in our archived podcasts.

[Tara Yellen is the author of the recently published novel After Hours at the Almost Home.]

My first semester of teaching, I was a graduate student in my early twenties at the University of Colorado. I’d arrived, I was certain, entirely prepared to teach.  I had articles and short stories — and an arsenal of exercises.  Exercises on objective detail.  Exercises on dialogue.  Exercises for free writing.

But, the second week of classes, a student surprised me at my office hours. She was a “nontraditional” student, in her forties, returning to school to work on her writing after raising a family. She was talented.  She was also crying. 

“Everything I write is awful,” she said. “I can’t get myself to turn it in.”

I was prepared with writing exercises.  Terrific exercises. There’s this one where you sit your class in front of the window and have them jot down observations of passersby.  It helps with description. But here was this woman, who’d had kids, spent years writing, older and wiser, asking me what to do. I was suddenly at a loss. Everything I write is awful. I’d been there so many times myself.

            And then, just as suddenly, I was transported.

            “Make it terrible,” I told her.

            She stopped crying and squinted. “What?”

            “Your next assignment.  Make it crappy.”

            She laughed at me.

            “I’m serious,” I said, and tried to look, if not older, than at least taller. ” If it’s good, I’m going to give it back and ask you to do it again.”

            It wasn’t an original suggestion. Many writing teachers use it. I got it from one of my earliest mentors. In fact, as my student stood there, red-eyed and confused in my cubicle, I could hear my teacher telling our class: Dare to be awful. Just get something down. All writers have shitty first drafts.

A moment of support, a small suggestion-and enormously freeing.

I’ve been fortunate. I’ve had wonderful writing mentors throughout my life-first my parents (my mother always had a book in her hand and my father read poetry to me), and then through high school and college and graduate school. At UVa, my professors read the manuscript for After Hours at the Almost Home almost as many times as I did.  They guided and coached and coaxed me as I (somehow) extracted a novel from a jumble of character and idea. And there wasn’t just the writing itself that I needed help with. There was finding an agent, navigating the publishing process.  Figuring out how to make a living. Just reminding me it was possible.

My own mentoring has helped me enormously-certainly in the immediate sense that I’m reminding myself of new approaches, different things to try, but also in that it puts me outside myself, it give me another lens on the world. In addition to teaching, some years back, I helped run a mentoring program for middle school girls, and I was astounded by the difference just a few hours with a kid can make — for everyone involved.  Teachers can inspire and be inspired. In the best situations, it becomes a symbiotic relationship.

We no longer live in a world that automatically fosters young writers — instead we have dazzling, delicious pre-processed entertainment.  So, more than ever, I think, we have to create that world.

That student, we’re still in touch.  She has since coached me at least as much as I’ve coached her. And, as for that class, she’d been able to turn in her next assignment, after all — though it wasn’t crappy. It was actually pretty good. But, no, I didn’t make her redo it.  Dare to be good, I thought, and I felt it: both taller and older.

Photo: Editors’ Prize winners with Jeffrey E. Smith at the Editors’ Prize Reading (4/12/2008): (from left to right) Otis Haschemeyer, Jude Nutter, Jeffrey E. Smith, & Robert Kimber.

On the sleety evening of Saturday, April 12, we had the pleasure of hosting the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Reading and Reception. Despite rampant flight cancelations leading into the weekend, Robert, Jude and Otis were all able to join us. We had an incredible pool of submissions for last year’s contest, but our winners’ readings demonstrated the qualities of freshness and heart that won for them these prizes.

Many thanks to the prizewinners for traveling to Columbia to share their work with us. Thanks, too, to the prize’s benefactor, Jeffrey Smith, and to our local friends for braving the unseasonable elements in the name of literature – and mini-quiches.

Those of you who weren’t able to attend the reading can discover the prizewinners’ work in issue 31:1, now available (those of you who did attend have undoubtedly already secured your copies).

Photo: An excited audience at the Editors’ Prize Reading (4/12/2008).

Visit our MySpace page to see more photos from this and other Missouri Review events.

In 1920 Sherwood Anderson and Ben Hecht were friends in Chicago struggling to make a buck as fledgling writers.  Hecht, who fancied himself a wit and a conservator of literary taste, said that he didn’t think Anderson’s book The Triumph of the Egg was a work of art and surely Anderson had reservations about his just published Erik Dorn.  He proposed that they should attack each other in print, starting a fake feud for the sake of getting their names out there.

Thinking him arrogant and too casual with his criticism, Anderson wrote Hecht a letter telling him that his behavior was unbecoming for such a talented man: 

Consider just for a moment that you aren’t as specialized a thing as you think.  You and I for example are friends.  Try the experiment of saying to yourself that there aren’t any smart thoughts I may have that Anderson may not have them too.

Anderson went on to say that friendship for him wasn’t based on looking either up or down at someone, but eye to eye.  He advised that Hecht give up the bluff of being “so energetic, smart and fast” and try to be himself for a change.  

I recently came across the quote, “It’s none of your business what others think of you,” which is true.  Yet, there are rare times when one needs a friend to tell him what he least wants to hear. 

Unfortunately, Hecht didn’t appreciate Anderson’s candor and accused him of a Pollyanna complex.  They did not talk or see each other again for twenty years.  Their literary “Bromance” took a final tumble. 

There have been times in my own life when fellow writers have given me advice that I didn’t fully appreciate until years later.   

One friend warned that I tried too hard to be cute and clever in my fiction.  “Just tell a good story,” he counseled.

Some of the moments I enjoy most in fiction are when a friend sees in another flaws that they share.  In Christopher Isherwood’s “Sally Bowles” from The Berlin Stories, Chris accuses Sally of always trying to shock people with her flamboyant style of dress and sexual escapades.

“You’re naturally shy with strangers, I think: so you’ve got into this trick of trying to bounce them into approving or disapproving of you, violently,” he tells her, as she stretches out languidly on the sofa powdering her nose, obviously not enjoying his analysis.

Sometimes friends can go too far, mistaking cruelty for candor.  In the movie Margo at the Wedding, Margo-played skillfully by a dressed-down, almost mousy-looking Nicole Kidman-ambushes her sister and her own son with endless debilitating insights and observations in the name of “being honest.”  Her unchecked behavior points out that we don’t have to drag our friends to the alter of truth on every count.

Yet the fact is that most of life’s meaningful lessons don’t come from parents, teachers or preachers but from peers delivered not as a sermon or lecture but as a whisper for our ears only.

The Missouri Review’s poetry editor, Jessica Garratt, gives a tour of the office and offers insight into the process of reading and responding to manuscripts.  Jessica, Katy Didden, and Marc McKee discuss the reading process and the things that make a poem successful.  This is a two-part feature.

Part I:

Part 2:

Of course, there are a few worse things in the world than the inexpert use of similes and metaphors, but at the moment nothing comes to mind. That’s because I just returned from my annual mammogram. Cloistered in a cell, my bare torso draped in a wrinkled sheet-like cape, I sat on my small plastic chair and watched a built-in television play an inexpensively produced video about the importance of breast self exam, mammography, and bone density testing. A long double strip of duct tape covered the on/off button, a sign that others before me had also been driven to shut it off.

I paged through a tattered Smithsonian and tried in vain to ignore the insistently pleasant sounding “doctor” as she explained what I’m looking for each month when I plumb the very shallow depths of my breasts for what in her words might feel like “a marble in a tube sock.”

She went on to explain that other women, perhaps a bit more demure and loathsome of tube socks, described the lump as a raisin beneath a linen napkin.

She saved her best description for last.

“Others say it’s more like a peanut in a bowl of Gummi bears.”

Yes, I just hate when I find a peanut in my Gummi bears.

Years ago, I had a less verbose doctor ask if I knew what a lump might feel like.

“No idea,” I said.

She folded my hand into a fist and had me feel the knuckle of my index finger.

Remembering this, once again I made a fist and shook it at the video screen, which had looped around for a second showing.

Watching these women model self exams I was reminded that some have a lot more real estate than I do. I have postage stamp-sized lots compared to rolling acres.

The doctor advised that when you lie on your back, if your breasts fall to the side, get them sitting upright so that the “nipples float on top like lily pads.”

And the self exam? The pie slice technique is out. Pretend you are mowing the lawn, moving your hand to and fro in long even rows. I prefer my lawn to have a checker-board pattern, but hey that’s just me.

As I was about to rip the tape off the concealed on/off switch, a firm rap on the door signaled that it was my turn to step into the silent, semi-dark room and have my breasts, one little shy bit of flesh at a time, placed into a rotating vice grip and photographed by a machine that evoked medieval torture rather than modern medicine.

But better that than one more lousy simile or metaphor, I thought, until my technician took me in hand and said, “Now, this is going to feel like…”.

If you’re reading this, then you’re seeing our new site design. This has been a project over a year and a half in development. This new design is database driven and allows us to present more of our content more easily than ever before. So click the “Browse Issues” or “Search Content” links in the navigation menu and explore.

We still have some other features in development which we’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks, so check back in later and find out what’s new!

–Patrick Lane
   TMR Webmaster

This month, The Missour Review is launching a redesigned website and changing to a new service provider. As part of this process, beginning this weekend and continuing through early next week, our e-commerce and submission systems will be disabled until the full migration to our new host is completed. We’ll let you know in this blog as soon as those systems are fully functional again. Thanks for your patience, and we hope you enjoy the new Missouri Review experience we have prepared for you!

Patrick Lane
TMR Webmaster

We’ve now concluded our podcast presentations of the winners of our 2007 Audio Competition. You can all of the winners are listed below with links to the podcast containing their work. Congratulations again to all of our winners!

Narrative Essay

First place, $1,000: Judith Sloan, “Sweeping Statements” [Listen]

First runner-up: Kris Saknussemm, “Cahoots” [Listen]

Second runner-up: Richard Paul, “Fighting With My Dad” [Listen]

Documentary

First place, $1,000: Lu Olkowski, “Grandpa” [Listen]

First runner-up and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Richard Paul, “Shakespeare in Black and White” [Listen]

Second runner-up: Ken Cormier, “The Secret Pianos of Manhattan” [Listen]

Third runner-up: Dan Collison, “Lord God Bird” [Listen]

10-minute play

First place, $500: Kris Saknusemm: “Memory Wound” [Listen]

First runner-up: George Zarr: “Old Dog/Newer Tricks” [Listen]

Second runner-up: Sue Zizza, National Audio Theatre Festivals, “Avian Invasion” [Listen]

Voice-only Literature

Creative Nonfiction

• First place in Voice-only Literature category and Creative Nonfiction subcategory, $500: Albert Haley, “The Cough” [Listen] 

First runner-up and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Lisa K. Buchanan, “All That I Missed” [Listen]

• Second runner-up: Randolph Jordan, “A Death in the Family” [Listen]
• Third runner-up: Angela Cervantes, “A House of Women” [Listen]

Flash fiction

First place in subcategory and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Josh McDonald, “Lost” [Listen]

 First runner-up and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Jithendria Kumar Aravamudhan, “Memoirs of a Mad Man” [Listen]

Poetry

First place in subcategory and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Todd Boss, “To Wind a Mechanical Toy” [Listen]

First runner up: Todd Boss, “Yellow Rocket” [Listen]

Second runner-up: Runner up: Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, “The Golden Lesson” [Listen]

Third runner-up: Eric Torgersen, “Taking Tickets” [Listen]

Fourth runner-up: Josh McDonald, “Women in Strange Trousers” [Listen]

On this Missouri Review podcast, we have for you the audio feature “Lord God Bird” produced by Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, which was the 3^rd runner-up in the Documentary category of our 2007 audio competition.

You can listen to this podcast directly here.

On this Missouri Review podcast, we’re happy to share “The Secret Pianos of Manhattan,” by Ken Cormier, which was the 2^nd runner-up in the Documentary category our of 2007 audio competition.

Ken Cormier is editor and producer of The Lumberyard, a radio magazine of poetry, prose, and music broadcast on WHUS in Connecticut, and also available online. His first book, Balance Act, a collection of poems and short stories, was published by Insomniac Press in 2000.

You can listen to this podcast directly here.

On this Missouri Review podcast, we’re pleased to present “Shakespeare in Black and White,” by Richard Paul, which was the first runner-up in the Documentary category of our 2007 Audio Competition.Richard Paul was also a winner in the Narrative Essay category, and you can listen to that program along with other winners in our previous Audio Winners Series podcasts.

You can listen to this podcast directly here.

 On this Missouri Review podcast, we present the first place winner in the Documentary category of our 2007 Audio Competition.

Lu Olkowski, in her documentary “Grandpa,” looks at the Zagar family and how they deal with death. A father and son have a contest to take the best photos of their dying father/grandpa. The result is an up-close portrait of death.

Olkowski is a regular contributor to Studio 360. Her work has also appeared on All Things Considered, Day to Day, This American Life and Weekend America. “Grandpa” appeared on WNYC’s program Radio Lab.

You can listen to this podcast directly here.

On this Missouri Review podcast, we present our final 10-minute play, “Avian Invasion.” This entry is the work of six first-time participants at the National Audio Theatre Festival’s Audio Theater Workshop, and was the second runner-up in the 10-minute play category of our 2007 Audio Competition.

On this Missouri Review podcast, we have another ten-minute play for your listening pleasure. Today’s entry is “Old Dog, Newer Tricks,” by George Zarr, which was the first runner-up in the ten-minute play category of our 2007 audio competition.

You can listen to this podcast directly here.

On this Missouri Review podcast, we begin our presentation of a particularly exciting category from 2007 Audio Competition, the 10-minute plays. Today we have the first place winner, Kris Saknussemm, with his play “The Memory Wound.” Kris also had a winning entry in the Narrative Essay category, which you can listen to on one of our earlier Audio Winners Series podcasts.

 You can listen to this podcast directly here.

This episode of our podcast features the remaining runner-up entries in the Voice-Only Literature: Creative Nonfiction category. The second runner-up was Randolph Jordan, with his entry “A Death in the Family,” and the third runner up was Angela Cervantes, with “A House of Women.”

You can listen to this podcast directly here.

This episode of our podcast features the first place and first-runner up entries in the Voice-Only Literature: Creative Nonfiction category. First place went to Albert Haley’s “The Cough.” Haley is associate professor of English at Abilene Christian College. He authored Exotic, the winner of the John Irving First Novel Prize. Places where Haley’s short fiction has appeared include The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and Image: A Journal of the Arts & Religion. His poetry has been published in Poems & Plays, The Texas Review, Christianity and Literature, and Rattle.

Our first runner-up is Lisa K. Buchanan, with “All That I Missed.” Buchanan’s fiction and essays have appeared in Mid-American Review, Natural Bridge, Quick Fiction, and Cosmopolitan. Her honors include awards from Glimmer Train, Carve, and Moment. She lives in San Fransisco.

You can listen to this podcast directly here.

We’ve added another video to our growing collection at You Tube. Here, Speer Morgan discusses the motivations behind and the rewards of publishing The Missouri Review.

It seems as though it is time once again for more hand-wringing about the cruel deceptions wrought by authors upon their publishers (and/or by publishers upon a naive and trusting public): another memoir turns out not to be true!

As reported by the New York Times, Love and Consequences, Margaret B. Jones’ memoir ”about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods” has turned out to be in fact the pseudonymous work of Margaret Seltzer ”who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family,” and who ”graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood.”

Publisher Riverhead Books (a unit of Penguin) is pulling the book from shevles and cancelling the author tour. Sarah McGrath, Seltzer’s editor at Riverhead, is quoted as saying “There’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one.”

So, the author is set up as villain yet again. Seltzer is hardly an innocent, but, in the words of The Simpsons’ Kent Brockman: “This reporter places all of the blame for this squarely on you, the viewers.” As you destroy a creature’s natural habitat, the canny survivors will try to find their way into new environments. It would seem that the increasing demand for socially conscious “true” memoir reflects the public devaluation of socially conscious fiction. And so, like coyotes and black bears nosing around the cul-de-sacs of our suburbs, fiction writers hungry for scraps of public attention slink into the aisles of Memoir.

As for myself, I’m less interested in why a writer chooses to fabricate a memoir (greed and the desire for attention seem to be the pundits’ favorites) than I am with the public’s obsession with memoir’s “truth” — and I believe there is cause for concern in as much as the cries of outrage at a memoirist’s “lies” bespeak a general distrust of or even disdain for fiction.

A commentary in the L.A. Times  today (a link worth reading) touches on this issue:

How many talk shows would have booked Seltzer/Jones if she had forthrightly admitted she was a white writer of imaginative fiction with a social conscience that impelled her to write about gang life in South Los Angeles?

It’s sad enough that this is presented as a rhetorical question. And one has to wonder even beyond the sphere of mass media culture how much this attitude manifests itself even among literary publishers. The “ideology of authenticity” remains strong in literary criticism and academia, and though certainly the desire for “authenticity” has been an engine for combatting oppression and drawing out minority voices, it seems just as often today to be a means of exploitation and imaginative repression. Taken to extremes, insisting upon authorial authenticity denies the possibility of authorial empathy. If you are not writing of your own direct experience, what you are writing cannot be “true.”

The longstanding ancient and medieval view of literature in the West has been that it’s made up of history, fable, and fiction. History is valuable because it tells us what happened and what we can learn from it. Fable is valuable because it provides us with examples of right moral conduct. Fiction is good only for light entertainment and diversion, which to many a devout medieval mind meant is was good for nothing, if not indeed actively dangerous to one’s spiritual life.

Is the pendulum of culture swinging back to towards a variation on this attitude? If one takes the temperature of popular opinion by what appears in internet discussions, it is not at all difficult to find online conversations about the socio-political meanings of movies and television shows constantly interrupted by posters genuinely castigating the others with cries of “It’s just a movie!” As if taking a fictional narrative seriously is the height of foolishness.

(In some ways I would love to be able to point to posters who interject with “It’s just a book” — but books don’t seem to merit even that level of attention anywhere other than niche literary forums.)

And so I would like to add this one additional motive to the list of reasons why a writer might scratch through “a novel” and write “a memoir” — the desire to be taken seriously. That may well not excuse the writer’s deception, but I think it directs us back to the source of the problem: the standards of the audience.

At the end of the NYT article, Sarah McGrath is quoted as saying “There was a way to do this book honestly and have it be just as compelling.” But one seriously questions whether or not McGrath would have found a market for it.

 In this Missouri Review podcast, we are pleased to present the wonderfully varied range of the second, third, and fourth runners-up from the Voice-Only poetry category of our 2007 Audio Competition. These are “The Golden Lesson” by Susan Somers-Willet, “Taking Tickets” by Eric Torgersen, and “Women in Strange Trousers” by Josh McDonald.

With “The Golden Lesson,” second runner-up Susan Somers-Willet gives an engaging performance of a poem rich in painterly image and metaphor, a poem both complex in its ideas, and visceral in its textures. Her poems have appeared in a number of periodicals including the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Somers-Willet is the author of a book of poetry, Roam, published as part of the Crab Orchard Award Series Open Competition in 2006, as well as a second forthcoming collection of poetry, Quiver.

The third runner-up of the Voice-Only Poetry category is Eric Torgersen with “Taking Tickets.” The poem defies easy classification-but we’re sure you’ll find this voice-driven poem, with its quirky character, entertaining. Torgersen is Professor of English at Central Michigan University. He has published two chapbooks and three full-length books of poetry, a novella, and the biographical/critical study Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker (Northwestern University Press).

And we conclude with the fourth runner-up, Josh McDonald’s “Women in Strange Trousers,” a prose poem about females attired in an assortment of odd apparel. McDonald is a writer, musician, and storyteller, currently writing his third novel.

 You can listen to this podcast directly here.

In this installment of The Missouri Review podcast, we feature the first place and first runner-up entries to the Voice-Only Literature (Poetry) category of our 2007 Audio Competition. Both of these awards go to poems by Todd Boss: “To Wind a Mechanical Toy” (1st place) and “Yellowrocket” (1st runner-up). Both poems are sonically resonant, without being heavy-handed in their music. They are lyrically complex, weaving narrative with a more roving, philosophical strain, so that listening to the poems is a varied experience, with lulls, pauses, crescendos, decrescendos, while also being unified enough to follow aurally.

Todd Boss is the director of External Affairs at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. His work appears in Poetry, The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. His first collection, Yellowrocket, will be published this year by W.W. Norton and Company.

You can listen to the podcast directly here.

Today’s podcast presents both of the winning entries in the Voice-Only Fiction category.

First place: Josh McDonald earns first place in the flash fiction, voice-only category with his submission, “Lost.” It’s a comic, surreal story of a madman on a bus shelter roof and the elderly woman who finds him. McDonald is a writer, musician and storyteller. He says he’s read his stories all over the United Kingdom (he hails from Bristol), including “bars, clubs, boats, yurts and coal-powered power stations.”

First-runner up: Madness, apparently, dwells in the minds of writers-or at least judges. The first-runner up in the voice-only, flash fiction category goes to Jithendria (Jithu) Kumar Aravamudhan, with his entry, “Memoirs of a Mad Man.” In the story, the main character narrates his past and the reasons that lead to his madness. Jithu is a third year graduate student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A native of India, he specialized in theatre sound design.

You can listen to this podcast directly here.