The Missouri Review

For years there’s been a wonderful image in my head, taken no doubt from the movies, in which a writer pulls the final page of his novel’s first draft from the typewriter—always a typewriter, never a laser printer—adds it to the stack of typed pages beside him that has been growing taller over the months or years, soberly sizes up his accomplishment, then pops opens the obligatory bottle of champagne to celebrate with his loved ones.

That moment always seemed like the writer’s equivalent of blasting through the finish line tape, or summiting a Himalayan peak. The climb was a struggle, but look at that view. . . .

I’m not a champagne drinker, and I don’t remember how the bottle got into my refrigerator. But it did. And I decided that, clichéd as it sounds, I would open it the night that I finally finished the first draft of my book. Before long, though, a nagging question formed: Will I even know when it’s finished? I write on the computer, after all, not on a typewriter, and it’s never been clear to me exactly when one draft ends and another begins.

Sure enough, one day I found myself busily revising a chunk of the manuscript when I suddenly thought: Drat! I think I missed it.

Now, I’m awfully glad for my PC and the opportunity it affords me to cut and paste and move effortlessly between the acts of adding new words and fixing the old ones. In fact, this way of working at the computer, a sort of undefined writing/revising amalgam, feels so hardwired in my brain by this point that I’d probably have about as much luck writing on a typewriter as I would writing on a Victrola. Yet I can’t help feeling nostalgic for a time that I never actually experienced—even if I suspect it probably never existed anyway outside of the movies. Surely one’s propensity to seize celebratory moments comes less from technology and more from personality. Still, I love to think about finishing a draft, for better or worse, and knowing that now—precisely now—is the right time to pop open the bubbly.

Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time, forthcoming in February 2011 from Press 53. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His website is michaelkardos.com.

About a year and a half ago this magazine decided to take its audio and digital presence to a new, transformative level. Then, I was an intern and overeager to get involved. Former managing editor, Richard Sowienski, and former audio editor, Lania Knight, asked for anyone interested in joining the audio team to help set up the new studio: a basement room, which still resembled its dormitory days (two opposite facing mirrors, two opposite facing shelves and bulletin boards). I’m not sure my thought process was so much a “Man, I can’t wait to scrub and paint and try to move an unassembled sound booth down four stories!” Nonetheless, I had nothing better to do on that Tuesday morning.

Today, Studio 54 (it’s in room # 54 and it’s a studio, get it?) is my project. Lania left the magazine at the end of the spring semester for a professorship (congratulations!) and recommended me as a suitable replacement. So, I say “Hello!” to you all. My first complete issue (33.2) featured the strength of Ken Kesey’s familial bonds, an electrocuted electrician, and the pain MS inflicts on the body and soul among many other great pieces. I learned to play the middle man between our published poets and the great recording studios we send them into and I also loved teaching interns the same techniques I learned not  so very long ago.

The work is challenging and I am lucky enough to work with some of the best staff, interns, and voice talent. Voice talent lands last on that list not due to some implicit pecking order, but I want to leave you with a story about how they are the ones that make me and the digital issue sound so good. Our next issue may have a surprise for our readers and listeners. At least, this story surprised me. R.T. Smith’s “First Meeting” carries a brevity and a voice unlike anything I have recently read in The Missouri Review. These same attributes make the story an incredibly fun read. The mind’s eye formulates a very specific character depending on one’s personal experience. My first thought upon finishing the story: “Wow, that’s really different and I really like it.” My second: “Oh, no. How are we going to record this?” That thought still rattled around yesterday when Emily Rollie (my talent director) and I sat down with Frank Lasik to record. We chose Frank because he fit the character’s demographics and because he is a very, very talented reader. Essentially, we said, “Here ya go, Frank. Good luck.”

I know I’ve had a good recording when I still smile as the talent finishes the piece, still laugh at the funny parts, still get goosebumps, still get choked up, still do all those things good writing makes me do while reading it. I walked out of Studio 54 at 4:00 p.m. yesterday still smiling. I hope you all enjoy these audio tracks as much as I enjoy creating them.

Scott Scheese is the audio editor of The Missouri Review.

We don’t usually say much about our covers, which needs to change because we’ve been using the work of some exciting contemporary artists. The cover of our current issue, Crash, is a photograph by Kerry Skarbakka. For the sake of the camera, he jumps off bridges, freefalls from skyscrapers, tumbles from stepladders, trips down stairs face first or simply slips in the tub. He has been compiling a portfolio of falling pictures since 2002. We had a difficult time selecting from this collection because all of the photographs had cover potential. You can visit his gallery at www.skarbakka.com

Our up-coming cover for the fall Shadow’s issue is by English filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist Sam Taylor-Wood from her Bram Stoker’s Chair series. This summer I took in one of her video installations at Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a playful piece of Robert Downey Jr. lip-syncing badly to an Elton John ballad as he walks languidly through an empty mansion. Her first feature film Nowhere Boy about John Lennon’s childhood in Liverpool opens in October before the seventieth anniversary of his birth. It stars Aaron Johnson as Lennon and Kristin Scott Thomas as his buttoned-up Aunt Mimi. You can view Sam Taylor-Wood’s work at www.whitecube.com

Kris Somerville is the marketing director of The Missouri Review.

With Jonathan Franzen’s new novel out this week, there have been reviews and articles considering if it tops The Corrections, which I first read as an undergraduate at Ohio State.  It is a brilliant book, and I was a little jealous and a little dismayed that someone else had written the sort of book I hoped to someday write.  But I’ve never felt a strong urge to reread it; whatever place the book has in my mental library, I’m comfortable with it staying there, collecting dust.  The Franzen novel that I have reread several times is not The Corrections, but Strong Motion.

Strong Motion, Franzen’s second novel, is set in Boston, a city I used to live in, and the overwhelming emotion in the book is barely channeled rage.  It’s anger from an author’s whose first book wasn’t a big hit, anger that is poured into the characters and the narrative into a multilayered howl against injustice across a wide-range of people, places, and events.  This raw anger is delicious, an invigorating read for a writer struggling with his/her work at any given time.  Strong Motion certainly has flaws, but the pugnacious emotion is captivating.  Which is why I keep coming back to it.

(Digression: not lately, though.  Why, exactly, I’m not sure.)

Recently I began what I am still calling a “new project” and compiled a list of books to read and re-read.  When beginning something new, I like to absorb as many novels as I possibly can that might have similar thematic elements, then pushing them all aside and forgetting them, at least consciously, as I tackle my narrative.  And at the top of this current list were The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, both of which I’ve just finished within the last two weeks.

No one, it seems, reads The Catcher in the Rye as an adult.  It’s a book taught in junior high or high school, and what I remembered of the book was that Holden was tossed out of school, cursed frequently, and wandered around New York for a few days.  Being told it is a “great” or “important” book didn’t make any difference to me when I was a teenager.  I had a vague recollection of it being good but not feeling any strong affinity for it the way other books struck me in high school (My standout?  A bit of an odd one: Kindred by Octavia Butler).

My reading experience as an adult is of course different now.  What I read for nowadays—engaging language, complex characters, moving imagery, a sense of place—were concepts that I couldn’t even contextualize in high school.  Nowadays, there is no rush for me to get through the book either: there isn’t a paper to be written or another class’s homework to finish.  And, when rereading, I always know what happens in the end.

An adult reader should be struck by the youthfulness of Holden, and how true and accurate Salinger’s vision is of Holden’s existential dread.  I’m not sure how much a teenager reader could appreciate it; recognize and relate, sure, but the sense of it being a period that can be survived, the memory of that time in our lives, creates a strong connection with Holden, a hope that if he can just get through the next few days, he’ll be all right.  Being an adult reader makes Holden all that more sympathetic as a character.  Then there is the incredible and overwhelming loneliness in the book.  Early in the novel, when Holden is speaking with Ackley, Holden moves away:

“I didn’t answer him.  All I did was, I got up and went over and looked out the window.  I felt all lonesome, all of the sudden.  I almost wished I was dead.”

After a few chapters of Holden’s sarcasm and petulance, this simple and direct awareness is devastating; I choked a little over that passage and reread it, twice, and wondered if I remembered the ending of the book correctly.

I sorta did (hey, that sounds like Holden!).  There’s this beautiful, wrenching moment at the end of the novel when Holden is in the park with his sister Phoebe:

“Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carousel, so they wouldn’t get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking w, especially my neck and my pants.  My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot protection, in a way, but I go soaked anyway.  I didn’t care, though.  I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around.  I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth.  I don’t know why.  It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.”

Kinda feels like we are.

Still, the sense is that the reason this book is so well known and widely read is notoriety and celebrity: it was frequently banned and Salinger was reclusive, and the American public just loves that stuff, and maybe the novel has been elevated into something greater than perhaps it is.  Holden’s isolation is entirely the point, but that point does become a little tiresome in the book, where every person either rejects Holden or is rejected by Holden.  This point begins to feel like The Point, which is why, perhaps, I think of the novel as worth reading but not necessarily one of my favorite books.

A Separate Peace is a novel that I believe I read at an even younger age than Salinger; for some reason, I’m thinking seventh or eighth grade.  Again, the appeal, the why it was taught to me in school, seems obvious: friendship among young man, the prep school, World War II.  And so forth.  So it was really amazing to discover what an incredible novel Knowles wrote: a brilliantly framed story of betrayal and duality where every chapter grabbed my attention like a hand around my neck.

Gene and Phineas—has there been kids named Gene and Phineas since 1950?—are best friends at the Devon School in New England in 1942.  The opening chapter provides indicators of Phineas’s death and the two places he fell—the tree by the river, and the marble steps of the First Academy Building—are revisited by Gene, fifteen years removed from these events, seemingly much older than his actually thirty years (he moves and thinks like a man twice that age).

As with The Catcher in the Rye, I only remembered the book’s basics.  The quote on the cover of the Scribner paperback edition is from critic Aubrey Menen, who wrote that “it ends by being as deep and as big as evil itself.”  Really?  And I read this in eighth grade?  I had no memory of experiencing the book that way at all.

Like the Salinger, knowing the outcome makes me read slower, and Knowles’s prose is pitch perfect.  He’s efficient, wasting no words to describe the Devon School, quick and loving descriptions of New England elms and tall, narrow windows in the red-brick buildings of campus.  Every passage is filled with dread.  Chapter four opens with this:

“The next morning I saw dawn for the first time. It began not as the gorgeous fanfare over the ocean I had expected, but as a strange gray thing … (Phineas) was still asleep, although in this drained light he looked more dead than asleep. The ocean looked dead too, dead gray waves hissing mordantly along the beach, which was gray and dead-looking itself.”

A good writer doesn’t use the same word four times without meaning.  Later in this chapter, Gene “said nothing, my mind exploring the new dimensions of isolation around me… It wasn’t my neck, but my understanding which was menaced … I was not of the same quality as he.”  Which is curious on its own, but even more bizarre when, shortly after Phineas’s fall, Gene tries on Phineas’s clothes:

“I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every though, to forget where I was, even who I was … when I looked in the mirror it was no remoter aristocrat I had become, no character out of daydreams. I was Phineas, Phineas to the life.  I even had his humorous expression in my face, his sharp, optimistic awareness.  I had no idea why this gave me such intense relief”

The war within Gene drives the novel, even with Phineas returning to Devon in 1943, crippled and turning into a denier of World War II’s existence.  This part I didn’t remember at all: Phineas denied the war?  The war that forced all the Devon boys to go work in a railyard for a day (a terrific scene), the same day Phineas returns?  When I recognized the way Gene recognizes, rejects, and duplicates Phineas, all at the same time, this denial is terrific: Phineas denies the war in the same way that Gene denies he intentionally jostled his best friend from the tree.

This sense of “two-ness” in both plot and character is what makes this book so captivating.  The boys are in the war, and not in the war.  Gene and Phineas are the best of friends; they are complete enemies.  Gene is dully aware of this throughout the novel, but Phineas (or, some other part of Gene, in a way) continues to deny these conflicts and contradictions, leading to the growing unease between the boy’s and the bizarre trail-like stunt that their classmate Brinker manufactures in order to discover the truth of what happened.

Holden and Phineas suffer from internal turmoil, these questions of identity that seem to be at the heart of all great American novels.  But for me, it’s the way the world encroaches on Gene and Phineas that makes A Separate Peace so much more engaging.  There is a growing threat that they attempt to refuse—the boys aren’t yet old enough to be drafted—but can’t be ignored.  The passage where Leper explains to Gene what happened to him in basic training—a rambling, terrifying monologue of a young man whose mind has cracked—is one of the best things I’ve read all year.

Why reread books we’ve read before?  I often reread Andre Dubus’s stories for no other reason than I enjoy them: his stories are wonderful, patient, and insightful about people who are holding onto their small place in society as they struggle through their marriages, jobs, and their adult children.  His stories are always in a place and time that I don’t recognize as the present but recognize as the world we once lived in that somehow mirrors the world today.  And I believe where we’re from is a large element of who we are.

Stories and novels can become didactic about social and political issues; these narratives always work better as essays rather than fiction.  On the flip side, fiction that ignores the world and places characters in a vacuum of suburbia or the university feels confined, even a little narcissistic in its obsession with whatever angst drives the characters, ignoring their surroundings to the point where the book could be set in Alaska, Arkansas, or Argentina and it wouldn’t make any difference.  The boys in A Separate Peace try to live in this vacuum but a world at war continues to blanket and then suffocate them, an encroaching reminder that there cherished time at Devon will soon come to an end.  Knowles novel does all these things I had been seeking: the simmering anger of Franzen, the isolation and identity crisis of Salinger, and the humane understanding of Dubus.  It would perhaps be disingenuous to say A Separate Peace hasn’t been read and appreciated it enough … but then again, maybe I just did.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog featured a note today from R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah, a journal many back issues of which are on a shelf behind me, concerning the expansion of its digital presence and the end of its sixty-year run as a print journal.

This is old news, but news to me, and my immediate impulse, for what it’s worth, is to voice my support for print, because despite Egon Spengler’s insistence as long ago as 1984 that “Print is dead,” I still believe in it, for reasons that have been articulated many times over  across the blogosphere and even outside of it, nowhere more memorably (to me) than in Nicholson Baker’s 2001 book Double Fold, which addresses the ’ tendency among libraries to throw out their print collections in favor of digitization.

The soberer approach, however, might be to see a move like Shenandoah’s – as many others do – as a natural step in the progression of a literary journal that intends to be accessible and relevant in an increasingly digital literary world.  And there are advantages to a move like this one; as Smith’s note reads,

“While many of us harbor divided minds about the dwindling of the physical print medium, I’m enthusiastic about the possibilities – from audio presentations to ease of access and extended audience and more frequent updates – presented by this brave new world of the Internet.”

This is a subject worth discussion far beyond what I can conjure up on my own this Monday afternoon, but I can agree with the above-quoted sentiment wholeheartedly, and not a little because of the nature of my current affiliation with TMR.

Robert Foreman is The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor.

So I had this gig to play on drums last weekend—a Bruce Springsteen tribute night in Oxford, MS. The group I was playing with was going to be performing the entire Springsteen album Darkness on the Edge of Town. Although I played the drums pretty much nonstop in my 20s, I don’t perform much anymore. So why did I get the call? It so happens that I’m a very qualified Max Weinberg. Before going back to grad school in 2000, I spent a year performing with a Jersey-based Springsteen tribute band called Thunder Road.

Thunder Road, Circa 1999

Playing this gig in Oxford meant learning the material (in my case re-learning; I’d played most of the songs before, but a decade earlier), driving the two hours to Oxford for rehearsals, driving to Oxford again for the show, then staying overnight in a motel room (unless I preferred to drive back home in the middle of the night, which I didn’t) that would cost almost as much as the money I earned from the gig. All of which is well and good.

 Except, here’s the thing: the gig never happened.

Why not? The club double-booked us. We learned just days before the show that they’d inadvertently scheduled two bands for the same night—and for various reasons, that other band won out.

Frustrating, but unfortunately just another day in the music biz. In fact, it felt like old times! Which leads me to the reason for this post—to lay out what I’ve come to see as a key difference between playing the drums and writing fiction. Here goes:

 Playing the Drums in a Band, Requirements of

1. Bandmates
2. Tolerant neighbors and/or a house on lots of land
3. Gigs
4. Patience with bar owners who confuse the number “1” (the actual number of bands that can perform on a given stage at a given time) with the number “2” (twice the number of bands that can perform on a given stage at a given time)
5. Somewhat reliable transportation
6. The ability to sleep in your somewhat reliable transportation (or to stay awake, if you’re the one driving)

 Writing Fiction, Requirements of

1. A computer—or pen and paper
2. Coffee and snacks (optional)

Playing music, in other words, requires lots of stuff. Not so with writing stories, which can be done anytime, anywhere, and with nary a ride in a half-busted van. Yes, publishing one’s work is another matter—but after playing music for so long, I quickly came to enjoy an activity that requires so few accoutrements.

If the Springsteen tribute gig gets rescheduled, will I play it? Of course. But for now, rather than be double-booked, I think I’ll just sit here and work on my single book.

Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time, forthcoming in February 2011 from Press 53. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His website is michaelkardos.com.

In the literary world, the past few weeks have been filled with stories about Virginia Quarterly Review and the suicide of its managing editor, Kevin Morrissey.  Not only has there been a flurry of inaccuracies, but also a damning indictment of the University of Virginia, VQR, and its editor, Ted Genoways.  Our marketing director, Kris Somerville, printed out the original story published in The Hook, and even in small type, the pages were the size of a phone book.  You also might have seen that this story reached The Today Show (who oddly called VQR a “campus magazine.” Um, actually, no, it’s a wee bit more than that …)

Tom Bissell, a regular contributor to VQR and author of several books, has a different and thoughtful response to the entire situation:

“Here is a different narrative of the VQR tragedy: Mr. Genoways, in elevating what had previously been a respected but quiet literary journal into one of America’s best magazines, revealed the basic incompatibility of the sinecure model of university employment with the high-pressure, emotionally tempestuous imperatives of commercial publishing. Mr. Genoways’ staff, including Morrissey, did not agree with the direction in which the magazine was going and moreover believed Mr. Genoways was spending too much money. Crucially, Mr. Genoways was bound by one extraordinary quirk of a university- and taxpayer-funded literary magazine. Morrissey, along with the rest of Mr. Genoways’ staff, were state employees first, VQR employees second. While Mr. Genoways could hire staff, he could not easily fire staff, which is the right and prerogative of, say, the editors of The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic, against whom VQR was attempting to compete in terms of content (if not circulation).

“Mr. Genoways was thus forced to run his magazine in what were essentially and increasingly mutinous circumstances. Paradoxically, as the magazine pulled in National Magazine Award nominations and critical acclaim, Mr. Genoways’ relationship to his staff became increasingly toxic. Job productivity suffered and resentments accumulated, even though Mr. Genoways, Morrissey and Waldo Jacquith (the former Web editor of VQR, who told The Today Show that “Ted’s treatment of Kevin in the last two weeks of his life was just egregious”) were drawing a combined compensation of $320,000.”

Read Tom’s entire piece here, and if you haven’t, The Hook’s original story is here. Also, lots of interesting comments at HTML Giant, too. Tip o’ the cap to TMR pal Tayari Jones for the link to Tom’s story.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

There has been talk, elsewhere in the literary hemisphere of the blogosphere, of what the consequences would be if libraries started charging their patrons a subscription fee in order to access their collections.  The talk I heard/read was prompted by an article in the Guardian this summer that addressed the London Library’s speculation that it might have to raise its patrons’ subscription rates.  As far as I know, subscriptions are mostly unheard of at public libraries in the United States, though I admit I’m no librarian and my knowledge is limited.

Over at Survival of the Book, it was speculated that this subscription model for libraries could potentially save America’s libraries, which are in peril, as a quick Google News search for “libraries” will attest.  Libraries are cutting hours and closing branches – because, of course, they don’t have enough money.

To offer an anecdotal description of the effects of this, when I dwelt in Cleveland in 2006-2007 I lived downtown and commuted to work in the suburbs – for some reason – and by the time I returned home from my long drive, every evening just before six, the library was already locking its doors.  I would have been glad to pay a small fee in order to help keep the building open later than that.  I would have spent my evenings patronizing the table where they displayed their collection of recently published poetry collections – or at least I would have watched television at home with the knowledge that I had the option to go read those poetry collections.

One of the obvious objections to the concept of the subscription library is that it flies in the face of the egalitarian principles we like to uphold, or at least talk about upholding, in America.  But rather than announce that I am all in favor of free libraries and access to them for everyone, whatever the consequences, I should emulate Orwell for a moment, and admit complicating facts.  Here is one:  I am someone who spends much of his time at a library that I pay to use – my university library.  Not only is it funded by my student fees, other students’ tuitions, and money from inevitable other sources; I am willing to shell out tens of dollars a year so that I can have access to my own personal study carrel, buried in the stacks near the literature on handling livestock.  Perhaps the library has resources set aside for community members that I don’t know about, but as far as I can tell a library card costs a non-student, non-faculty, non-staff user $35.  So we do have what amount to subscription libraries, after all.

At least, for now, we have free alternatives to them.  I have to wonder, finally, what a non-university subscription library would look like.  Would it be dramatically different from what we now expect a library to be?  Would it carry only the books that its subscribers requested?  Would it do the important work of archiving our culture’s printed material, which we entrust it with now?  Would it subscribe to the New York Times or USA Today, if it could afford only one, and how would its librarians make that decision?  Would it subscribe to a literary journal?

Robert Foreman is The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor

Recently, we were having a quiet day in The Missouri Review offices.  It was one of those Missouri days in August when your vision gets hazy from the heat rising off the concrete and once inside, you still don’t stop sweating for at least an hour.  With a stack of manuscripts in front of us, editorial assistant Sara Strong and I were reading carefully for poems and stories for the winter issue.  There’s a good-sized conference room that is a little bit cooler than our other offices and so it took us a little while to realize there was a person hovering at the door.

When we finally did, I said hello and asked how I could help him.

“I have a question about my subscription,” he said.  “I didn’t get the last issue yet.”

He was serious.  I directed him to our office manager, gave Sara a really? look, and didn’t give it much more thought (I was reading a pretty good story at that moment).  But, it turns out, he was sticking around for a bit.

The subscriber, Brian, had just driven his friend Ari from Tempe, Arizona all the way to Columbia and the good ol’ University of Missouri, where Ari will begin as a PhD candidate this semester.  (Note: that’s a long drive and a good friend!).  Since they were here and had some time, they figured they would swing by our offices and check things out.  Ari meet Speer, who showed him around the offices and talked a little shop about The Missouri Review and writing workshops.  And, then, yes, we got a copy of the summer issue in Brian’s hands.

It was strange, harmless, and kind of fun.  How often do we get to meet our subscribers face-to-face?  Other than the AWP conference, it’s probably rare for a magazine to meet one of its readers in person.  I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that this doesn’t happen too often at Time Magazine or Tin House.  However, I’m not suggesting that any readers should just swing by our offices and knock on our doors and say “Yo. ” Even if we are pretty friendly and we’re centrally located in deepinthehearta-Missouri.

One of the challenges of publishing a literary magazine is that we can’t give the reader exactly what he or she wants.  If you’re reading a news magazine—let’s say The Economist—what you want is relatively clear: what the Obama Administration is doing, what Congress is doing, the cleanup of the Gulf Coast, and all sorts of world news.  Like us, The Economist editors have a style, taste, and focus particular to their magazine.  There are decisions to be made about every issue and how it is examined, but for the most part, the content is already provided by world events.

It’s not that easy for a literary magazine.  Art is subjective.  The taste of our editors varies greatly though there is probably an aesthetic to The Missouri Review.  One of my close friends recently asked why we keep exchanging book recommendations when what we like varies so much: for example, she loved Being Dead by Jim Crace (meh) and I raved about Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (she didn’t even get halfway through it).  With our readers, each and every person has a different literary aesthetic: how can we make everyone happy?

We can’t.  Which is why the emails, letters, posts, and comments we receive are so valuable.  It’s great to hear how much Rachel Riederer’s essay “Patient” affected you.  Or M.C. Armstrong’s moving essay about Ken Kesey.  Or how engaging Fiona McFarlane’s prize-winning story “Exotic Animal Medicine” was to read.  All of which are just a few of the pieces that I’ve heard wonderful things about during the last few weeks.  The editors of literary magazines and the writers of all those stories, essays, and poems really need to hear from our audience.  These things aren’t being written and then printed to be stuffed in the back of a desk.  They demand to be read, and when they engage you, we want to hear from you.  We need to be reminded how much it matters to you.  Because discovering the literature that engages and moves our audience is the most important thing we do.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review

The beginning of the fall semester means having to straighten my office, dry-clean some shirts, wash out my coffee maker that the summer has turned into a science experiment…but the good news is that it also means rereading some favorite stories that my creative writing students will be seeing for the first time. One that I keep returning to is Richard Bausch’s story “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr.” There are any number of wonderful aspects to this story, from its blend of humor and tragedy to its take on American mythologies to its clever nod (in my view, anyway) to Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

But what really gets me is the opening paragraph.

I love how much we learn about these two characters without ever being told explicitly. But I especially love how what looks at first like a relatively straightforward paragraph of summary is actually a series of small mysteries that raise key questions in the reader’s mind, questions that make us want to keep reading. (The footnotes are mine.)

On his way west¹ McRae picked up a hitcher, a young woman carrying a paper bag² and a leather purse, wearing jeans and a shawl—which she didn’t take off, though it was more than ninety degrees out and McRae had no air-conditioning.³ He was driving an old Dodge Charger with a bad exhaust system and one long crack in the wraparound windshield.⁴ He pulled over for her, and she got right in⁵, put the leather purse on the seat between them, and settled herself with a paper bag on her lap between her hands.⁶ He had just crossed into Texas from Oklahoma.⁷ This was the third day of the trip.

(From The Stories of Richard Bausch. Copyright 2003 by Richard Bausch)

1. Why is McRae heading West? And what, specifically, is his destination?
2. Um, what’s in the bag?
3. Why won’t she take off her shawl? Also, McRae must not have a lot of money.
4. Yep. These details confirm that he’s pretty broke, which makes his road-trip that much more interesting and tinged with desperation. (And as anyone who’s ever driven a car with a large crack in the windshield knows, this is a precarious situation: the windshield could shatter at any moment!)
5. The woman shows no hesitancy at all. No fear.
6. Seriously, what’s in the paper bag? It’s been mentioned twice already. She sure is protective of it. Must be important.
7. Oklahoma? He still has a ways to go. Perhaps this doesn’t bode well…

That’s a lot of work for one paragraph—especially one that reads like no work at all.

Any favorite story openings?

Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time, forthcoming in February 2011 from Press 53. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His website is michaelkardos.com.

This week, we’re catching up with author Dennis McFadden’s, whose debut fiction-collection, Hart’s Grove, is just out from Colgate University Press.  Snag your copy here.  Dennis’s story, “The Three-Sided Penny” appeared in The Missouri Review’s Winter 2007 issue, which you can purchase here.  He lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, off Peaceable Street, just up from Harmony Corners, and took a few minutes this month to let us know how it feels to be a debut author.  This interview was conducted by one of our summer interns, Andrea Waterfield.

1) You work as a project manager for New York State.  Do you ever find yourself bringing experiences from your daily job into your writing?
For the most part, no.  Work is work and fiction is fiction and never the twain shall meet.  Well, never say never.  I did write one story called “Building 8″ the protagonist of which is a career bureaucrat, and which takes place in the infamously “sick” title building, a building based, incidentally, on a real state office building here in Albany.  The story is a wonderful, laugh-out-loud-funny parody of bureaucracy, but unfortunately I’m the only one it seems to make laugh out loud.  It remains, as of this date, unpublished, though full of hope.

2) What have you been reading/spending your time with most lately?
My full-time job, which, as the term “full-time” might imply, occupies at least part of my time.  When I’m not there, or writing or sleeping, I’m often reading historical novels.  I try to read what I’m writing.  For the last decade or so, when I was writing short stories exclusively, I was reading nothing but short stories.  I seldom read collections (Alice Munro and George Saunders being the glorious exceptions); on the theory that if you want to write your best you should read the best, I read the prize anthologies for the most part – O. Henry, Pushcart and Best American Short Stories.  As a matter of fact, I collect the latter as a hobby; I probably have 75% of all the volumes published since they were inaugurated in 1915, and I’m hoping they’ll rub off.  With hard work and perseverance I hope to someday be included in Good American Short Stories, then work my way up to Better American Short Stories.  I think Best is probably too much to hope for at my age.

3) You’ve just published your first collection of stories, Hart’s Grove. What did you find to be the most exciting part of the process?
Without question, the most exciting part is the launching of the book after all the hum-drum hard work and tedium is done.  Any writer who says otherwise is either lying or a fool.  Of course, I suppose he or she could be both, a lying fool.  Or a foolish liar.  At any rate, after years of laboring in rejection and obscurity, never sure if your little collection of letters and syllables will ever see the light of day, the bright sunshine of the limelight is pretty irresistible, not to mention metaphorically mixed.  I could get used to champagne, adoration, and applause if I weren’t so humble.

4) What are you working on now?

I’m writing a historical novel right now.  The protagonist is a young doctor in the year 1857 in, of all places, Hart’s Grove, Pennsylvania.  It’s based on one of my Hart’s Grove stories (which is not included in the collection) and I’ve written over 200 pages.  Some wonderful writing there, if I do say so myself, chock full of terrific characters, snappy dialog, beautiful settings.  But, it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m probably going to need a plot as well, so it could be a while yet.

Andrea Waterfield is a summer intern with The Missouri Review.

I’m not the kind of person that tends to remember dreams. I had one a few weeks back, however, that has really stuck. In the dream I was reading an old book (the kind with heavy, leather binding and yellowed pages that smell a little musty) in the library, and the book began to fall apart in my hands. Holes appeared in the cover, and the pages blackened at the edges and crumbled off wherever I touched them. The dream wasn’t frightening, but I woke up with that creepy, post-nightmare feeling and couldn’t, for a while, go back to sleep.

It took me several days to realize that the dream might have been a visual representation of an anxiety. The evening before the dream I had been listening to an interview on NPR with Bob Stein, a director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, in which Stein claimed that not far down the road, the print book would be obsolete. We’re in a moment of transition, he said, “from the book to whatever is going to become more important than it.” (My emphasis).

With the release of the iPad in April and with improvements to the Kindle appearing later this month, there’s been a good bit of discussion out there lately about the move from print publishing to electronic formats—though I don’t think I had heard that transition described in such absolute terms before listening to this interview. Perhaps it’s the assumption behind Stein’s claims that disturb me the most. I understand, of course, the benefits of going paperless: it’s more economical for publishers, it’s better for the environment, it’s more portable, yada yada. The reasons are all very practical. But since when do practicality and higher profit margins add up to “more important?”

Call me a traditionalist, but to me the loss of the book would be more than the loss of a cumbersome, costly, “wasteful” object. Isn’t the book-as-object, its heft and smell, the tooth and weight of its pages, an important part of the experience of reading? Yes, the book delivers content—information—but to the book lover, reading is also an aesthetic experience. The Kindle and its like are essentially invisible media, designed to perform a function without calling attention to themselves. Many books, on the other hand, are designed to be noticed. As a poet, I appreciate the fact that the way the poem looks on the page is just as integral to the poem as the music of the words or the rhythms of its stresses and syllables. The pleasure of the poem is an experience of the eyes, just as it is an experience of the ear and the imagination. There’s an element of this to prose, as well.

Additionally, the book-as-object is an artifact. As a kid, I used to love to explore the books my parents had stacked around the house. Sometimes I’d find funny marginalia, inscriptions from old high school sweethearts, newspaper articles or photographs stuck between the pages as temporary bookmarks and then forgotten. I’ve learned quite a lot about my parents from the books they’ve kept. Just a few weeks ago, on a visit home, I came across a copy of Leaves of Grass that had belonged to my great-grandfather. I’d had no idea my great-grandfather read poetry. That book is a treasure to me. I highly doubt that three generations from now someone will find my Kindle and treasure it. Technology is disposable. Technology is sterile, impersonal.

I have a tendency, perhaps unfairly, to connect a lot of American cultural strangeness to our Puritan roots. Why, for instance, are we uniquely obsessed with sanitation: bleach-based cleaners, disinfectants, odorlessness? Undoubtedly because some of our earliest settlers believed that cleanliness was next to godliness. The infatuation with the electronic book is another one I’m adding to the list. The Puritans forbade embellishment and imagery in their places of worship because they feared that churchgoers would venerate the object as holy, forgetting that it was merely a symbol of the divine. In American culture, when it comes to a contest of function and form, function seems to win out nearly every time. The Kindle is economical and efficient. It is not beautiful. If you see the book as a mere medium to convey information, then obviously this doesn’t matter.

Earlier this summer I did some guest editing for a literary journal that, like The Missouri Review, receives many, many high-quality submissions from all over the world. The process involved reading some three-hundred fiction submissions. It isn’t often that I read so many manuscripts in a compressed period of time, so I tried to pay attention to any recurring themes, motifs, styles, etc. across all the stories. I’m happy to report, if these 300 stories are any indication, that the state of the American short story as of the summer of 2010 is downright eclectic. Thank goodness.

That said, two minor trends did crop up which I found interesting.

Trend #1: Lots of stories begin with the color green.

Seriously. And I’m not only talking about leaves and grass and stuff. If a story begins with a description of a sofa in the first paragraph, you can bet the sofa will be green. If a woman is wearing a dress, it will be green. A car? Green. A man’s sweater? You guessed it.

What accounts for this? Beats me. (And might it only be a coincidence? My particular sample of stories? Not being good at statistics, I suppose that’s possible—though 300 stories seems to me like a pretty large sample.) If I were to hypothesize, I’d say that this “greening” of the short story has to do with a writer wanting to choose a visual detail, but not wanting to choose one with built-in meaning, especially one with a gender association. A man’s pink sweater implies too much. So might a red necktie. Hence green, the vibrant-yet-neutral hue.

Though now that I think about it, green does suggest inexperience. But an inexperienced wall? An inexperienced sofa?

Trend #2: The world of short fiction is populated with shoe salesmen. Seven or eight out of 300 stories might not seem like a lot, but I ask you this: when was the last time you even saw a shoe salesman? I don’t mean the kid who takes your credit card at the counter, but rather the guy who measures your foot with one of those metal contraptions, runs into the stockroom for a pair in your size, slides your foot into them, laces them up, checks to see if there’s enough room in the toe…I think it’s been about 25 years since I was in a shoe store like that.

Oh, and the related observation is that none of these stories hinged on the protagonist being a shoe salesman. The selling of shoes rarely seemed to matter in terms of character or plot or theme. The protagonist could just as easily have flipped burgers or sold garden supplies for a living.

So why all these shoe salesmen? Maybe the writers, thinking into their own pasts, decided that a shoe salesman represents a sort of prototypical job that is neither white collar nor blue collar and, like the color green, doesn’t unduly telegraph how we should feel.

Still, I was surprised that so many writers came up with the same job, which makes me think that the next story I write will steer clear of shoe salesmen and greenery.

Until the second paragraph, anyway.

Your thoughts?

Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time, forthcoming in February 2011 from Press 53. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His website is michaelkardos.com.

This weekend on The Huffington Post, writer and critic Anis Shivani posted a piece called “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary Writers.”  Some of the authors declared overrated are Amy Tan, Michael Cunningham, William T. Vollman, and Antonya Nelson.  Why have these authors been inappropriately “rated”?  According to Shivani, it’s because of the lack of good criticism, the proliferation of MFA programs, and prose that is politically irrelvant.  Shivani writes:

“If we don’t understand bad writing, we can’t understand good writing.  Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance.  Good writing is exactly the opposite.  Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself.  These writers have betrayed the legacy of modernism, not to mention postmodernism.”

Well, okay.

Shivani’s post has received quite a bit of attention: there are over 1100 comments on his article, and a quick trip around the literary blogosphere will have all sorts of response about what one commenter called a “drive by shooting of criticism.”  From reading other criticism by Shivani – he’s a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post and the literary journal Boulevard – he has always struck me as a smart, well-read critic.  Which is why his post is so disappointing.

The goal of good criticism is, in part, to show you something you haven’t seen before.  Agreeing or disagreeing isn’t the point at all.  Whether or not I agree with Shivani isn’t relevant if he can get me, or any other reader, to experience the reading of these books in a different and interesting way.  Here are just a couple of his passages that were interesting and worth more exploration:

On John Ashberry: “Mixes low and high levels of language, low and high culture, every available postmodern artifact and text, from media jargon to comic books, to recreate a reality ordered only by language itself.  When reality=language (as his carping cousins, the language poets, have it, just like him), politics becomes vacuous, and any usurper can and will step in.”

On Antonya Nelson: “She can stuff in two or three similes in a single sentence she won’t do with only one.  Has engineered a peculiarly depthless style, evoking sitcom scripts, where narrative moves by accumulation of insults and incomprehension.”

On Junot Diaz: “Replaces plot in stories and novel with pumped-up “voice.”

Whether or not Shivani is correct, none of the ideas gets any additional thought or consideration (wouldn’t, say, an example or two of the writer’s work be really helpful here?); further, they are often surrounded by a foaming rage at how connected these people are to the world of publishing.  With it’s bullet-point sentence style and unexplored ideas, it’s difficult to read his post as anything other than the sour grapes of a writer with a bully pulpit and a microphone on the outside of the publishing world.  The ideas are always suggested – again, Shivani isn’t dumb – but there isn’t any exploration of them in a way that might be the type of thoughtful criticism that he claims doesn’t exist anymore.

The construction of the column itself is an excellent example of exactly what Shivani complains is wrong with modern literature.  Is there any easier column to write (or conversation to have) than overrated/underrated?  Sportswriters have been using those for years, and at least have statistics to back them up.  Overrated compared to what, exactly?  It’s the type of word that stops thought, like any cliche, and strips away meaning.  The title is inflammatory and the column is a rabid attack, which is what it is supposed to be.  Check out the way the post is designed: pictures of all the authors, with a box to the side so you the reader can vote on the author’s “true” rating, all in a slideshow that we must click-thru to generate revenue and load new ads (see those on the side of the author photos?) for The Huff.  Everything about Shivani’s post – the title, the writing style, its “criticism,” the construct of the text – is designed to kill thought and generate clicks.

Too often that’s what writers are doing now: saying things very loudly and with tremendous emotion, like a talking head on the news, with only one or two talking points to generate all the noise.  That’s not what we need from our books, our authors, or its critics.  What we need is Shivani to explore those ideas that are only touched upon in his post – and there are compelling thoughts that could be fascinating – rather than savage famous writers with the kind of personal attacks that are far too common nowadays.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

Julia Wendell’s work has appeared in TMR vol. 8.2, 12.2, and 19.1. Her new collection The Sorry Flowers was published in November 2009 by WordTech Communications.

Q: The Missouri Review first published your poem Fireside” in 1985. What is the biggest change in your interests as a writer since that time?

A: There have been a lot of joys and disappointments since then, and lots and lots of change. Since I’m a writer who writes from my own experiences, what is happening in my life affects my poems in a singular way. Back in 1985, I was rather freshly out of Iowa, still a publisher and teacher. At 54, I’m an equestrian athlete (specifically a three-day event rider) and am about as far away from the academy as possible. Somehow that seems to suit me. I draw life and energy and purpose from my horses, in much the same way that I do from my poems. Three-day eventing is as much about determination and bravery as poetry is about self-doubt and questioning, and somehow these oxymoronic elements in my life feed each other.

Q: What poets do you read frequently or particularly admire?

A: In a pinch, I’d say, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Mark Strand, Wordsworth, Keats, T.S. Eliot, and Milton are my favorite poets. They’re the ones whose poems I can read a thousand times and still find something illuminating and delightful on the 1001.

Q: In the last poem of your new collection, you wrote, “I want to fly on my new wings / I want to leave the barn and its longings.” Does that sentiment apply to you as a poet?

A: In much of The Sorry Flowers, the poet is hemmed in by sickness, depression, loss of her parents, conflicts in family life and life in general. There’s almost a claustrophobic feel as she confronts these issues, but I like to think that the poems open up a bit at the book’s end, offering resolutions and [an] escape from the self-consuming earlier poems. Life is change, and if we can change with it, then we can escape our boundaries and limitations as poets and as people and even identify with the natural world, [becoming] the young bird in the rafters.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: After finishing a memoir about my life as a three-day event rider called Finding my Distance, I’ve gone back to writing some poems and am enjoying a new narrative element that is infiltrating them, probably because I’ve spent the last five years writing all the way to the edge of the page. I would love to write more prose in the near future, and am waiting for the right spark.

The end of July also means the end of our summer internship class.  We’ve had a wonderful group that was with us for eight weeks – way too short – and they’ve done a tremendous job on putting the finishing touches on the new issue out now and the autumn issue, which will be arriving in September.  In this space, over the course of the next few weeks, you’ll read interviews our interns have conducted with previous contributors to TMR, the first of which was Olivia’s conversation with Tom Ireland.  As always, we hope that a few interns will get the opportunity to return in autumn or spring.

Every few weeks, our intern staff turns over.  But this time of year also brings massive turnover with the departure of key graduate editors and staff.  After several years with TMR, Lania Knight accepted a position with Eastern Illinois University and hotfooted it out of CoMo.  The inclusion of audio recordings of each and every piece we publish was the brain child of Lania and our previous managing editor, Richard Sowienski, sparked by a random “Hey, did you ever consider …?” conversation in the hallway years ago.  She helped write the grant, build the studio (which is in room 54 of our building.  yes, it is Studio 54.  yes, really!), master the software, discovered the voice talent, conducted print interviews with writers like David Sedaris and Paul Eggers, worked with NPR affiliated across the country, and made our audio recordings what is today.  She’s left a massive imprint on us all here, and we’re grateful for all her time here.  Check out her fiction here.

This year, Stephanie Carpenter often appeared in our offices at odd hours with a large stack of essays sitting haphazard on the coffee table.  She’s been gracious with her time as a senior reader for us as another set of smart, critical eyes for the prose we consider.  She also worked as our contest editor back in 2007-08.  You can read one of her stories here.  She’s headed back to her home state of Michigan where she’ll start at UM-Flint in the fall and teach Tom Izzo how to run the motion offense.

Dan Stahl has been “editorial assistant” with us for almost two years, but that title doesn’t do justice to what he has meant to us.  Dan has done just about every project conceivable here, from manuscript reading and editing, research projects, and even filling in as our office manager for six weeks with just a moment’s notice.  As the Swiss Army knife of TMR, he’ll be terribly missed.

Finally, our poetry editor, Marc McKee, has accepted a one-year appointment down at Warrensburg.  He’ll have the chance to leave his fingerprints on Pleiades, another fine journal from deepinthehearta, and educate the youngsters on how to write awesome poetry.  Speaking of fine poetry, remember that Marc’s first full-length collection, Fuse, will be out from Black Lawrence Press in 2011.  As poetry editor, he’s championed a wide-range of wonderful poets that have appeared in the last four issues and had their work appear on our website as our Poem of The Week feature.  Or to use an analogy that Marc and I will enjoy, he’s been vintage Dominique Wilkens to my Doc Rivers the past six months.

So, bon voyage, y’all.  A short blog post won’t be enough to tell Marc, Stephanie, Dan, Lania, and our entire intern staff how much they’ve meant to us.  Their work and friendship has made my transition into TMR easy.  For our readers, their influence over the last several years is in the pages of TMR and the great interviews, stories, essays, and poems you’ve read – and, yes, listened to! – for years.  Good organizations are only as strong as the people that work there, and because of them, we’ve been fortunate enough to have not been not good but great.  Thank you!

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

In yesterday’s New York Times, there’s an interesting essay under the “The Way We Live Now” section by Walter Kirn, a frequent Times contributor and author of many awesome books.  His article describes a modern phenomenon called “procedural voyeurism,” which he defines as the focus on the business of creating a spectacle rather than the spectacle itself.  He cites LeBron James’s “The Decision” and the tabloid back-and-forth between Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno.  Best part, cut and spliced:

“The process of delving ever deeper into questions of process is relentless, a kind of narcissistic spiral into a procedural heart of darkness … Procedural voyeurism grants us an illusion of control over realities that we secretly fear we have no power over.”

Writers might be nodding at this, especially when thinking about the Q&A section that is commonplace after a public reading.  Questions such as “Do you write by hand or on a computer?” or “Where do your ideas come from?”, to name just two, echo the ideas that Kirn has raised.  Hearing these questions from behind a podium, I nod politely and answer truthfully, but I’ve often wondered why anyone would care about how my work is created.  What difference does it make, I’d wonder, compared to the experience of the story?  I’ve always admired the way William Trevor is noticeably silent in the back of all those anthologies his stories appear in: why comment on how it all came about when the story is in your hot little hands?

But, on the other hand, as a sports fan, I enjoy seeing how a team is constructed, what decisions go into who is hired, signed, for what type of contract, all that stuff.  The construction of a baseball club or a basketball team is interesting to me.  Is it a “narcissistic spiral into a procedural heart of darkness?”  (Could I just quote a kinder part of Kirn’s essay and take it easy on myself?)  I’ve never felt believed that the simple narrative process about the BP oil spill or the backroom deals about the health care bill or any other complex sociopolitical event gives me an semblance of control over these disasters.  Nor have I, or any reasonable person I know, bought into the idea of some grand conspiracy by the president, corporate oligarchies, or left-wing (or right-wing) cabals.  Conspiracy theories strike me as a form of illiteracy: because modern events are so complex and absurd, we create some character, probably like this guy, at the center of the storm, conjuring havoc.

With events like the Gulf oil spill or the war in Afghaniston, I don’t believe discovering this procedual voyeurism is a bad thing at all: doesn’t how it all happened matter?  Isn’t the transparency of the decision-making process in our government important?

But when it comes to art – be it film, literature, sculpting, etc. – should the process matter at all?  Or is it simply a matter of the end product?  It’s not quite as simple as one might think from behind the podium: many artists, such as Percy Shelley, Pablo Picasso, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were, to put it mildly, difficult (and this could quickly be a very long list of “difficult” artists) to live with and, with an arsonist’s glee, set fire to the lives around them.  The How-Did-This-Happen asked of a writer isn’t just about the process, because the process isn’t a great big Hollywood studio (insert Dan Brown joke here), but, more often than not, just one person.  One person in front of the page, worrying and writing and working, getting ultimately at this question: Who am I and what do I have to say?  And, when dealt with honestly, that’s a haunting question with no easy answer.

No wonder we always ask it of other artists.  And ourselves.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

Recently, several of our past contributors have had some great news: Seth Fried’s first collection is getting published on Soft Skull Press, Cheryl Strayed is being anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, and Scott Coffel has won the  2010 Norma Farber First Book Award. So, we wondered, what is everyone else up to?  In the interest of keeping you updated on the comings and goings of our talented writers, we present the first in a series of short interviews with contributors to The Missouri Review, beginning with Tom Ireland.                                                                                                                         

Tom Ireland’s essays have appeared five times in The Missouri Review. Three of them, “Fianchetto” (from TMR 21.2), “My Thai Girlfriends” (27.3) and “The Pending Disaster” (30.3) also appear in his new collection, The Man Who Gave His Wife Away (Tres Chicas Books, 2010).

INTERVIEWER: “Famous” is a much more journalistic piece than the other essays you’ve published in TMR (“Our Love Is Like a Cake,” “Fianchetto,” “My Thai Girlfriends,” “The Pending Disaster”).  Are you moving away from the more personal style that characterized those earlier works?

IRELAND: “Famous” began as a travel narrative and ended up more like journalism than originally intended. I wanted to write what I and only I could know about the attacks through the accident of being in Mumbai right after they occurred. But it became painfully apparent while rewriting that in order to hang together, the piece had to be more about Ajmal Kasab and less about me. That required research, and leaving things out that didn’t belong. For example, I carried more rancor towards the Mumbai taxi driver who overcharged us one afternoon … than I did towards the terrorists, since I’d been personally victimized by one and not the other. But the taxi man and my righteous anger about getting cheated didn’t belong in the essay I was writing. Journalism might be more appealing to me if it didn’t rely so heavily on accuracy. I admire the creative aspects of journalism at its best, but I don’t think I have the temperament for it.

INTERVIEWER: In “Famous” you mention that although you were in Mumbai shortly after the massacre, you did not learn Ajmal Kasab’s name or begin to follow his story until after you returned home.  What kind of research and preparation goes into an essay like “Famous”?

IRELAND: I tried to make it clear in the essay that everything I “knew” about Kasab … I learned from media sources—photos, newspaper articles, and other peoples’ versions of the story on the internet. No respectable journalist works this way. Besides studying up on Indian history and the Indian railway system, I had to sift through the deluge of available online information to find details that interested me or that might lead to a better understanding of who Kasab was and why he did what he did. This brings up issues, not touched on in the essay, about the uses and abuses of information. How much of what you read can you believe, and how much can you repeat?

INTERVIEWER: What are you working on now?

IRELAND: A poem based on a recurring dream in which I’m always about to leave for Moscow but never get as far as boarding the plane. It may be a metaphor for the books I haven’t written. And publicity for my new collection, The Man Who Gave His Wife Away (Tres Chicas Books).  The book was almost twenty years in the making, all told. Two of the pieces in it had been book-length manuscripts. As unappetizing as self-promotion is, I need to do some flag waving on its behalf.

You can purchase Tom Ireland’s collection The Man Who Gave His Wife Away from his website, from Tres Chicas Books or in Tom’s neighborhood at Collected Works in Santa Fe, NM.   You can read his most recent TMR essay, “Famous,” here on the TMR website.

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith is a summer intern at The Missouri Review.

Brevity, the awesome online journal of (very) short non-fiction, has been around for over a decade, publishing, in 750-words or less, wonderful work that has been anthologized in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and Utne Reader, among others.  Heavy hitters published by Brevity include Sherman Alexie, Terese Svoboda, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robin Hemley, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, Robin Behn, Abby Frucht, Bret Lott, Ira Sukrungruang, Rigoberto González, and Diana Hume George.  Also:

“The three most recent issues also include work by graduate students, recently graduated students, and those still very much at the beginning of their publishing careers. We have featured at least one undergraduate in our pages (though we didn’t know she was an undergraduate student until well after we accepted her stunning essay), and we read always with an open mind.”

In a blog post this week, Brevity asked readers what they thought about a new policy the magazine is considering: charging a submission fee of two to three dollars.

Fast and furious, Brevity has, in less than 24 hours, received over 220 blog comments and who knows how many links, pings, trackbacks, and blogger commentary.  Along with this month’s press release from Tin House that they will be requiring a receipt to be accompanied with all submissions this fall (see our thoughts on that matter here), once again, the discussion about magazines and their audience is back in the crosshairs.

Originally, I wrote up a lengthy post about Brevity’s decision, but really, everything that crossed my mind was brought up by the comments in the original post.  Go back and read them carefully because there are many thoughtful ideas and strong emotional responses that editors and readers alike need to consider.  There are comments from Travis Kurowski, Karen Craigo, Chris Offutt, Leslie McGrath, Liz Prato, J.T. Bushnell, Amy Holman, Antonio Vallone, and Mary Tabor.

From Dinty:

“I have logged many personal man hours contacting the schools that have gone overboard with sending unprepared students, and the following semester, even more schools show up doing the same thing. Very disheartening.”

Based on what was written in the comment section, a submission manager system would be a tremendous benefit (Travis Kurowski’s suggestion).  Submission managers require registration, and usually ask for basic information such as an email address, mailing address, as well as the option to be added to the mailing list.  This is information that a journal can use to not only control submissions (particularly writers that ignore Brevity’s guidelines and send work more than twice a year) but can provided subscription deals, coupons, links, and so forth.  Currently, submitters to Brevity fire work off to a Gmail account, and without explaining it here, I bet you can imagine how quickly that can get, um, messy.

Anyway, to me, the most important and laudatory aspect of all this is that Brevity asked its audience for their opinion first.  Whatever decision the editors make—and to be clear, a decision has not yet been made—Brevity first went to the most important people: its reading audience and its submitters.  Those two camps (which are not mutually exclusive) are the reason Brevity exists.  And asking for their opinion first is a strong indicator of a magazine that gets it.

Oh, and if you read the comments, and actually, even if you didn’t, you should enjoy this and this.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

The advanced copy of the summer issue just arrived on our doorstep. Which means your copy will be shipping in the next few days.  We hope that it goes this week, but we hit a bit of a snafu with the boxes.  Typically, our issues are 192 pages, but this action packed ditty has 208 pages, which means our mailer needed to find slightly larger boxes than normal, hence, a short delay.

(Digression: My buddy Dave and I love baseball. Whenever we’re at a game and it’s tied after nine innings, one of us yells “Free baseball!”  One of the beauties of baseball is that it is a timeless game: there is no clock so the game ends only at its own pace. Some sports fans, of course, don’t like this and wish the game was faster. Not us. Now, of course, “Free Literature!” doesn’t have quite the same ring, but hey, you get the idea …)

Our summer issue is titled “Crash.”  We have new fiction by Wade Ostrokwski, Becky Adnot Hayes, Devin Murphy, and Nathan Hogan’s first published story, “The Church at Yavi.”  Our essays are M.C. Armstrong’s fascinating look at Ken and Faye Kesey’s life after the death of their son in a school bus accident, and Sharon Solwitz’s examination of her struggles with her husband as he suffers through the late stages of multiple sclerosis.  Also, new poems by Benjamin Grossberg, Jonathan Johnson, and Cubs fan John W. Evans.  We also have a terrific Found Text feature on the letters of James Stern, and poetry editor Marc McKee sits down with Natasha Trethewey to talk poetry, New Orleans, and LeBron James (okay, I made that last one up).

A big Thank You to all our contributors, staff, designers, and printers: the new issue looks wonderful!  I know our readers will soon agree.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

Mathew Chacko’s “Ivy: A Love Story” (from TMR 31.2) is a vivid portrait of a grief-haunted man redefining the boundaries of his world after the loss of his wife.  Vibrant imagery, a dynamic Indian setting and a protagonist steeped in a lifetime of memories make Chako’s story a compelling and layered read.

Saw Georgeanne Nixon and Governor Nixon at the movies yesterday. Georgeanne is a serious and involved supporter of the arts. Didn’t get a chance to talk to them after the show but wonder what they thought of Winter’s Bone, which might be interpreted as a “negative” portrait of drug dealers in the Missouri Ozarks.

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve enjoyed the long weekend: any excuse for a three-day weekend that includes barbecue, fireworks, baseball, and parades is okay with us. So, when I returned to the TMR office today, there was a large pile of unread emails in my Inbox, including a lengthy thread from literary journal editors about this annoucement via GalleyCat. For those of you inclined to click the links later rather than sooner, here’s the gist from the press release:

“Between August 1 and November 30, 2010, Tin House Books will accept unsolicited manuscripts with one special condition–the submission must include a receipt that proves the author has purchased a book at a bookstore. The same rule applies for unsolicited work submitted to Tin House magazine between September 1 and December 30, 2010. There are a few additional rules to keep in mind when submitting. Tin House Books does not permit electronic submissions. However, the magazine does permit manuscripts by mail or digitally (as well as scanned bookstore receipts). Any manuscript breaking these rules will be returned unread.”

Visit Tin House here to see for yourself.

For me, this doesn’t pass the Blink test: something about this, instinctively, is wrong.  Forcing someone to buy a product in order for the opportunity to be a part of your magazine doesn’t sit right with me.  It sounds an awful lot like totalitarian democracy.

The relationship between the literary magazine and its audience has grown increasingly combative over the years (over the years – yeesh, I’ve been in this for less than a decade!) and, more than dollars and cents, this poor and deteriorating communication seems to be at the heart of this controversy. Literary magazines are feeling increased pressure to remain fiscally sound, if not profitable, as seen by the recent pressures on TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, New England Review, just to name a few, and are looking for ways to monetize just about any aspect of their organization, not out of greed, but out of the increasingly desperate need to remain alive.  Readers and submitters sense not only are the major venues and financial support vanishing as the slicks stop printing fiction, but that magazines that do publish fiction are increasingly chosen because of agents and a writer’s “platform” in cooperation with the literati’s self-fulfilling prophecy of annointing the 20-Under-40 (and so forth).  Further, readers and submitters believe that the literary magazines are closed to them: the quality of the work is poor and the editors are only publishing their friends based on who they went to graduate school with or who can do them a favor (“Publish my poem and I’ll publish yours!”).

So, literary magazines believe readers and submitters aren’t financially supporting their journals; readers and submitters believe literary magazines are a clandestine society off-shoring their money woes onto the backs of others.

Frankly, I think both parties have valid complaints.

In their defense, Tin House is not requiring the submitters to buy a copy of Tin House or a Tin House book.  In fact, the news release doesn’t even say it has to be a new book: one could, conceivable, go to the nearest used bookstore and buy a twenty-five cent copy of Bleak House and mail the receipt in with your story.  Considering that as a writer, your submission needs to factor in the costs of its printing, the envelope,  SASE, stamps, gas and/or bike energy to get to the post office, perhaps twenty five cents isn’t that big of a deal.  Tin House directly gains nothing.  Plus, Dickens is awesome.

Literary magazines have a challenge: we don’t know what our readers want.  To say that a reader wants “good” literature is pretty vague: what makes good or great work is subjective.  If we knew exactly what that was, we wouldn’t be presenting art, but selling a product, and we would have test groups and marketing plans telling us what you (who would no longer be a reader, but a “consumer”) demand of us.  Art isn’t like that.  And this is, of course, a good thing.

It’s also problematic when it comes to the fiscal side of publishing a journal: if we don’t know what you want, and don’t know what we have (because we rely on submissions we haven’t seen yet), how do we appropriately plan on meeting our budget and not go under?  We come up with innovative ways to put money into our magazine, and if not into our magazine, then into our industry.  Sometimes, this works.  Sometimes, this doesn’t.  Most of us enter into literary publishing not because there is a pot of gold at the end, but because we believe that presenting the world with the best work we can find, and getting an audience for those writers, is a worthy endeavor.  We want to support our authors as best we can.  And those authors are, of course, our submitters.  And those authors often publish books that can be purchased in bookstores.

Ultimately, to me, what is most troubling here is the lack of choice.  The submitter must buy a book.  The submitter has limited options: reading online, going to the library, ordering from Amazon, etc., are all unacceptable.  One of our staffers compared it to going to Six Flags and getting a reduced admission price because you bring a can of Coca-Cola; another said it was like getting a free coffee from Starbucks because you have a Starbucks bag.  But, if you don’t have a Coke or a bag, you can still get into Six Flags or buy a mocha-frappa-whatever at Starbucks.  Tin House isn’t giving you this option.

Thoughts on this?  Drop us a line and tell us what you think.

You don’t need a bookstore receipt to send your work to The Missouri Review.  So, go ahead!  No ticket!  After all, we don’t want this to happen to anyone.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

That’s right: we would like you to follow us on Twitter!

As The Missouri Review makes its first foray into the Twitterverse, we wanted to ask all of our readers, bloggers, and contributors to come join us.  Tweets will include updates on behind-the-scenes action at the magazine, favorite literary quotes, retweets, and of course, lots of stuff about Martin Amis.  Please bear with us these first few weeks as we get used to the Fail Whale regularly appearing on our ‘puter screens.  We should have it running along smoothly in no time!

Contributors to The Missouri Review have received some great news the last few weeks, and of course, I’d like to pass that on to everyone else (if you haven’t heard already).

Seth Fried, whose has published two stories with us (“The Siege” and “Loeka Discovered”), has just had his first story collection accepted at Soft Skull Press.  He even has a mathematical formula to explain this:

Soft Skull + Seth Fried = (Endless Love + Debut Short Story Collection) x Awesomeness

That sounds about right.  Congratulations, Seth!

Several of our authors published in 2009 have been shortlisted for the Best American anthologies in 2010.  These include:

Andrew Cohen, “Television Days,” Vol 32.4 (essay)

Cheryl Strayed, “Munro County,” Vol 32.4 (essay)

Deborah Thompson, “What’s the Matter with Houdini,” Vol 32.1 (essay)

Elise Juska, “The Way I Saw The World Then,” Vol 32.4 (story)

Eleanor Lerman, “Persistent Views of the Unknown,” Vol 32.3 (story)

It’s wonderful to see these writers recongized for their work. Congratulations to all! You can check out these particular back issues (all of our back issues, actually) here and read (re-read?) their amazing work.

We have a winner!  We’ve just (finally!) done our iPad drawing.  I’d like to thank all our readers and writers who wrote in asking to be entered in the drawing.  We received several hundreds of entries, and had to scrounge up a very large hat to throw in all the emails we received.  I stirred the whole pile of small notebook pages around and around, held the bin way up in the air, shook it a couple of times for good measure, and asked The Intern to reach up and pluck a winner.  The Intern, grateful to not do any more filing for the afternoon, complied.

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

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

Sometimes I think of my graduate student stipend like a miniskirt: something that just covers the essentials, and pretty much restricts free movement.  This is why, when I was earning my MFA degree, I never used to submit my poetry to contests that cost money.  Do I want to send off a check to this journal’s contest, for which my chances of winning are slim, and my chances of disappointment fairly high, I’d wonder, or do I want to be able to pay for a glass of wine with dinner? The glass of wine always won out.  It seemed less like throwing away my barely existent salary.

I said something to this effect once when I was in workshop with a poet I particularly admire, and he looked at me as if I had said something ridiculous.  “You have to think of entry fees as an expense of the craft,” he said.  “As writers, we don’t have the huge expenses that most other artists have.  We don’t have to buy paints and canvasses and brushes; we don’t have tools or instruments that regularly need to be repaired or replaced; all we really need is a pen and a piece of paper.”  It was so simple, but this one bit of advice altered my perspective dramatically.  If I spend a couple hundred dollars a year on contest submissions, I’m still spending less than a sculptor spends on clay and glazes or a ballet dancer spends on pointe shoes.

It’s a perspective that, as this year’s contest editor, I want to pass on to others.  And really, I’m not just saying this because it’s my job to say this.  I’m saying submit to other journal’s prizes too, like the Black Warrior Review’s contest (http://www.bwr.ua.edu/), the American Literary Review’s contest (http://www.engl.unt.edu/alr/contest.html), Indiana Review’s “1/2 K” (http://indianareview.org/general/prize.html), and others.  Work contest entry fees in as a part of your budget.

I know.  A lot of writers don’t have day jobs that bring in huge salaries.  We freelance, or teach yoga, or wait tables, or maybe adjunct at a couple of colleges.  But there are plenty of reasons why sending our work to contests makes good sense—why it doesn’t, in fact, constitute a waste of money.  For one thing, you might actually win something.  If you research the contest and know that your work matches up, then you’re already giving yourself an advantage above most of your competition.  Even if you don’t win the grand prize, you still might wind up a finalist (a good CV line) or have a poem or story accepted for publication.  And even if neither of those things happens, you can still feel good that your money is going to support a journal that depends on contest fees as a major source of income.  More than that, a lot of journals—The Missouri Review included—offer a year’s subscription as part of their entry costs, so you’re still getting something for your money.  (For info about TMR’s June submission bonus—where we’ll extend your subscription—click here: http://www.missourireview.com/contest/editors_prize.php).

I hope you aren’t in the position where you have to choose between that glass of wine and a contest entry.  I hope you can have your cake and eat it too.  But if not, think of the tradeoff as just a small expense for the craft you’ve chosen.  Be glad that almost everything else you need to succeed as a writer is free.

With the end of the fiscal year looming, I’ve fallen a wee bit behind on the blogging. So, a quick link for you. Tip o’the cap to TMR favorite Cheryl Strayed for this link to Danielle Evans blog, who pushes through the typical complaints about MFA programs and discusses several interesting concepts (particularly the novel in workshops) on her blog.

To many readers of the literary journal scene, Jacob Appel is a familiar name. He’s published in a slew of places such as AGNI, StoryQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Boston Review, to name just a few.  Jacob also won our 2007 Editors’ Prize with his story “Creve Coeur.”  You can purchase the issue with his winning story here.

In the January/February 2009 issue of Poets & Writers, Jacob wrote his essay “The Case for Contests” (sadly, it is not available on the PW website). Among the many nuggets Jacob tosses out, there is this: “My best advice is that one should submit to contests early and often.”

We agree!  The submission period for our annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize is now open.  To celebrate the 20^th year of our contest, we would like to offer you an additional issue of The Missouri Review at no extra cost if you submit your entry during the month of June.  Winners in each genre receive $5,000, plus a featured publication in our spring issue—making this one of the top literary prizes in the country.  Three finalists in each genre will also receive awards and be considered for publication.

The entry fee of $20 includes a year-long, 4-issue subscription.  To take advantage of our special offer, simply submit your entry between June 1^st and June 30^th, and your subscription will automatically be upgraded to include a 5^th issue, in digital format, for free.  You may choose to receive the rest of your subscription in hard copy or in digital format.  Digital format includes full access to our print version—plus the audio version of the magazine, allowing you to hear every poem, story, and essay performed by either the author (such as Judith Sloan’s 2008 Audio Documentary essay) or a professional reader (such as Kevin McFillen’s reading of Paul Guest’s poetry).

It would be super smart to read our full contest guidelines and then you should absolutely submit your contest entry by mail or online. As always, please feel free to contact us via email at mutmrcontestquestion@missouri.edu  if you have any questions about the whole kit-n-kaboodle.