Blog Archives

New Yorker Fiction 2014

2/26/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
John Steinbeck
Born February 27, 1902

Longer Than One Expects

March 3, 2014, Denis Johnson, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”: Bill Whitman, a sixty-three-year-old ad man living in San Diego, recalls his life as he returns to New York to receive an award for a thirty-second bank commercial. ¶ There is in this story a bit of Johnson’s mordant wit: “. . . and what little of it she managed to make comprehensible didn’t even merit being called shallow”—much of what I cherished about his novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991). ¶ Johnson’s story is comprised of ten sections, each a mini-narrative of its own. They seem somewhat disjointed, but one comes to realize that they make up the cumulative narrative of this man’s life—much like our own narratives, wandering but all related to one another in the end. Whitman is at that point we all reach, whether we realize it or not: “I note that I’ve lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future.” ¶ The title must be derived from the final paragraph (Johnson claims to have seen the phrase in a book of fairy tales):

“Once in a while, I lie there as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon the sea maidens, eggs that fulfill my wish, and pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again.”

Johnson's The Laughing Monsters is out next fall.
[The magazine lists no credit for the story’s illustration.]

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

Short Essay, Photograph

2/25/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The malicious have a dark happiness.
Victor Hugo
Born February 26, 1802

Fort Ticonderoga, New York, 2003

I'm not sure why I love this photograph so much. Maybe it is the point of view—I was able to scoot down onto a series of steps, aiming my camera at calf level. Perhaps it is the wonderful contrast of dark navy and scarlet. Perhaps it is catching these eighteenth-century gents in a twenty-first century stance, cell phones vibrating in their pockets, their parallel shadows in the afternoon sun of an August day in 2003. Perhaps it is the patch of sky located below the stained drum, the turquoise cannon aged by time. The stone wall still standing after all these years. I could now go back eleven years later, and, though the young men would have spread to the far corners of the earth, this wall would remain essentially the same. I would just bet on it.

THURSDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

My Book World

2/24/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
America, on one level, is a great old-movie museum.
Anthony Burgess
Born February 25, 1917

Terms We Should Remember: Masscult and Midcult

Macdonald, Dwight. John Summers, editor. Louis Menand, introduction. Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain. New York Review Books. New York, 2011.

I became interested in this book when I saw it reviewed in The New Yorker. Then after I received my copy, I found that this blurb from the back cover gives the reader a great introduction to Macdonald, who published most of these essays prior to 1972:

“An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon ‘Midcult’ and he attacked it not only an aesthetic but political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free.” Wow!

Some Nuggets from a Book Filled with Them

On the Mags:

“This is a magazine-reading country. When one comes back from abroad, the two displays of American abundance that dazzle one are the supermarkets and the newsstands. There are no British equivalents of our Midcult magazines like The Atlantic and the Saturday Review, or of our mass magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post and Look, or of our betwixt-&-between magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker (which also encroach on the Little Magazine area). There are, however, several big-circulation women’s magazines, I suppose because the women’s magazine is such an ancient and essential form of journalism that even the English dig it” (59). 1960

“The nearest approach to a ‘center of consciousness’ in our magazines is in the Midcult ones like Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Reporter and the Saturday Review, and the trouble with these is that the editors consistently—one might almost say on principle—underestimate the intelligence of the readers” (62). 1960

On Speculative Thinking:

“Books that are speculative rather than informative, that present their authors’ own thinking and sensibility without any apparatus of scientific or journalistic research, sell badly in this country. There is a good market of the latest ‘Inside Russia’ reportage, but when Knopf published Czeslaw Milosz’ The Captive Mind, an original and brilliant analysis of the Communist mentality, it sold less than 3,000 copies. We want to know how what who, when, where, everything but why” (208). 1957

Middlebrow:

“The objection to middlebrow, or petty-bourgeois, culture is that it vitiates serious art and thought by reducing it to a democratic-philistine pabulum, dull and tasteless because it is manufactured for a hypothetical ‘common man’ who is assumed (I think wrongly) to be even dumber than the entrepreneurs who condescendingly ‘give the public what it wants.’ Compromise is the essence of midcult, and compromise is fatal to excellence in such matters” (269). 1972

I was fascinated with this man’s informed opinions because essentially little has changed since he made these assertions (when I was but a child or youth). If anything, such conditions have worsened. What can be more Masscult than People Magazine? And has even The New Yorker slipped a bit? Are we getting stupider as a culture, or was Macdonald too smart for his own good?

WEDNESDAY: SHORT ESSAY AND PHOTOGRAPH

Dictionary Revisited 2

2/20/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
...your first successful piece of writing is your best piece of writing—until you finally out achieve it with another piece of writing, terrifically new and phenomenally well done.
Felice Picano
Born February 22, 1944

Dictionary of Errors--Conclusion

Adjectival Envy. There exists another rule that is no longer taught anywhere on the face of the English speaking world—except perhaps in Merrie Olde Englande. To practice it fairly, one must understand that only SOME adjectives can be transformed by adding (i)er or (i)est. Hark ye, the following. Yes, recently, a local weather person said something like “Tomorrow, winds will be more breezy than they were today. Tonight, the sky will be more bright.” Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, my heart cries out. Who told this child he could employ more with a regular adjective?

How does one know whether an adjective is regular or irregular? you might ask. One’s ear (unless it has been pounded into veal), that’s how! Would one say, “The sky is beautifuler today than it was yesterday?” Of course not. One’s ear tells you that beautiful is irregular, requires the word more to form the comparative and most to form the superlative form. The sky is more beautiful than it was yesterday. By the same dull token, one should hear that breezy is a regular adjective; merely drop the “y” and add “ier.” Tomorrow, winds will be breezier than they were today. The sky is brighter than yesterday. So simple a child could do it. And therein lies the problem.

Public school teachers are no longer teaching these inviolate rules. Why? Because they themselves were not properly taught. Today’s youngish teachers attended elementary school in the nineties—during our school-of-what’s-happening-today period (recall the cooperative learning debacle, open education, whole language, harrumph). I charge you with journeying to a used book store and locating an old (but never outdated) copy of the Great Grammar Book of Inviolate Rules and learn them by heart, yes, by rote memory, if the nation is to avoid a catastrophe.

Printer, Printer, Printer. Whenever I find a typographical or spelling error (sometimes both) in a published work, I mark it, make a photocopy, and send it to the publisher. I feel that it is my duty. Perhaps in the second printing (if an author is lucky), the publisher will get it right. In any case it makes me feel better, because I’ve made a contribution to the language I must strive to defend and protect at all costs.

The problem has gotten out of hand, not only in the arena of the subliminal error, but now (as they always have) the ad agencies have made misspelling a career, something fun, like crossword puzzles (think how much fun those would be if the words weren’t spelled correctly). Thanx is an atrocious example. Thanx for the memories. Many Thanx. Thanx Be To God. Pleez. And God, don’t get me started on the Internet. GoDaddy for an employment agency? Wix for a Web site company? Google for a search engine? How can one take any of these things seriously? Wikipedia? Expedia? Puh.

I believe here is still hope for the human race, but we must act quickly.

All my best,

Porter E. Cresswell

Citizen Editor

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

Dictionary Revisited

2/19/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him.
Ellen Gilchrist
Born February 20, 1935

A Dictionary of Errors

When Porter Cresswell thinks of the vast number of mistakes that we speakers of English make each and every day of the year—for how can we help it, we’re only human, after all—there are a few that stick in his craw like a toothpick caught crossways in his throat. And he writes a letter to the editor of his local newspaper. Online, no less.

Dear Fellow Citizens,

You would do well to recall that grammar books are written based on usage. Yes, through the long lineage of our language, crafters of such books have discarded that which no longer works (thee and thou, for example) and accepted or transformed a former mistake into something that is now acceptable usage. Over time, after humans insist on melting the “h” out of a certain word or making one agree with a verb that it didn’t in the beginning, the writers of the Great Grammar Book of Inviolate Rules often acquiesce to the hoi polloi . . . and change the rule. Still, I think we should uphold certain rules of grammar, as long as we can.

I or Thou. I hear people of all ages violate this inviolate rule, but mostly it is the young, and such usage is appalling. Appalling, I tell you!

Me and my friends went to the store.

Yack!

Me and coach decided I should pass the ball off instead of trying to take the entire game on my back.

What makes either of these sentences unacceptable is that the speaker has chosen to use the wrong pronoun, indeed the wrong type of pronoun. Me is an object pronoun. Not in a million years can it really serve as the subject of a sentence (well, we could wait around and see). One can put it before the verb and pretend, but no no no, I protest. Me cannot ever be the subject of the sentence. I is the subject pronoun one wishes to use.

My friends (to be polite) and I went to the store.

Coach and I decided (equally) that I should pass the ball off instead of trying to take the entire game on my back.

The rule is so simple. I performs the action; only me can take it up the you know what. (Or is it Only I can take it . . .?)

FRIDAY: END OF PORTER CRESSWELL'S "Dictionary of Errors" RANT

See Ken Dixon's most recent post at kendixonartblog.com. In it he talks about his latest show at the William Campbell Gallery in Fort Worth. Exciting stuff!

Photographs, Palo Duro Canyon

2/18/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
Carson McCullers
Born February 19, 1917

A Warm February Day in Palo Duro

Saturday, February 15, it was 86 degrees in Palo Duro Canyon, Texas! Celebrating 38 years together, we took advantage of the great weather on this day trip.

My Book World

2/17/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
Born February 18, 1931

What a Childhood, What a Writer!

Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

In this memoir, author Annie Dillard recalls the freedom she was given as a child. Is this childhood lived in 1940s and 50s, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the sort of childhood that helps create artists? From her book I developed the following tenet: Parents who allow their children to be their own person have no equal:

“I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill” (149).

When she is not even twelve, Dillard and her friends, the Fahey brothers, form what they call iceballs and throw them at cars for sport. At one point she lobs one that hits a man’s windshield inches from his head. He throws open the door of his Buick and leaves it agape as he chases them block after block until, breathlessly, he catches them:

“‘You stupid kids,’ he began perfunctorily.

“We listened perfunctorily indeed, if we listened at all, for the chewing out was redundant, a mere formality, and beside the point. The point was that he had chased us passionately without giving up, and so he had caught us. Now he came down to earth. I wanted the glory to last forever.

“But how could the glory have lasted forever? We could have run through every backyard in North American until we got to Panama. But when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal, what precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory?” (48).

I witnessed a similar event one year, when a man who lived next door to my elementary school in Wichita stacked dead branches in the area of land between the sidewalk and the street. When a kid picked one of the large branches and began to drag it down the street, the man raced out and dragged the boy toward the school to report him to the principal. Just watching that act of violence froze me to the sidewalk. I could never have thrown a snowball at a Buick traveling haplessly down the street. Perhaps Dillard’s childhood equipped her with a certain courage many of us do not have. Parents who leave their children alone can produce results that go a variety of ways. For Dillard it seems to have helped to produce one of the most creative writers in America. I'm sure I’ll read this work again.

WEDNESDAY: A PHOTO AND A SHORT ESSAY

New Yorker Fiction 2014

2/13/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Fortunately, religion depends as little upon theology as love upon phrenology.
Israel Zangwill
Born February 14, 1864

Does Story Come Together?

Javier Jaén

February 17 & 24, 2014, Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Come Together”: Boy meets girl. Boy is enticed by girl to go “out.” They kiss for fifteen minutes, breaking a record of the boy’s friend. Girl calls it off, breaking boy’s heart. ¶ Coming-of-age stories are tricky to write. If they’re too generic, they can be horribly uninteresting, except perhaps to other twelve-year-olds. The perfect modulation is needed, and such an element seems to be missing from this story. It seems a bit disingenuous for an adult writer to pretend that he is twelve again. A bit of the retrospective point of view is needed, I think, to put the story in its proper place. ¶ Also, I keep expecting something new or different to happen: Karl’s older brother is setting him up for a fall or his parents are going to catch the two mid-kiss or something! ¶ And I issue the same disclaimer I often make with regard to translations. Something seems to get lost, indeed! Perhaps I’ve missed some finer nuance of the story, but I don’t think so. It seems like a very elemental narrative by someone who must be a very fine writer in his own language. Knausgaard strikes a number of chords—music albums, song titles, rock groups from the period—but they fail to make a sound that I can hear. This story is part of the author’s forthcoming title, part of his My Struggle series of novels.
Javier Jaén, Photographer.

Refugee of the 20th Century

2/12/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The events of childhood do not pass, but repeat themselves like seasons of the year.
Eleanor Farjeon
Born February 13, 1881

A Refugee of the Twentieth Century Cries Out!

PRESS HERE FOR PAIN

I cherish the days when I could call my doctor’s office, or any other business concern, and speak to a real person. I stayed with the “press-one-for-this” era for a long time because I knew I would eventually reach flesh and blood, a voice that would help me. I even learned the trick of pressing “0,” which would bypass the menu and take me directly to the operator, receptionist, a live one! Ha, tricked you.

But the other day I called my primary care physician . . . and the “0” stunt failed to work. The only way to reach a real person, the recorded voice declared, was to leave a message. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. The she-voice obviously didn’t own a cell phone. “You dial 911,” I screamed into my message, “because by the time you call me back, I will have cut my throat.”

In a calmer state, I read online that all of us—even us dinosaurs from the last century—can still maintain plasticity in our brains by learning new things. And I think I agree. I should keep reading. Writing. Constructing things. Being with people. Playing the piano or some other instrument, and learning a new piece, not just reworking all the old ones. I should learn how to maneuver new software, one that helps compose and score music, one that edits video or film footage. Play video games. X-box. PS4. Rah, rah, rah. These are the things that create new space in your brain.

But let me share with you, dear doctor, what I’ve also learned: that it is easier for you to email or voicemail someone than it is to speak with one of your clients.

BETTER BUSINESS

If you call a particular department store, one whose name shall remain a secret, their Tech division, for example, to get help with one of their forking appliances, you get a voice that can’t be any older than twenty telling you: You’ve reached our Tech Squad. No one can take your call at this time. We’re all busy helping customers like you, but please leave your name, number, date of birth, and we’ll get back to you soon as we can. The person speaking turns and says to a companion, in a rather rude aside: Don’t wait for hell to freeze over. (Cascades of mirthful laughter follow.)

Then I realize . . . I might get through faster on Facebook. Yeah, I’ll just post this little ditty: Why don’t you friend me by answering your phone!? Or what about this twit: Hey, world, do you even know what a crappy place _______ is to shop for appliances?

PREACHING TO THE CONVERTED

At this point, I don’t want anyone to think I don’t love what technology has brought to me. I worship my iPhone! It’s not my phone as much as it is my calendar, my stereo cabinet, a photo album, a camera, a calculator, a notepad, a clock and timer, a newspaper stand, a library, an atlas that helps me find my way in the world, a weather guide. I could go on about film aps, restaurant aps, wine aps. Whew, why would I want to go back in time?

I have the same adoration for HDTV: 450 stations. I can record up to two hundred hours of programming in HD and watch them on my fifty-five-inch screen! Movies, premium TV series like Girls and Looking. My life is perfect. Why would I wish to return to a time when one used a black rotary phone and was proud to have it, when one had three TV stations, four if you counted PBS? Houses and cars without AC? I don’t think so.

Still . . . I would like to get through to any of my doctors, thank you very much, or, I should say, his or her receptionist or nurse. Keep it real, man . . . woman. Talk to me. Now . . . if you have the time, please!

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Hawk in the Neighborhood

2/11/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
There is no freedom for the weak.
George Meredith
Born February 12, 1828

Hawk in the Neighborhood

Not the greatest shot in terms of photography. I had to shoot with a telephoto lens through three panes of glass. Still, this hawk is an unusual sight, and it entertained us throughout the day, as it sailed through the air above our block.

Cooper's Hawk

Close-Up of Cooper's Hawk

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

My Book World

2/10/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.
Lydia M. Child
Born February 11, 1802

Playing St. Barbara Not Easy

Szczepanski, Marian. Playing St. Barbara. (City): High Hill Press, 2013.

In October author Marian Szczepanski wrote a guest post in this blog about how she came to pen her book. Before beginning my profile, you may wish to click on her name for a link to that post.

Publishing a book today is as dependent on word of mouth as it has ever been, more so if you consider that most publishers either don’t have the budget for reading tours and other expensive forms of publicity or else save their millions for their top-earners. What follows is my word-of-mouth entreaty to read a fine book.

A COMPELLING STORY

Playing St. Barbara begins in 1929 with an eighth-grader’s winning essay describing the seventh-century legend of St. Barbara, patron saint of miners. The salient features of Barbara’s life—a cruel and unyielding father, her unbending conversion from paganism to Christianity, her apparent disappearance into the earth—play out in various ways throughout Szczepanski’s novel, and it is important for the reader to internalize the saint’s story before moving on.

The narrative reveals the lives of three daughters, one of whom writes the winning essay, and the wife of a coal miner, primarily during the decade of the 1930s in southwestern Pennsylvania. As an aside, in 1957, my family’s car broke down in a coal mining town in this region, and we spent three days there in a “hotel” waiting for our car to be repaired (my parents wound up buying a new Pontiac before we returned to our home in Kansas). Coal dust was so prevalent that my mother felt compelled to wipe every chair before we sat down, even the toilet seat. She must have prayed before each meal we ate, that we would not breathe in any more of the powder than necessary. Such fine dust is spread throughout this story like a black veil.

The father, Finbar Sweeney, is an abusive brute. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t verbally abuse his wife, Clare, or physically harm her by way of a brutal slap or unwanted sexual advances. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t abuse one of his three daughters. All three seem like shards of the same person, and they are, in a sense, all reflections of their mother, Clare. It may be because of their suffering that Clare in some way consumes what seem like magic seeds to free her body of a number of pregnancies.

One bright thread in the lives of the coal miners and their families is the annual St. Barbara pageant (the other is baseball), offered up to the martyred life of the patron saint of miners. Each of the Sweeney daughters, very close in age, is called upon to play the life of the saint over several years—and each in her own way fails. The event emphasizes the class differences in that the play is directed by a woman the youths call The Queen, a wife of an “upperhiller,” a woman whose husband is in management. However, The Queen must depend on the miners’ children to play the parts and is not always pleased with their performances.

Each of Clare's daughters, in her own way, manages to escape from the town: the eldest by marrying well, another by becoming a nun, though she sacrifices her own love of a man to do so, and the third by her very wits, bidding good-bye to the town and venturing off to nearby Pittsburgh to start a new life. Clare, too, long-suffering wife must make a decision with regard to Finbar. After the mine experiences a huge explosion and collapse and Fin must spend time in the hospital, she goes to see him every day, and each day, unless sedated, he lashes out at her. Temporarily free of his ill treatment at home, she, of course, drinks in her freedom. Her friends and daughters urge her to leave Fin, an act of desperation at a time and place where the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church are clear, where most women wouldn’t leave their husbands for any reason. But the women in Clare’s life are clear: Finbar, alcoholic brute, is never going to change.

BUY THE BOOK

Playing St. Barbara is a rich amalgam of many things: historical novel, romance (capital R), crusade for the rights of nonunion workers (Pennsylvania Mine War of 1933), exposé of the Klu Klux Klan’s work in the 1930s, the plight of women since time immemorial. But most of all, it is a window into a small fragment of life that must have begun somewhere in Germany, where coal-mining was developed long ago, and continues through today in the States. Though the conditions and rights of miners have improved, the delicate and flammable nature of their work will probably never change. And sadly, though the lives of women everywhere have improved, as well, there are still souls today who are being subjected to men like Fin, trapped in lives that are as dark and dirty as the mines themselves. Szczepanski’s book will not allow us to forget.

Today’s writers depend heavily on the “platform” they themselves build: websites, blogs, readings in indie bookstores (that they themselves must arrange), Facebook pages, Twits (you know what I mean), Google+. But most of all, steady sales depend on the hardy word-of-mouth transfer from one reader to the next. Marian Szczepanski has written a highly literate and transformational book. It is a book for women. It is a book for men. It is a book for the old and the young. Anyone who loves a great story, a significant one. To get your copy, click on any of the links below. I highly recommend that you do!

Amazon

High Hill Press

Powell’s Books

As an added note, click here to follow a link to Marian's website for a PDF of the cast of characters and a number of other aids for readers, as well.

WEDNESDAY: PHOTOGRAPHY

New Yorker Fiction 2014

2/6/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.
Sinclair Lewis
Born February 7, 1885

Minister of Whose Interior?

Gil Inoue

February 10, 2014, Zadie Smith, “Moonlit Landscape with Bridge”: The Minister of the Interior of an island nation deluged by a typhoon abandons his place in the world by using his last shred of power to board a plane to Paris, where this man in his sixties will join his family, whom he has sent ahead. ¶ The Minister’s internal turmoil is the engine that propels this story: along his way to the airport, his last ride in an official SUV of black, with a driver whose courage is fading fast; a look back at his purpose as he stops and unloads crates of bottled water to islanders so crazed with thirst that they are more greedy than grateful. During the water delivery, the Minister loses a shoe in the muck of the storm—emblematic of something else he is leaving behind. Then his one-hour trip to the airport evolves into a five-hour ordeal, and he suffers a broken elbow in a melee while stopping to take a leak in a public place. A knife-wielding maniac, a man the Minister was once comrades with, “hails” a ride to the airport only to shout BON VOI YAH GEE at the minister as he boards his jet. One senses, as the minister grimaces and moves toward across the tarmac, that his elbow will be the least of his pain. Smith is the author of NW.
Gil Inoue, Photographer

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

A Black-and-White Day on 32nd Street

History of a Manuscript

2/5/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Nature, that fram'd us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for
regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring
minds.
Christopher Marlowe
Born February 6, 1564

History of a Manuscript

When I first began writing in the 1970s, I studied a book written by a woman who had experienced a great deal of success creating children’s books in the 1950s, and she shared what she knew, in a very “how to” fashion. One of the forms she passed onto the reader was one she called "The History of a Manuscript.” On it included space for about eight spots in which the writer could list his or her rejections and acceptances for the same story title. I still use that form to track the six to twelve stories I’m trying to place with journals at any given time. This past year I didn’t have to check any records to realize that I had not placed a story since April, 2011, and I was wondering if the universe was making different plans for what I’d frivolously called my career.

In checking through some of these histories, I see that I’ve sent the same story out as many as eighty times before stopping to think. What’s wrong with this manuscript? Is there something about the subject matter that turns editors off? Is it the tone? The point of view? Is it poorly written? It has taken me many years to realize something I always sensed, that the selection process is a very subjective one.

I’ve now reached a point where as many as forty or fifty percent of my rejections are of the “A” variety; that is the type in which editors say they like your work and invite you to submit again. Type “B” consists of what might not be more than a two-by-four-inch shred of paper that contains a generic message, one with absolutely no encouragement to submit again. How is it that fifty percent of these editors think I’m pretty good, but that the others can’t be bothered?

In 2012 I wrote a story that seemed to come to me by divine intervention (it would be good if I believed in such a thing). It seemed to be channeled to me by some force all of a single weekend in the mountains of New Mexico. Then, of course, I polished and polished the story. I submitted it to my local writing group, a network of knowledgeable writers with MFAs and PhDs. Not that I always think they’re correct about their opinions, but I do believe they always help me to see certain things I hadn’t before—and through the eyes of people I would hope to gain as my audience.

So I revised it and began to send it out. Written about a very timely subject, though not really, for I always think the best stories are about human existence, if “about” anything. The topic is merely a way to get at the narrative about life on this earth. I received some rejections very quickly, within the first few weeks. Geez, didn’t you make it past the first paragraph? I wanted to ask. Then a few “A” rejections rolled in. I can’t tell you the number of almost wistful regrets that were handwritten by some of the editors at the bottom of their “submit again” message.

Then the editor of one journal wrote and said he’d overridden the opinion of his collegiate staff and said he like to publish my story. If I would be willing to change the title and reinvent the ending, which he felt was a bit facile, and resubmit it ASAP, he would see that it got a fair rereading for the 2013 edition. I thought about it. But I liked the eponymous title based on the central character’s name. I also didn’t agree with the editor about the ending and wrote him an e-mail declining his offer. What? you might be thinking. In my mind I was thinking that one of the journals listed on this story’s manuscript’s history would surely want to publish it. I just needed to sit tight. But slowly, the remaining thirty journals sent their rejection notices of my timely story, the one that ought to have been on store shelves for almost a year now . . . had the editor accepted the first round of revisions. If, if, if. Always the narrative of a loser.

After a number of months, as my history of a manuscript sheet revealed more and more rejections, I begin to rework the story of my own volition, and, hey, guess what? I decided that my story did deserve a better title. And in working through the manuscript again, I made a subtle change to the ending—the very aspects that particular editor had indicated. By now it was a year after having sent the ms. the first time.

In checking my records for The Beloit Fiction Journal, I realized that in eight years I had submitted six previous titles, none of which has subsequently been published anywhere. And my plump notebook of writers’ guidelines for over 300 journals is full of notations like these. I swallowed and wrote another cover letter to the editor, Chris Fink, at Beloit Fiction Journal, and asked him if he would consider looking at the story again. I’d changed the title, the ending. In addition, I believed I’d fleshed out the story to make it more substantive, of a higher quality. At the end of January, 2014, I received a phone call from Chris, saying, if the story was still available, he’d like to publish it. Eek! (As the Mary Louise Parker character on Weeds once said, “Do people still say ‘Eek’?”)

The Beloit Fiction Journal began publication in 1985, almost thirty years ago, a long period for a print journal to have survived, especially when one considers it is published by the English department of a small liberal arts college in Beloit, Wisconsin. So many journals in similar situations or at even larger institutions have failed since 2008, especially since the advent of the online journal. Work first published by BFJ has been reprinted in award-winning collections like the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, the Flannery O’Connor, and the Milkweed Fiction Prizes. Fine writers I admire, like Rick Bass, Lan Samantha Chang, Gary Fincke, and Maura Stanton have been published by the BFJ.

So . . . I feel very proud to announce that my story “A Certain Kind of Mischief” will be published in the next edition of the journal, which comes out in March. I’m grateful to Chris Fink, Beloit professor and writer, for having the patience to deal with a bit of authorial ego and publish my story after all. If you read the history of the BFJ at their website, you’ll see that the key may lie with who looks at a story. As Fred Burwell, historian, states, “Best of all, we learned a great deal about writing through winnowing the slush pile. And out of those stacks of paper-clipped manuscripts came our ‘eureka’ moments, the delightfully shivery feeling when we recognized an artist at work, a writer with the gift to move us. That’s when the Beloit Fiction Journal became magic.”

I am happy to become part of that magic, shiver, myself, to think that my story has passed the muster of the journal's editorial process. When the issue comes out, I plan to set up links so that my readers can buy their copies from the journal. For now, I simply wish to share a procedure I go through with each and every short story I attempt to publish. If you’re not into a certain masochism, well, you may not wish to create such a history.

I am.

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

(I intended to publish some photographs on Tuesday and failed to post. Look for them next week.)

My Book World

2/3/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
Betty Friedan
Born February 4, 1921

A Tough but Redemptive Outing

Cobb, Joe and Leigh Anne Taylor. Our Family Outing. Tulsa: Total Publishing and Media, 2011.

Sometimes I read a book out of curiosity, not because I think I'll love or even like it. I first became aware of the Cobb/Taylor book it through my college alumni magazine. And because I'm not always quick in ordering books I want to read, I just now find time to read one that was published three years ago. But I'm not sorry I bought a copy.

Ms. Friedan's epigram above calls upon me to think of my own days in seminary, many years ago, a testament to my faith that failed. Coincidentally, seminary, the same one that Joe Cobb, co-author of Our Family Outing attends, is the place where I learned that in marrying a woman, I was a gay man who had also attempted to fit in to the societal norms Friedan references. The book is painful reading for one who has already forged his own way through this wilderness, but I admire Cobb and Taylor for publishing their account of their ordeal.

Our stories cross paths in so many ways, though we've never met. I grew up in Wichita. I also attended Southwestern College, the undergraduate school that Joe did, only more than a decade earlier than he. I know some of the people whom he references in the book, ministers of churches in the Kansas West Conference, the one I would have returned to once I finished my M. Th.—if I had finished it.

I have great admiration for Cobb who, although he left the Methodist church in Kansas, did choose to continue serving as a minister in other ways and eventually became ordained through the Metropolitan Community Church, the noted MCC of gay communities across the country. I parted ways with the Church, not only because the Methodist Church in particular would have demanded that I return my credentials, but because I no longer wished to be part of an organization that would de facto reject me. Now, part of that stems from a childhood practice of rejecting my father and his actions before he could reject me, a game at which we both excelled. But I ultimately felt I'd rather serve humanity as a public school teacher than through an archaic religious structure that to this day still rejects the legitimacy of the lives of gay men and women.

This criticism betrays my bias, but the authors are more successful when they stay with the concrete, rather than slipping into philosophical or theological realms. For example, Joe says, after he's left his wife and is experimenting with his behavior in a favored bookstore:

Leaning against literature, while reading poetry,
I looked down the aisle of science fiction and mystery.
A clerk walked toward me followed by two men.
The third man wore a red bandanna,
brown curls of hair peeking out from beneath.

As he turned the corner between mystery and science fiction, he winked and smiled.

I nearly dropped Emily Dickinson.

I had no words,
only a reality,
a knowing.

This will be a terrible and liberating gift (79).

At this point, Joe's desires take on a face, a reality. He sees he can literally have some skin in this game he's decided to play. And he continues to maintain a sense of humor:

I dated a mortician for a month. He was a beautiful man who excelled in make-up for the deceased. At the end of the month, right after we watched a romantic movie, he looked at me and said, "I'm not falling in love with you." I tried not to take it personally, but I felt like lying down and having him do my make-up (155).

Throughout the book both Cobb and Taylor share with the reader their growth through therapeutic and spiritual experiences. And the reason they do so is because of the people they love most. Yes, they set aside their hurts, their resentments to make sure that their two children are not harmed by their divorce, to make sure that they continue to reach out to their extended family members. This aspect of the book may be the most important, the idea that though everyone has suffered concerning Joe's coming out, they all come through it together. By the end of the memoir, the reader learns that Leigh Anne has found a second husband and a job near her parents in North Carolina. Joe moves to the area to be close to his children, and they work out an amicable visitation program. Joe also meets a new partner, and they have two children, a boy and a girl, through surrogacy—all in pretty short order. Though I began reading this book out of curiosity, I wound up finding a great story of separation and ultimately redemption.

NEXT TUESDAY: A PROFILE OF PLAYING ST. BARBARA
WEDNESDAY: A HAWK IN THE BACK YARD

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Longer Than One Expects

Short Essay, Photograph

Fort Ticonderoga, New York, 2003

My Book World

Terms We Should Remember: Masscult and Midcult

Some Nuggets from a Book Filled with Them

On the Mags:

On Speculative Thinking:

Middlebrow:

Dictionary Revisited 2

Dictionary of Errors--Conclusion

Dictionary Revisited

A Dictionary of Errors

Photographs, Palo Duro Canyon

A Warm February Day in Palo Duro

My Book World

What a Childhood, What a Writer!

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Does Story Come Together?

Refugee of the 20th Century

A Refugee of the Twentieth Century Cries Out!

Hawk in the Neighborhood

Hawk in the Neighborhood

My Book World

Playing St. Barbara Not Easy

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Minister of Whose Interior?

A Black-and-White Day on 32nd Street

History of a Manuscript

History of a Manuscript

My Book World

A Tough but Redemptive Outing

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