The Missouri Review

We’d like to congratulate some of our past contributors on their recent achievements:

Peter Levine’s story “How Does Your Garden Grow” was recognized as a notable story in the University of Texas Press’ 2009 volume of Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri. The story first appeared in TMR issue 31.3.

Frannie Lindsay, The Missouri Review’s 2009 Editors’ Prize winner in Poetry recently published a new collection of poetry, Mayweed (The Word Works, 2009). A number of poems in Lindsay’s collection have appeared in TMR issue 31.1.

Camille T. Dungy edited an anthology of African American nature poetry, Black Nature (University of Georgia Press, 2009). Dungy’s poetry has appeared twice in The Missouri Review. Her latest feature can be found in TMR issue 27.2.

Peter Gordon, author of “Fish” from The Missouri Review 28.2, has recently published a book of short stories, Man Receives a Letter (Red Hen Press, 2009).

The latest “From The Archives” feature is up! Our selection is Cheryl Strayed’s essay “Munro Country,” which originally appeared in our Summer 2009 issue.

The sensation of a shared small-town coming of age is the connection that leaves Strayed feeling powerfully linked to Alice Munro. Follow along as Strayed learns the balance between embracing this link to her past and following her own path to the future.

Last week, as I edited one of the final audio recordings of the current issue of TMR, I remembered why I love audio so much. Usually, I contact the vocal talent, I’m at the recording session, or I’m editing some portion of the piece myself. When I was out of town in December, one of our interns, Jackie, had done the entire production for “The Way I Saw the World Then” by Elise Juska, which was read by Meg Philips, and I got to enjoy listening from start to finish.

This is why I love audio, why audio recordings of literature matter: it’s about storytelling. I love having stories read to me, where it’s just me and the voice of the reader, as if we were sitting together in a corner, away from the rest of the world and its worries.

My world, like yours I’m sure, has lots of worries. So, as a small remedy, I offer one of my favorite recordings–Brian Swann’s poetry feature from 32.3, our recent issue on Demons.

Poetry Feature by Brian Swann

We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2009 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. The winning entries in each category will be featured in our next issue, 33.1. Congratulations to all our winners and thanks to everyone who submitted their work!

2009 Contest Winners:

Fiction

Winner:

Fiona McFarlane
“Exotic Animal Medicine”
Austin, TX

Finalists:

Diane Simmons
“Yukon River”

Mai-Lee Chai
“Tomorrow in Shanghai”
San Francisco, CA

Siobhan Fallon
“Remission”
Monterey, CA

Poetry

Winner:

Christina Hutchins
Albany, CA

Finalists:

Sarah Blackman
Greenville, SC

Joseph Fasano
Middletown, NY

Brian Brodeur
Fairfax, VA

Essay

Winner:

Joseph Murtagh
“A Hive of Mysterious Danger”
Trumansburg, NY

Finalists:

Jonathan Starke
“What Happens to Heroes”
Fort Collins, CO

Rachel Riederer
“Patient”
Brooklyn, NY

David Bahr
“Bootstrapped”
New York, NY

Our deadline has been extended to January 16th!  Submit your entry in Audio/Voice- Only Lit or Video Documentary. Winners receive a total of $4,500 in prizes. First prize in each category receives $1,500, second prize $500. Five entries from both categories will be selected for a $100 Editor’s Prize. All entrants receive a 1-year subscription to The Missouri Review’s Print or Digital Edition. Entries in both categories will be considered for publication in our print edition or on our website. The winning video will be screened at the 2010 True/False Film Festival in Columbia, MO.  Please visit TMR’s website for complete guidelines.

Best of luck, and happy recording!

“My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her,” says Esther in The Bell Jar.

I was reminded of Esther’s self-questioning a few evenings ago when I got together with several of our interns and poetry editor to review Editors’ Prize contest submissions.

One of the poetry interns was graduating in December to return home to an uncertain future. He wanted to go to law school but didn’t have the money. He thought he might enlist in the military. The other two had sent out graduate school applications and were waiting to hear if they were admitted for fall.

All three had what you might call “buyer’s remorse.” They openly wondered where an English degree from a state university would get them. The figured, at worst Mom and Dad’s basement and a counter-culture career, at best more school and, if they were lucky, a teaching job.
One regretted not going to J-school. Another thought he should’ve gotten a teaching certificate. All of them knew how to write decent papers for class, but wondered what explicating a text had to do with the “real world.”

I told them if they knew how to write they were already ahead of the competition on the job market. I said, “Writing and editing is a valuable commodity. Employers are desperate for workers who can put together a sentence.”

One of them admitted that he wasn’t even sure he was such a great writer.

We passed the bottle of wine and refilled our glasses.

Twenty years earlier, I was one of five who graduated from my small liberal arts college with a BA in English. Most of my classmates had BS’s in business management and computer science and were going onto jobs as soon as they turned in their caps and gowns. My career trajectory was slow and roundabout, but somehow I had ended up with the work that I wanted: writing, teaching and editing. Looking back, I made my way by accepting little bits of work that became increasingly steady and higher paying. Rather than talent, I’ve always had a simple willingness to work.

I know our three poetry interns will be fine. It will simply take them awhile to find their ways. In the meantime, I know where you can find three bright, funny, and energetic English majors for hire. Will work cheap.

This week at TMR Dedra and the office workers decorated for Christmas. Charles and Lisa and Lindsay plugged in my old Target-bought fiber-optic tree and decorated it with colorful chrome ornaments hung with paperclips. They wrapped a passel of fake presents to put under its light-pulsing plastic branches. And they placed Santa paraphernalia about our conference room and main office. Next week, we will have a Christmas party for our interns before they head home for a month-long vacation.

It’s all quite nice and cheery. Except for me. As a kid on the day after Christmas, I felt much like Esther does in The Bell Jar: dull, stuffed and disappointed. As I got older, I began to feel this way well before and long after the holiday.

Fortunately I have a husband who feels the same way about most major holidays. For Thanksgiving break we went to Palm Springs. On turkey day we took a tram into the mountains to hike and picnic. For Christmas we are planning a similar escape, first to Arizona and then to Mexico.

Around the office I made the mistake of announcing that I don’t like Christmas. My co-workers looked at me as if I had sprouted horns on my head and warts on my nose. I know better. There are certain likes and dislikes that you share only with your intimates. For example, you should only divulge how you feel about babies, holidays, religion, drugs, nude beaches, and your childhood to those who know and like you. None of these topics works in polite conversation.

So I’ve outted myself. I don’t like Christmas. But unlike Scrooge, I can do without visitations from ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. In fact, because I dislike the holidays so much, I practice the old axiom that it’s better to give than receive. My husband and I write Christmas checks and send gifts to our family and friends before we put out a “gone fishin’” sign and fly off to warmer climes.

Last year, Christmas dinner was sushi at Nik Sans, and we spent the next day sunning on a beach on the Sea of Cortez. Sitting in the shade of an umbrella sipping a daiquiri, I had forgotten what day it was until two young girls in bikinis walked passed me carrying brightly wrapped packages with floppy red ribbons. The juxtaposition of sea, sand, and Christmas presents made me smile as I ordered another drink to toast the holidays.

When the choreographer Twyla Tharp is developing a new work, she keeps what she calls a scratching box. She buys a simple cardboard file holder from an office supply store and fills it with bits and pieces that relate to the dance she is working on. All sorts of artifacts go into the box: video and cassette tapes, photographs, magazine and newspaper articles, pieces of clothing. Her box is an important part of her process.

In Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” she combs through various notebooks that she’s compiled over the years and remembers what inspired her to jot down fragments of overheard dialogue, odd facts, and place details. Unlike Tharp, the material in Didion’s notebooks seldom feeds her art. Rather it provides insight into her former selves. She writes, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not.”

With these artists’ habits in mind, this semester I asked my nonfiction students to fill their own scratching boxes or notebooks with mementoes that pertain to both the essays they’ve been working on and their writing process. Over the years, I’ve learned that simple assignments like this one are often the most successful.

Last week they brought their baroquely decorated boxes and notebooks to class and like kindergarteners squirmed in their seats until it was their turn to share. They passed around pictures of themselves, boyfriends, best friends, family. They read poems and quotes from their favorite books, burned their favorite candles, played their favorite mood music and passed around their favorite pens. Many held up T-shirts and concert tickets and fake IDs and peacock feathers. By the end of show and tell, the classroom looked like a small bazaar, exotic stuff scattered everywhere. The students continued passing around pictures as they walked out the door, leaving me envious that I had not put together a scratching box of my own.

Often called Generation Me for their attachment to Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, I shouldn’t have been surprised that they enjoyed talking about themselves. Yet, they had an openness and innocence as they explained their inventories that that nixed any air of narcissism. The exercise tapped into the primitive desire we all have to say “look at me; this is who I am.”

There are only a few months left in the semester, and sadly, (for me, anyway) the blog posts left has chopped down to only a few.

I find this time of year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, almost surreal. It seems to me that it is never remembered for long. Characterized by grinding out to finish the projects and finding time for holiday shopping, it seems like if you blink you might miss it.

Here in Missouri it is getting cold and the hours of sunlight are shrinking. I spent Thanksgiving in Iowa and up there people are already having to scrap off morning frost from their windshield. I think this time of year is odd because when I have a moment of time, I look at to what’s coming and think about how this year has gone. It’s getting to be the time when movie and book critics have started to make their top 10’s of the year and decade. I think it’s not a bad idea, what’s a better way to remember the past than to rank it?

So here are a few of my tops that I read, watched, or just experienced for the first time:

Best thing I read: Grendel, by John Gardner

Between Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illych and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment I needed a humorous intermission. Gardner’s book satisfied my humor, philosophical and literary needs. I’ve noticed that in the world of literary greats, Gardner is over looked, despite writing The Art of Fiction. Though he is more contemporary (Grendel came out in ‘71), I hope he will be recognized more.

Notable runner up: The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemmingway

Best thing I watched:  “Up”

Okay, I will admit, I have not gone out and seen a lot of movies in theater this year. “Up” was one of the few, but it was possibly one of the best movies I have ever seen. “Up” managed to established a emotionally heavy story, within the first fifteen minutes, without any feeling of melodrama. And with the magical realism a house of floating away by balloons- some writer out did himself.

Notable runner up: “Watchmen” (that came out this year… right?)

Best thing I just plain experienced: Thanksgiving diner

Maybe it is a little rash to say I had one best thing that I experienced, but Thanksgiving is up there. I still feel full just at the thought of all the food I ate.

Notable runner up: TMR internship (thankfully, there are a lot of runner ups in this category, but TMR has been a incredibly beneficial experience).

For the past several weeks, I have felt particularly thankful not to be a parent.
Here’s why: This semester I have been teaching creative nonfiction at a small college in Columbia. For their second essay, the students are asked to write about a memorable person.

As model essays I use several examples from TMR’s archives. Both “Ingo Prefers Not To” and “Renee” are written by mothers who find their daughters’ choices inexplicable. One daughter becomes a heroin addict while the other simply prefers not to finish high school. Tracey Crow’s “The Facelift” tells of her husband’s nip and tuck and his resulting popularity. “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” by Catherine Rankovic is a lesson in how to describe the nearly impossible—Elvis’ phrasing and singing voice.

I also teach John LeCarre’s terrific portrait his five-star conman father “In Ronnie’s Court” published in The New Yorker and Annie Dillard’s memorable, much anthologized piece “The Stunt Pilot.”

The point is that these essays illustrate a range of subject choices and approaches to the assignment. So what did my students do? They either wrote about their mother or their father. For weeks we’ve been reading about parents who by their children’s accounts have committed grave sins; everything from abuse, drugs, alcohol and neglect to dirty houses and bad cooking.

One student’s essay was a cut above the rest. Rather than enumerating her father’s failings; she tried to understand her “absent daddy.” To get closer to him, she tagged along on his hunting and fishing trips, even though they weren’t past-times she enjoyed. She learned that he never had the opportunity to go to college. At nineteen he went to work for the railroad, an industry that she depicts as exploitive. To advance, he made himself indispensible, which kept him away from home for long stretches. She recognized that he worked hard to give her a life better than his own and thus far had succeeded.

After the eighth essay in this series, we joked that we should put together an anthology. I asked them what they wanted to call it.

“How about ‘Fined: Violations in Parenting’,” one student suggested. Her mother had spent three years in prison for dealing drugs.

A few students nodded. All right, but not great.

“What about something like ‘Broken Ashtrays and Double-wides: Pieces on Terrible Parenting.”

The students agreed that we were getting closer. The title we eventually decided on was ‘Hello, Child Services? Tales of Terrible Parents,’”

When I asked them what we could learn from the essays we’d spent more than a month work shopping, they had many answers. No one’s childhood is perfect. Parents don’t know crap. And the phenomenon of super parenting is more media hype than reality.
Children and parents have always struggled to get along. I recently re-watched the film adaptation of Tobias Wolfe’s memoir This Boy’s Life. Wolfe’s stepfather reminded me so much of my own that I could barely watch it. But more surprising was that I’ve never much considered writing about my parents. And now it seems to me that I’m too old to carry on about their failings.

This blog entry by Barrelhouse, made me sad because it is true. The post, which talked about a film and how utterly disappointing the film was, got me thinking about the films I see these days. How very few have anything of a good plot!

Under my nostalgia lens I lament, have we forsaken good stories containing thought provoking questions for CGI effects and cheap, charming romance? Are screen-play writers in Hollywood simply tapped out of ideas? I find the latter hard to believe, considering the competitiveness of getting a screen-play published. But still, I am left to wonder how directors get by with making a film from such a horrid and/or overdone plots.

All is not lost however, for although terrible ideas like 2012 and Twilight’s New Moon will always be around, there are still a number of directors turning out some movies I cannot wait to see. The two (and drastically different) I have in mind right now are Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus. Eastwood’s, if you haven’t heard about it, is “A look at life for Nelson Mandela after the fall of apartheid in South Africa during his first term as president when campaigned to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup event as an opportunity to unite his countrymen.”

With actors Morgan Freeman (who plays Mandela) and Matt Damon, once you get past Freeman trying to speak in a South African accent, and Damon an English one, it seems pretty good.

Check out this cool little article over at The Millions that talks about the newest issue of the Best American Short Story Series. I’ve read this series, along with the Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best American Comics lines, for the past few years, and I always look forward to its release. This post also contains a link to a spreadsheet that details every story the series has published, including the number of stories each author has had published in the line’s thirty year run. Alice Munro tops the list with 18 stories, the next closest is Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike who both have 9. In total, authors who have been included in the anthology more than once make up 52% of the collections sizable history, which means that first time selections make up about 48%. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a great split to me. I think this is due, at least in part, to the distinguished guest editors that put the book together each year and make the final decisions on who is included. Each year, when I read the book, I sincerely believe that they are looking for the best stories, not recognizable names. I’ve also think they’ve done a great job again this year.

This article also includes a link to a breakdown of The New Yorker’s fiction statistics. The magazine has long had the reputation for publishing stories by only a select few authors (Alice Munro also tops their list, with 12 stories), but, even though their stats are not as good as Best American, they’re better than I thought. Take a look at the story Here.

Having said all this, I should point out that The Missouri Review also has a strong reputation of publishing developing authors who haven’t published anything previously. We’re still wrapped up in your contest entries, including many from unknown or unpublished authors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them ended up a winner.

During the ‘08 summer, when politics was happening, but I wasn’t really paying attention, I grew enamored with Obama. Not because I was at all informed on his view of political topics, but because I read Obama’s book, “Dreams of my Father”.

Politics aside, I loved that book, I found his writing easy and enjoyable, and his story incredible (though when I think it, perhaps it was more his tone, one of a young person trying to find his identity while living in a world he seemed to look at coldly).

I am happy to see that there may be a sequel, and I don’t mean Audacity of Hope. Just a few days ago, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, President Barack Obama’s half-brother released a semi-autobiographical book titled, “Nairobi to Shenzhen”.

I am curious about this book and have high hopes, despite how easy it must have been to publish such a thing (although I think he tried to self-publish it). From the description it seems similar to Barack’s, a man trying to find his identity. It will be interesting to see what Mark has to say in his closer, detailed account about his and Barack’s father.

SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS is an interesting project that pairs thrifted, seemingly insignificant objects with creative writers.  The participating writers then invent fictional stories about the objects, and the objects and stories are sold together on ebay.  The stories suddenly give these discarded objects significance and value, and the stories that are basically pulled out of thin air are pretty surprising.  Significant Objects includes writers from The Elegant Variation and Maud Newton, as well as many other names you might recognize.  Check it out!

Today in my Introduction to Creative Writing class I showed my students a catalog for women’s clothing called Poetry. Most of them are would-be poets so I wanted them to see how they were expected to dress.

Poetry’s merchandize is distinctly understated, classic and elegant. A lot of cashmere sweaters, velvet dresses and blazers, white blouses, a few swing coats that are worn with loafers or ballet flats. The women are pictured outside of country estates, stepping off the bow of small yachts, or ambling down the cobbled streets of quaint English-looking villages.

I had paged through the catalog a few days before and other than a pleated jersey dress didn’t see anything I wanted to buy. It was a little too holiday at Balmore for me. I only occasionally have fantasies of myself walking the Scottish hillside in wellies and a mac with a pair of welsh corgies trailing after me. The look is too Sloane Ranger to suit my taste. I didn’t start admiring the way their patron saint Princess Di dressed until after she bolted from Prince Charles and started lowering her necklines and raising her hems.

Surprisingly, several of my Ugg and sweat pant wearing students said, “I would totally wear that.” They loved the cardigans and sweater vests worn with springy cotton skirts.

“Really? The clothes aren’t too staid, too preppy?”

We had just been discussing Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, so the idea of east coast chic must have been on their minds.

“We’re bringing preppy back,” one of my more vocal students said.

I nodded, hiding my skepticism. Most of them were still regular wearers of tiny T-shirts and low-riding jeans.

I dislike the whole preppy scene and the sense of entitlement that went along with it. Cashmere and pearls were never my thing.

But the real point was the retailer’s view of poets: stately, elegant, classic. Where did this come from? Not the poets and writers that I know. As far as I can tell there are two schools of dress: Edna St. Vincent Millay flash and Dylan Thomas fizzle. They either care too much or distinctly too little.

All the clothes in Poetry start at $100, prices more in line with the corporate world than academia. Many times when I admire a fellow writer’s clothes, they confess, “thrift store” or “resale shop.”

Perhaps we can’t help but romanticized and re-dress writers a bit— Shelley in Marc Jacobs and Byron in Armani. When I imagine of Fitzgerald, he’s as coiffed as his literary creation Gatsby, and, when I first took a look at Poetry I couldn’t help but envision Sylvia Plath at Cambridge.

Only a brief post today, we’re very busy here reading contest entries and planning for another on. I wanted to call your attention to this interview with Jonathan Lethem over at the LA Times. I’ve been a fan of Lethem’s since I read his Motherless Brooklyn a few years ago, and his new novel, Chronic City immediately jumped to the top of my to be read pile. Enjoy this engaging interview.

So Publisher’s Weekly came out with their 2009 top ten list and at first look I thought the list was interesting. Some I had already wanted to read, and others caught my eye (particularly Stitches by David Small).

Then I reached the bottom, and what really caught my eye was the user comments, which made me take a another look at the list. All the books were by men.

Since I first read about this last night, here has been my train of thought:

Wow, somebody messed up.

Though wait a minute, PW is a private organization and they have a right to choose what books they honestly thought were the best books in 2009.

But, on the other hand, people have just as much a right to call them out.

So I’ve reached this conclusion: Dear Publisher’s Weekly, how do you go about deciding which books are the best of 2009? What are you looking for?

It makes me think, maybe the entire publishing industry should be more transparent with the process of how they go about selecting works. It could be the case that PW selected the 10 best by a non-discrimination method and thus justifying their seeming discrimination. For example, selecting the best by how many copies were sold.

But the problem is they don’t show their methodology, and many critic publications don’t explain how they come to the conclusions they arrive at.

So what do you think? Did Publisher’s Weekly goof?

The image of the struggling writer hunched over a desk with an overflowing ash tray and multiple cups of coffee is  a common stereotype seen in T.V and movies.  Blame it on the deadlines, the writer’s block, the late nights that facilitate creativity, or just the roasted aromatic goodness that seems to appeal to everyone, but i think that writing and coffee go well together.

I was recently looking through this month’s GQ magazine and they have an article titled “Where to get the Best coffee in America” that can also be viewed online.  I was so excited to see that Kaldi’s Coffee Roasting Company in St. Louis, and Columbia was listed among the top coffee shops!  While Columbia has a plethora of good coffee shops (many actually located across the street from each other), Kaldi’s definitely stands out as one of the best and deserves recognition.  Perhaps the Kerouac-laden stereotype is irrelevant because coffee is a popular drink loved by many people, but I still can’t help but feel cliché as a sit in Kaldi’s long after dark, working on writing and brooding over my laptop with my bottomless cup

Okay, so this post isn’t really about peas, I’ve actually always liked peas. But had I said suddenly I like poems, well, that would have been boring.

But before I get to that, I have to say its pretty crazy over here. As we are cracking into these contest submissions, we’ve got another contest that is about to (kind of already is) on way. Its the third annual Missouri Review Audio & Video Competition, with $4,500 in prize money! Awesome? I think so. If I wasn’t working here, I’d submit for sure. Check out our website for more details.

Lately I’ve been reading a gross amount of material. I don’t want to count pages, but one intern here has estimated by now we’ve each probably read about 1 million words (in 8 weeks, I’m skeptical, but only because I don’t trust my math skills).

It could be from all this reading, that my tastes have changed, or it could be that as I accumulate life experiences I just begin to see things differently.

It used be, for a long time anyway, that I did not like poetry. I’ll let you in on a secret: it used to be, that I thought poetry was mostly shallow, and that being called ‘poet’ was often times an insult.

And I thought I was in the right. I had a habit of fixating on a line, dissecting the poem. I would pinch a noun and watch the adjunct adjectives dangle helplessly. And when I did that, the words just seemed too dramatic.

I still do that from time to time. I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing, but what I also do, more often than before, is read things aloud, and when it comes to poetry, what a world of difference that makes!

I used to only really enjoy something edgy, a good beat poem, or even a little Bukowski. But now, its anything good and truthful.

And I have to say I love what’s coming out today. In our last issue, we published Traci Brimhall. I loved her piece, ‘American Pastoral’. Something about that piece just makes me want to cry, yes that’s it! I highly recommend it.

Take a look at these two similar articles; one from The Huffington Post and one from Quarterly West’s website, written by George Saunders. Both deal with the trials and tribulations of being an aspiring writer; Mostly the constant chorus of “what do you plan to do as a writer?” and also the long waiting periods in before or in between acceptance letters. Melaine Drane ponders the allure of writing workshops and MFA programs. Saunders, with his typical wry humor, tells the story of his first acceptance and the sense of confidence and validation that came along with it.

Here at TMR, we’re busy digging tunnels in the mountains of contest entries that have poured into the office over the past few months. We’ve received well over 2,000 entries and we’ll be spending the next couple of months working through all them. Obviously, only a few of those entries will eventually be accepted. But to all those whose submissions are not accepted, don’t give up. Keep tweaking and writing and waiting for that letter that will make you forget all the ones that came before it.

Best,

–Cameron

I’ve noticed around several literary blogs, and information sources in general, that everyone is talking about  the movie, Where the Wild Things Are. I’ve gotten pretty sick of everyone either talking about how much they liked it, or how much they didn’t, and how much different it is from the children’s book.

So instead of saying anything more about it, I’m going to take a stroll down nostalgia alley (it’s not a lane) and write about three of the best children books, that AREN’T Where the Wild Things Are.

3) The Lorax. Forget One Fish Two Fish, lets talk about the genius that is Dr. Seuss. Its beyond the obvious underlying theme; The Doc’s great for the complete and crazy world that the story is in, and the odd Lorax character (whom wikipedia describes as ‘resembling an Emperor Tamarin‘), that’s the real gold. The wood chopping machines, the products the trees produce, etc. Its that crazy imaginative land that I loved as a kid. I think a lot of people  hail Dr. Seuss for the creations like “Oh the Places You Will Go” which, in its own right, is okay, but anyone could have written that story. For me, its all about the setting.

2) Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I don’t like the movie. It ruins the book, entirely. I don’t like its style, I don’t like the trailers. Cloudy wasn’t about some creation that tries makes life better, that’s malarkey.  Its all about the things in life that come down on you. The good, the bad. Its about getting too much and living through it, starting over. OR at least that’s what it was for me. And also the illustrations in the book were great. They teased me with the idea of delicious foods, then made my stomach sick toward the end. Boo to Sony.

1) Where the Sidewalk Ends. Do I need to justify this? Shel Silverstein just got it. He made poems for kids and they liked them. Who does that? Who can pull that off? I still read this book. The best part? They won’t make a movie out of this one! (please don’t make me eat my words hollywood)

Consolation award goes to Calvin and Hobbes. Technically they are a cartoon, so I didn’t really consider Bill Watterson’s writing in the category. But that being said, the dialogue of Calvin and Hobbes was terrific. I feel like Watterson really understood that kids understand a lot more than we give them credit for.

As a senior at The university of Missouri my time to say “Oh the economy will improve before I start looking for a job” is quickly coming to an end.  The reality being of course that the economy has not drastically improved and that jobs for new college graduates are more difficult than ever to secure.  Its times like these that I start to question the relevance of my college education (I’m an English major) and start wondering if I should have sprinkled in a few business classes here and there.  I was recently lead by my frantic google search of “how to get a job in publishing” to an article titled, well, “How to Get a Job in Publishing.” The approach taken by the writer of the article to find a job is anything but traditional, and she even goes as far as creating an ad for herself on facebook..  I’m not one to shy away from creative approaches, and I am more than ready to give it a good effort, but as I spend more time scanning MediaBistro and Bookjobs,  I’m feeling a bit discouraged with the job market.  GALLEYCAT has a new blog post everytime any major company advertises a job opening, and I can only imagine these positions are flooded with thousands of applicants. I would love to hear if any readers have advice on how to go about getting a new job, or if anyone has been successful in getting a job advertised online.

Just Google it. The Millions, The Book Bench, Drawn and Quaterly, The New York Times, they’re everywhere, and, personally, I love it.I’m not sure if my parents would corroborate this or not, but I fondly remember Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are as being one of my favorite books as a child. I don’t remember what I thought the book was actually about then, but as I look back it, I think of it as a tale glorifying the power of imagination and how important it is to a child. Fifteen years later, as a college student and amateur writer, imagination is still very important to me, both to fulfill coursework and as a form of escape.

As you can imagine, I am both extremely excited and nervous about Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of the book that comes out on Friday. The trailers look great and they include everything I would want from the original. What I’m nervous about is everything in between. Sendak’s scant 38 page book would hardly be enough material for a feature length movie, and Dave Eggers’s novelization of the children’s book surely added something. I have faith that both Jonze and Eggers, who I can only hope loved the book as much as I think I did, stayed faithful to the kernel of wisdom at the center of the book about the power of imagination.

I’ll be at the theatre Friday night, sweating in my seat. At least until the wild rumpus begins. Maybe I’ll see you there.

All the Best,

–Cameron

I’d actually like to follow up on my post last week, “There’s an app for that?”. Another literary group doing something for the ipod is an author named Andrew Foster Altschul. I’m not sure if this is an actual app, or something else, but the brief blog entry at the One Story blog explains Altschul is producing Flash Fiction for the mobil phone.

I think Flash Fiction and digital technology could (already is?) be a matrimony made in heaven. There are right now a number of flash Journals that don’t even produce paper publications and, though not all, some do see success. I agree with Cameron that there is nothing better than reading a real book, but, at the same time, if I got a Flash Fiction piece, sent to me every morning through my phone, or my email or whatever, I would definitely take the five minutes to read it. I think the argument is best described in two words: Why not?

Well, I’ll leave that at that. I want to mention one more new literary happening before I go. I was reading Maud Newton’s blog, apparently there is this new(ish? not sure how new it is, but recently featured in huffington post) site called fictionaut As far as I can tell, skimming through the site and a couple articles, its like a collision of social networking and literary works. Also, I guess anyone can publish. Very weird, interesting and apparently successful. Check it out.

-Eddie Kirsch

Did anything eventful happen this week? Oh yeah the Nobel Prize for literature was announced!  And the winner is…  Herta Müller for her works depicting the ‘landscape of the dispossessed’ with “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose.”  I’d like to give a celebratory high five to Müller for becoming only the 12^th woman to win the prize in 108 years, making this the first year in history that four women have been Nobel laureates (the others being U.S-based researchers Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for medicine, and Israel’s Ada Yonath for chemistry).  While I’m happy to see the ladies holding their own, the truth is that I know very little about the Nobel Prize, and rarely do I even hear mention of the Nobel Prize for literature.  NobelPrize.org offers a complete list of past winners, and for some interesting commentary HTMLGIANT also offers a funny and brief history of the winners.  Scanning through these lists I recognized very few of the writers, so I’m wondering what impact (if any) winning the award has had on their writing.  Looks like I have a lot to add to my reading list.

So the question remains, will you be reading Herta Müller in the near future? Do awards and prizes influence your decisions about what authors to read?

Oh and this just in, as I’m sure you know, Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.  Any thoughts?

Have a great weekend

Eddie’s post sparked my interest in the new wave of electronic reading devices and I stumbled across this hilarious piece over at McSweeney’s. Whenever I see an ad for a new reading device, whether it’s the iPhone or the Kindle or Sony’s new model, I always wonder the same thing: why is it necessary to improve on a device that has been successful and popular for hundreds and hundreds of years? I don’t know the answer. Of course, I’m probably biased — the majority of my time is probably spent with a book in my hands, but I still think that if the book needed to be improved upon there would have been a constant stream of innovations since it’s inception. I’m by no means an expert, but my understanding is that once ancient cultures switched from scrolls to bound books, the basic concept has changed very little; there’s been improvements in materials and strategies for making them, but the idea of what a book is is still relatively the same. So again, why do I need a $300 computer to read a $15 book?

As I said, I’m biased, but do people actually want these devices? I’ve done no actual research to support this, but I’m not really sure they do. I haven’t seen anyone using one here in Columbia. I know Mid-Missouri isn’t exactly the biggest city in the world, but I would expect to see at least a few in all the technologically savvy students that are here on campus.

Here’s another example that I have absolutely no research to back up. My Father works in the marketing department for a large company in St. Louis. His department toyed with the idea of using Amazon’s Kindle as incentives for placing large orders. From what I gathered from talking with him, this promotion didn’t seem to boost sales or even perk much interest. He fought the idea from the beginning, but he too is probably biased seeing as he faithfully hauls a book with him on the Metrolink (St. Louis’s subway-esque transportation system).

Maybe I’m wrong and the book does need to be improved upon. Maybe recent “Green” trends will push people in the direction of a more energy efficient form of reading. Maybe I’m deluded in thinking that the book will always be around. I hope I’m wrong on that last one, but even if I’m eventually forced to switch over to a Kindle, I still wax nostalgic about the days when I could curl up in a comfortable chair with a heavy book instead of a green-glowing, paper-thin computer screen.

All the Best and Happy Reading(In whatever form you like),

–Cameron

I’d like to talk with uneducated speculation about market theory. This is outside my beat, but take a moment to read this Wired article. Yeah, someone is making a literary journal app for the I-phone/I-touch. Will it work? Depends how you put it.

Millions of people now own an I-phone/touch. Apps are new, and everyone is downloading them. They are cheap, easily accesible, a way to pursue your endless interests on a tiny gadget. I think there is an assumption that most people aren’t interested in reading short stories, poetry, etc. I BELIEVE, however, that this is only half-true at best, and what’s half true, is still false.

2 ideas.

1) Perhaps the reason why anyone is interested in anything is as much due to the marketing scheme than to the content of the product. Why don’t more people read literary journals? Maybe many people don’t know anything about them. This product gives more face to literary journals AND even if, out of the millions, only say 10,000 get this app. That is still twice the amount of circulation of a healthy Lit. Journal. Oh, and, they won’t pay paper costs, saving them a large sum of money.

2) It’s a no brainer that markets shift, they are ever-changing just like anything else in our world. In one of our meetings, I believe someone made a comment that Literary Journals need to be flexible. They can’t expect to survive, remaining ‘traditional’ in the way they operate. In my humble(sk) opinion, I think journals must evolve and find ways to do well, or they will constantly need to justify to the universities supporting them for why they should continue to do so.

So in conclusion: I should probably never be a wall street analyst, and props to the ‘Scarab’

-Eddie

Just a short post for today. If anyone is sitting at home on this windy and cool Friday night, you should check out www.wefeelfine.org. While it’s not exactly literary related, wefeelfine is a site that explores feelings and thoughts and all of those other crazy things that some might say are important to literature.  Here is what the site has to say:

“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.”

DO IT!

Have a great weekend

Give this article from The Wall Street Journal a quick glance. I found it very intriguing and almost humorous at some points. It’s hard for me to imagine the publishing world without posthumously published books. After the cloud of Obits and retrospectives settles, one of the first questions that everyone asks is what the author has left behind — what’s been left unfinished — what’s lying lying around that we can curl up next to before there is nothing else?  And there’s always something, half of a novel, four unpublished stories written 25 years before, outlines, etc…

I waffle back and forth when I try to decide whether or not I agree with publishing  unfinished or unpublished work. On one hand there’s Kafka; we’d have none of his work without the persistence of Max Brod, nor would have any idea what “Kafkaesque”, a staple descriptor in writing workshops, meant. But for every Kafka, there’s a handful of Truman Capote’s, whose novel Summer Crossing was written when Capote was a barely twenty. The manuscript was “rescued” from his trash can by his housekeeper and auctioned off after her death in 2004. The novel is by no means bad, but I have a hard time believing that if Capote had thought it was worth publishing, he wouldn’t have sought that option out for himself.

Of the examples in the article in WSJ, I find the Nabokov example to have the most shades of grey but also the most possibilities for extreme outcomes — either good or bad. It also has a certain amount of irony that I think Nabokov would’ve appreciated. His “manuscript” is a series jumbled index cards that have no discernible organization. Can’t you just see Nabokov sitting at his desk thinking this idea up and laughing at us for believing we could conceive of what he really meant for? That’s the image in my head anyway. It also reminds me of the poet John Shade in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, who wrote out his drafts on a series of index cards.

The plan for the publication of this “manuscript” is a bound facsimile of the cards with perforate edges that can be torn out and rearranged how the reader thinks they should be organized. I’d envision Nabokov taking this one of two ways. 1) He’d hate it and rip the cards out of the publisher’s hands and burn them himself. Or 2) He’d like the innovation of the form instead of a gaggle of academics poking and prodding the cards into the equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. The bonus option, my personal favorite, is that this form is actually how he planned it out all along and his son is following some kind of script.

In the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter. I know I’ll be reading this book, along with the posthumously published writings of David Foster Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ralph Ellison; all have novels that will be published by the end of next year. One part of the article that I thought could have be examined more was the economics of publishing posthumous novels; that they’re the closest thing to a sure thing possible in the publishing world. There also seems to be this kind of trend in Hollywood, where an unprecedented amount of film remakes are being green-lighted. Just something to think about when you crack open the latest Norman Mailer book or you buy your tickets for the upcoming Wolfman movie.

On a completely unrelated note, The Millions concluded their list of the top twenty books of the new millennium,  with The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen earning top honors. I will refrain from commenting on their decision for the time being. Maybe Nabokov will be on their next list.

Best,

–Cameron

In our first meeting at TMR this semester, Speer Morgan, the editor here, had us read a couple stories. One of them was titled “Careful”, and it was by Ruth Hamel. We do these readings each week and Speer gets us to answer questions- what’s good about this writing and why. With Hamel’s story, which was very first one we read, Speer showed us suspense, and how incredibly important suspense is- where ever it is. (Note that it’s not always in the plot.)

I was sick for the past week and there wasn’t much to do besides: a) bemoan the large amount of work that continues to pile up, b) watch (for hours on end) Cash Cab, and c) think until complete boredom of thought (where I proceeded then to stare at the the ceiling or some desolate corner or a piece of clothing on the ground). In this era of thought I began to grow aware that suspense carries in to so many things. In so many good journalism stories, the article is designed by laying out 90 percent of the facts in the first two (or so) paragraphs, but withholding some information, making the interested reader wonder what the ending could possibly be.

I remember a music theory class and when thinking about it, even in music there is suspense: in very basic composition you don’t return to the beginning chord without playing a chord before that suspends (by which I am mean, needs resolution).

To philosophize- It’s safe to assume most people want to live long lives, and I want to ask, why is that? It may seem obvious, but answers like ‘To love’ or ‘because there is so much to enjoy’ isn’t necessarily true nor satisfactory, and beyond reasons similar to these it is hard to pin point an answer besides “people are afraid to die”, which in my mind seems too negative.

So perhaps it is the case, that suspense is what drives us to keep living, and maybe ‘the will to live’  can be rephrased as ‘the need to see what happens next’.

I like this idea. I think it gives me reason to consider that if I put myself out into situations, then anything can happen. It makes me feel that I never will be pigeon-holed if I try hard enough not to and has me believe that I don’t know necessarily any outcome before I actually see it.

I’ve noticed that people comment on our facebook page and voice their opinions when they read these articles, which is awesome. So my question this week, is what do you think? How important is suspense in relation to life?