A poem

Gritty truth, human, you human, too human.
You are the king, queen, you are the knave.
Stalin dances on a coffee mug: no.
Y the dance.

Two dragons embrace, they cry.
I M BITING TO THE BEAT
Tigers grinning moanfully
Meatastic, you human
yuman

To the dogs go the spoils
bible smuggling, the other white meat
shoot me so I can never stop

I'm Trying to Jinx Myself

I've had a great run so far as a writer of fiction and other weirdo stuff. I'm really glad for it. It's a great outlet, this writing stuff is. I'm happiest when it feels most natural, and happily -- most of the time -- it feels very natural. I'm also happy for the places I've been accepted for publication. I want to acknowledge that first and foremost, so I don't sound to whiny here in a second (though I know I'll sound whiny, and that's no one's fault but my own). I've had a ton of success publishing my stories. I'm really proud of that fact. HOWEVER, there's one realm I can't seem to break into. I'm sure we all have our "targets," those of us who write and submit work. Mine of late (that is, for the past two and a half years or so) have been literary publications associated with MFA programs. Usually they're amazing! The ones I like definitely are. And so I can see how exclusionary this necessarily leads them to be, how exceptional the work must be. But still, with all that taken into consideration, I'm humbled by my lack of success. While I've had hundreds of stories accepted over the past four years, only one has been published by a literary magazine associated with an MFA program (Booth Journal, which I highly recommend you read, by the way). Yes, poor me. Pity me! No, I know. Obviously, no one should do that. Don't pity me in the slightest. I have nothing to complain about. And yet, here I sit, typing out a pretty obvious complaint.

I guess the difference is, I don't expect anyone to coddle me (certainly in the wake of a rejection, I feel a good deal of outrage -- but I know that's my problem. What's more, eventually the feeling abates and I'm rational again). It's just stunning, the lack of success. I'm really impressed by my failure at this point. I suppose that's where I'm going with this, the positive spin I intend to make. Here is a complete list of the MFA literary journals I was rejected by last year alone: Washington Square Review, Whiskey Island, Moon City Review, Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, The Journal, West Branch, Emerson Review, Devil's Lake, Superstition Review, Diagram, Quarterly West, LIT, Puerto del Sol, Ghost Town, Barnstorm, Redivider, The Minnesota Review, The Cincinnati Review, Bat City Review, AGNI, Phoebe, Beecher's Magazine, Noctua Review, Eleven Eleven, The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, MAP Literary Journal, Gulf Coast, Cutbank Literary Journal, Passages North and Fence. And that was just last year. It's a bit liberating to write them all out like this. I might be forgetting a few. I know I submitted multiple times to quite a few on this list, so this list will need to be multiplied by number of times submitted and number of submissions each time (I send flash and prose poetry!). By my count, thirty-two separate places. Granted, they're thirty-two of the most revered publications that publish literature in the country. And in case you're wondering, yes, I've read pieces -- if not entire issues -- from each and every one. Something drew me to each one of them (I try not to just send my work out in rapid fire). (I should also mention several have been very kind with personalized rejections that give me that nagging hope that some day something could change.)

So ultimately, my hope is that this jinxes me. That one of the places listed finally caves to my undaunted, stupid will, which I expect in time will happen, and I finally can be published in an academic literary journal (other than Booth Journal, which again is awesome, don't misunderstand me). Thank you.

UPDATE (1/23/14): Green Mountains Review rejected me yesterday. The streak continues!

Saying Goodbye to 2013 and Hello to 2014 -- Things Worthy of Checking Out

Firstly, a note from our sponsor that's written by me and goes as follows: I use Grammarly's plagiarism checker because sometimes it's the robotic, objective eye of an internet web-based program that can be the best friend to your writing, and sometimes it takes that kind of robotic and objective eye to tell you what others can't (i.e. your work "has flaws" or plainly "sucks" -- though Grammarly won't literally say your work sucks; that you will need to infer (I myself have gotten quite good at inferring such things)). 

Honestly, I've used Grammarly on a trial basis, pasted in some stories I wanted to have someone look at, and I was really pleased with the results. I consider it a good thing and encourage your considering it as well. 

Now moving on: 

I think 2013 was a good year for writing and reading.

Tenth of December arrived and was what I hoped it would be, even being nominated for a National Book Award. You can see more of what I read and what I thought of it here. That's a link to TNBBC blog, a blog I become acquainted with in 2013 and highly recommend you read. Lori Hettler runs it and runs very well, if I may say so.

I didn't finish as many books as I set out to read (I read 24 of a planned 40, according to Goodreads). I did start quite a few, thoug, for whatever that's worth. In the place of books (i.e. poetry and short story collections and novels), I have discovered the joys of a great many literary magazines, and here, to name some: Whiskey Island, Unstuck, Caketrain, Salt Hill Journal, Mid-American Review, Sleepingfish, The Lifted Brow and Black Warrior Review. All are places I'd love to see my own work published, but even if it never finds a home at any of these journals / reviews / magazines, I'll at least have the pleasure of reading them. That's plenty. I encourage you to check them all out.

I've decided in 2014 I'm going to read 50 books. To do so, I'll have to finally finish all the books I started in 2013, which I believe I can do. What's more I want to,  I want to be a more proactive reader of novels and that sort of thing.

A book I'm excited for this coming year is Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore (it'll be out in February). I hope I don't have to explain why, but ok, I will. Because it's Lorrie Moore. Looooooorie Moore. She's great? Ever read her? Like her? Yes! Don't like her? What's the matter with you? Stop it. Self-Help is awesome. She is one of the great short story writers of our time, dammit.

Anyway, I think you should also be aware one of the great poets of our time, James Tate, has a few poems in the latest issue of NOÖ Weekly. What are you waiting for?

Revenge of the Scammed Anthology

Don't like being scammed? Edward J. Rathke doesn't! And why should he? It sucks. People who scam suck. The man, "James Xavier Reed," who scammed Rathke sucks. That is certain. So, action is being taken. Entirely positive action, though. Revenge of the Scammed Anthology. That's action, folks. That's action you can believe in.

And if you're interested in getting in on said action, there is an effort afoot to raise money for publication of this anthology and other things (such as money for Rathke to repay a debt owed because of being scammed). Take a look at this listing on indiegogo to see exactly what went down and how you can help / benefit (however gauche the latter may be).

Guest Editing at SmokeLong Quarterly 11/11 to 11/17

Hey, yeah, been floating around, working on various projects. Untoward remains a thing in progress, as does something else I've been working on and alluding to.

But most important of all is that I'm currently guest editing at SmokeLong Quarterly, a wonderful publisher and proponent of flash fiction.

You can get a sense of what I'm looking for on their blog, which is HERE.

Come one, come all.

UPDATE: I happily accepted a short story entitled "Sparks" by the wonderful Bezalel Stern. Thanks to all who submitted.

Books That I Keep Coming Back To For My Reasons

I reread. I don't reread a lot by the standard of some friends of mine, but I reread. There are certain books whose shear force is too much not to return to over and over again. Certain stories within certain books that I cannot forget about and have to keep reading and thinking about. So with that in mind, I thought, for once I'd like to compile them here, on the old blog, in all their glory. I have some things to say about each one, naturally. Take a gander, if you so choose. (Do take a gander at these books for yourselves, regardless of whether you care to read what I have to say about them.)

For as much as Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 and Mark Twain and dozens of others of the recent or more distant past have had on my perspective about what fiction can do, George Saunders has in so many ways eclipsed them. Perhaps it's because I've had several wonderful encounters with Saunders over the years (not that we're friends by any means, though I can dream, can't I?), but there is such an earnestness to his work and his humor that adds to its potency. The man, himself, in my limited experience, seems to exude these characteristics as well. Though I'm only remarking on two of Saunders' books here, I could just easily include everything he's ever published. It's all very worthy of your time and attention. Rather, I'll let you investigate the entirety of his work yourself. I'll say a few things about the works of his that have resonated most powerfully, and which I return to most frequently. 

Allow me to begin with the one I consider more formative of the two: The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (Riverhead Trade, 2005). A marvel, truly. Few books have captured the attention of summer school students I've taught like this one has. Humorous, certainly, in all the bombastic and wondrously whimsical ways Saunders tends to be. Students identify with the plight of the Inner-Hornerites, their subjugation at the hands of the Outer-Hornerites and specifically a tyrannical, megalomaniacal jackass named Phil, whose cruelty and justification for his cruelty likewise are salient through the eyes of those he oppresses, and those sympathetic to the oppressed. We learn more about Phil than that, though. He's not merely a villain, to be sure. Phil's sad early life is given its due, is taken into consideration. It's not impossible to imagine that Hitler, too, could evoke our sympathy were we to more closely scrutinize his early life, his abusive father, his intense struggle with failure creatively. But like Hitler and the great many other despots who've come and gone in time, Phil is judged ultimately and quite reasonably by his most significant actions -- which is, indeed, a lesson for us all.  

Of all of my favorite Saunders short stories, and there are many, I think more than half are contained within the pages of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Vintage, 1997). In fact, the only ones not included in this collection that I can definitely say I'd immediately miss are, "Sea Oak," "Escape from Spiderhead," and "The Tenth of December." The titular story in CivilWarLand, meanwhile, is really spectacular. I can't lie, I find myself constantly overly influenced by CivilWarLand and "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," in particular. A lot of things I've written in the past five years got their start merely from wondering WHY can't I write a short story as good as "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline"? I've tried. I'm not George Saunders. Can't be him. Happy with who I am, at last, as a writer. BUT I am thankful there is a George Saunders out there who continues to write disjointed tales in his beautifully idiosyncratic way. The melange of atrophic capitalistic dreams and nightmares fills his pages. Stories rife with the human toll society often takes, as we search hopefully to succeed at the kind of gain this country, at least, suggests is our one monomaniacal purpose on earth. Saunders looks at those who fall between the cracks, live on the margins, don't always get to see the light of day. We care about them because Saunders cares about them, teaches us that they are people, too. And there are more like them. And there's more to them, so much more, than we could possibly have expected at a superficial glance.

Don't Kiss Me (FSG, 2013) is a new classic, which I admit is a strange thing to call it seeing as it was only just released this past July. Lindsay Hunter is a writer you should expect to hear more and more from in the coming years. I was a fan of her work before I ever had the privilege of meeting her, and I was pleased that she's every bit as wonderful and kind and generous as I could hope she'd be. Her stories are amazing. I've heard people compare certain classic writers to her works and writing style, many of the southern tradition, and I would not disagree. Not exactly. BUT, where all that's concerned, I see Lindsay Hunter as a fascinating fusion of Southern and Midwestern traditions. It's no coincidence, I think, that Don't Kiss Me was dedicated to Chicago. She understands certain notions that cross the complexly different and similar sociological patterns of the two cultures. Much as Middle America can look and maybe even feel the same to the outsider, to the East and West Coasters, it really couldn't be more philosophically disparate. And in her fiction, Lindsay Hunter often creates emotional collages of these often contradictory elements. Stories like "After" bring this notion immediately into focus. Certainly, with the ostensible rural dialect of her first-person narrator, you could attribute this story to anyplace outside the urban and suburban sprawl in the post-apocalyptic United States. Anywhere troubles abound, which Lindsay Hunter recognizes seems to be everywhere. It's fun. It's the most fun you'll have in a society of ruin. Lots of gross descriptions loaded with black comedy. Bodies that are literally falling apart. Lindsay Hunter's work tends to walk the tightrope between what could happen and what is surreal. It's a delicate balancing act, but she has a way of making the improbable seem possible and the everyday seem spectacular. It's enviable and I hate her for it. But I get to read her stories, so in the end, I'd say I probably don't actually hate her for it / am happy she's out there, writing. She has a novel in the works. I consider that a very good thing.

As much as I'm thrilled Amelia Gray moved right into prime time with the release of THREATS (FSG, 2012), I'm certain to remain a devotee of Museum of the Weird (Fc2, 2010). With a title like that, how could it not be my favorite of her books? I ask you! And it's truly a museum of the weird. Stories like "Dinner" -- which I've taught to my high school students, and they typically enjoy puzzling over its disgusting dilemma: a woman must decide whether or not to eat a plate of hair. It's perfect for that age, too, because it asks them to reflect upon the possibility of pressure from a peer or more specifically a possible romantic interest and decide how far they'd be willing to go to prove their devotion. (I've yet to meet a student who would eat the hair in that situation, although they have said they'd do it for a lot of money.) There's also the killer who calls himself "God" and removes two ribs from men's rib-cages. 

Amelia Gray has such a gentle style of prose, casual and really pleasant to ease into reading. It is always fun to watch how it reveals her often disturbing or at least irreverent narrative turns. It creates a fantastic amount of tension, too. I suppose I'd liken it to the greats of the past. She brings to mind the matter-of-factness despite its twilight zone subject matter of writers like Shirley Jackson, Roald Dahl and, yes, George Saunders. She's great at picking out minutiae to have her characters obsess over, too, like a bag of frozen tilapia, a human tongue for possible ingestion or the hostage negotiating skills of javelina. Prepare yourself and enjoy. 

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (Penguin Books, 2011). I've reread this book a couple times now. It's really a wonder of spare prose and fabulism. Loory is so subtle, so precise with his strangeness. I heard him explain to Brad Listi on the Other People Podcast that he has certain, if I'm not totally bungling this, mathematical methods for determining some of the plot turns and whatnot. That just sounds cool to me. And it works, if that's actually what he does. It works well. His stories are mazes of ambiguity, reminding me of Kafka in some respects but really are something entirely new. Fiction that's all his own. And the darkness that floats through his work is so appealing. Even in stories with "happy endings" we get this sense as readers that the other shoe is soon to drop. Things can be very grim, especially in the world of fiction. It's why we keep reading. We want to see things. Loory wants to tell you things. His characters are meant to experience things. Certainly he develops a sense of who they are, these characters, at their core. But he's more interested in how the nameless will respond in any given situation, at least that's been my takeaway. It's why almost no character in any of the stories, certainly no main character, is referred to as anything other than "the man" or "the woman." You don't need to know. Judge them by their actions, or their paltry little circumstances, as Nietzsche might refer to them.


HONORABLE MENTIONS: Adam Levin's Hot Pink, Mathias Svalina's I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur, and Patrick Somerville's The Universe in Miniature in Miniature.

Why Do People Love Walter White?

I'm on a "Breaking Bad" kick. Over the past two weeks, thanks in no small part to Netflix, I've seen all of the first three seasons, and Ashley and I have just begun the fourth. Intense, dramatic, suspenseful, all that stuff. It keeps you guessing, keeps you interested in the characters and their always present humanity, and it does so in a way that doesn't condescend to the audience. (So please, if you do decide to leave a comment NO SPOILERS, I beg of you.)

Here are thoughts so far...

But I realized something recently. Why had Walter White, the mercurial lead character of the show, seem to resonate so well in the times we're living in, finding an easy niche in the zeitgeist? Sure, we love our anti-heroes. That's been true since forever. I know there's something satisfying about the underdog taking the bull by the horns and changing his/her circumstances. It's an idea most of us have little trouble relating to. So that Walter White manufactures the purest crystal meth the world has ever known, a drug notorious for its power to ravage its users / abusers so completely that they are often unrecognizable (something the show hardly ignores, e.g. Wendy the meth-head prostitute), is something we're readily willing to forgive. I would say there's more to it than that, though.

What makes "Breaking Bad" and its anti-hero unique is the way in which this storyline seems so closely tied to undermining the American mythos, namely "The American Dream." Walter White embodies the extremes we're now required to go to achieve the so-called success of a more than comfortable life. Think about it, as the story begins, Walter White is a high school chemistry teacher. He pulls in somewhere around 43,000 dollars a year, so paltry he needs a second job working at a car wash to support his family. In what time in place has that been true? That a man with a job that should comfortably place him in the middle class cannot afford his very average lifestyle. Mortgage payments are too steep. And what's worth, while his wife is pregnant with his second child, he is diagnosed with lung cancer, "inoperable," they tell him. His employer provided insurance is so insignificant that it won't scratch the surface of the cost for his treatment. So he decides he must operate outside the law. It's the only way he can provide for his family in the way they deserve, as he sees it. It's the only way he can leave them not only debt free but in a situation that could allow them to flourish -- college tuition entirely paid for, as one thing he finds himself calculating (adjusted for inflation, or perhaps a little bit above the rate of inflation as is the current trend).

Many people identify with Walter White because he exposes the American Dream, the speciousness of the idea in a modern context. Look at how hard I work, and look at what I'm forced to do, the evil wicked things I'm forced to do, if I truly want the financial success so inextricably tied to the notion of "making it" in America. What a bleak but terribly true television program. And so we want Walter White to succeed.