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Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more

Sunday, April 29, 2012

I’m having what The Boy calls “a crisis of confidence”. I don’t know that I would call it that. I think I would call it that I sometimes hate writing. And it’s not even that I hate writing. One doesn’t write for a living and then write after the work day is complete if one hates writing. Right?

Here’s what it’s like: I have this story in my head. Or eleven thousand stories. And then I try to put them into Scrivener with my clumsy attempts at prose and it feels like I’m trying too hard and the words come out totally wrong and I ruin it all. I ruin it. I get my jammy hands all over it and I destroy that perfect thing inside my head.

Let me introduce you to my Muppet doppleganger, Don Music.

This fear– no, this certainty– that I’m going to fuck it all up? It causes physical pain. And it’s not that I don’t like to write fiction every night after work, but rather, I want to avoid that sensation. And who could blame me? When you burn your hand on a hot stove, you don’t keep touching the damned burner.

I look at the people in the writing life — Tim Pratt, Roxane Gay, Wendy McClure, and so many others — and they are getting shit DONE. They write and write and rock and roll and it’s like it ain’t nothing but a thang.

This week, I’m going to see Lynda Barry and Dan Chaon at an arty thing in Madison. And Chaon’s going to ask if I’ve published anything and I’m going to say No. Hopefully I can restrain myself from whining at him again. Probably not. Maybe at least I will manage to not cry on Lynda Barry this time. Ok, probably not.

(Speaking of which, I have a film of Chaon reading the titular story from his recently released fantastic Stay Awake collection of short stories. The video is seemingly locked on my iPhone, as apparently it’s too big to transfer off through the various technologies. Apple, I love you, but seriously — don’t give me the ability to record a 30 minute video if I can’t get the phone to release the file.)

Because I can’t stand myself when I’m being a Sensitive Artiste, I do have the illusion of productivity– Kylos Brannon, the former art director at Barrelhouse and illustrator of my short story “Billets Doux” contacted me recently. He is doing a residency and would like to work at adapting that story into a video project. So, by nature of sitting on my ass, at least someone is doing something with my writing. Thank God for Kylos keeping me honest. I also have about ten new submissions out, including an entry into the delicious Paper Darts short fiction contest. I had to write something fresh for that, since I tend to write marathon short stories and they needed something under 800 words. I think I managed it in 796 total, which for me is amazing. I envy Jen Larsen’s ability to fucking nail the flash fiction every damned time.

Tell me, dear reader, how do you keep yourself going during these supposed crises of confidence? How do you get your inner perfectionist to shut the hell up? The comments are dying to hear your secrets.

 

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Sounding my barbaric AWP

Friday, March 9, 2012

I’m a bad blogger. For those folks who won the contest (Ainsley, who chose Black Clock; Angela, who chose a Narrative VIP backstage pass; and Dawn, who chose a subscription to the very wonderful Missouri Review), you should hopefully all have received your first and perhaps even second issues by now and are enjoying the wealth of words in your various johns. I highly recommend the john for reading short stories. You know you’re going to read something when you go in there, and if you don’t read a lit journal, then it’s just going to be Real Simple or Marie Claire or Nylon. Your brain and soul will thank you for picking up an issue of Pank instead.

(True confession time: all of the above are currently in my john right now. My apologies to Pank, as it truly doesn’t deserve such company.)

I spent last weekend at AWP in Chicago, where I hung out with old friends and some new ones too. I fell in love with the creative forces behind so many new journals(new to me, anyway) and also had a great time fighting my way through the masses in the basement of the Chicago Hilton. Some high points:

  • Staking out a front row seat for the Jennifer Egan reading, only to have Liam Callanan randomly sit next to me in the seat being saved for him. Somewhere on the AWP website, there’s undoubtedly a photo of us clapping. I am almost certain that my eyes will be crossed, drooping and perhaps my fly will be open. Actually, I think I was wearing a dress that day, but it’s still possible.
  • Giggling with Molly Backes on the fourth balcony of the Margaret Atwood keynote.
  • Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood. Sure, it was only twenty minutes of basking in her fantastic self, and from my vantage point, she looked like a Fisher-Price Little People (specifically this one) but it was still glorious.
  • Dan Chaon, waving his arms around as he saw me approaching and then telling me that Lynda Barry said to say hi.
  • Going to Wendy McClure’s reading at The Hideout and then skipping another reading to go out and eat plantain and steak sandwiches with her and her husband. Because sometimes it’s the small table that matters instead of the big filled room.
  • The Paper Darts journal. You guys, it’s so beautiful that I want to have its babies. I’m serious. Go buy issues 1 and 2. Now. Don’t wait.
  • The AWP Karaoke Idol party. It was actually worth waiting out in the cold, because I met crazy awesome poet girls Sun Yung Shin, Loretta Clodfelter and Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen.
  • The “Who’s Oldest” mutha-fucking walk-off with Anh-Hoa. I’m not telling which of us is older, but apparently non-drunk partiers attested that neither of us looked as old as we were.
  • I may be a fiction writer at heart, but man, I need some more poets in my life.
  • I got my nails done AND a cocktail for ten bucks!
  • The ladies working at the Weiner Circle bought me my hot dog and cheese fries. That’s right, the bitches tipped ME (although with the $27 in cab fare to get to and from the Weiner Circle, this was merely a symbolic victory.)
  • I am so fucking glad that I didn’t book a hotel room in time to get a room in one of the conference hotels. It was so peaceful in my little hotel off Michigan on the other side of the river. Plus, I got free breakfast every day.
  • Quiet time on Saturday away from downtown with Kate Harding, where we talked about writing process, the blogosphere and dogs over ridiculously delicious peppery brunch fare.

Less awesome things at AWP:

  • I think I had to face off the minotaur in the bookfair. Seriously, what was with the Southeast room ghetto? There had to be fire code issues there, with the narrow aisles and overcrowding.
  • Who picks a room that only seats 30 for a session with Dan Chaon? DAN CHAON. Yes, yes, I’m a big fan girl, but come on. Simple math.
  • It was SO hard to pick things to go to! There were so many sessions that were awesome, seemingly at the same time as every other awesome thing that ever was. However, this is minor griping, because the only solutions are to stretch out the conference over more days (not realistic) or reduce the number of sessions (please no). Or, you know, let me schedule everything so that nothing I want to attend conflicts with anything else I want to attend.
  • Not getting to go to the Barrelhouse party because I wandered around Chicago like a lost little lamb until they had reached capacity (bittersweet, per above).
  • Only getting to see Tom Williams –my undergrad fiction mentor–but once across a crowded Irish pub (thanks to skipping the reading mentioned above). Ah well, there’s always next AWP.
  • I tried checking out the Bull: Fiction for Thinking Men table, only to be totally ignored by the staff and literally elbowed aside so that they could speak to male attendees. Then not a week later, the editor is stating that they are mystified as to why they don’t have more female writers. Um.

All in all, AWP was very enjoyable and a check mark in the positive category. I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to go back to Indiana this year (although Dan Chaon, Lynda Barry AND Jean Thompson? Hmmm) but I am tentatively in for AWP 2013 in Boston.

Did you go to AWP this year? What did you think? Did you get a chance to traipse through the Chicago art museum up the street to Dream Academy’s cover of The Smith’s “(Please please please) Let me get what I want” by any chance?

If so, I want to be your friend.

 

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How to subscribe to your favorite lit journal for absolutely free

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Well, that was eye-opening!

It seems that my question of why writers don’t subscribe to the literary journals they hope will publish their stories is actually not so simple. There’s really two issues: why aren’t writers READING the journals and why aren’t people subscribing to them. Let’s break down both sides of that coin.

Marne Grinolds pointed out that she reads journals at her local library. She wrote:

I know (because they have told me) that some editors feel using this tactic is somehow cheating, but I don’t see how you can make that argument stick. Wise journals already charge more for institutional subscriptions than they do for personal ones, and there’s certainly no way I could afford to subscribe to the hundreds of lit journals my library can.

And I thought I was lucky for getting to see The Killers for free two weeks ago at VMworld, but Marne has it made — she has access to hundreds of lit journals RIGHT THERE AT HER FINGERTIPS. I agree with Marne that this does count: you’re consuming the periodical, regardless of who actually paid the bill. Those writers are getting read, those pages are being flipped. That’s why the books were put on this earth, right? I guess the spirit of my argument was assuming that people who would read journals would also be subscribing, which I totally conflated. More on that later in the post.

Kate Maurer brings up a valid point:

I already don’t have time to read all the journals that arrive. I am a writer who is at my day job 35 hours a week (a schedule I was lucky to get and that involved taking a $3,000 annual pay cut to eek out five extra hours a week to write), and as an editor in a non-literary field, a good deal of that time I am reading things that I wouldn’t read if I didn’t have to pay the bills. In the remaining time, I try to find the wherewithal to read books and journals plus actually write my own work and revise it and submit it and fight through all those familiar forms of self-doubt, etc. (plus do all the things normal people do when they aren’t at work) Meanwhile I feel guilty that I don’t read more books or journals, buy more books or journals, attend more local live music shows, go to the art theater, go to more readings, comment on the work of any number of writer friends who are waiting on me, participate in more community activism, or do any number of things that support things that are important to me (even though I already do more of all of the above than many people). But I don’t think this means that I am not entitled to be a writer or to attempt to publish my work in whatever venues are available to it.

I totally get that. I’m busy too. I work with words for a living, do an excessive amount of airport time, and also, the new season of Bored To Death is starting soon. Even more time-consuming, I am writing a novel, trying to read books for enjoyment and to stay on top of the lit world (my To Be Read book shelf is staggeringly behind, mostly because my friends keep publishing books and I will always read one of their books before, say, Jonathan Franzen or something) as well as reading my ten to fifteen lit journals that I get per year (my subscriptions plus the ones I buy on newsstands). I have a very sad pile of them sitting right now on my desk next to me. When I can’t see over the pile anymore, I start putting them in the john, because I know that I’ll read at least half a story a day just out of sheer boredom. I also tend to take one with me on planes to read during those times when it is not safe to use portable electronic devices, and then I leave it in the seat back when I deplane. (I’m not trying to sound especially altruistic, I only included that last bit because I don’t get to use the word “deplane” enough.) Anyway, I know you’re busy. We’re all busy. We do what we can. And if it’s important, we make sure it happens. It takes about twenty minutes to read a short story, yes? If you read one short story a day, you’d consume two lit journals a month just on your coffee breaks and your brain would be happier than if it spent that time catching up on the Dance Moms TWOP forums.

And by “you” I don’t mean Kate, I mean me because my god, I’ve got to stop watching Dance Moms.

Robin Kalinich said

I’m an aspiring (and most failing) writer, and I consider subscribing and reading lit mags almost as important as the writing itself.

Hallelujah! I thought I was the only one. Can you imagine a professional athlete saying that they didn’t have time to go to the gym? A basketball player whining that the hoop was too high? Or a dancer who said that it was impossible to find time to practice dancing? Would you feel bad for them if they didn’t make it into the pros? No, you wouldn’t, because they clearly didn’t want to hone their craft. (I certainly know what the dance teacher on Dance Moms would say.)

There are a lot of demands on our time, pretty much like every adult in the free world. But you know, the concerts will still be attended, the bills will still get paid, the commuting time will still happen if you read a journal now and then.

My favorite came from Chris Roberts, who said

Either Wendy is ninety years old or operating in an alternate state of reality. More unreality. Slush pile? Really? Hint: it’s 2011, not the Roaring Twenties. It’s such an droll, antiquated term that it leads me to believe that Wendy worked at a literary magazine office located under a rock. “Slush Pile Whisperer” That’s a hoot. I guess W. is going to break out into the Charleston…cut a rug dinosaur!

Chris gets extra points for using the word “droll”. For what it’s worth, I ended my editing duties on the Cream City Review in 2008 when I completed my Masters and while it annoyingly still used paper submissions (oh look, I talk about reading the slush pile here), my editor friends who are using Submishmash have recently referred to unsolicited submissions as the slush pile. Is there a different term in vogue these days? Also, RAWWWR! I think I have officially made it in the literary world now that I’ve had an angry young writer call me a dinosaur. Now where are those fat Alice Munro-esque royalty checks?

Shannon, however, really gave me pause. Here’s her comment in total:

This comes across as coming from a really privileged position.

I think it is more than fantastic that you can do all of those things with your money. It is, I envy that a little bit.

That said, there are a lot of writers like me who are the breadwinners in their households, who are the working poor, who are otherwise not in a position to financially support literary magazines when a lot of us are on the verge of being unable to financially support ourselves and our families. I don’t honestly think I would have ever even started to even try getting work published if I had to wait until I could afford to subscribe to every magazine I like.

If it is suddenly common sense to say, screw you poor folks, that doesn’t honestly sound like the kind of literary world that has room for me or anyone like me. And it’s not one I’d like to be a part of even if it would have me.

Is it a privileged position? I spend about $100 a year on lit journal subscriptions, and then tend to buy probably five to ten issues throughout the year off the racks in indie bookstores when I travel (shout out to Sam Weller in Salt Lake City and Myopic in Chicago!) that probably add up to another $100. Honestly, I can’t think of another craft that only costs $200 a year.  I have a friend who runs marathons. She goes through $100 pairs of shoes every three months. I have another friend who makes less than $35K per year who spends $12 just about every weekend going to see a different movie at an art house cinema. Hell, a Netflix subscription alone… That adds up to a LOT of journal subscriptions, you know?

But Shannon’s right. I am speaking from a place of privilege. I can afford these journal subscriptions probably a lot easier than my friends can afford their running shoes and weekly movie addiction. When I was in college, and shortly after that while I worked in nonprofits, it was a different story: we were so broke that we considered Rice-A-Roni to be really treating ourselves because that stupid flavor packet somehow made 20 cents worth of rice and pasta cost $1.50. And whenever I got a Barnes & Noble gift card for Christmas, I still spent it on single issues of Glimmer Train and Story (now I’m really showing my dinosaur status). Yeah, I know from poor, and thank you Shannon for reminding me of that.

That’s why I’m going to give away some subscriptions to lit journals. Really, I’m not giving them away so much as investing in the journals and the community, but if you feel weird about it, you can think of it as a starter subscription that you can renew in the future when you’re starting to make some more dough. I’ll be using Random.Org to select winning entries and then will give away as many subscriptions until I’ve given away at least $100 of lit journal subscriptions to broke writers.

Here’s how to enter!

Leave a comment with just four easy answers:

  • What was the name of the last lit journal you read?
  • What was the last journal where you submitted your work?
  • Your email address in the blog comment system (just make sure you use a real email address and only I can see it, promise), and
  • Which lit journal would you like a subscription to?

That’s all. Easy, right?

Who’s eligible for this giveaway

Writers who are too poor to buy subscriptions to lit journals and don’t have access to fabulous libraries such as Marne’s. I’m not going to ask for proof of income — this is totally on the honor system. I mean, don’t kid yourself: if you’re stopping at Starbucks more than once a week for a mocha, be cool and leave the prizes to the people who are really hurting in this godforsaken economy.

Also, to keep things fair, if I know you, you’re not eligible for this contest. Sorry it has to be that way, but I’d be happy to give you some lit journals next time I see you. I promise not to give you the ones that have been in my john.

Multiple Winners!

This contest will go until Oct 14 when the prizes will be awarded, with the first winner getting a subscription of their choice. If the first winner’s subscription is less than $100, I’ll draw again, and the second winnner’s subscription will similarly come from that $100 pot. I’ll keep picking comments until I’ve purchased at least $100 of subscriptions for as many commenters as possible. Also, you can comment as many times as you want, but only your first comment on this entry counts. Does that make sense? Ok, that’s how it will work. I hope I’ve covered everything.

Ready, set, go!

*The little metal thing on the photo at the top of this was not a campaign button for the current Wisconsin governor, whom I most definitely do NOT support, but rather a thing I wore at some charity event where I was volunteering to help walk people back and forth to different places on campus. Regardless, the holiday card still makes me laugh.

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Why writers are parasites: A writer’s debt to the literary community

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Once upon a time (actually, two times) I was the person who read your submission to a lit journal and decided yes, it was worth the fiction editor’s time or no, it started with an alarm clock going off so please no no no. I actually really liked reading the slush piles. It was a little power trip and also, for a brief period, one of the editors called me the ‘slush pile whisperer’, because everything I pushed to the second round made it into the book.

What I learned from reading the slush pile: people lie on their cover letters (I can use Google and no you weren’t in Glimmer Train), past performance was not a measure of future results (there was some stanky fiction coming from people with impressive pedigrees) and also, the submitters clearly weren’t reading the journal. I’m not exaggerating: we had more submissions than subscribers. I  mean,  I was a subscriber and I wasn’t submitting, and I knew lots of other people who were subscribing (past authors we had published, professors, alumni, etc) who also weren’t submitting. So who the hell did these slush pile authors think they were? I mean, sure, one or two, but like 90% of them weren’t even reading the journals.

Can someone explain that to me? How can a lit journal be good enough to support your work but not good enough for you to read the work inside it?

I have a very controversial opinion that has made me somewhat unpopular among my writer friends and it is this: if you don’t subscribe to at least five lit journals while you’re trying to get published in lit journals, then you’re a literary parasite.

I’m not trying to be provocative. I earnestly don’t understand the logic. From where I sit, there are two possible arguments:

Writers are writers. We write for readers and also, we’re often broke because we now have thousands of dollars in student loan debt for a graduate degree that doesn’t usually come with a high paying job. Hell, even professors barely make above the poverty line without tenure, and I know people with PhDs who are fighting tooth and nail to get full-time work. In theory, there are readers out there, readers who enjoy fiction and poetry with no designs on ever creating it themselves. I want to believe those people are out there, but perhaps they are magical unicorns or maybe they only subscribe to The New Yorker.

Writers are readers. If a brain surgeon had never himself experienced brain surgery, no one would think twice (and maybe would be concerned if he had) but unlike brain surgery, you’ve absolutely got to experience the work of your fellow writers as a consumer. Ok, maybe that’s arguable, but let’s just choose to accept that one fact for the moment. Writers got to read.

So, if you’re submitting to Journal A and you don’t have a subscription, why exactly is that? I can think of a few reasons:

  1. You’re already subscribing to too many other journals who have already or won’t publish your work.
  2. You’re broke.
  3. You don’t like that journal.
  4. You just saw a call for submissions, liked what you saw on the website and plan to subscribe at some point. Maybe.

What did I miss? I totally understand #1, but I have no patience for #2 and #3 (which doesn’t even make sense but I’ve heard it several times when I’ve asked writers this question), and I want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and think that it’s #4 and then something else comes up and/or they’re flakes.

You know those writers who moan loudly about the deaths of their favorite markets for submitting and yet, never supported those great little journals in the first place? They just spam editors with their work and demand to be noticed in the slush pile without having the courtesy to read and support other writers. A slush pile shouldn’t be larger than the print run of a magazine, you know? Who the fuck is going to read it?

It’s parasitic. Yes, writers tend to be poor, but they also are probably typing away (as I am right now) on a MacBook, possibly sitting in a hipster cafe drinking four dollar lattes. Four damned coffees could pay for one subscription, and that is a sad truth. Suck it up. No one owes you anything. Robert Olen Butler and Amy Hempel might be courted by lit journals left and right, but unless they’re coming to you, then you owe it to the journal to really understand whether your work belongs in those pages.

Full disclosure: I subscribe to seven lit journals, am a member of AWP (which was a stupid spend of my lit dollar, quite frankly, because I could have gotten like five journal subscriptions out of that) and, looking at my PayPal history, have donated to four different online publications in the last six months. I do it because I take responsibility for my role in this community. And you should too. You read my work and I’ll read yours. That’s only fair.

I think it is a shame that Pank has to resort to a frickin’ tip jar. I mean, come on guys. A tip jar. I’ll bet if every writer who submitted to Pank actually subscribed, they won’t need to be begging for your spare dollars.

Writers who don’t subscribe to at least five lit journals are like that guy at the party who spends all evening talking about himself. And the slush pile that I used to cull from? A party full of boors.

Or maybe I’m wrong. I hope someone will enlighten me in the comments and tell me why I’m completely wrong and being unfair. Please. Seriously, I want to understand why writers don’t subscribe to the lit journals they hope will publish them.

 

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The top five best BASS markets for women writers (and five not-so-great)

Monday, July 18, 2011

This one’s for the ladies!

We’ve already covered how over half of all BASS stories came from the same 12 sources from 2005 through 2010, so let’s move to my pet peeve about the literary community: the potential for bias against writers who are women.  I posted this graph in a previous entry, but since it’s handy, let’s take a look at it again.

 

 

One could interpret these results one of two ways–Either females aren’t getting chosen for the BASS (with the exception of 2010, when even with the margin of error in the Not Obvious column, there’s no clear bias for either gender) or the stories that are published or mentioned in the BASS are a cross-section of what’s out there and women authors are not getting published as often as men in the journals that the BASS is using to collect its fiction. You decide what’s going on here.

The five most female-friendly BASS sources (and the bottom five too)

I took at look at that top 42 BASS markets (ie. where 80% of the BASS stories are originating) and stacked them based on percentage of female authors versus everyone else (Male author names as well as Not Obvious names). The five publications with the lowest ratio of female authors listed in the BASS (We’ll call them The Boys and Girls Club):

  • Virginia Quarterly Review (23.5% female)
  • Granta (25% female)
  • The Paris Review (25% female)
  • The Southern Review (26.7% female)
  • Zoetrope (29.2% female)

It is my responsibility to defend some of these publications as potential victims of the data gathering process, as all of these publications have authors who had names which were Not Obvious male or female names (see table after the jump), and Granta and  Zoetrope especially could have much higher female ratios within that margin of error. I hesitate even to include Granta in this list at all, because with only two female names and two Not Obvious against four male authors, it might even be a perfect split and then it’s super unfair to list them here. So please remember, this is not an indictment of these publications, just a measurement of my perception of their entries in the BASS.

Conversely, these five publications have the highest percentage of female authors in the BASS (let’s call them the The Girl Scouts)

  • New England Review (84.6% female)
  • Alaska Quarterly Review (75% female)
  • The Sun (71.4% female)
  • Ninth Letter (71.4% female)
  • Missouri Review (71.4% female)

The delightful spouse has actually suggested that I go one step further and buy a year’s backlog of a few of the BASS top 12 and compile a census to compare ratio of gender published to gender selected so that one COULD validate the hypothesis  that the BASS selection was a statistically random sampling of the stories selected for publication of those markets.  But  I’m not sure that I’m that crazy yet, as I do actually have to work for a living to keep the lights turned on.

I should also point out that it’s entirely unreliable to assume that because New England Review has such a high percentage of female authors in the BASS that they must be publishing more female authors in general. Not true. It’s also possible that they (or any other of the journals listed in either The Girl Scouts or The Boys Club) have the opposite bias in their overall publishing schema but the females (or males) they do pick are so exceptional that they defeat the journals own bias as well as get noticed by the BASS editors. We just won’t know unless we actually did a standard deviation calculation and some predictive calculations (did I mention that I have a Six Sigma certification? It’s true. And yes, that makes me a little weird.)

The Top 12 BASS Markets by Gender

Want to see how the Dirty Dozen play out in the war of the sexes? I thought you’d never ask.

While The New Yorker does not have an impressive female-to-male ratio of authors in the BASS, they have had more female authors listed/published in the BASS than any other publication. Woo girl power!? Of course, of The New Yorker‘s 39 females, Annie Proulx and Alice Munro make up 30% of that figure with 12 stories between the two of them.

In fact, many of the women authors are consistent players. Matt Bell dropped a hint that he’d be interested in seeing who the teacher’s pets (that’s my term, not Matt’s) of BASS were, so I will compile that data for a future post, including what the numbers look like when you take out the more famous writers and see who is left.

Before the ladies in the room start drafting up submissions to Glimmer Train and Ploughshares, please remember: this is not indicating that these publications are skewed or biased toward female authors anymore than it indicates that Tin House or Zoetrope are biased toward male authors. It’s simply a study of how those hungry BASS editors are nibbling from each market.

Speaking of how the editors are picking stories, I think I have a kindred spirit in Susan Gibb, who caught onto something hinky in the Michael Chabon-edited Best American Short Stories ’05.

As I mentioned, in February I read the 2005 Best American Short Stories and did brief reviews on the twenty selected stories here on Spinning.  Last week I decided to read through the 2005 Best American Mystery Stories, something I was looking forward to since my roots are in the genre and I hadn’t read or written mystery in quite a while.  Kind of strange, but I realized that the fifth story in BAMS, Old Boys, Old Girls by Edward P. Jones, was one I had just read in BASS.  When I checked the index, I found Dennis Lehane’s Until Gwen.  This story was also in the BASS collection.

It seems to me that there are so many stories published that it struck me as kind of a really, really amazing coincidence that two different guest editors (BASS, Michael Chabon; BAMS, Joyce Carol Oates) would, out of all those stories, select the same two to include in their separate collections (both are published as part of a Houghton Mifflin series).   When I remembered that Joyce Carol Oates was one of Michael Chabon’s selections in BASS, I checked the BAMS for Chabon and confirmed he was not included.

Susan Gibb also warned me that I’m probably never going to get a story in the BASS after this. Yeah, this is a serious risk that I’m taking, but I want to believe that the BASS editors are can withstand a little inspection without taking it personally. And since it IS my goal to have a short story in the BASS, I’m simply taking a page from Sun Tzu and trying to get a better understanding of the playing field.

As always, for my two data-hungry readers, there are tables at the bottom of this post just waiting for you to love them after the break!

(Continued)

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Words of wisdom from Ira Glass on fixing broken writers

Saturday, July 16, 2011

This is a true story: my friend Wendy (a different Wendy, I promise I’m not talking about myself in the third person or that this isn’t that split personality deal I talked about in this entry) once met up with me on Chicago’s Navy Pier a couple of years ago. We were drinking overpriced strawberry daquiris and getting sunburned. She was all glowy and beautiful, even more than she normally is, and then she casually mentioned that she’d just come from interviewing Ira Glass.

So, not only is Ira Glass amazing and talented and wise and hilarious, he also is a beauty product not yet approved by the FDA. Take that, Lancome.

Here. Everyone needs a little Ira Glass in their lives. He’ll make you better looking and also he just might have the answer for broken writer syndrome.

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Why women writers will always experience gender bias

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

This post from Max Barry is too good to not share. It starts like this:

This has been a great year for male writers, with women shunted aside for major prizes and all-new hand-wringing about why it is so. Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but male writers get taken more seriously. Also, stories about men, even if written by women, are considered mainstream, while stories about women are “women’s fiction.” This despite the fact that women read more than men, and write more, and are over-represented generally throughout publishing.

Let’s go to V.S. Naipaul for the sound byte:

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me. And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.

I mentioned this particular quote to a fairly successful male writer last month and he took a little umbrage to the suggestion that women writers are being underrepresented by the award and anthology circuits. Being a white guy writer, he has a harder time seeing the bias. I encouraged him to prove me wrong with cold hard facts, sir, and I would join his umbrage! Umbrage for all! Wait, I have some facts, I can whip up a handy graph right this minute from the last 6 years of Best American Short Stories data.

So much for the umbrage.

(We both agreed that V.S. Naipaul is cranky and old and probably smells like couch cushions.)

Thankfully, my generation of male writers isn’t suffering from Naipaul-esque sentiments, or at least they aren’t saying them out loud, but I have a hard time understanding why this divide exists.

Then I polled a few writers on who their favorite authors were, and the female writers answered with a mix of male and female authors while the male writers (with one single exception) replied with a list of male names. And these are men whose work I enjoy and who, if asked, would likely label themselves as being open-minded to equality, would vehemently defend a female writer’s work and might even use the term “feminist”.

Here’s a random listing of the favorite authors on five Fictionaut profiles, which is a bit more formal and premeditated than my informal poll at Writer’s Camp. Can you guess which of these respondents are male and which are female? Click the * to see if you guessed right.

Ernest Hemingway. Raymond Carver. T.S. Eliot. William Carlos Williams. Charles Bukowski. a few Billy Collins. a few Jack Gilbert. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Roberto Bolano. *

I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan is one of my favorite books. Also, The Once and Future King written by T. H. White, Chuck Palahniuk, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolfe, Anne Sexton, Jim Morrison, David Mamet and many many more. *

I love James Salter, Charles Baxter, Mona Simpson (mostly for her short story “Lawns”), Samantha Hunt, Amy Bloom, Maile Meloy. I buy lit journals with any pocket money I ever have, and Lolita will probably be my favorite novel forever and always.*

Iain Banks, Candas Jane Dorsey, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Carroll.*

So many: Aimee Bender, Louise Erdrich, Jayne Anne Phillips, Kurt Vonnegut, N. Scott Momaday, Francine Prose. Some favorite books: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Tinkers, Four Corners, The Great Gatsby, on and on…*

Did you guess right?

This has much to do with what Max Barry called the problem of Dogs and Smurfs.

Male is default. That’s what you learn from a world of boy dogs and Smurf stories. My daughter has no problem with this. She reads these books the way they were intended: not about boys, exactly, but about people who happen to be boys. After years of such books, my daughter can happily identify with these characters.

And this is great. It’s the reason she will grow into a woman who can happily read a novel about men, or watch a movie in which men do all the most interesting things, without feeling like she can’t relate. She will process these stories as being primarily not about males but about human beings.

Except it’s not happening the other way. The five-year-old boy who lives up the street from me does not have a shelf groaning with stories about girl animals. Because you have to seek those books out, and as the parent of a boy, why would you? There are so many great books about boys to which he can relate directly. Smurf stories must make perfect sense to him: all the characters with this one weird personality trait to distinguish them, like being super brave or smart or frightened or a girl.

I get it now. Women writers are Smurfette, in a sea of dogs who are male by default. George Elliott figured this out years ago, this is no surprise.

Remember my informal poll of sensitive male writer types? It’s worth noting that on Max Barry’s list of 20 favorite books, there are but a few Smurfettes.

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The Best American Short Stories exposed!

Saturday, July 9, 2011

 

This is Part One of a series analyzing the Best American Short Stories anthologies from 2005-2010.  For part two, read “The top five best BASS markets for women writers (and five not-so-great)”

I’m one of those creepy writers who are less right brained and more perfectly balanced brained. It’s possible that I have a split personality and don’t realize it, that my inner mad scientist goes off and plots for world domination when my free spirit poetic right brain has control of the wheel. I dunno. But let me show you something cool with statistics for a second. I promise, it won’t hurt.

I’m fascinated with the Best American Short Stories anthology. I bought my first one in 1993 shortly after declaring myself an English major with a creative writing emphasis and have purchased every anthology since, some of them in hardcover because when someone I love is choosing the stories, I can’t possibly wait for the paperback.

I’m kind of fascinated with the whole process. I envision months of reading journal after journal, polling writer friends and editors. I don’t know why but I used to think of the process like the scouting scene in A League of Their Own where a big city scout sits through hundreds of little backwater games trying to find that one kernel of wheat amongst the chaff.

I decided that I’d know I made it as a writer if one of my short stories made it into the BASS.

One day, reading the Stephen King edited collection while home from work sick with the flu, I got it into my brain that I should treat the BASS like I did a Six Sigma project. Since the BASS selection process is out of my control, I could analyze the post-production data. After all, you kept seeing The New Yorker and Glimmer Train mentioned time and again as sources for stories, so if you could get your stories into one of those journals, then you’d have a better shot, right? But the thing is, every writer knows about The New Yorker and Glimmer Train being super important places to showcase fiction… what about the rest of them? Maybe I’d discover some great little journals to focus on with my so-called “emerging writer” fiction.

I decided that a good cross-section that was viably accurate would need at least two BASS samples, what we call a census. I’d catalog every story published in the BASS. Ok, that was 40 entries. Not good enough for my internal mad scientist. I flipped to the back, where they listed 100 Notable Short Stories for that year. Brilliant! I typed them all into my spreadsheet too, noting whether the story was actually published in the anthology or if they were just honored as being a notable story. Looking at my data, I started to notice a weird thing: there were a WHOLE lot of male names in the author columns. In fact, it seemed disproportionate as I glanced over my numbers. I had happened to pick two years that had male editors, so I wondered if it would be different with a female editor. Sigh. Another 120 entries into my spreadsheet. I ran some quick analysis and… hrrmm.

I still didn’t have enough data. Luckily, I live in a state that experiences 11 months of winter and also, I’m a really fast typist. Had I known about this public database of all the BASS published stories going back to 1978, I might not have gone so crazy, but I didn’t know about it, so crazy I went.

After I finished typing six years of BASS authors, titles, and journals, comprising 680+ lines of data, I thought I would have had at least three hundred literary markets to focus on and research as potential places to submit my own fiction. Sure, the biggies would have multiple appearances, but what I didn’t expect is that over the spread of 6 years, only 111 journals were represented.

Surprised? I was kind of shocked. Many journals were only touched once, with biggies like The New Yorker and Tin House taking up the whopping percentage, so using the concept of a pareto chart, I took a look at the top 80 percent. Here’s where it got a little queasy.

Also, before we get started, a confession: I really had to think about whether I wanted to share this information with the world, because it’s actually kind of super-charged info. I mean, if there really is a way to game the system to get a story into the BASS (or improve your chances anyway) then there are only a limited number of spots in both the BASS and the journals represented therein. The fewer writers knew about those BASS secrets mean that my stories have a better shot of being selected by the respective editors. But on the other hand, hopefully by exposing what I’m seeing here, the Hawthorne effect will cause a change in the BASS selection process, hopefully resulting in a spreading of the love, so to speak. One would hope, anyway. Also, it’s not like what I’m revealing is KFC’s eleven secret herbs and spices or anything. It’s all printed in the BASS, so anyone could have (and probably has) compiled this data on their own.

The top 80% of all published stories in the BASS 2005 through 2010 as well as notable stories mentioned in the back pages came from the same 42 journals.

Check it out. I made a graph because writers sometimes get cross-eyed looking at numbers. I only included those with 7 or more stories published/notables because otherwise the text would get too squishy to read them but you get the idea. It shakes out to be a breakout of the sources of the top 70% of all stories mentioned or published in the last six years of the BASS. (Well, technically it’s 72.8%.)

Ignore the header in this graphic, it’s actually BASS ’05 to ’10, not ’06.

 

Keep in mind: I’m not saying that these literary markets are better than other markets. They are simply the literary markets most represented in the BASS 2005-2010.

Some eye-poppers there, huh? Quite honestly, I was surprised Granta was so low and that McSweeney’s is so high. I love both of those journals dearly but I would have guessed they would have been flipflopped in the rankings, personally, just because McSweeney’s is kind of the hipster of the crowd and let’s face it, I didn’t expect younger journals to do as well as old faithfuls like Granta and I certainly didn’t expect Granta to be paced by frickin’ Narrative Magazine.

If you like to look at actual numbers, there’s a table of the same data, broken out by year so you can see how certain years are unreasonably skewed (check out Ninth Letter, for instance) at the bottom of this post.

Did you notice that over half of the BASS stories come from just 12 journals? Yup, 356 stories from the same twelve publications. Apparently those BASS editors love them some New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, One Story, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, McSweeney’s and Conjunctions. And who can blame them, but wow… half? HALF?

You know, there are a lot of fantastic publications out there. Hobart. Post Road. Artifice. Aren’t they publishing even one piece of BASS-worthy fiction? Or are they even getting considered?  I mean, I don’t expect it’s the responsibility of the Houghton Mifflin to save every wonderful little lit journal from going out of business but show them a little love? Hell, I’d be happy to buy Heidi Pitlor a subscription or two if that’s the problem.

I’m really hoping to believe that there’s only so many pages one can read in a single year, but come on… TWELVE JOURNALS?

But wait, there’s more shockers to unfold. I have some interesting findings to share with you in upcoming posts regarding genders of authors who are included in the BASS. Stay tuned!

PS. Here’s that table I promised you data junkies in the bunch (all two of you).

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 TOTAL
The New Yorker 31 18 8 14 22 18 111
Tin House 7 8 4 5 10 10 44
Ploughshares 5 9 5 5 4 3 31
Zoetrope 5 7 4 4 3 1 24
One Story 4 5 2 2 4 4 21
The Paris Review 5 3 1 5 3 3 20
Glimmer Train Stories 1 1 9 1 1 7 20
Harper’s Magazine 4 1 3 6 3 1 18
Virginia Quarterly Review 6 2 5 3 1 17
The Atlantic Monthly 1 2 4 5 1 4 17
McSweeney’s 2 4 2 3 3 3 17
Conjunctions 6 1 3 3 3 16
The Southern Review 2 1 1 6 4 1 15
Antioch Review 1 4 5 2 1 13
New England Review 1 1 3 4 4 13
American Short Fiction 1 2 4 2 9
Alaska Quarterly Review 2 2 2 2 8
The Iowa Review 3 2 1 2 8
Narrative Magazine 1 4 3 8
Granta 3 2 1 2 8
Five Points 1 3 1 3 8
The Sun 1 5 1 7
A Public Space 3 1 1 2 7
The Kenyon Review 2 4 1 7
Epoch 2 2 2 1 7
Prairie Schooner 1 2 1 3 7
Oxford American 5 1 1 7
Ninth Letter 6 1 7
Missouri Review 2 3 2 7

 

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Do MFA programs break writers?

Friday, July 8, 2011

Awhile ago, I tweeted

All writer’s retreats/workshops talk about loving writing. I think I fit in better with the people who HATE writing. Where are those people?

A writer friend who is having much more success in being productive than I am posited that the one thing she’s noticed about friends in MFA programs is that they spend an awful lot of time moaning about writing (which, uh, sounds familiar) which contributed to her decision to not pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. She described another Midwestern creative writing program where the environment seemed to produce more stress and neurosis amidst its students than viable fiction.

It’s a question I hadn’t actually considered before, but her description was pretty interesting. Academia itself is a weird hot house environment. Sometimes I would sit in class and listen to the complaints of my fellow students and just think to myself “My god, you’ve never had a real job in your entire life.” Most cubicle residents don’t have half the amount of autonomy of your average TA, and it was especially funny when the people WITH funding would be upset about losing a sixth year of their contracts and hoped to garner sympathy from those of us who had zero funding, which really drove home how little perspective the average graduate student actually has.

Are these programs actually cultivating that lunacy or are the types of people in MFA programs the type to be crazy? I used to think it was the latter, but my friend’s question really gave me pause.

Writers tend to play pack games. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s been a constant phenomenon that I’ve experienced and witnessed. I’ve never been in a group of more than, oh, six writers where everyone didn’t on some level sum up the competition. This doesn’t just occur with higher education: I’ve seen it in practice at blogger conventions, even in subgroups of bloggers where the focus isn’t creative writing but rather nonfictional stuff like memoirs, How To and even photojournalists.

Just like in the prison yard, graduate workshops suddenly become proving grounds for that hierarchical structure: you’re only as good as your latest story or poem or whatever (obviously, you earn some kind of reputation equity that you can pull out some stinkers but too many and people start to think your good work was a fluke).  And every one of those MFA students came from a high school where they were the best writer in the school and probably an undergrad program where they were one of the best writers in the department. Now they’re fighting it out against people who are equally as talented and determined as they are, and possibly in classes where the professor is playing favorites (the line between authority and camaraderie in the graduate world is very very blurry) and burned out and probably fighting for their own limited resource pool among the university staff. It’s a special skill to create purple prose that doesn’t LOOK like purple prose, but man, have I seen some god awful crap come out of people trying like hell to sound really smart.

If this seems silly, take walking instead of writing. Anyone who has ever seen a bad fashion show at a local mall knows that it takes some very special skill to make walking natural look, well, natural. I mean, heck, three-year-old kids walk without any concern for how they look, how can we turn something as simple as walking into being so self-conscious that we can’t even do it without causing the audience to feel embarrassed FOR us? The simple act of being self-conscious. Models have to study for years before they can strut down the runway without looking like complete mental cases.

And we all know that modeling is not exactly a great career choice for one’s mental health.

So who can blame those writers for hating feeling like they’re not good enough? If bringing pen to paper starts pulling up all of those feelings, can you really blame us for wanting to avoid the mental anguish?

And does that mean we’re broken?

I can’t speak for all people with graduate degrees in Creative Writing and I certainly don’t regret my Masters degree, but using that definition something is certainly not right. I do remember a time when I couldn’t stop writing, when it was an enjoyable and as addictive as playing a video game and that time ended somewhere in my junior year of undergrad and got progressively worse as I spent more and more time talking about the process of writing. And today I have to trick myself into writing for disciplined periods of time, with an actual mantra of “It doesn’t matter if it sucks” because I earnestly believe it will not be good enough.

Broken? Perhaps. Wrong? I’m not sure.

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You could be anyone

Monday, June 20, 2011

Oh you guys, the Indiana University Writers Conference was so awesome.

I can’t even begin to tell you how awesome it was. Everyone was awesome. Awesome. It’s an overused word, but I mean it in the truest sense: I am full of awe.

Every day, I took a tiny little cranky elevator down to the Writer Camp headquarters and then sat in a classroom where we talked about the process and wrote some words and then wrote some more words and then Lynda Barry would make us laugh and then we’d all evacuate when the screenwriting lady came in, and I’d go sit in the cafeteria and try to find something edible (true fact: nothing served at the Indiana Memorial Union is actually edible unless it’s a naked scotcheroo pile (You know how delicious scotcheroos are? How normal people make the scotcheroo filling and then press it into a pan and cover it up with melted chocolate chips? Yeah, well, the geniuses at the University of Indiana skipped that there step and just dumped the filling into a pile to be served as an “no bake cookie” or whatever they called it but I’m here to tell you: it was a pile of scotcheroo guts and it was delicious and totally worth catching the diabetes) or a gingerbread man with red hot eyes (apparently these are famous or something because everyone was talking about them. I don’t know why the scotcheroo piles aren’t famous but the gingerbread men WERE pretty good) and read tons of short stories and write cogent and thoughtful critiques (at least I tried) and then eventually wandered across the campus, through oh my god unbelievable heat and humidity (look, I spent most of May in Las Vegas and I’m telling you, this was some egregious heat) into a scarcely cool classroom building to discuss character intent with a bunch of other word nerds. And it was bliss.

Bliss with scotcheroo pile cookie things.

This conference totally made up for the last two conferences I went to, the one where Amy Hempel couldn’t be arsed to show up and the other one where everyone seemed like they spent more time talking about writing than actually writing. I’ll admit: I’m in danger of falling into that camp and I recognize that those people are INSUFFERABLE to be around. You know who is awesome to be around? Lynda Barry. No lie. I have a crush. I’m not even joking that I’m placing her up on a pedestal next to Mr. Rogers.

I may have cried on her a little bit on the second to last day, but then she made up for it for being a dirty rotten cheat at drinking games that night. Oh yeah, I may have gone out drinking with Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry. Just a little bit.

I also made new writing friends. They are awesome and made me happy and also, gave me hope for writing conferences of the future (also, weirdly a lot of my new writing friends are blonde! And beautiful. Writers are pretty sometimes. It’s true!) Fantastic stories in my fiction workshop! Ones that didn’t start with alarm clocks going off. Brilliant discussions and also, writer dinners at weird ethnic places, filled with laughing and gossip and then readings EVERY blessed night. This is pretty much my idea of heaven, right there. Plus, free wine (although I rarely had any because it was so fucking hot that I drove the 11 blocks to the reading every night. Also, the readings happened right in the middle of the two block Bermuda Triangle where Lauren Spierer disappeared and everyone was kind of freaked out about walking alone at night.)

I have but one regret and it is that I was not able to get my phone out fast enough to record Dan Chaon saying “Wendy Wimmer is beautiful.”* And then when I DID have it out, he refused to say it again. He’s wily, that Dan Chaon. Brilliant and more than a little wily.

There were so many fantastic moments, like when Lynda* mooned me or when I recognized a fellow bloggers work being cited in the blogging session being referred to as a Mommy blogger (and is, in fact, a dude and would likely be very upset or conversely turned on by the confusion) or skipping the Mexican Mennonite movie to go watch XMen at the local cinema like a fucking bad ass (and finding out later that it was probably the smartest decision I made all week) or trying a voodoo spell to help the ancient hotel room’s thermostat dip below 73 degrees or when Dan* walked into workshop, sat down and said “Wendy… darlin… Mommy’s not feeling so good right now”.  There are too many choice moments to pick from and I couldn’t possibly do any of them justice to describe them, especially when the only words that float into my brain are “Again! Again! Again!”

But perhaps it is this one that was the truest to the reason I went.

One night before dinner, I was waiting for my writing posse to check out a Turkish restaurant for dinner and Dan Chaon was reading the newspaper, probably waiting for HIS posse, so he called me over to chat while we waited.

At one point, after telling him about how I defended his honor during my master’s thesis committee, I said “Ok, so I’m here to learn how to write a novel… so, how do you do that?” and I googled my eyes at him, because even though my last blog post promised that I wouldn’t get too tongue-tied around Mr. Chaon, I still acted like a class one dork half of the time (Note to famous writers: I’m actually quite reserved and normal, despite appearances(I’m probably lying right now)) and he shrugged and said “You just do it.”

And then I whined about outlines and snowflake methods and might have said “I don’t know how to DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO IIIIIITTTTTTTTTT” like I was eight and someone just asked me to do something I resented like picking up dog vomit or running a marathon or climbing the wall on an obstacle course — or all of those things combined.

He waved me off and said “Nah, forget all of that stuff. Just write it. Just dive in from chapter one page one. You can fix it later.”

It’s some powerful faith, for those of us who are so worried about mucking things up with our clumsiness that we are frozen. Those ideas inside our head are so perfect right now, just as they are, and we’re absolutely certain that we’re just going to fuck everything up. But apparently the trick is in just closing your eyes and diving in.

So here we go.

*SO much better than France!

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