Fiction Workshops Examined
I don’t know what the secret of success is for writers, but I doubt it has anything to do with writing workshops. To be blunt (and it is Mean Week), it seems like you’re just paying strangers to take mild interest in your work. This might even be the case with an MFA in writing—who knows; I work full-time at an office and publish mere ‘flash’ online, so that tells you how much I know.
I google imaged “fiction workshop” and have written about some photos I’ve found.
I. NOT ENOUGH CHAIRS
Maybe they’re gearing us up for a life of the ‘starving artist,’ or maybe it’s some Hindu thing. All I know is, any more pressure on that women’s coccyx and she’s gonna accidentally CTRL-A and hit backspace. There goes two weeks of writing lady. Life is unfair, you should hit the save button more often.
II. IN A HURRY TO LEAVE
The guy’s already zipped up this bag. Shawl women in the middle is looking at for the nearest fire escape. Ms. Happy on the right can’t believe it’s already :57. They are thinking “I’m down 300 dollars and my ego is still a wet fish flopping over the barren plateau of my non-existent career.” Either that, or we got some major bladder issues.
III. UNHAPPY BLACK PEOPLE
If art is indeed a microcosm of society, then, as usual, the black people are pissed—and for good reason. I imagine they just got through reading five stories about boyfriends and living in apartments and trouble with granny or a weekend in Cape Cod that turned out colder than one thought. Tiesha (let’s call her that) works two jobs at KFC and Carl’s Jr., and she’s not in the fucking mood to hear white bitches moan about a blowjob gone bad.
IV. JUDGMENTAL BODY LANGUAGE
If you are a writer, deep down inside you think this: “My stories are better than this asswhipe over here. What kind of self-involved baby writes in the first-person anyways?” Graciousness is a myth; we are all resentful at attention directed at someone else; like every time Blake gets into another journal (which is every other day), I say ‘fuck him, I hope he cuts his cornea with the table of contents.’
V. WOMAN LIKE TO BE OUTSIDE
I’m not one for creating gender stereotypes, but seriously, women think fiction is better outside for some reason. It must have been E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India that started this fascination with abandoning one’s domestic prison and going outside into the sand swept wind. Of course, take away their sunglasses, suntan lotion, sunhats, and folding chairs and they’d be fucked. They’d come back into the foyer looking like Bukowski’s nose, or worse, Joan Didion’s face. (Be nice now, it’s mean week.)
“boston review” or “shitty suck-sack”? you be the judge
in an attempt to be really mean, i decided to randomly attack a journal. so i went to google and typed in “the most literary journal” hoping someone would have referred to themselves like that. then i tried “mega awesome lit journal” and i got nothing. then i typed in a stupid sounding name “the boston review” and ta-da, it exists. here, for your spiteful edification, is me interjecting things into their about page:
“Boston Review is a nonpartisan magazine of ideas [yeah, shitty ideas]: animated by hope [and stupid-assedness] , committed to equality and reason [and being lame and butthole-y], convinced that the imagination eludes political categories [p.s.: we blow more than the show “m.a.s.h”]. We see each issue as a public space where people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions [really? or perhaps, loosen a stool into your mouth, just perhaps?] and bring this openness to bear on today’s most pressing issues [like what a good plot arc is]. Our mission requires that as editors we shun polemic and partisanship [and being not-dumb], uphold the highest standards of argument and evidence, value ambition and originality, seek widely diverse perspectives, and make complex ideas accessible [also to publish things as close compositionally to shit as possible without streaking the printer]. We have a national readership of men and women [and people who wear slippers in the reading room when they read our publication] who are engaged in the challenge of today’s world; who want deeper [anal] coverage of current affairs than the mainstream media offers; and who see the arts as an essential part of the human enterprise [yeah, the human enterprise of being a fuckhead with a shriveled penis that wears brooks brothers khakis].
all internet writers are fucking pussies and i could kick all of their asses
look around you. is there a cat? are you experiencing existential problems? are you currently refreshing your network browser to see if that other disembodied internet person has furthered the argument about what surrealism is? do you read the believer? did you just laugh at a story on mc sweeneys about what it would be like if franz kafka had a little league team? do your poems suck really hard? and are you a pretentious asswipe? well then my friend, you are an internet writer. wait now, hold on, put those really skinny arms down, i’m not looking to fight it out with someone who experiences depression on so grand a scale as yourself. no doubt you’ve had it bad. but seriously, fuck you. you are passive, halfway philosophical, you write the same fucking autobiographical stories using the same contrived depression and angst and i could beat your fucking ass in a heartbeat. that’s right, i’m not even going to continue intellectually. i could kick all of your asses. so close your macbook pro (and stop ripping on whoever, most likely dave eggers or john updike because i am sure they are weeping onto their keyboards and listening to bright eyes, cursing that “writerdude78” just called them a “sellout”) and email me your address so i can come to your house and beat your skull in with my hand. i know this will alienate me further since like, or something, like physical violence is existentially fucked and like, you just want to write poems about being a pussy, and you can’t get hard anymore and you’re too busy defending someone else on their blog from a random commenter, like it even matters, but seriously, there is not one writer on the internet, with the exception of barry graham, who looks like he might be able to kick my ass, who i can’t fuck up. i hate everyone. the very idea of mean week is because you’re all pussies. fuck you. suck my cock. stop being a neurotic pussy and write something that makes you want to throw up when you read it.
Everyone That Writes for This Site is Shit
Hi. It’s Mean Week. We are going to be mean to people. We are going to say things. We’re just being honest, and really we’re all a bunch of pieces of shit. We couldn’t write our way out of a paper bag (see, I can’t even make it a few sentences without cliche).. Here’s more reasons why we suck behind the jump:
MEAN WEEK: ‘The Editor/Multi-Book/Duh Named Effect’
I like new journals. I like journals with their own aesthetic and who invent themselves primarily because they want to put words in the world: words that likely would not have found a way to get read if that journal hadn’t existed. There can never be too many high quality journals. A node is a node.
Though not all new journals, or even existing things, seem bent for these reasons. It seems semi-frequent, and perhaps most pointed to the world of poetry publishing, where you see a tendency to publish well-known names and no one else. Scanning the contributor notes of certain journals you can often see what I now will call the EDITOR / MULTI-BOOK / DUH NAMED EFFECT.
When this effect is applied, it means the journal has been infected wherein all the words published in their particular nook are 90-100% consisting of writers who are themselves the editor of a journal, who already have one or several full length books out at indie presses, or are a combo of both, being a name that literally most everybody in the publishing world is already very familiar with. They don’t both with searching for new voices, with including some people as yet unexposed who can then be read as others can to the journal seeking the ‘bigger names,’ no, everyone in the journal is someone who likely would have little to no trouble getting their work in almost any existing poetry journal already out there.
So then the question is: Why do you exist?