Notes:

1. The results are in reverse chronological order, then alphabetical order by author’s first name.
2. I’ve also included links when I could. Otherwise, you’re going to have to Google/buy a book.

OK, here are the stories!

2012

• Said Sayrafiezadeh: “A Brief Encounter With the Enemy” (in The New Yorker)

2011

• Adam Peterson’s “It Goes Without Saying” (in Camera Obscura #3)
• Alissa Nutting: “She-Male” (from Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls)
• Ashley Farmer: “Digging Deep” (in kill author #15)
• Anthony Luebbert: “Bobby Kennedy and His Sea Lion Sandy” (in Quick Fiction)
• Ben Lerner: “Leaving the Atocha Station” (from Leaving the Atocha Station)
• Casey Hannan: “Piano Hands” (in PANK)
• Charles Dodd White: “Winter by Heart” (in PANK)
• Colm Toibin: “The Street” (in McSweeney’s #36)
• George Saunders: “Home” (in The New Yorker)
• Hannah Voskuil: “Currents” (from Sudden Fiction Youth)
• Jeremy Robert Johnson: “Persistence Hunting” (from We Live Inside You)
• Jon Trobaugh: “L’Anguille” (in TRNSFR #4)
• Kirsty Logan: “Underskirts” (in PANK)
• Leslie Bazzett: “Screen Test” (in New England Review, V. 32, #2)
• Mary Stone: “We Will Plan Big Things” (in kill author #15)
• Mike Meginnis: “The Navigators” (in Hobart #12)
• Nathaniel Rich: “The Northeast Kingdom” (in McSweeney‘s #38)
• Pinckney Benedict: “The Beginning’s of Sorrow” (from Miracle Boy and Other Stories)
• Scott McClanahan: “any story in Stories V!”
• Ysabel Sex: “Fuck Coolhunter” (I looked for this but couldn’t find it, sorry.)

2010

• Aimee Bender: “The Color Master” (in Cincinnati Review and from My Mother She Killed Me My, Father He Ate Me)
• Allyson Armistead: “Oasis” (in eight cuts)
• Amanda Goldblatt: “If Your Light Must Leave You” (in The Collagist)
• Angi Becker Stevens: “The Opposite of Free” (in Wigleaf)
• April Ayers Lawson: “Virgin” (in The Paris Review)
• Deborah Willis: “Remember, Relive” (from Vanishing and Other Stories)
• Elaine Castillo: “Graphy, or The Girlhood of Achilles” (in PANK)
• Heidi Julavits: “Multiples of Cohen” (in Harper’s)
• Ingvar Ambjornsen: “Another Star” (in McSweeney’s 35)
• Jennifer Egan: “A Visit from the Goon Squad” (from A Visit from the Goon Squad)
• Matt Bell: “Dredge” (in Hayden’s Ferry Review #45)
• Rachel B. Glaser: “The Monkey Handler” (from Pee on Water)
• Roxane Gay: “Do You Have a Place For Me” (in spork)
• Roxane Gay: “La Negra Blanca” (in The Collagist)
• Seth Fried: “Those of Us in Plaid” (in McSweeney’s #33)
• Stepen A. Dixon: “Wife in Reverse” (in matchbook)

2009

• Amina Cain: “Black Wings” (from I Go to Some Hollow)
• Sam Pink: “Saved by the Bell” (in Titular)
• Steve Almond: “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Get Punched” (in Tin House)
• Ted Chiang: “Exhalation” (in Eclipse Two)

2008

• Brian Van Reet: “The Rooster” (in Shenandoah vol. 58 #1)
• Glen Pouciau: “Claim ” (in The Paris Review)
• Jill McCorkle: “Magic Words” (in Narrative Magazine)
• Kyle Minor: “They Take You” (in Pilots With Guns #3)
• Mary Ruefle: “A Half-Sketched Head” (from The Most of It)

2007

• George Saunders: “Puppy” (in The New Yorker)

2006

• Chris Adrian: “A Better Angel” (in The New Yorker)

2005

• Brian Evenson: “Mudder Tongue” (in McSweeney’s #16)
• James Salter: “Last Night” (from Last Night)
• Jeremy Robert Johnson: “Swimming in the House of the Sea” (from Angel Dust Apocalypse)

2004

• Chuck Palahniuk: “Guts” (in Playboy)
• Brian Evenson: “Moran’s Mexico” (from The Wavering Knife)
• David Foster Wallace: “Incarnations of Burned Children” (from Oblivion)

2003

• Sherman Alexie: “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” (in The New Yorker)

older stuff

• Spencer Holst: “Brilliant Science” (from Brilliant Science, 2000)
• William Gay: “The Paperhanger” (in Harper’s, 2000)
• Joshua Ferris: “Mrs. Blue” (in The Iowa Review V. 29, #2, pp. 34–46, Fall 1999)
• Ken Kalfus: “Pu-239″ (from Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, 1999)
• Gene Wolfe: “Tracking Song” (in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, 1997)
• Greg Egan: “Crystal Nights” (from Crystal Nights and Other Stories, 1997) (PDF)
• A.M. Homes: “A Real Doll” (in Barcelona Review, 1990)
• Gene Wolfe: “Seven American Nights” (from Sailing to Byzantium/Seven American Nights, 1989)
• Barry Hannah: “Testimony of Pilot” (from Airships, 1974)
• Stephen King: “Cain Rose Up” (in Ubis, 1968, and from Skeleton Crew, 1985)

+ there was a vote for “Blake Butler’s coming of age story in an airport shuttle filled w/ doe-eyed clergymen”

Now go enjoy!

Well, it’s finally started happening. Penn State’s MFA program decided to commit harakiri rather than go on forcing its students to go into debt over a degree to no where. I don’t think it will be the last we’ll see to go. I don’t even know if it’s the first (and it seems likely that it isn’t.)

***There’s a good chance I wouldn’t have gotten an MFA if this was true, though, because the competition would have been so steep I would have been rejected or too intimidated to apply, and that’s fine by me. The MFA is a luxury, not a necessity.

Instructions:
* Never leave the house.

The downsides:
* Psychic fracture (this could happen at Cornell too)
* Your boo marries your brother (this could happen at Cornell too)

The upsides:
* Hot letters
* Yellow ribbon

2. THE WHITMAN

Instructions:
* Read those classics
* Work as journalist (or litblogger)
* Have cool and talented friends
* Self-publish

The downsides:
* Vested interest in defending self-publishing on litblogs
* People all up in your business (this could happen at Iowa too)
* Dealing with Thoreau’s bullshit

The upsides:
* There’s no cure like travel
* Sex (this could happen at Iowa too)

3. MY METHOD

Instructions:
* Work at a company, factory, or farm that provides tuition reimbursement
* Attend a city university or public college that only charges ~1,000 per class (at my city university I’ve studied with Marilyn Hacker twice, Elaine Equi thrice, Suzanne Gardinier, David Groff, among others)
* Only take the number of classes per semester that your tuition reimbursement covers (in my case, one)
* Graduate in ~10 years.

The downsides:
* You never form a poetry clique
* You still have to live in “the real world”
* You’ll probably never be a professor

The upsides:
* You never form a poetry clique
* You still have to live in “the real world”
* You’ll probably never be a professor

I
Among twenty posts,
The only moving thing
Was the Hitler meme.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
With three Disqus personae.

III
The litblog whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a big part of the procrastination.

IV
A man and a litblog
Are one.
A man and a woman and a litblog
Are a VIDA pie chart.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of turning on the computer
Or the beauty of turning it off,
The moment you hit send
Or just after.

VI
Commenters filled the long box
With lame-ass words.
The shadow of them
replying to each other.
The mood
A shitstorm
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin yellow snippet
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the commenters
Flock to the feet
Of your openended question?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That ‘experimental literature’ is involved
In what I know.

IX
When Boobs Friday flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of yet another new blogger
Flying in a pink light,
Even the teddy bear-avatar-thing-is-that-a-raccoon-what-is-it?
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over the internet
In a litblog.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his online persona
For relevance.

XII
The river is moving.
God must be off the computer.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The man sat
And hit refresh.

First, I either remove the left eyeball of my owl with a breast milk pump or I remove the owl’s entire head by giving it so much love its head pops off. Once the head or eyeball is removed, I pour the insides of the owl into a large bowl. Next, it is important to separate the yolk of the owl from the rest of the innards. It’s important to not break the yolk. Also, if you want, take the non-yolk innards and spray paint them white. Then when the paint dries, grind these innards into a fine dust. Take this product to a local school and sell it as industrial strength lime for lawn treatment purposes. No one will be able to notice the difference. After the yolk has been removed from the owl innards hire a small obedient dog. Place the yolk in the dog’s mouth and tell it not to swallow for at least twenty-four hours. While the yolk is in the small obedient dog’s mouth you can take the empty owl shell and fill it with bird seed. Hang it outside from a tree and watch the squirrels and raccoons eat from it. When the yolk has spent twelve to eighteen hours in a small obedient dog’s mouth then it should be hardened into what can be described at a yolk brick. You’ll next want to find a graduate student who is good at fractal geometry and ask them to give you a equation that will turn the yolk brick into forty thousand equally-sized pebbles of owl yolk. When the yolk brick has been reduced to a fine powder you can now ingest it with your nose. After you have ingested it with your nose then you should call your friends and tell them you have owl in your brain and you want to have stimulating conversations. Your friends will want to have stimulating conversations with you while you are on owl because you are better on owl then when you are not on owl.

If Paris Review Daily is running some of your shit…

Don’t say: I am going to be published in The Paris Review!
Say: Paris Review Daily is running some of my shit.

If your boyfriend is printing out copies of your poems and distributing them around Portland on his fixed gear bike…

Don’t say: I have a book coming out!
Say: My boyfriend is printing out copies of my poems and distributing them around Portland on his fixed gear bike.

If your agent is showing your novel to Melville House…

Don’t say: It’s all happening for me!
Say: Nothing. Or maybe post a picture to fbook of your baby looking at its first tree, because somehow that is less annoying.

If you’re still talking about Breece D’J Pancake…

Don’t say: Breece D’J Pancake.
Say: Ryan D’J Breakfast Taco.

If you just wrote 10 million words of your novella…

Don’t say: Just hammered out 10 million words of my novella!
Say: Let’s go see A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.**

If you (or your protagonist) are engaged to be married…

Don’t say: My fiancée.
Say: Anything else.

If you (or your protagonist) are a sophomore in college…

Don’t say: During the Spring of my Sophomore year,
Say: Anything else.

If you really dig a book…

Don’t say: This book is a gut-punch-face-ripper-offer-slayer-thrasher.
Say: Anything else.

**Please! No spoilers, folks. Really excited for this.

Poet Eve Grubin told me, many years ago, that a strong poem possesses a weave, an interplay between light and darkness, self and other, internal and external, the lucid and the paradox. She said that it is this weave, not necessarily a linear narrative and firm conclusion, which binds a strong poem together. This might have been my first brain-opening to experimental literature—whatever experimental literature is.

I thought about the weave again when I recently read Rae Armantrout’s essay “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity.” Have you read it? It’s good, and it was published in 1992, the year between Nevermind and In Utero. The essay describes the poetry of that time as “univocal…often culminating in a sort of linear epiphany.”

Armantrout depicts a homogenized experience of poetry, one which leaves little room for ambivalence and the interplay of the weave. She then pits this singleness of focus (which I view as an arrow, a Castro peen if you will) against “the core of woman’s condition.” What is the core of woman’s condition? Well, Armantrout says that woman is “internally divided against herself” and I’ll be the first one to back that up.

So, let’s think. A poem possessing a strong weave contains opposing forces. The experience of being a woman on this planet also contains opposing forces (though I’d be willing to bet it does for some dudes too). Is poetry today less linear, more weave-permissive than it was in 1992? Were any of you alive in 1992?

A final thought. In the essay, Armantrout examines Jacques Lacan’s notion that women are excluded from the symbolic order. She perceives this exclusion as a “moment of freedom” and an opportunity to “challenge the contemporary poetic convention of the unified voice.” I can get down with this, in the sense that if I pick up Anne Sexton’s The Death Notebooks (luv u Anne!) a little alarm might go off in my head like “too juicy” or “not trendy” or “do not admit to this on Goodreads.” And I’ve definitely felt at times that my own work is too juicy or messy or does not contain enough self-sustaining deer to comply with today’s contemporary poetic convention(s). Ultimately, though, I don’t know if this discomfort is about being a woman, or an outsider, or a poet, or a human.

I went to the bar with Mark Bibbins after class.  He bought my first drink and then he bought my second drink and possibly my third.  I don’t remember.  I asked him about Gertrude Stein and he told me about Gertrude Stein but no great conclusions were arrived at.  No, wait.  One great conclusion was arrived at.  I came to the realization that when Gertrude Stein said “when painting becomes abstract it becomes pornographic” she was talking about pornography in the 1930s and not the pornography I usually look at.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  When we sat down, an actress walked in and Mark recognized her.  She walked over to Dean, the bartender, hugged and kissed him.  Mark said they were making out.  Then the realization happened.  Then we talked about money, power, and domesticated animals.  Mark has a cat named “The Pagoda.”  I remember being amazed at how good the name “The Pagoda” is, yet not acknowledging this in any way to Mark other than a brief nod of my head.   I talked a lot of shit about nearly every person in my MFA program in harsh and intolerant ways.  I tried to draw a picture of a cat on a napkin and failed and continued to do this over and over.  I made Mark do this with me.  Justin Taylor appeared.  I don’t think he recognized me with my beard on.  I made Mark introduce us for fun.  We talked about a few things.  I talked to another person.  It became late.  I don’t remember leaving the bar.  I took the wrong train and ended up in the wrong part of Brooklyn.  I could have easily taken another train and gotten home quickly, but instead I took the train back to where I had originally gotten on and just started over.  It took a very long time.  I’m going to be blogging here now.  Sup with you?