Modern Submission Convenience
We just finished our first workshop in my fiction class and now my students and I are talking about revision and what students should consider, if and when they choose to submit writing to literary magazines. I want to make clear to my students that publication isn’t what they should be thinking about right now but I still want them to start to understand what it means to submit work, receive editorial feedback and face rejection or acceptance. Most of the students are, understandably, intimidated by the submission process and what it means to put their work out into the world. Hell, I’m still intimidated by the submission process. For newer writers, it is hard to grasp what editors really want. It’s hard to break yourself of the mindset that you need to worry about what editors want. I went over some of the basic etiquette of submitting–address the proper editors, spell their names correctly, don’t explain your story, don’t ramble, proofread your work, read it aloud, proofread it again, research the magazines where you’re sending your work, read the magazines where you’re sending your work, and more than anything, make sure you’re submitting writing that matters.
When I first started submitting work, there was a ritual to it. I’d print a story out on my dot matrix printer and tear off the perforated edges dotted with tiny holes. I’d consult my Writer’s Market, write a cover letter, address a return envelope affixed with enough postage for a response and send off a story I now know had no shot in hell of ever being published by the likes of those glittery magazines I foolishly hoped would love my work. I am not nostalgic for that time. It was pretty terrible. I did learn, though, that becoming a published writer required patience and effort and sometimes that effort was secretarial.
Reading Comics: Peter Tieryas Liu on 100 Bullets
Welcome to the fourth installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Peter Tieryas Liu…
100 Bullets are 100 issues packed with graphic brutality, tales of moral compunction, and the evolution of noir into a merging of both crime fiction and pseudo-history. Every gunshot exposes frailties in the cracks of a society pining for justice. The premise of the comic goes something like this. You’re the victim of an unforgivably heinous crime. Down on your luck, the mysterious Agent Graves informs you that the cause of all your suffering is Person X. He offers you an attaché case filled with a gun and 100 untraceable bullets that you can use in any way you want without legal repercussions. What would you do?
Reflections from a Shiny New Creative Writing Teacher
I’m writing this in between grading my (first ever!) students’ second poems. I’ve been teaching for about a month.
One of the first things I learned about teaching: grading takes an ungodly amount of time. There are several steps, which include:
1. Excitedly read through first batch of student poems on the bus home from class.
2. Read poems at home.
3. Read poems aloud to roommate (also a teacher) to make sure you’re not missing something.
4. Write comments on poems in pencil.
5. Worry comments are too prescriptive.
6. Erase comments and try again.
7. Agonize about putting numbers on poems.
8. Briefly consider flaunting university guidelines and not grading poems.
9. Put numbers on poems.
10. Reread poems and compare grades.
11. Hope students read comments instead of just staring at their grades.
Christopher Higgs—
Yesterday I finally got a chance to read Dennis Cooper’s superlative interview in the new Paris Review. If you haven’t read it yet, you should treat yourself.
One thing that struck me was at the beginning when Dennis explains that he got interested in literature because he read an interview with Bob Dylan where Dylan mentioned Rimbaud. I had a similar experience in that I came to literature through Jim Morrison. I wonder how many other people found their way to books through musicians?
Glow-Rally: Kim Chinquee
They all wanted Cokes and the grandma said a beer please, and the boy’s father went and ordered, delivering while the pins clinked and banged and rattled.
Another train ride, and here I am with your goddamn strawberry lotion.
She tried to hide her breath, said she had a good day.
The lights were on and so I knocked and then the lights were off.
She was healthy and her laughter proved it, her laugh was like a cluck, like the chickens she used to feed, watch hatch, then butcher.
“What do we do with him when he’s dead?”
“She loved God,” the chaplain said. He was getting wobbly on the drum.
Later, lunch at Denny’s, we talked about what to do with the lorazep, trihexphen, risperidone, fluoxetine, the haldol in the lock box.
Random Ass Live Reading of Some Recent Books I Liked #7
You missed the live reading but you can still check out the books I read from if you are on the internet. Here they are, I recommend them all highly:
Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt [New Directions]
selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle [Muumuu House]
Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me by Mark Leidner [Factory Hollow]
0.174 by Gordon Massman [New York Quarterly Press]
Simple Machines by Michael Bible [Awesome Machine]
The Trees The Trees by Heather Christle [Octopus Books]
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus [Knopf]
The Hermit by Laura Solomon [Ugly Duckling]
Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines [reissue, Fence]
How The Days of Love and Diptheria by Robert Kloss [Nephew]
An Interview with Andy Frazee
A literary university press offer exposure for the students; the gap between writer and publisher blurs, has been blurring, as more and more one partakes in the work of the other. Why should an MFA only prepare a person for a profession in teaching? People enroll in ever-growing programs in order to write anyway (right?), not necessarily to teach. Writers, however, thrive with publishers. As mentioned later (in the interview), Ted Berrigan could staple together as many copies of his Sonnets as he likes, but everyone I know owns the copy published by Penguin. Why should this job be left up to a person with a business degree? Expanding an MFA degree to encompass, or at least introduce students to the business of books would not be difficult. Those who write have stakes in that buisness whether or not they are involved, so why not be involved?
The opportunity to be so involved in a press was exciting. Being part of the working relationship from the inception of making a manuscript into a book was rewarding and something I’m happy to have done. Below is an interview with the 2010 winner for poetry (published in 2011), Andy Frazee, whose book is available on Amazon or SPD.
Other books in 2011 include Alta Ifland’s Death-in-a-Box and Sandra Doller’s Man Years.
More information on Subito can be found on the website.
Stephen Daniel Lewis: One thing that surprised me about The Body, The Rooms was form. Not only that the form steps away from more standard types used in poetry, but the layout morphs section to section; sometimes even within a section the reader will see an evolution of the employed form. It was exciting to see how the usage of space encompasses the content in a way that seems inextricable.
I’m wonder what process led to this? Did the content come first, did it happen the other way around, or was it simultaneous? Also did you have specific reasons in mind for including elements that rarely surface in poetry (such as the explication that undercurrents the poems in the “Cartography” section, and the Dramatis Personae in the section titled “That the World Should Never Again Be Destroyed by Flood”)?
Andy Frazee: In general, content comes before form for me—not in terms of precedence, but in terms of chronology. For the most part, the content first comes in the form of journal entries and notes, which I at some point return to and cull for interesting phrases and ideas. A lot of the language in both “Cartography” and “In this Element of Capture,” for example, came from a series of sketches I’d written trying to re-write Eliot’s “Prufrock.” Both of those sequences have gone through many different formal manifestations, and I think this has a lot to do with my own attempts at trying to restrain an impulse to make the poem too organized, too logical. I often introduce some rudimentary form of chance operations to thwart that impulse—so at a certain point in the evolution of “Cartography” I listed out each individual sentence and dispersed them randomly in four-line sections over several pages. In the end, I go with what my gut tells me works, and that ultimately seemed to.
One example of the future tense is “Future Tense Books will do amazing things for the next 20 years too”
20 years is a long time. Future Tense Books, run by Kevin Sampsell, has been putting books out for 20 years. These books are about things like talking to the moon and petting whale carcasses. They’re about finally figuring out what it means to belong to what you are, which is that it means you’re a freak. They’re about when your son loves Spiderman. They’re about pictures of ceiling fans in different emotional states. They’re also Gary Lutz, Zoe Trope, Elizabeth Ellen, Shane Allison, Chloe Caldwell, and 20 years worth of folks all the other peppermint cans were too freaked out to publish.
Along with putting out these books, Kevin Sampsell has also been, for 10 of those 20 years, single-handedly curating the most amazing small press cave at Powell’s in Portland, OR. Occupy Indie Lit is a leaderless casserole, except Kevin is probably the one who lent us the stove. He’s been around. He’s helped everybody. He’s sexy. He’s the shit. All of which is to say: do you want a cake maybe? Do you want someone to write a ukelele song for you maybe? Do you want incentive perks, I mean? Most importantly: do you want to support a press that’s been around 20 years and is now running its first ever official fundraiser to help push itself to the next level, literally shank anything depressing you can think of about “the state of publishing,” and take over the world? Well then go here. Help the Future of Future Tense.