Trying To Figure Out What Is Wrong With My Writing

 KH and I have been discussing my rejections. If anyone is interested in the rejection letter themselves, I have posted them under the subject/label of Literary Magazine. Some indicate I made it up to the last cut; others leave me thinking they wanted rid of me like the plague.

KH does poke at me for the rhythm of my sentences, that I am a bit too clipped. This I admit. As much as I admire Proust, I think I am as flat-footed as Theodore Dreiser. Maybe it is a left over from my days of legal writing. Plain-spoken, simple, clear are what I meant to shoot for. You can see my stories that are online, there are three of them, through the menu on the right hand of the screen.

I think i am too grim in style and content.

On what we are seeing in some of the literary magazines, KH has a theory of what else is wrong with my fiction. He thinks I am too mature. For a very long time I have worried about being too old, being too unfashionable for publication. This leaves me very susceptible to KH's theory. My interests are more aligned with Faulkner and Steinbeck and Algren than with the crop of MFAs. I enjoyed what I read of Ben Lerner, but his is a different world than mine.

Today, I gave a look at two stories. Both from publications to which I have not submitted.

Ropa Usada by Fernando A. Flores from The Common is not quite what I would write about, although it is not so far removed from how I have written some material. KH has been worn down by my story that has Edgar Allan Poe and Captain Ahab alive and well in an Indiana town. I do not find his diction so different from my own. Which leaves me thinking the great difference is the content.

Here are the three opening paragraphs of the story:

Cassie knew she could make extra money selling vintage clothing on the internet, so in her first semester out of grad school, she drove to Chulas Fronteras Ropa Usada, down by the border in the maquiladora district. The bouncer at the door weighed Cassie on a scale as a shoplifting precaution, and handed her a ticket, along with a map of the enormous warehouse. She was originally from the border, and so she said “No, thanks” to the map, since she knew her way around well, and walked inside. There were hills of denim, with polyester, wool, and old jeans compacted, forming different roads. Fans as tall as Cassie were blowing everywhere like electric windmills, creating metallic cyclones that howled over the exclamations of people—mostly brown women like her, but many with young children—picking through the used clothing.

Cassie began sweating, and from the clothes on the ground she felt steam rising, as if the ghosts trapped in the clothes were sweating, too. She took a purple envelope out of her dress pocket, just to make sure she hadn’t forgotten it, to make sure it was really there.

Cassie followed the denim road, expecting a silk scarecrow or barkcloth lion to jump out at any moment—then she remembered that the outside rules didn’t apply at the ropa usada. She saw about ten women on the crest of a hill of used clothes, pulling sleeves and khaki legs from under their feet like ripe carrots. Three kids were huddled down on the ground by a fan, with their six eyes immersed in a book, the child in the middle holding it open. Cassie saw the book consisted of complicated epic verse, and she kept walking and spotted the train to take her to the other end, but discovered it wasn’t running.

I think these show a great imagination at work. One need even get the allusions to The Wizard of Oz to know we are not in Kansas anymore. And the details of the third put me into the place. No, I could not do the story as written. Too old to think of selling clothes on the Internet. Frank Baum would not be my model for a frame.

Teh other story came from Granta, Avigayl Sharp's Animals After Dark. This one has a prose style not so different from mine, but is even more a story which my imagination could not generate. This is a world I do not recognize.

I was working that year as an administrative assistant at an all-girls private high school. It remained unclear to me why I had been selected for the job. My resumé was weak and obviously padded; I had no prior experience; during my interview I caught myself sucking absentmindedly on stray tendrils of my own hair, twice. When asked why I thought I’d be a good fit, I spoke at length about how much I ‘really related’ to adolescent girls. This was an insane thing to say. Yet my supervisor assured me that the hiring process had been very competitive. They were thrilled to have me. They had been impressed by my extensive credentials, my positive attitude, my genuine passion for women’s education. I, too, was thrilled. I needed cash, a lot of it, to pay my rent and the quack psychiatrist I had found to dish out a steady supply of Xanax, Adderall and Ambien.

At work, my duties included drafting emails, proofreading emails, sending emails, scheduling emails to be sent at a later date, replying to emails, sorting emails into categories based upon importance and reminding my superiors about emails to which they had yet to respond. In my own emails, I said ‘thank you’ too often and used many exclamation points, which caused other members of the faculty and staff to think that I had a low IQ. I did not know my real IQ, but I did have a vague idea that if I took an IQ test the results would reveal that I was a genius. Still, I was aware that my manner at work was idiotic and overly friendly, like that of a drooling, poorly-trained dog and though I hoped my enthusiasm would eventually win me a fond, if condescending, benevolence from my colleagues, it seemed to only fill them with hatred.

Occasionally when a teacher was absent I was asked to fill in as a substitute for their class. The children hated me even more than the faculty did. I was horribly afraid of them. When I looked at their moist, vicious faces I was reminded of something one might find in a nature documentary: a colony of secret, oceanic worms, buried in the deepest sand, slippery, pink and blind. My fundamental lack of authority was dazzling. The children sensed it intuitively. When I tried to take attendance, it released in them an animal frenzy.

For me, what feels surreal may be realism for some. 

I like both stories. They do address issues beyond my interests, and I will take that as a sign of my unfashionability. I do not see that I could shift to the substance of these stories; I am too old for that. What I must not do is stop trying to make my stories conducive to readers. I should be working on that right now, so I leave you to work. If you have any thoughts on my stories, I would be glad to hear them.

sch 4/5