Readings 10/28 & 10/29

Another two days of not wanting to go out, to do anything. The best I did today was watch Bottle Shock. Go figure. Tomorrow must be different. Even this is just being done to get something done.

 Keeping Up Appearances | Los Angeles Review of Books

Terror Incognita: The Paradoxical History of Cosmic Horror, from Lovecraft to Ligotti | Los Angeles Review of Books

  Susan Saint James, Emmy-winning actor of ‘Kate & Allie’ fame, dies | CNN

“When we did Paint It Black, and it was kind of finished, and we were listening in the studio, I said, ‘There's not enough balls'”: Bill Wyman recalls his unorthodox but vital contribution to a 1966 Rolling Stones classic | MusicRadar

US’s RFK Jr claims Arabs ‘don’t produce science’: Why he’s very, very wrong | US Midterm Elections 2026 News | Al Jazeera

Trump says Iran war will end 'when I want it to' as costs balloon

Don Jr.’s Hunting Trip Reveals He’s Closer to Putin Ally Than We Knew | The New Republic

Shaken and Stirred by the Search for the Next James Bond | The New Yorker

7 Old-School Westerns That Are Now Unwatchable

Three Reasons Why Donald Trump Probably Wants the Republicans to Lose | The New Republic

Literary Hub » How Joe Biden and the National Democratic Party Paved the Way For American Fascism

Literary Hub » Worth the Risk: On Daring to Choose the Writing Life

“It’s all performative.” Why Hoosiers say government is corrupt - Mirror Indy

ZEPPELIN NIGHTS – HILOBROW

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Snow - Hemingway's Juice - Timelines

Catching up after a period of unwellness has left me without time for more analysis or comments on the following. 

 I have written much about Orhan Pamuk as I think he has something to say to America in our day and age, as an empire tottering on collapse and facing the costs of our history. Jeffrey Meyers's Symbolism in Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Snow’ (TheArticle) does not touch much on this aspect of Pamuk's fiction but does offer insights into Pamuk's skill as a novelist.

Ipek first agrees to escape with Ka, then changes her mind and decides to remain.  When the snowstorm stops, Ka leaves Kars on the first train out of town.  Liberated from the horrors but weeping about the loss of Ipek, he ends in a dark mood: “All the people on the platform disappeared into the thick-falling snow.  As I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimneys at last seemed a smudge through my tears.”  Like the snow in Mann and Joyce, Pamuk’s snow is symbolic, thematic and tragic.  

 I have put “Love Stinks” off to one side, but this makes me think the delay was worth taking: Pulling Off Dual Timelines: An Exercise in Cohesive Storytelling.

Hemingway on revision and inspiration: 

INTERVIEWER

Can you dismiss from your mind whatever project you’re on when you’re away from the typewriter?

HEMINGWAY

Of course. But it takes discipline to do it and this discipline is acquired. It has to be.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do any rewriting as you read up to the place you left off the day before? Or does that come later, when the whole is finished?

HEMINGWAY

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.

INTERVIEWER

How much rewriting do you do?

HEMINGWAY

It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

INTERVIEWER

Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

HEMINGWAY

Getting the words right.

INTERVIEWER

Is it the rereading that gets the “juice” up?

HEMINGWAY

Re-reading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.

INTERVIEWER

But are there times when the inspiration isn’t there at all?

HEMINGWAY

Naturally. But if you stopped when you knew what would happen next, you can go on. As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.

And I wanted to include this just for the hell of it:

INTERVIEWER

Who would you say are your literary forebears—those you have learned the most from?

HEMINGWAY

Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinier, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Gongora—it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.

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Writers and Writing!

leaning out the tabs and email after having a bad few days of being a little ill and working on a new novel. I hope these might be of help.

Anna North on the Genre You Didn’t Know You Needed: Bogcore (Literary Hub)

Do You Need to Be Surprised? (Reactor) raises an interesting issue.

I don’t think of myself as a person who has strong feelings about surprise in general. I don’t hate or love surprise parties; I try to be adaptable when a day goes not as planned and surprises me, for better or worse. The only kind of surprise I actively avoid is the jumpscare, but that’s because I hate being scared. I’ve never been a reader who focuses on seeking out the new, the “original,” the thing I’ve never seen before, though I’m always pleased when I stumble across it. I tried to think of the most surprising book I’ve ever read, but it was harder than expected. I just don’t think about books that way. Does that mean the twistiest? The most shocking? The book with the most gasp-inducing moments? (I can do that: That scene in Code Name Verity, or the moment in The Saint of Bright Doors where something is understood about the narrator. I gasped, and turned back, and read both those scenes at least twice.) 

I tend to think instead about whether a story showed me something cool, or looked at a familiar situation in a different way, or was structured intriguingly, or had characters that I wanted to understand. Did the writing sing? Did I want to crawl into the world and never come out? 

Is newness surprise? If a book shows you something new, is that inherently surprising? Am I splitting hairs? Possible. Merriam-Webster’s third definition of surprise is “the feeling caused by something unexpected or unusual.” Perhaps my sense that “new thing” and “surprising thing” are not necessarily the same thing is not borne out by the dictionary. 

But even more important since I think it can apply far beyond the practice of writing:

This is the thing about Davies’ remarks: I don’t think he’s really talking about fans. It’s too generous a word for people who have learned a detail from a leak and decided that they know how it’s all going to go and they can’t be wrong about it. I don’t prioritize surprise in the narratives I find interesting, but I do prioritize a capacity for surprise in myself. A capacity for surprise is a willingness to be wrong. A willingness to be wrong is, one one level, a willingness to find joy and delight and meaning where you didn’t expect it. On another level, it’s the only way I see to move through this world: to learn, and change, and keep doing both.

Yeah, think about that.

 And back to technical issues, have a look at How to format a book manuscript (Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing).

Literary agents and the various professionals you will work with throughout the process will absolutely view your manuscript as a proxy for your overall digital fluency. Being bad with computers is not necessarily a total dealbreaker, but there are more demands on authors than ever, and it could hurt your chances.

There isn’t an ironclad industry standard format for manuscripts that’s as exacting as, say, a Chicago Manual of Style. Instead, there are a mix of “must haves” and “some people do these things.”

What I’ll cover in this post:

• Why you shouldn’t mimic the formatting of a finished book
• Manuscript formatting must-haves
• Optional manuscript formatting
• A sample manuscript with proper formatting

Talent Isn’t Everything (Writing Forward)

Plenty of things can hold talented writers back from success:

• Some people only write when they feel like it.
• Some can’t accept criticism or stick it out through revisions and tedious or unpleasant phases of a project.
• Some refuse to learn new skills and practice the craft.
• Some give up too easily or drop projects to chase after newer ideas that seem more exciting.
• Some lack discipline, which encompasses just about everything else on this list.

Notice a theme? Discipline, not talent, is a more reliable path to success.

 On Seeking Validation...and Something More

During our session, Katie did something unexpected: she shared her screen with me and opened a spreadsheet she started 25 years ago to track her submissions. She scrolled through quickly to show me every line that says “Rejected.” She laughs that her relationship with literary rejections is one of her longest-standing relationships.

For every prestigious acceptance she’s earned over the years, there are countless rejections that came before those. She shared a story about how she and her fiction-writer husband used to keep a “Rejections Jar” in grad school where they put a one-dollar bill in for every rejection they received. When the jar filled up, they took themselves out to dinner.

The 5 Ingredients You Need to Write Subtext in Fiction (Helping Writers Become Authors )

Since the whole idea of story subtext is that you’re not supposed to look at it in the direct light of day, writers often get the feeling they’re supposed to tiptoe around their own stories’ subtext, never looking at it.

This is exactly what you shouldn’t do.

It’s true you’re not going to give your readers a direct look at your subtext, but you absolutely must be thoroughly familiar with it. The subtext must exist—the iceberg must be under the water—if the story on top is going to have any chance of floating.

Create your story’s subtext deliberately. This requires an absolute understanding of your characters’ backstories, motivations, and goals, as well as a firm grip on the world around your characters. This doesn’t mean you have t0 know all of this right away; it may be something you discover as you uncover the shape of the story for yourself.

 

Terms Publishing Assumes You Know (by Kristen Weber)

Practice makes some new content--Dey (FreedomFiction.com on Patreon)

Processing: How Adam Wilson Wrote Fail Sons (Counter Craft), an interview on writing process and ideas.

Yes - 

Point being, I’m a firm believer that people’s experiences of art—films, books, music, etc.—are as formative as any other experiences, and it’s precious and dishonest to pretend otherwise. In Fail Sons, specifically, Scott is a former magazine editor, and his midlife crisis is connected to his newfound feelings of obsolescence. It’s not just that he’s out of a career, but that he’s spent his adult life building a cultural knowledge base that seems to have been rendered worthless by things like recommendation algorithms. In the book, his constant cultural references tend to fall on indifferent ears, and I think that among many other things, Fail Sons contains a comic but earnest lament for a social language that’s quickly going extinct.  

A rejection that came in on 10/14:

Thank you for sharing your work with us. We often have to turn down well-crafted writing, and while "The Unintended Consequences of Art" isn't quite right for our current needs, we appreciate the time and effort which goes into every submission we consider. Thank you for sending your work.

Sincerely,

Sequestrum

 

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What Happens When Your Story's 16 Year-Old Manuscript is Terrible?

I made it through the remaining notebooks for “Stew.” Pure crap. Furthermore, I only have 9 chapters here. Maybe I wrote more. I hope not.

 

I am left wondering what I was thinking and also knowing what I was thinking. Muncie, old girlfriends, music, Faust. It does not resemble my memory of the original idea and it does not resemble my memory of what I wrote in 2010. The only interesting idea is a multi-dimensional bar. 

 

Having spent Sunday, parts of Saturday and Friday, and a bit of Thursday working through Chapter 8 with mostly new ideas, I have left myself on my own. I remain on hiatus for the next few days.

The good news is that I might be able to use some of the material (exclduing visits to a crossroads) for “Chasing Ashes” when I get to Muncie. Perhaps shrink it down to a chapter to follow “Passerby”. 

 

I have been a mess since Friday. No church yesterday because when I was about to leave the digestive tract decided to rebel. Saturday, it was my back and stomach. I meant to go to No Kings only when I arrived I felt too tired to be in a crowd or even to stand in the crowd. I called CC, and we went to dinner at the new Yummy Mongolian Barbeque. The place is rather posh in its ambience, was packed, and the food was good until my stomach turned on the spices I chose.

 

Insomnia has been a problem. Even tonight I had to crash after taking care of some business. It was the back again.

 

I managed a few blog posts this morning, and I got my dishes done and vacuumed! I spent an hour talking to J. I left her laughing, something she needs.

 

It is going on 11 PM. Too much caffeine too late and sleep will probably be unsuccessful. I will put off submissions until tomorrow. Unless insomnia strikes again.

 

 

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Cormac McCarthy Materials & "East of Eden" Reviews

 Best Cormac McCarthy Books: Every Essential Novel Ranked

I read them in the order not prescribed in the article. And all it did was wet my appettite for more. 

 

'East of Eden' Was an Instant Bestseller in 1952—But Critics Were Divided for These Reasons 

I agree the Cain & Abel plot is heavy-handed; it may be why I do not want to re-read the novel.

AK Blakemore: ‘The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt was extremely silly and bad’ ( The Guardian) makes a couple of interesting points.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I studied F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for my English GCSE and it entirely reshaped my brain. I still think it’s about as near to perfect as it’s possible for a novel to be. All the stupid loveliness and yearning in the world, distilled down into image after image, with a core of white-hot rage, at the way extreme wealth enables – necessitates, really – extreme cruelty. There’s functional alcoholism, and then there’s whatever Fitzgerald was doing in 1923. Everyone should read it.

Part of me is perhaps too contrarian. Maybe I have seen too many film adaptions that feel as if they missed the mark that I now attribute to the novel. Must it be read? Certainly.

 The book I could never read again
The Sun Also Rises. I was worryingly into Ernest Hemingway, for a teenage girl, whereas now I think he’s a bit of a pillock.

The book I discovered later in life
I’m 35 so I flatter myself nothing I could say really counts, but: I thought I’d use my maternity leave to finally give some Donna Tartt a go. I staggered through The Goldfinch and thought it was extremely silly and bad.

Pillock: UK offensive. 

The Sun Also Rises is a pillock; so is the Hemingway myth. The man seems now a cautionary tale.

I remained enamored of The Goldfinch for combining Dickens and Camus.  But my ardor has cooled.

 

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Writers Stuff

 I am old so Lessons on Writing and Life from an Elder (Electric Literature) drew my attention and gave me some hope.

And so, I too am preparing to go. Word by word. I look out my window, from my office where I’ve been writing for these 30 years, and the air is unseasonable warm for March in Minnesota, even if the trees are still bare and won’t sprout leaves for several weeks. It’s a day of mild sun, a little overcast. I’ll go running out there along the river road in an hour or so, trying to stave off time and the body’s decay. I’ll think of this piece and this book I’m finishing. I’ll be thinking of the next book, and the next. It’s what writers do. I’ll feel this pain in the soles of my feet that’s more frequent now, I’ll be aching a bit in the knees and afterwards, with tingling in my calves and feet. I’ll worry about the neuropathy that’s only gotten worse in the past few years or my recent A-fib diagnosis. My body is signaling me—your warranty’s over, nothing more guaranteed. You’ve racked up the miles, only a few left. But I love the fact that I can still run and still write and I feel lucky I’m still here. And as she has for decades, she will be waiting for me when I return from my run, as will the next page on my computer. 

And today, with my knees aching but not screaming, with submissions to make even when the odds are certainly against me, when I have dredged a manuscript out of 2010 thinking it was a matter of only typing when it has turned into a complete rewrite for what worked in 2010 is completely useless, reading articles like Mr. Mura's has me hitting the keyboards.

Out of much to think about in A Few, Good Writing Tips to Keep You on Your Toes (Writing Forward ), I have latched onto these two.

Are you a writer or a storyteller? Writers know how to use their most important tools (grammar and language). Storytellers spin tales. You can be one or the other, or you can be both.

Follow your heart. Don’t write for the market or for your friends and family. Figure out what ignites your passion, and then figure out how to translate that into a story, poem, or essay.

I like to think I am a storyteller, for all they seem to fail as stories, but worry that I am more of just a writer. The answer might come when I stop plugging away.

All I can do is follow my heart. Time is too short for me to do anything else now. Would I had learned that lesson 44 years ago.

And the same with I Took ALL The Advice... by Kristen Weber.

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Reading About Writers & Their Lives & About Writing

 I never finished reading  Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two in the Shade. Why is beyond my memory. I had read a couple of his short stories and I liked them. It may be that the last story I read in Playboy was one of his. He is one of those guys I know I should pay more attention to as the time gets away from me. Therefore, I am using my time and the space here to suggest you do what I haven't done enough of. 

Literary Hub published Thomas McGuane is Writing the Most Vital Literature of the Trump Era and perhaps this will make my case for reading and learning from McGuane.

McGuane’s subtle wonders work because of their brief length. Novelists in the Trump era combat the daily sturm und drang with extended responses defined by their reach and, at times, their inability to grasp. The novel must develop; nobody wants 250 pages of stasis.

The MAGA faithful, on the other hand, take pride in their intractability. In McGuane’s hands, this other “half of the divide” become ideal subjects for the short story. His characters confront moments of reckoning—some comic, others karmic, often both—where self-belief collides with a buckling status quo.

Which might make A Wooded Shore terribly outré at a time of incipient fascism. (As outré as using the word outré.) But if we engage with McGuane on his terms, our engagement with fiction will extend both our reach and our grasp. What else is a literature for?

One more time for Marcel Proust.

 

 

Eight Writing Secrets:

 

 Alan Moore's writing advice is a little strange, enough so that I think I need to come back to it to make sure I am correct about this: he takes a different approach to make points long-standing.

 I have heard of Pachinko, but knew nothing of Min Jin Lee until this video. Now, I am a fan after hearing what got her writing and what she wants to do with her writing and her life in general.

 

 

I cannot recall the last time I read either Rudy Rucker or Bruce Sterling. Longer for Sterling, and I came to Rucker after I had read William Gibson, Sterling, and Neal Stephenson. It had to be before prison. It is harder to find Rucker's books but do look for them. His cyberpunk is more surfpunk; that is more humorous. Check out Rudy's Blog's for Blog Archive Podcast #119. Writing Cyberpunk. Rudy vs. Bruce.

Read A Writer’s Life: A Life if you are a new writer. One thing I did not know when I was younger was what it was like to be a writer. I wish I had this collection of examples.

Everything you’ve wanted to know (but didn’t know who to ask) about Substack Lit Mags 

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Edgar Allan Poe, Harlan Ellison, Hamlet, and Marcel Proust All Walk Into A Bar.....

 

 

 

and in the bar they discuss American Transcendentalism.

 

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Fun Stuff

 Goofing off!

'Pretenders' Doc Is Anything but Precious

How ‘V for Vendetta’ Perfectly Explains Our Age

The Rolling Stones Have Had the Same Bassist for 30 Years, and He Has Never Been in the Band ( Ultimate Guitar)

Speckbohnen (German Green Beans)

Pollution in the Midwest:  Booth Tarkington’s “The Midlander” (Thornfield Hall)

Cardinal Field Guide (Cardinal Media)

De Gaulle: Résistance at Ciné Lumière (Institut Français · Royaume-Uni)

Bass in the Forest (Videos & Movies on Vimeo)

THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

What Is “a Character,” Anyway? (George Saunders)

The Underground Cooks of Singapore's Prisons (Gastro Obscura) - read it and do not think it is not that much different from what I saw in Fort Dix FCI.

 The EI Podcast / Reinventing Disraeli

 

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Writing, Plays and Books: Hemingway, Salman Rushdie, Lolita, Dorthy L. Sayers

 Rereading “The Odyssey”:  Translations and the Film (Thornfield Hall)

Every decade there is a popular new translation. In the 1970s and ’80s, it would have been Richmond Lattimore’s, with its pared-down style, then considered closest to the Greek.  And Robert Fagles’  gorgeous, lively translation, published in 1996,  outdid Lattimore’s in beauty of language and poetic style.   And now there is Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation, published last year, which was praised by Jorie Graham and Lee Child.

Of course seeing  the film of The Odyssey  – twice –  has inspired me to reread the epic poem (Fagles’ translation).  Before I make a few comments about Book 22, let  me talk about the cast of the movie.

Short, to the point, and a post I agree with in the most part. I have not read The Odyssey since the movie came out, but i do not recall it leaving me tired. 

I like how this documentary points out the difference between Hemingway as a man, a writer, and a myth.

 

Christina Anderson: “Man In Love” (The Yale Review), I have draft plays I need to get back to, but they worry me since I know so little about stage craft. Ms. Anderson annotates her play. I like the play. Her annotations give me ideas.

More Hemingway! I was disappointed by For Whom The Bells Toll when I read it again in my fifites. This podcast almost restored it for me. 

 

Another play excerpted in The Yale Review, S. Shakthidharan: “The Sun’s Song”.

The Sun’s Song, by contrast, has an all-male-identifying cast and consists of several acts and intervals. It alternates time periods and takes place across many different parts of the globe. It is the story of a father and a son, and it delves into questions of masculinity and intimacy; the wild earth and the wild in us; the politics of climate change; and the consequences of not dealing with your own hurt. I hope it will premiere in 2028, although it is still very much a work in progress. I am sharing an excerpt of the current draft below, along with annotations to provide insight into the play and my artistic decisions. 

Again, I learned from the excerpts.

 

Not sure if I ever posted this style analysis of Hemingway and feeling too lazy to check myself.

 

 I am not sure why Jonathan Frazen gets on my nerves. That he is about my age and from the Midwest and can damn well write, I ought to be less cautious about him. It goes back to The Corrections and a sense that he treated Midwesterners as bumpkins. That he's way smarter than I ever could have been might be in there anyway. All the same I read what I can about and by him, such as The Guardian's profile piece Jonathan Franzen: ‘It’s still mysterious to me that I was angry for so long’. 

Does this mean he sees writing as a means of self-improvement? God, no! When he’s working on a scene, trying to capture a character or get the tone right, he’s not thinking in moral terms. “If you’re really engaged with that, it’s not a matter of morality, but a matter of getting at something true. So I prefer truth as a goal to morality, to self-improvement, to the betterment of one’s soul,” he says. “I don’t really care about bettering my soul. I care about getting it right,” he adds. And then, the reflexive edit: “Which is a pretty good ending line.” 

A review of Library of America's Nineteenth Century short stories:

 

I know why I like Toni Morrison, another Midwesterner. She looks at America without blinking, without any sense of picking easy targets. Reading Tracing Shadows from Lapham’s Quarterly reinforces my bias.

That said, to pretend that just because an author was not racist, their character’s point of view or diction is not racial would be just as much of a folly. In American literary criticism up to that point, Morrison reflected, “the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference...Every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.” In other words, when it comes to the way race works in literature, denial and finger-pointing are equally childish.

Morrison’s posture was instead to treat race and racism as worthy of interest, but unworthy of debate. Eschewing the representation game of bewailing the absence or distorted presence of race in American literature, she told us: Look again! No need to destroy the canon. No need to deify it, either. Why not just read it? This begins with something as simple as the act of noticing.

 But I have spent too much time with Indiana's history of racism.

Morrison’s reading of Moby Dick spilled beyond “Unspeakable Things, Unspoken.” In a 1990 interview about her argument, the journalist Bill Moyers declared to her, of the bestselling books on the eve of the Civil War: “Your people never show up in the novels of that time.” Morrison gently contested this, saying, “Well, they do. They show up...It’s in Melville, it’s everywhere in Poe.” These are aesthetic figures rather than three-dimensional characters: “getting a truly complex human black person in a book in this country in the nineteenth century was unlikely. Melville came probably very close with…classic complexities, but not real flesh-and-blood people.” 

She raised a pattern in Moby Dick as an example of this complex symbolism: “He gets into bed with him in the very first scene. Ishmael goes to bed with Queequeg. Each one of those white people in Moby Dick has a black brother. They’re paired together. Fedallah is the shadow of Ahab. Queequeg is the shadow of Ishmael. They all have them, and they work together in tandem.” She explained that, “even though the realistic representation is not there, the information, subtextual information…is all self-reflexive, it’s all about the fabrication of a white male American.” This is one meaning of her title, which also appears as an uncanny refrain in her 1987 novel Beloved: “Unspeakable things unspoken. Always we are defining ourselves by the other.”  

No kidding. My research project has brought home to me that liberty exists only in opposition to tyranny, including slavery. That it has no definition other than as dialectic.

In her brief analysis of Huckleberry Finn in Playing in the Dark, she castigates the way critics of Twain’s 1884 novel had thus far tended to “focus on its celebration of savvy innocence, at the same time voicing polite embarrassment over the symptomatic racial attitude it enforces.” Morrison, by contrast, never dismisses or defends the racism in that novel in her writings on it. Instead, she considers its aesthetic and ideological function—and its narrative one: “Neither Huck nor Mark Twain can tolerate, in imaginative terms, Jim freed...freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement.” 

Lolita has never rested easily with me, a brilliantly written novel about characters I do not like, but the following has me seeing more that might make me more sympathethetic.

 There is now a documentary about Salman Rushdie being almost killed. I offer you two reviews.

‘The damage was much worse than I had imagined’: the shocking inside story of Salman Rushdie’s survival (The Guardian)

It is hard to say which time zone of the film is more viscerally shocking: the grisly footage of Rushdie being stitched and stapled back together in 2022, or the murderous hatred that roars out from news headlines in the months and years following the fatwa. In the US, the office of the Riverdale Press newspaper is firebombed after it runs an editorial about the book defending free expression; in Pakistan, six people are killed in riots; in Japan, a translator is stabbed to death; in Italy, another translator is stabbed in his home, while, in London, an effigy of a mutilated Rushdie is paraded through the streets by a furious crowd, some of whom declare on camera that nothing less than hanging will satisfy them 

Knife review: Salman Rushdie doc is a potent reminder of art's power amid persecution (Robertebert.com)

This is a simple but strong document about the importance of art as a way to comment on the world, the artist’s resilience in the face of the controversies their work might inspire, and the determination not to let violence be the answer to everything. These may seem like obvious concepts, but as this film clearly shows, we need constant reminders. 

For something a little lighter, two videos about Dorthy L. Sayers. I think there is a bit of an oversell of her as neglected but then I am one of her fans.

The Maine Review

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Closing Out Tuesday

 Went nowhere to my embarassment.

I did get the email thinned out.

Now for things I want to share.

The Mutants (Joyce Carol Oates: A Writer's Journal)

A Zeitgeist of the Bizarre (TAP Magazine)

Speckbohnen (German Green Beans) 

Why Trump May Not Serve Out His Presidency (The New Republic)

 

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Writer Related Items

Things put off as I worked through my research project. 

A Scottish hospital. A dying man. A fascist doctor. Will we listen? (The Herald)

We know how the story starts: on a bright cold day in April as the clocks are striking 13. We know how the story ends: in the basement of the ministry of love with a cage full of starving rats. And we probably feel like we know what the story means, what it’s saying, what it’s warning us about. Yet here we are, the story is happening again, and in a different way: in a hospital in Scotland, with a dying man, and a fascist doctor. It is unexpected.

I wonder, as it gets going, this brand new version, if it can have anything left to say, or at least anything surprising. Everyone has read the book, and everyone’s familiar with its dark and disturbing iconography: Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police. These are the phrases we use to talk about the state we’re in. They form the questions we ask. Has fiction become fact? In what ways is 2026 like 1984? How Orwellian are we really?

***

The solutions to all of this are harder to come up with – at one point, the Scottish doctor wonders what the way forward might be and Orwell shrugs and says “I don’t know” before coughing up more blood into his handkerchief. In a way, it’s the bleakest, most dystopian way to end a bleak and dystopian story, but the comfort for us, in the audience, is that, even though the parallels are there and they’re strong, Winston’s world is much, much worse than ours, which means there’s much more hope in our world too. It’s hard to watch at times, but perhaps this version of Orwell can remind us of the basics, the sums that make us. Such as two plus two equals four. And Winston’s final desperate statement of an un-disputable, un-editable fact: it takes two to be human.    

  10 Reasons Why We Didn't Accept Your Submission (Thin Skin) - read this and it might help you revise.

From Literary Hub: What Weimar Berlin’s Most Famous Plays Revealed About Artistic Freedom and What Latin American Literature Can Teach the Current Leaders of Latin America. The latter has more humor than the former, but both should widen your horizons.

A good refresher covering everything:  All about perspectives in novels  (Nathan Bransford)

Q: Can stories with unsavory characters find a home in today’s lit mag landscape?

Processing: How Nicholas Russell Wrote Observer

Asking Confidently and Advocating for Your Work

That can feel pushy at first. Self-centered. Why should someone want to read my writing? Answering this question is key to seeking your audience’s attention. No matter who you’re speaking to, let whomever is considering your work know quickly that your writing is worth their time. And tell them why, succinctly. In my experience, when I can confidently advocate for myself and my work, the reader—agent or editor—will be more willing to entertain the possibility that it IS worth their time.  

We Were the Mulvaneys  JCO writes about her novel.

Finally, I have to say of We Were the Mulvaneys that it’s the novel closest to my heart. Passages were transcribed in white heat, as in a fevered dream. I was scarcely inventing or imagining, only just “remembering.” My writing is so much about homesickness. The rural landscapes and waterways of upstate New York, where I was born and grew up on a small, not-very-prosperous farm north of Lockport. The sights, smells and texture of life in a small town. The intense emotions of high school life, ephemeral anxieties and joys. The wounds that can cut deep, and scar for years, or a lifetime. 

 Novelist Annie Dillard has died (NPR).

I read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while in prison. I thought it was wonderful and recommend it as being along the lines of a modern Walden.

Margaret Atwood: ‘God made the middle finger for a reason’ (London Times) - always witty, always worth listening to. 

“They don’t want Democrats being elected.” Wry insouciance vanishes, and raw exasperation with Americans enters her tone. “Yeah, so how about voting this time, instead of doing what you did with Hillary Clinton, because she wasn’t perfect enough? And how far did that get you, nincompoops?”

Atwood has no time for ideological purity or extremism on either left or right. “Defund the police was a really stupid idea,” she says. “An awful slogan. What did they think was going to replace it?” To many fans’ disappointment she won’t even call herself a feminist “because there’s too many different kinds, so what are we talking about?” I suspect she is bored with being asked about gender politics, and when I say so she looks relieved.

“I’m the human rights generation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made up for a very good reason, so that’s my point of reference. And if you want rights for women, you also have to have human rights for men.” She fixes a stare. “Radical idea, right? But it doesn’t make any sense otherwise. So what kind of gender politics am I interested in? I’m interested in the legal kind. I’m interested in whether or not you can have a credit card. Or whether or not you can have an abortion, or whether or not you can wear trousers to the office.”

***

Research suggests that people are having a lot less sex, I tell her. Last year, for example, a study by the Institute for Family Studies found that weekly sex between Americans aged 18-64 fell from 55 per cent in 1990 to 37 per cent in 2024. The number of 18 to 24-year-olds who’d had no sex at all in the previous year had doubled since 2010.

“That’s interesting. Well, silly old them. Enjoy it while you can, kids.”

She pauses, then volunteers languidly: “I still get letters from pervy people. Which I’m considering rather flattering, actually, at my age. And no, I am not going to put on black leather and high heels and walk all over your face. Dream on, wanker.”

sch 9/16 

  

On Writing: Interiority

 [Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]

Lincoln Michel's Counter Craft on Substack has been a source for ideas and instruction. Do check out his The View from Inside: On Adding Interiority to Your Fiction.

In fiction, interiority is relating the internal world of a character to the reader. Their thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, anxieties, memories, motivations, and so on. This is a simple yet consequential thing. Every one of us lives simultaneously in the external shared world and our own private worlds. These two realities are constantly colliding, separating, and distorting each other, whether that’s something as small as snapping at a friend because you are “hangry” or having a life-altering epiphany at the image of, I dunno, a dove flying over a lake that symbolically completes your character arc because you are a protagonist in a literary fiction short story published in a university literary magazine.

I kid, a bit. Still, it is true that our interior worlds are as vast as anything outside of them. If your fiction is missing interiority, it is leaving quite a lot out. This is true in a grander, philosophical sense yet also in a very practical craft sense. Readers tend to connect to stories through the emotions and desires of the POV character(s), and interiority provides that connection. The simplest story structure might be a character wants something but obstacles get in the way. This is a classic and powerful story, but only when the reader understands the character’s wants.

Interiority provides far more than just desires and goals. An interesting character will typically have a gap between how they act or speak and how they think or feel. Here’s an old CW class chestnut: In every scene, you should know what a character says they want, what they think they want, and what they really want. This can be applied to anything from prize-winning literary novels to pulpy superhero films. In this scene, the villain, Dr. Evilguy, says to the security guard that he wants to just use the bathroom but what he thinks he wants is to steal the blasto-ray 4000 omegagun prototype and conquer the city yet what he really wants, deep down, is to please the daddy that never loved them.

sch 6/3 

 

 

JCO Answers How She Writes a Book a Year

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Is it possible Harper's Bazaar asked the one important question of Joyce Carol Oates and no one had before? Check out This Is How Joyce Carol Oates Writes a Book a Year.

Stephen King in his On Writing (a book I recommend, albeit for an odd reason: King publishes how he revises a story) recommends having in mind an audience. Oates offered a similar and different idea:

Who do you write for and why?

I started writing really when I was in high school, and I think I’m sort of writing for an ideal audience. It’s more like telling stories and trying to express the experience of a story as if it was a little movie. I think our lives are one story after another and we’re trying to give voice to that experience. I’m not sure if there’s necessarily a specific audience. I mean, if you had no audience at all, you might still want to take photographs, and you might commemorate something. I don’t have a specific audience, but I would hope to have a literary community.

Do you mean a community of readers or writers or both?

Just that we have a common vocabulary and respect for literature, because there are so many people who don’t. It’s like that community of people who care about good films: more of a community of people who care about our culture.

How she describes a novel may explain one of the many reasons the short story form is difficult for me.

What do you usually start with when you are starting a novel? Is it an image or a character, or is it a sentence or a word?

A novel is a river, with a number of tributaries flowing into it. I don’t think you could write a real novel, a substantial novel, on just one little idea. For me, it’s like a number of ideas that come together, and I kind of conjoin them like characters. You have to have a little family of people. For me, it can begin with a place. All of my writing is set in a real place in my recollection. In The Frenzy, for instance, the first story is very much in New Jersey, down the New Jersey Turnpike, and then it’s on the Garden State Parkway, and then it’s in Cape May with a view of the ocean at a certain time of year, off-season. Very New Jersey.

SCH 3/26

 

 

Thinking Bourgeois

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Somerset Maugham said that it was the middle class that created English literature. I think that was in The Summing Up. I was a teenager with ambitions to be a writer, so it has been in my head for a very long time. What was meant by middle class might have been a bit muddled by me. Or circumstances in my case and time left me too little time left to write after trying to keep a law practice afloat.

But I think, on the whole Maugham was right. The rich are too comfortable in their economic status to use their education to create art. The poor are too desperate to create art, that does not help pay the bills.

Reading Hidden in the Bourgeois by Morten Høi Jensen brought all of this to mind. He is writing about Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

...And indeed, what could be more bourgeois — as Thomas Mann understands the term — than Hans Castorp’s celebrated epiphany in the famous “Snow” subchapter, that “man is the master of contradictions.” The coexistence of apparent opposites is characteristic of the bourgeois. Werner Sombart, in his The Quintessence of Capitalism, makes the Faustian claim that “two souls dwell in the breast of every complete bourgeois: the soul of the adventurer and the soul of the respectable middle-class man.” A claim that sounds quite a bit like Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, who, in the eponymous novella, cries out: “As an artist I’m already enough of an adventurer in my inner life. So far as outward appearances are concerned one should dress decently, damn it, and behave like a respectable citizen…” Thomas Mann offers the image of the writer as someone who keeps his office hours and dresses appropriately, whose writing is characterized not by the heat and flame of inspiration but by the cold comfort of thoroughness and industry. “There is much to be said for a wife and children,” Thomas Mann wrote in his diary in 1919, “but given my nature, the decisive consideration for me is that it allows me to hide in the bourgeois realm without actually becoming bourgeois.” As the French writer Bernard Groethuysen observed in 1927, “the bourgeois likes to keep his incognito.” It was Flaubert who originally formulated the contradictory character of the bourgeois when he observed, in a letter, that “one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god.” But it was Thomas Mann in whom this dialectic, the yes and the no of bourgeois culture, found its most prophetic repository. “I have become what I am,” Thomas Buddenbrook, the good bourgeois, tells his brother, Christian, the failed artist, “because I did not want to become like you.” Many years after writing those words, Mann described his enemy Adolf Hitler as “a brother, a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother,” by which he meant that Hitler, like himself, was an artist, only he was an artist gone astray, a good-for-nothing who believed himself “reserved for something else — as yet quite indefinite, but something which, if it could be named, would be greeted with roars of laughter.” Significantly, Mann titled his essay “A Brother,” as though aware that he and Hitler represented two paths for Germany. I have become what I am, because I did not want to become like you. A few weeks after the war, Mann, ever the conscientious artist, confessed: “it is all within me, I have been through it all.”

We have denigrated the middle class for not being cool. Is that not the heart of The Graduate? But it is the middle that has enough education to grasp the world around them. It is the middle class that has enough stability and enough uncertainty to see the wrinkles and twists of reality to have a reason to act. If memory serves, Lenin and Joe Strummer came from the middle class.

And so let us encourage the middle class to create. Preferably in the arts and not in politics.

SCH 3/26

 

 

Trying Not To Be Stupid

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Though Toni Morrison was not interviewed for Harper's Bazaar's Writing Through It: Five of our greatest novelists on what it takes to write something true, this felt its most important point:

In 2003, Charlie Rose interviewed Toni Morrison, and there’s a quote that sums up novel writing for me. “Are most of your characters winners or losers?” he asked. “Always winners. Even if they drop dead,” she replied. “They learned something very, very important—some critical thing they learned that they never would have known except for the novel. Their experiences are epiphanies. I think those are happy endings when you finally figure it out. And you know it. Maybe they don’t have a car, or maybe they don’t have the loved one or whatever, but this is a life of the mind and the spirit, and they win. They’re not stupid anymore.” I think that is why I will always read novels: to win at the life of the mind, to have an everyday epiphany, to build another story.

I would like my characters to be a little less stupid about something at the end - whether that something be factual, emotional, or philosophical, personal, or of the wider world.

SCH 3/26

 

 

Exposition

 [Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

 Let me expose another weakness in my writing: interesting exposition.

That is why I wanted to give attention to Andrew Martin on How to Manage Exposition: Don’t Fear the Info Dump (Lterary Hub). If you read enough science fiction, you know about info dumps. My eyes glaze over and skim automatically. Even worse is when one reads a series to find earlier info dumps squeezed into the later volumes. 

Some points I gleaned from Mr. Martin's essay:

What fear of the dump translates to in practice is a broader resistance to the work of exposition in a story or novel. I’m not talking about a philosophical objection to backstory, the way Joy or Diane Williams reasonably might in work that is disorienting by design. Rather, it seems to be about something more fundamental—an anxiety that providing too much concentrated information about a character or situation is, on its face, artless, or worse, boring.

Like a lot of workshop-based neuroses, this is rooted in the experience of seeing something done badly, or doing it badly oneself, and hearing a teacher explain wearily why it should be otherwise. We all have our familiar writing hobbyhorses—me, I’m a stakes guy, sorry. There is of course a thing as too much backstory, and when a writer frontloads information before giving the reader a sense of why it has some kind of emotional or psychological value, it’s hard to expect them to keep reading. Historical fiction, fantasy, and science-fiction are particularly vulnerable to this problem, as the process of explaining a time period or world different from ours can stretch to nearly infinite dimensions if not checked. There’s also the dreaded shadow of “show don’t tell” hanging over all of this—boy do I wish I could talk to the guy who came up with that. You don’t show someone a story, dammit, you tell it.

And this:

As with finding a title for a novel or story, if no great option presents itself, the goal with exposition should be to do as little damage as possible. Tell us what we need to know, don’t go on for too long, get out of there. The better course of action, if at all possible, is to be stylish and elegant with your exposition, as one strives to be in all things. Mary Gaitskill is particularly good at this ideal combination of straightforwardness and pithiness. She’s not afraid to tell the reader things, but she maintains her poise while doing so. Her very recent New Yorker story “Something Familiar” contains a good example. The protagonist is recalling the very Gaitskillian jobs of her youth:

“Nude art model (poorly paid), waitress (she got fired), hostess (she wasn’t charming enough), whore (bingo.) That was another threshold she’d crossed with Carly; they had both started at the same place, a “house,” rather than outcall, which they’d agreed was too dangerous. They did it on an emergency basis, off and on for maybe five years. Neither took it seriously; it seemed of a piece with the pleasing artifice of clubs and magazines, an almost comical piece, more real and more absurd than dating. And safer, actually, on an emotional level; none of the men she met there could really hurt her.”

There’s a jaunty Nabokovian compression to the first sentence that draws us in, and the comparison of sex work to the “pleasing artifice” of clubs and magazines is a surprising turn that holds our interest. But the rest is simply informative, neither coy nor overly blunt. We’re learning important things about this character, filtered mildly through her consciousness. Gaitskill has the confidence to know that backstory is action, is story, if it’s done right.

And finally this:

...It was important to remember the principle that exposition shouldn’t feel any more rote than action or dialogue. Every sentence in a novel carries weight, provides an opportunity for the writer to display their sensibility.

Now, if I can find the time and the talent to do this with my own work!

sch 3/12 

 

Does It Matter That Prestige Lit Is Dead?

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

 I have tried my hand at many things related to writing. I like science fiction, and I love detective stories. I wanted to try my hand at flash fiction because I thought it might help me write better short stories. Most of what I write is experiments with genre, even if I am more inclined to write what is, to my mind, literary fiction. But I am not interested in prestige fiction. I think prestige cuts off fiction from readers. That also lets me rationalize that my talents do not rise to a level necessary for prestigiousness.

What prompts these statements from me is Dennis Wilson Wise's review essay Prestige Fiction Is Dead (Los Angeles Review of Books).

In the final analysis, anyone still committed to the novel’s specialness—probably most folks reading this article—is bound to consider Novel Competition thoroughly depressing. But Brier is a historian, not a prophet. He has no answers, no grand solutions, for the novel’s lost pride of place. The prestige competition is over, he says; there’s just “less to be gained by denying it now.” And that rings true. Although winning a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award can still make one’s literary career, we no longer expect our literary lions to become public intellectuals. Once upon a time, authors like Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and Susan Sontag were recognizable faces on the television circuit. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine any novelist finding that same prominence.

That paragraph made me wonder if we are not settling into the same patterns in literature as we are in politics: pre-WWII divisions have returned. I knew Truman Capote and Norman Mailer from television long before I read their work. But how much did the public know about Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, J.P. Marquand, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl S. Buck, or Eugene O'Neill during their heyday? Consider my list contains three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a long-running best-selling author, and four winners of the Pulitzer Prize. The only writer who did not win any awards for his writing was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Who is read today by the general reader? Fitzgerald. Prestige is the eye of the beholder; literary fame is ephermal.

But from my list, who is not a good writer? I would suggest none. They may be stuck in their time (Tarkington and Marquant and Lewis seem most likely to suffer from this fault), but they wrote to the best of their talents. I found The Good Earth a surprise for not being boring. I think Fitzgerald probably did not rise to the challenges of his talents, but they are better talents than I have, and what would America be without The Great Gatsby? If I recognize humanity in their work, then I think it is worth reading.

That means to me that we write not to make a television appearance or be lauded in The New York Review of Books. It means we write as best we can to connect with humanity.

Sam Kahn's What Has Gone Wrong With Fiction in Our Era? A Laundry List (Castalia) includes much that makes what I have written foolish, certainly off the main stream. But then I am far from the main stream of American publishing. Nor do I have an MFA. I am a writer with nothing to lose and, at my age, little to gain.

I feel more in line with Damien Cowger of New Ohio Review Recommends…

And there I end today's sermon.

sch 3/12 

 

Saturday Working Through Stuff

Another day without much to talk about. I went to the convenience store twice. Nowhere else, though. I took one short nap. Why am I still so easily tired? Why is the still the same amount of discomfort? Small worries creep in.

Rejections:

8/7 

Thank you for submitting to Exposition Review Vol. XI: “PARA/SOCIAL.”  This year we received a record-breaking number of submissions, and we appreciate your patience while we gave each piece the time and attention it deserved.  We truly value your submission and consider it an honor to read your work. Unfortunately, “Agnes” is not a fit for this issue.  Since you indicated that you would like feedback on your submission, we will send comments from our editorial board along shortly.

We wish you the best of luck in your future writing endeavors and hope you will submit again!

Take care,

Exposition Review

Submissions 

8/8

Cream City Review, Gordon Square Review, Southern Humanities Review: After Making Landfall 

Thriller Magazine Press - One Dead Blonde.

Readings

Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds (Indiana Authors Awards), a review (and one that has piqued my interest).

 While never rising to the comic heights of Vonnegut, and without his more overtly obvious moral lessons, these stories nonetheless have elements that will be recognizable to his fans, and the straight faced delivery of preposterous circumstances Moody presents will certainly be appreciated by those who enjoy Charlie Kaufman or even Terry Gilliam. Like Kaufman, Moody can verge on the allegorical and the surreal, and like Gilliam, the visuals are often of our reality but with the volume turned up on some of their more unsettling attributes.    

 Across all five pieces included in the collection, Moody’s writing is serviceable. He never quite swings for the fences when it comes to the prose, but that’s probably a good thing in that he is already stretching the imagination with the content he presents and doesn’t distract from the heart of his stories with cumbersome or showy sentences. Readers who need mimetic recreations of real life in order to find themselves drawn into a story might struggle here, but those who can set aside their nagging questions about how such things could be (or readers who prefer to!) will enjoy playing in the melancholy, symbol laden worlds of Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds.  

The Lie the Character Believes: A Deeper Look at Consciousness and Character Arc (Helping Writers Become Authors ).

Being perverse, some of my characters do not transform positively.

But as I’ve come to recognize over the years, the Lie is not just a Lie. I’ve come to emphasize it specifically as a comparatively limited belief that exists in a continuum with a comparatively expansive Truth. Because here’s the thing: at the beginning of a story, the Lie starts out as the character’s Truth. To some degree, it was a Truth that worked for them up until the story begins. 

***

And so, I would posit that the Lie a character overcomes really isn’t so much a wrong belief they must correct (or at least not always and not at its deeper levels). Rather, it is a fissure in consciousness—a place where the conscious self is inhabiting an ego identity that has created separation between its surface-level understanding and the deeper Truth of our being. 

I have been more interested in people making choices based on incomplete or incorrect information and then having to live with those choices. Well, that has been the subject of some of my short stories.

 This may be why my stories keep getting rejected, and I should shift from wrong assumptions to lies.

First, we have the Lie as simply a mistaken belief or even an outright deception that must be seen through.

Second, we have the Lie as a point within a continuum from a comparatively limited perspective to a comparatively expanded perspective. Both “Lie” and “Truth” are qualified here; they are not black and white, good or bad. They are just reference points for where characters may find themselves along the continuum at any point.

And third, we have this deeper understanding of the Lie as an ego identity or a comparatively limited consciousness. It is ultimately a separation between the conscious self and the unconscious self. When we zoom back from the minutiae of any specific character arc to look at the movement of human growth, what we are really tracking is the larger expansion that becomes possible as we release the limitations of our ego identities, allowing us to embrace our capacity for deep alignment with the truths of life.

Or stick to my guns and live with characters who do not transform into better selves but live and die by their choices. After all, Ahab does not transform into anything apart from fish food.

Other lies addressed in the article: The Lie the Character Believes as Separation and The Lie the Character Believes as Social Reality. Some additional notes for me, if not for you.

Although I dearly love the idea of character arc as being about transformation, I think this expanded model reveals it might be more accurate to instead think of character arc as being about coming into alignment. It’s less about a change to the character’s fundamental self and more about the removal of the false self. It’s not the addition of a new perspective, but the stripping away of what isn’t true so the character may see more clearly.  

 ***

Ego identities are not simply personal. They are reinforced through collective social consensus. Society itself can be seen as an ego identity. In their seminal book, sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann posited that reality, as we think of it, is a social construction. Customs and traditions are dictated by varying societies. That America or Columbia or Italy are countries at all is a social convention. Indeed, the conventions of language are a social construction, with (mostly) agreed-upon rules.

Although we each, in our own small way, influence society, society bears a tremendous influence upon our own ego identities—not just in how we operate socially but also in how we understand ourselves internally. Arguably, the vast majority of our ego identities are inherited. We all entertain outer Lies (aka, limiting beliefs) about what we believe reality to be and inner Lies about what we believe our identities within that reality to be.

 I wonder what my father would have made of A Dying Art by John Semley. He was an embalmer, he held himself to a high standard, and I expect he would be appalled.

I spent somewhere around 2 hours writing a query letter and synopsis for One Dead Blonde. I do not have much hope for it.

sch 

Once More Lagging Behind: Rejections, Ideas, Submissions

 8/6

I find myself tired and dealing with insomnia this week. It has gotten in the way of reporting my days.

Last Saturday was my most active day out of the apartment. Laundry, the farmer's market, a quick lunch at Popeye's, and the car returned was the morning. I got back here around 1 PM. Then I found out my friend DM was in town for DWNTN Muncie. He and I grabbed lunch at the Downtown Farmstand. He agrees they have great pizza. That took up about two hours. I arrived here a bit achy.

I have photos that will appear in a separate post. 

Sunday, I managed Liturgy but only Liturgy. A little weak doing all that standing, but also from the sitting and standing up.

I need to get out today. I seem to have lost my pants on Saturday. Confused by that.

I woke around one and went back to sleep around 5 AM and then back up around 10.  

Emails and Star Trek Discovery dealt with.

I started a new short story.

Onto other things. 

8/3

I went to the grocery, I think. Certainly to the convenience store. Watching Star Trek shows on YouTube.

8/4

I started this post.  

Stayed put, a convenience store walk. Working on the MS.  

Reminded last night of something unpleasant: Murder of Sylvia Likens. This I did not know about until my forties. One may smile and smile and be a villain indeed.

8/5

I meant to spend the day out. All I did was get to the writer's group and in the evening to Walmart.

 

 

 Readings:

‘I want to be ripped to shreds’: writers flock to MFAs - but does it breed elitist literature? (The Guardian) touches on a sore point for me: MFAs running the show and me not having one.

These days, the writerly lone wolf is more a myth than it is a reality. Most of today’s celebrated authors are trained in the profession and their qualification is the MFA (master of fine arts). Percival Everett received his from Brown, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie studied at Johns Hopkins University, and Jhumpa Lahiri went to Boston. Great writers, now, are less rare animals discovered in the wild and more elite thoroughbreds, meticulously trained and set up for the race ahead.

 But is it a good thing?

While the idea that the workshop is de facto a magical, hermeneutic space where mediocre writing turns into something great is a lie, it can be a tool. For the most part my workshops were generous and generative spaces where people read plentifully and with grace. A writer who is forced to confront her work regularly through the eyes of others must think about what it is she wants to write and why, and this inevitably leads to writing that is more thoughtful and ambitious. Of course, learning who to listen to is a skill in itself. 

One rejection came with a critique and a recommendation to workshop my story. Okay, could it be that workshopping also offloads editorial work? 

What seems to be the consensus is that an MFA teaches you style as opposed to soul. A focus on craft, on how to write, creates automatons who can turn a good phrase, but whose writing is stripped of something essential. Pulitzer prize-winning Robert Olen Butler, interviewed by Edward J Delaney for the Atlantic, sums it up: “creative-writing students, who are typically trained almost exclusively in craft and technique […] don’t know the first thing about [being an artist].” Jo Ann Beard told me she could recognise an Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate anywhere. There was something honed, particular and controlled in the writing. Perhaps the imprint MFAs have had on fiction feels more forceful at a time when the gulf between literary and popular fiction has never been wider. Do MFAs guard the ivory tower of literary fiction while “untrained” writers produce popular fiction for the masses? Or more generously, do MFAs protect a dying art?

While it is true that spending hours in a classroom under the influence of certain teachers can create similarities in style among a cohort, in my classes students submitted widely: magical realism, noir, historical, auto-fiction. They had epic aspirations.

Yet there is a sense that contemporary fiction conforms to a similar style. Is this because MFAs encourage that? I’m not sure. Or is it rather the influence of narrow trends, which force certain books into the public eye at certain times. That many of the most popular authors today have MFAs, and that those novels might have a similar style or focus on a similar subject is a bit like saying fire engines cause fires.

But a shared education may implicate a shared philosophy. Or it could be a shared culture beyond the MFA program creates a shared world view, or just a shared set of cultural touchstones. What I write about seems to be slightly outside what MFA writers latch upon.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to say exactly how an MFA influences writing, and whether it is worth it. The truth is, an MFA isn’t a magic pill. It’s much harder to pastiche a style than you think; spending hours on anything takes stamina. Doing an MFA puts you in a rigorous environment for several years where, hopefully, you can learn how best you write. As Everett put it in Brown’s alumni magazine: “Brown allowed me to really just be who I am and just work.” 

Ideas:

The Greek Tragedy Behind Suddenly Last Summer - JSTOR Daily

Structurally, The Bacchae and Suddenly Last Summer are dominated by two key monologues, and, specifically, Violet’s and Catharine’s monologues turn Sebastian into the subject of a performed drama. “Sebastian himself, of course, exists only within the competing dramatic accounts of Catharine and Violet,” says Morra. “These expressions are themselves contained within a work that calls continuous attention to itself as drama, vehemently anti-realist and self-consciously subjective. The play refrains from staging or confirming the violence of Sebastian’s demise; even more so than The Bacchae, it contains its narrative at the level of language rather than action.”  

Frame-Breaking: When Stories Step Outside Themselves – The Hemlock Journal

 Description 

If writing descriptions intimidates you, consider breaking the concept down to just remaining mindful. Reflect on what the protagonist is thinking, feeling, and perceiving as they advance through a scene, whether or not you know the “perfect” language to describe that. Then, it will be up to you to decide which of these details are most relevant to convey the tone you’d like a scene to have. Including each of the five senses all at once is rarely necessary—in fact, doing so will work against you by reducing the impact that your words have—so be sure to prioritize what feels like it best fits the moment.

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A complete lack of description, on the other hand, isolates the reader from the characters, environment, and plotline that they’re meant to bond with by leaving them in the figurative dark. If the reader is given no visuals, sounds, scents, or other details to ground them in a narrative, very little remains for them to connect with to envision our scenes as real. Dialogue and exposition alone, while both incredibly valuable skills for writers, cannot reach their full potential without the aid of description, and the same may be said vice versa.

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With all of the above in mind, it’s also vital to remember not to rely solely and excessively on description to elevate our writing. Doing so is often referred to as writing purple prose, which many readers prefer to avoid, making it a distinctly unflattering label to have attributed to our narratives. Similarly, utilizing an abundance of repetitive descriptions may begin to fall into the territory of cliché. Because of this, it’s necessary to be mindful of how our descriptive writing works alongside other storytelling aspects like pacing and dialogue, as depending too heavily on descriptions may lead us to neglect equally necessary skills. 

Untranslatable Food Words (Vittles) there is something here, even if it is only a reminder of language's limits.

I really think Mike Bloomfield represents a story that needs telling and “It’s tragic the way he died. He made the blues accessible to a lot of guys like me.” Bob Dylan and Jorma Kaukonen on the 1960s guitar icon who led an electric blues revolution and died alone and unknown (GuitarPlayer) reinforce this idea.  

Rejections 

 8/1 for “The Unintended Consequences of Art”

 Thank you so much for your submission to the Submission Pit’s July ‘26 window.

I regret to inform you that your short story did not win this month but fear not! You’re more than happy to submit for August immediately.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the Submission Pit Substack below if you haven’t already.

Also if you have had a recently published short story elsewhere (or forthcoming) feel free to let us know about it and we'll give you a special shout out in next month's statistics post.

8/3:

Thank you for trusting us with "Agnes." After a close reading, we've decided that the story isn't the the right fit for us at this time.

Sincerely,

StoryBottle Co 

8/4:

Thank you for letting us consider "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 – 1984" for publication in the Missouri Review. We enjoyed reading your work, and though it doesn't quite fit our needs at this time, we wish you excellent luck with it and hope we will have the chance to read more of your writing in the future.

Sincerely,

The Editors
The Missouri Review 

Submissions 

8/4:

BoomerLitMag (Agnes 2026-06-26)

Thin Skin (Agnes 2026-06-26)

Passager Books (A Heart’s Judgment Judged)

The Fanatic (After Making Landfall)  

For Page & Screen (Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1836 -1990)

Planet Scumm (The Psychotic Ape)

8/5:

I was looking at a possible submission of One Dead Blonde. Only it required another 2,000 words. That took most of the day. 

EPOCH (After Making Landfall) 

Blue Mesa Review  (After Making Landfall)

MIAMI UNIVERSITY PRESS NOVELLA PRIZE (Plain Tales From The Flatlands)

The Iowa Review (After Making Landfall)

 

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