Removing blind submissions is a terrible idea, but so is keeping them

Let’s start by acknowledging that writing literary fiction is a bad deal financially for almost everyone right now. It’s bad for privileged cis, white, male writers like me, and it’s bad for nonbinary, poor writers of color. It's bad for writers and it's bad for journals. The economics of the literary journals we need to get to accept our work in order to progress as writers are, to be blunt, a scam. If that seems harsh, consider the similarities between how the average lit mag operates and those kiosks at the mall that grab passersby, telling them they have the face for modeling, and if only they’ll invest a mere $300 in a portfolio, they might be on their way to superstardom. The only thing that differentiates literary magazines is that they typically charge a lot less than $300. However, since you have to apply to many of them to have a hope of getting published, the total cost to the victim of the scam is about the same.

The modeling scam takes advantage of people’s natural tendency to overestimate their own value. Of course someone thinks I should be a model, the victims of the scam believe, so nothing seems out of place when someone suggests that the world sees a similar value in the victims.

For literary magazines, the exploitation of the Dunning-Kruger effect is even more invidious, because most of the people submitting actually do have some talent. The last few decades of MFA programs have generated tens of thousands of graduates, each of whom has, presumably, at least some ability. To go along with all of these, there are the hundreds of thousands more whose teachers or professors recognized they had some skill and encouraged them to make use of it. So the writers submitting their stories aren’t just fooled by their own vanity. They really can write at least passably. Do they write well enough to beat the 50-to-1, 100-to-1, or a million to one odds that some journals put in front of them? Likely not. But it’s three bucks to try, kind of the same as a lottery ticket, and you can’t win if don’t play, so in the three bucks goes. Maybe once in a while, you risk the big money and enter a $20 or $30 contest.

I assume my writing is as sexy as this woman's silhouette.

The people who run literary journals aren’t greedy like the scammers at the mall. In fact, most aren’t getting paid at all. There’s not much money in selling literary fiction these days, which is why they have to resort to squeezing writers to get even the few dollars needed to keep up a website or print a few copies. Stephen March, in a piece in Lithub in 2021 on Sally Rooney, compared literature as a business to the game musical chairs: “There is less and less room. There is less nature, there is less humanism, there is less capacity for argument, there are fewer places to publish, there is less attention to go around. There is less space, generally, from which to affirm life.” There are far too many writers relative to readers, so the only money literary journals can get is from the supply side, rather than demand, giving it its scammy appearance.

It’s important to keep this in mind when discussing the idea of blind submissions, or, more accurately, ending the practice of blind submissions. If the literary ecosystem currently favors certain demographics, it doesn’t favor them that much, because the system is bad for nearly everybody. And if certain proposals might shift the balance of favor in ways that might harm the potential for success of some writers, well, it’s not like the people benefitting are going to find themselves in all that enviable a situation, either. Writers should be kind to one another and try to preserve what dignity they can, rather than let the fight for the remaining scraps get ugly. There isn't much hope for any of us, so let's die with class. 

 The argument against blind submissions

I first became aware of the trend to end blind submissions a few weeks ago when I entered a short story contest. The decision surprised me, as I suppose it has a lot of people, mostly because I thought the research on blind submissions had showed it to be effective. I thought of the success of blind auditions in orchestras, which has been proven to improve the representation of women in orchestras.  

In explaining its decision, the journal cited three articles. Since becoming aware of the practice and looking into it a little further, I've seen these same three articles quoted quite a bit by other journals moving to similar practices. They are:

• The Politics of Gatekeeping: On Reconsidering the Ethics of Blind Submissions, by Joyce Chen
• The Politics of "Blind Submissions" Policies, from the editors of Apogee Magazine
• "How Can Literary Magazines Counter Their Biases?" by Elisa Gabbert

Below, I'm going to try to summarize the main arguments they make. Just in case it's not already clear, what we're talking about is the idea that when a story or poem or essay is submitted, it should either have information identifying the author or it should not. The three essays above all argue that it should include identifying information. 

1. There is a difference between orchestra auditions and literature

Two of the three essays explicitly mention those orchestra studies, and they acknowledge them as a reason why it might seem like a good idea to do the same thing in publishing. However, they argue that there are important differences between playing music and a writing/submitting a piece of literature. One important difference is that musicians typically do not play their own, original pieces in auditions. They are playing someone else's music, and there is, perhaps, while not perfect objectivity, at least relatively more of an objective standard as to how they are to perform. Chen writes: "Blind submissions do not actually have the same effect as, say, blind auditions, which suppose that the strength of a voice or an instrumental skill is more important than the identity of the singer or musician (also, the performed piece is not always an original piece). When it comes to writing, however, acknowledging the totality of the person behind the piece is arguably just as important as the piece itself." 

Gabbert probably explains the argument a little more precisely with: "Two cellists, a man and a woman, might audition with the same Bach piece; they won’t be playing their own music. And there seem to be nearly universally agreed upon standards of what constitutes good playing of Bach, which don’t vary much by gender. If they were each playing music of their own composition, we might run into a problem of bias again: namely, that we have been trained to perceive music written by men as great music. You glimpse this thinking in the common question, “Why are there no great female composers?” (Who says there aren’t?)"

2. The illusion of objectivity within the blind submission allows editors to indulge their conscious and unconscious biases

If writing has historically favored white, cis-male, heteronormative writing, and editors either fit those categories themselves or have been heavily influenced by an academic system that emphasized them, then they will struggle to avoid bringing assumptions fed by that system into their editing about what constitutes good literature. As the editors of Apogee put it, "the problem is that white/male/cis is the assumed standard."  Chen's version of the same idea was: "...in many corners of the literary world, quality has long been judged through a largely white, male, cis, heteronormative lens, and the practice of reading submissions blind perpetuates that standard of excellence and allows it to go unchecked." 

These assumptions might mean that an editor will fail to recognize another mode of storytelling, one that doesn't follow the narrative arc brought down from Aristotle. Or editors might discount diction that doesn't meet their expectations. In short, taking names off manuscripts doesn't mean that editors don't still bring biases with that into reading that can prevent greater inclusivity. Two of the articles cite statistics that show how literary magazines are still not (or as of 2017 were still not) as diverse as they ought to be. They reason from these statistics that editors continue to hold on to biases 

Problems with their arguments

The three articles use somewhat different logic to arrive at these claims, and cite different examples in places, but those two main arguments hold. Furthermore, all three acknowledge that blind submissions are not total evils. They can serve to fight against nepotism and favoritism. The Apogee article wrote" "There are valid reasons for doing blind submissions. Our friends at The James Franco Revieware all about blind submissions in order to stop the cult of celebrity." However, they also feel that in general, the good that blind submissions can do is outweighed by the negatives. Above all, all three alike argue that whether a journal chooses blind or identity-revealing submissions, what is really important is the makeup of the editorial staff. 

Overall, I think their arguments hold a reasonable amount of weight and are hard to dismiss completely. In practical terms, I think most literary journals have never really been blind. Other than in contests, which cost more money to enter, most do want identifying information on the piece being submitted, and it's been that way for a long time. If journals are going to do this, they ought to be all-in about it. Doing it halfway--by, say, asking for the name of the author but not looking at the biography--then they're asking for trouble. They might, in the quest to be inclusive, rule out someone who actually is Chinese or Guatemalan because they were adopted or took a married name or have a white father and now don't "sound" Chinese or Guatemalan. Also, some white writers might be able to present a very convincing world set within a non-white setting. I speak three foreign languages well enough to professionally translate in them. Much of my life has been in the company of non-white people, so I end up writing stories about non-white characters. Because I've been pretty deep in their culture, down to being able to speak the language, I can write a story that will make an editor think it was written by someone sharing the identity of those characters. I might even win a blind contest this way. In fact, I know that I've done this, because one editor told me so. So if a journal wants to avoid mistakenly picking a story by a white author, they need to go all-in. I'd recommend doing what Gordon Square Review has done. Their submission practices, the last time I submitted to them, said this: "We request that no cover letter or author bio be included in your submission. Instead, please share with Gordon Square Review what the story is about, the writing process of the story, and any context you believe is important to know while reading story." That seems to split the difference between not allowing for nepotism by allowing a writer to state how successful they already are, but also allowing a writer to explain how their background contributed to the story. 

Nonetheless, I do think there are some problems with ending blind submissions, and also with the philosophy of putting the author's identity front and center when selecting stories. Because that's really what all three articles are calling for. 

1. The lack of perfect objectivity in literature doesn't mean there are no standards at all. 

All three articles demonstrated what I would consider to be a troubling casualness in dismissing the notion of objective standards in literature. Chen wrote that "there is no such thing as objective quality." Apogee put it less extremely: "However, artistic and literary aesthetics are not an algorithm, and “literary excellence” is not an infallible mathematics." Gabbert, though, echoed Chen's absolute rejection of objectivity: "There is no universal standard of goodness." 

Rejecting the notion of objective aesthetic standards has become so commonplace, it seems many critics don't feel any sense of sorrow pronouncing that there is no such thing as "good" literature. They accept that literature can be reduced to a dialectical struggle between competing political interests and don't seem to feel any sense of loss. I've never been able to understand how. "No objectivity" would seem to mean you could just randomly pick stories for a magazine and do no worse than having a team of supposedly expert editors. Ask a computer to account for identities, pick the mix you want, and ignore the stories altogether. 

I'm sure Chen and Gabbert would reject this idea, if for no other reason than because it would diminish the political power of editors, which presumably they would like to keep in order to allow their kind of editors to fight for political ends they agree with. But they'd also likely agree that just because literary standards are not based on perfect objectivity doesn't mean there is no objectivity at all. It doesn't mean that 50 Shades of Grey is as "good"--yes, I think we can use that word--as Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

In aesthetics and ethics both, we might never be able, absent the decree of the gods, to determine with perfect accuracy where "good" lies, but we can create something like a plot graph, and we will find, over time and across cultures, that most of the dots for "good" are near one another. It can be hard to describe the area they inhabit, but that's really the job of literary and cultural criticism--to try to adduce something close to objectivity in a realm where there will never be absolute standards. 

Kim Yong Ha, a Korean writer I much admire, has written much about his admiration for Aristotle's Poetics. In spite of Kim's different cultural assumptions and identity, he finds a universal applicability in many of Aristotle's principles: "Thanks to (a movie director he heard about who always carried a copy of the Poetics in his pocket), I also started reading it, and that reading had an influence on novels I wrote afterwards...of course, my novels can't be compared to (the great classics Kim had been discussing earlier) but many writers the world over have gone through a similar process and ended up writing "work that seems new, but in reality is old." (From "Reading Dangerous Books," appearing in the collection See, Read, Speak. Translation mine.) 

Speaking three foreign languages may not make me the most globally aware reader, but it does mean I can to a small degree balance Western writing against some other traditions. And those other traditions show a nearly universal preference for a standard of "good" that even a fusty white professor from the 1950s would at least somewhat recognize. Even within Western culture, there have been eras where very different assumptions went into the production of literary work, and therefore those times yielded quite different work from other times. "Western literature" of the last 3,000 years is far from homogenous, but that doesn't mean we can't find something we can call "good" in any of the surviving records. 

2. The level of diversity needed to ensure the goal is impossible 

In this year's Best American Short Stories collection, one of the entries was "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam. As I pointed out in my critique of the story, it included a lot of veiled references to the last sixty years of Ethiopian history that would have been lost of most readers. At least some critics of the story ignored it, figuring one African country is the same as another. But I recognized the references, because, as fate would have it, I spent about five years studying modern Ethiopia rather deeply. So the story read quite differently to me than it would have to other readers. 

America is the most culturally diverse country on Earth. That means a journal can and will get submissions from writers who fully qualify as "American" but who are also writing from deep within other cultural contexts. Can any board of editors be diverse enough to recognize the political bent of a Nepalese-American, how that writer might be coming down on a variety of political issues well known to Nepalese diasporic readers but invisible to others? Can they do this for all the diasporas that might be represented within the submission pool? 

If we followed the recommendations of these three editorials, we might have picked a black, female editor over someone like me in order to achieve the needed diversity to judge a story like Maya's. But white, cis-male, middle-aged, balding, upper-middle-class me would have been a better judge of Maya's story.  (I say "Maya," rather than "Binyam," because Ethiopians use their given names to identify themselves. Did you know that? I do, but some critics of her story did not.) 

All three articles hoped that they could make up for weaknesses in identity-revealed submissions by first ensuring a properly diverse team of editors. But how on Earth is the average journal supposed to do this? How would they know if they are being blown away by something that seems novel to them, when in fact the writer is simply picking some very common item from another culture, one that wouldn't impress readers from that culture at all, the way Yoon Choi did in "The Art of Losing"? (For that matter, isn't it politically problematic that so much of the literary understanding of Americans about other countries comes from diasporic writers, rather than truly foreign writers in either the original language or in translation?) 

3. The statistics cited don't always support the arguments made

All three articles used similar statistics to prove that literary journals are still in thrall to white, cis-male, straight guys. They all seem to have ignored what is very clear from one of the very studies they cite: employees in the publishing industry are about 75% female. This has been an open secret in the literary community for as long as anyone can remember. Personally, as a writer who often creates what I've termed "bro lit," I feel that it's had an effect on what kinds of male stories get published. They are often either over-the-top tales of toxic masculinity, or they feature male characters I don't really recognize. 

One might also note other anomalies in the data. A whopping 19% identify as something other than straight, although the percentage of people in the general population identifying themselves as LGBT is around 7%. As in music and film, if anything, there is an over-representation of non-straight voices, at least in terms of raw numbers. This might be because there is something about literature that tends to attract LGBT people. Indeed, I've taken personality inventories that suggested I was gay, largely based on nothing more than my self-identified love of poetry. So there's likely nothing invidious in it, but it would be hard to claim that if there's an under-representation in publishing of non-straight voices, it's owing to a lack of representation among decision makers. 

That same study from Lee & Low Books identified a number of improvements within publishing that have taken place since the first survey they took. All in all, the assumed dire situation all three share seems overstated. We are in the middle of a shift, and if the slow and steady approach hasn't yielded all the results we'd like right away, that's no reason to suddenly switch to the nuclear option.

You keep on citing those statistics. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

4. Putting the author back in the center of literary study will undo a century of important critical work

In his essay "Authorship in Contemporary American Literature," Anis Shivani traces the history of the place of the author in critical theory over the last 100 years. Once, critics viewed the mind of the author, or the author's true intent, as the transcendental signified it was the critic's duty to discover. However, after first the New Critics and then Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, not only did the author cease to be the central foucs of literary study, but actually, in the more extreme versions, the author disappeared entirely. The author was "dead," to use the title of Barthes' essay. 

However, Shivani observes that, counter to the critical preference for the decentralizing of the author, the publishing industry prefers to have the author at the center of literarture. "From technology to economics to culture, the tendency today ought to be for the supremacy of ecriture (writing), the reduction of the author to scriptor, whereas in fact the literary industry pushes hard for exactly the opposite, the transcendence of the author and the negation of the reader."

Criticism sees the death of the author as an important part of dismantling authoritarianism in general, because of the way it gives freedom to the reader, whereas authors "actively excluding creative readers from interpretation" is exactly what publishers want. The author's "own authenticity deriving in large part from the academic discourse of diversity, authors must blend into this discourse if they are to have any authority in the marketplace of texts. Authority is extracted ultimately from the community of novice writers, rather than freestanding critics, again evoking medieval conditions. Active readership, which may take interpretation in such stray directions, becomes a hindrance to the author's establishment of authenticity, which rests on constraining the possible range of interpretations."

Criticism of all sorts viewed author-centered readings with suspicion. To use one example from feminist theory, Toril Moi's criticism of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic undermines the way the book assumed a unitary and whole female author throughout its history of literature, a move that ironically reified the entire patriarchal structure it was meant to attack: "For the patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin, and meaning of the text. If we are to undo this patriarchal practice of authority, we must take one further step and proclaim with Roland Barthes the death of the author." 

Chen claimed that "When it comes to writing... acknowledging the totality of the person behind the piece is arguably just as important as the piece itself."  What is this if not putting the author's identity at the forefront in a way even the pre-New Critical world would not have? 

My own biases and interests 

I conclude by acknowledging that I, like everyone trying to publish fiction, have my own interests that are affected by the philosophies or editing staffs. If they are to actively, rather than wistfully, push for greater diversity of story tellers--and they should--then this likely makes the odds longer for me. I don't want to write this, because it sounds like "reverse racism" nonsense, but I don't see how the math works out any other way. The majority of writers submitting to any mainstream journal are probably white. Let's say a staff makes a decision to actively pursue diversity by considering the identity of the writer, and says that of the four stories it will chose to publish in its next edition, at least two must be by writers of color. If 80% of the 500 submissions are from white writers, my odds of getting published are now 200 to 1. The odds of a writer of color are 50 to 1. Those odds are still terrible for both of us. The point is not to claim some kind of reverse racism, but I think it's dishonest gasligthing not to admit that at least in the short term, the odds for a non-established white, cis-male, straight author of breaking in through a journal are going to be longer than those of a lesbian Chinese-American woman. 

Of course, the writers of these essays would argue that the practice isn't unfair, because the writer of color had to overcome more obstacles just to get to a place where she could submit a story to a journal at all. There's certainly merit to that argument, and in the big picture of what's good for society, the practice is likely beneficial. But when I get rejections and feel like I'm worthless for a day, I may not care about what's good for society as a whole. I'm not going to argue that my feelings are a reason to keep the old policies, but editors should at least be aware that those feelings will exist. 

The big difference between what I'm saying and what a "reverse racism" proponent would say is that I'm not really arguing that it should be different. Harold Bloom complained about literary awards given out based more on the identity of the writer than on the quality, but I've found, as a close reader of short fiction award winners for the past decade, that the quality of writing of stories hasn't gone down. I would guess that what's more likely happening is that editors are getting an abundance of stories good enough--and here, I'll use "good" unproblematically--to be published. With more good stories than they can publish, they look to authorial identity as a sort of tie-breaker. It's much the way affirmative action college decisions were supposed to be made. This is a fine way to pick stories, and probably as good a way to decide between stories of relatively equal merit as there could be. 

The biggest award I've received as a writer was winning New Letters' Robert Day Award for fiction. I won a contest that was read blind. The judge was a female writer of color. I wonder if she read my story, about a North Korean defector working at a hotel in Seoul, and found it "felt" authentic enough that it likely came from an ethnically Korean writer. I wonder if that helped me win. Nobody ever said anything to me about it, and the magazine still runs this contest without identifying information on entries. That story had been a near-miss at many journals before winning the contest, and I do wonder if it would have ever been published in such a high-quality journal if it hadn't been for a blind contest. If there are no blind contests again, I might never get into such a high quality magazine again. 

If that's true, it's okay. Proponents argue that in the long run, this activist approach might actually help writers like me, because it will grow the community of readers. Ideally, it would make journals less financially strapped in the future as the literary world becomes less moribund. I'm skeptical this will happen, but I do think that of all the attempts to actively improve our society's assumptions about race, the most effective one has been the proliferation of narrative platforms to new and diverse voices. If I have to be a part of the generation of white writers whose prospects shrank for the first time in history in order to get there, then I accept that, based on utilitarian "greatest good for the greatest number" reasoning. I'd only ask that in return, I not be given assurances that things are still easier for white, male writers than they are for everyone else. This might be true for established writers, but I don't think it's true for people trying to break in. The math just doesn't support that. 

Why this Super Bowl stings a bit

I'm from northeast Ohio and grew up rooting for the Browns. When I moved to Maryland near Baltimore in 2004, I didn't really embrace the Ravens, because, as anyone who knows their football history is aware of, when the Browns closed up shop in Cleveland in 1995, they moved to Baltimore. Then, using the players and organization they took with them, they promptly won a Super Bowl in 2001, the same Super Bowl that had eluded the Browns and continues to elude them to this day. 

When I watch football now, I try very hard not to root for teams. I want to enjoy the game with perfect equanimity, appreciating greatness wherever it shows. To help me achieve this emotional detachment, if I find myself thinking I might root for one team during a game, I immediately place a bet for the other team to win. This usually enables me to find some level of calm.

During the AFC Championship game a few weeks ago, though, I was not able to keep calm. Even when I placed a bet on the Chiefs, I couldn't keep from rooting for the Ravens. No, it did not have to do with Taylor Swift hatred, although I do wonder why the universe thinks it necessary to heap so much good fortune on one person. It was because I was hoping a victory by the Ravens would put to rest a sneakily racist attitude still living among some fans.

For a very long time, there were no Black quarterbacks. Open and undisguised racism was a big part of it. Coaches didn't think Black players were smart enough to be quarterbacks. They thought they were athletic enough to be running backs or wide receivers or linemen, but not quarterbacks. Last year's Super Bowl, when two Black quarterbacks faced off against each other, was a huge moment for the game. But there is still sneakily racist discourse about Black quarterbacks, especially ones who are also athletic. Among fans I speak to or read, I continue to see and hear what I take to be coded racist language, particularly when it comes to the Ravens' quarterback, Lamar Jackson. This language will sound something like this:

A: Mobile quarterbacks can win some games, but they'll never win a Super Bowl.

B: Wasn't John Elway pretty mobile? And Steve Young? 

A: Yeah, but they were different. They were pass-first and then they ran when they had to.

B: Young played a long time. Elway played a long time. They both had a lot of years when they didn't win a Super Bowl. Won't Jackson likely eventually get one, too?

A: No, because he's just not that good. 

B: Not good how? His teams put up tons of points.

A: But not in the playoffs.

B: Isn't it just hard to win playoff games against good teams?

A: But the greats do it, and he's not that great. He can run, but Super Bowl quarterbacks stand in the pocket and make throws in crunch time. 

When I hear this kind of bullshit from white fans, I feel like they're offering me a shibboleth, because they think that as a white person, I might want to join them in their coded horseshit. It makes me angry that anyone thinks I want to be a part of their shenanigans. 

Unlike Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, last year's winning Super Bowl quarterback, who is part white, Jackson does not give a great interview. He is not especially handsome or dynamic or magnetic. He's just a great football player. Vaguely racist fans, in their illogical worldview, don't see Mahomes as a violation of their rule that athletic, Black quarterbacks can't also be smart and efficient throwing the ball in the pocket. Jackson would have been.

Jackson has had some great years, but never much playoff success. This year was his best year, and it had a lot to do with having an offensive coordinator who understood how to use him as a weapon. I think that often, when athletic quarterbacks have struggled, it's been because so few coordinators understand how to use them. 

The Ravens had a great chance. They were the best team in the league all year, they had home-field advantage, and they were relatively healthy. They just picked a lousy time to play their worst game of the year. 

I'm not a football expert, but I think you can look at a few reasons why they lost. The Chiefs do have a very good defense, and their defensive coordinator came up with some clever tricks to keep the Ravens off-balance. The Ravens also probably didn't have a great game plan. A week after the Chiefs gave up a ton of running yard to the Bills, the Ravens, who were the best running team in the league, didn't really run the ball much. There was also some bad luck, like a fumble right at the goal line. 

The Ravens also probably suffered from the wrong mindset, playing not to lose rather than to win. That's the fault of everyone, not just Jackson. Jackson didn't play a great game. Brady, Manning, Mahomes, and the other greats have a lot of playoff wins to their name when they also didn't play great, but they played well enough to win. Jackson very nearly did that, gutting out a tough win under tough circumstances. Football is cruel. It's why I try not to root for teams. 

I did root in that game, just because I wanted a very stupid racist trope to get another kick in the pants. It'll have to wait until next year, though. I'm sure the NFL is thrilled to have a Taylor Swift extravaganza for its big night, and I'm sure ratings will be through the roof. The Ravens will be kicking themselves, although they shouldn't be. Football teams make adjustments throughout the year. They find weaknesses in other teams and shore up their own. The Chiefs benefitted from a bad spell in the middle of the season when other teams showed them where they were weak. They fixed the problem just in time to make a good run in the playoffs. The Ravens, unfortunately, didn't have anyone to show them where they were weak until that AFC Championship Game. 

I can't imagine how athletes pick themselves up emotionally from losses like that, where the job in front of them now is to go play another entire season well enough to get back where they were and redeem themselves. It must seem so daunting. But I hope they do it. Just, you know, not enough that I'm going to root for them. 

Have I been a low-key CNF guy all along?

Despair has its advantages. I know I've said a dozen times in the last ten years that I was giving up writing fiction, but this current funk feels more permanent, in proportion to the acuteness of the despair. At the very least, I needed a break, so for the time being, I've moved on from reading contemporary literary fiction. Not knowing what to read instead, I've been kind of choosing things at random. One recent book I read was the 2023 Best American Essays collection, edited by Vivian Gornick. It says "essays," but I think the book is filled with what might be more accurately called "creative non-fiction." Some of the entries are essays, in the sense that they're sustained discourse or argument about a subject or theme. But many are more short memoir.

Whether they were essay or memoir, I found myself much more engaged and interested in the anthology than I have been in perhaps any volume of Best American Short Stories. I only found myself not generally enthralled with two of the entries. Maybe this is simply because it's new to me. People who spend a lot of time with one type of literature--like, say, the short stories that show up in literary magazines--tend to get a little fastidious. When "Cat Person" became a big sensation, the strongest backlash against it was from the literary fiction community, for whom it was just one story among many, and not the best example. Ordinary readers seemed to love it, or at least hate it in a way where they were interested in it. So maybe I just don't know enough about what contemporary CNF looks like to find the faults in this collection. 

I've had some exposure to CNF, of course, but never read one essay after another the way I did for the book. It's strange to say, but I found reading non-fiction, which you'd think of as dryer and more like work than reading stories, to be far less taxing than reading fiction. Reading it was closer to pleasure than I've felt in a long time. More than this being a result of my lack of exposure to CNF, I think I might have been discovering, this late in the game, that I've really got more of a CNF mind than a fictional one. 

I don't mind the occasional slant-wise telling of the truth, but maybe at heart, I'm kind of a pragmatic guy who wants you to just give it to me plain. Even in reading fiction all these years, I think the greatest pleasure I've gotten in it has been when I've felt I was able to take a work of fiction and then re-cast it into an essay analyzing the fiction in plain language. I've valued the slant truth in no small part for the opportunity it's given me to try to straighten it back out. 

Even when writing my own fiction, I think I've tended to try to write the kinds of stories that lend themselves to the very kind of analysis I like to do. That contrasts with how a lot of fiction writers say they write. They tend to be more like method actors, who try to treat their characters like real people and then become them. I always found this way of talking about one's characters, like what they did "surprised" you, to be a little annoying and artificial. There was an episode of "Only Murders in the Building" this most recent season in which Matthew Broderick plays himself, only the version of himself is so obsessed with getting to the core of his character, it eventually drives his director, Oliver, to fire him. That's what a lot of fiction writers sound like to me. 

I've toyed with trying CNF over the years, but one major hurdle has stopped me. I still don't really understand the line between CNF and, say, a very good editorial. Google's first offered answer to the question seems to me more or less in the right ballpark. It suggests that compared to traditional essays, CNF is more likely to emphasize scene, character development, narrative, and subjectivity. Concerning subjectivity, it suggests that: "In traditional nonfiction, the writer keeps a distance from the subject. But in creative nonfiction, the writer’s perspective, emotions, and insights can be part of the story. This is particularly true of personal essays, which are often written from a first-person point of view."

Okay, so that would explain why sometimes, I've read CNF and not realized it wasn't a short story until the end. To judge by the 2023 anthology, some CNF is nothing but a personal story without any real reflection on how it might fit into a larger theme in the world. "Any Kind of Leaving" by Jillian Barnett would be one example. Some begin as memoir but then transition into thoughts on how the personal fits into the political. For example, "Care Credit" by Angelique Stevens begins with the author's own struggles with poverty, with her poor dental health as the leading symbol of that poverty, then occasionally moves into thoughts about American health care in general. Still other entries were very like traditional essay, with only small amounts of narrative or personal experience thrown in. "Gender: A Melee" by Laura Kipnis could have appeared in Mother Jones or, if it was feeling particularly frisky that day, The Atlantic, and not seemed out of place. "Life and Story" by Sigrid Nunez is more "essay about the literature on why writers write with occasional personal information" than it is grounded in the personal with occasional references to the world. "An Archaeological Inquest" by Phillip Lopate begins with a story of someone giving him an old literary review, but the essay is entirely an analysis of the old review and an assessment of how literary culture has since changed. 

Other than the literary analysis I do on this blog, I think a lot of what I write on here could be considered CNF. But if so, it leans toward the kind of CNF where it's "essay with occasional personal bits" rather than the other kind, and I think the other kind is a lot more prevalent and likely to be published among journals that publish CNF. I think editors are unlikely to want much of what I write. One of the essays in the anthology this year was "Dreamers Awaken" by Scott Spencer, a memoir-short about a baby boomer who was once asked to play John Henry in blackface for a school concert. It's a great read, but at the end, it kind of intentionally avoids drawing conclusions about its meaning in the larger context of society. He is standing with a black school official he tried to apologize to, with her seeming to refuse to understand the meaning of his apology. "We were in our own little impromptu pageant, folktales from the future, and we were waiting for the invisible proctor to tell us in a whisper, or perhaps with some urgency, what to say next." It's perfect for the story, but I tend to write stuff that's more like "Here's how to solve racism" and then I use a few personal experiences to make my point. That seems likely to get the editor's "not for us" generic rejection letter. 

I started this blog as a way to work through the frustrations of trying to figure out writing, but also, since I was sure I would figure them out, to be a record in the future of how I had done so. It would be there to encourage others struggling along the same path. See how much trouble Jake had? But he got through it, and so will you. Now that I've despaired of ever really succeeding, I've often thought of just making this blog my whole writing project. 

Of course, that presents me with a problem of presentation. It seems like a successful blog (if such things still exist in a world with TikTok) would need to have content more or less centered on a coherent, central theme. Writing about literary fiction in some sense gave me such a theme. Readers might tolerate an occasional digression into "Here's how to solve racism," but only if I'm normally sticking to one kind of topic. "Jake's brilliant thoughts on sundry things" can't be the main draw of the blog. Not if I want people to read it, which I do.

I guess I could change this to a blog that writes about CNF. I could write a lot of analysis of CNF, the same as I've done for fiction, and then occasionally mix it up with my own CNF. But CNF, I think, doesn't really lend itself to the kind of analysis I've been doing for fiction. Fiction isn't making an argument in a straightforward way. It needs analysis in order for ordinary human brains to see more in them than the surface story. But CNF is sort of already analyzed. Especially in the more essay-like forms of CNF, what it has to say, it has already said in more or less plain terms. I could write personal responses to CNF pieces, but for the most part, there wouldn't be a lot to break down. 

Ceasing to write altogether isn't an option for me. Responding to the world with words is like breathing. Despair will stop me from submitting stories to the journals who've rejected me a million times, but it won't keep me from writing. Not for good. As many doubts as I have about being as good as I wish I were, I also feel pretty certain I'm a better writer than many people who make a living doing it, so I feel like I deserve some sort of platform. Or if not deserve, at least it's not an abomination. 

Whatever form my writing takes from here, I'm glad I chose to spend some time with CNF, however I've felt in the past about the uncertainty of what it is. I felt things reading I haven't felt in a long time, and in the end, I realized I still have a lot more I want to say myself. 

If my New Year's resolution was to remain ambivalent about writing, I'm nailing it

For most of my life, when I've considered the ubiquitous question writers get asked about why they write, I've always thought of it as something of an after-the-fact justification of what I was already doing. I wrote all the time, starting almost as soon as I became a serious reader as a teenager. So answering the question was something of a rearguard action, an attempt to justify what I was already doing. I was never going to come up with an answer that made me say, "Oh, you know what? That's a bad reason for writing. I should stop doing it." I couldn't help but write, so seeking to answer a question about why I was doing it was more of a philosophical curiosity than a matter of practical urgency. It wasn't like considering the question of whether I should take a particular job or marry somebody. It was more like finding myself naked in bed with a beautiful woman and for some reason taking a second to ponder the mystery of human sexuality and why we enjoy it so much. There was no doubt about what I was going to do; I was only indulging in a brief reverie before diving in. 

The question now, though, is totally different. After having spent most of my available free time over the last ten years focused as much as time would allow either on writing fiction or writing for this blog, I find myself unwilling to sit down and transfer thoughts into words. I still have the same urge as always, but inevitably, before I put my butt on the back-friendly yoga ball to begin writing, I am waylaid by wondering, "What's the point?"

Most writers will say one reason they write is because they can't stop themselves. I always felt that way, too. So where I am now is like waking up and finding I don't like sex or chocolate anymore. Or maybe it's like still liking chocolate but the last 32 times I've eaten it, it's given me explosive diarrhea, so now I'm reluctant to eat it again. 

I don't like refraining from writing. I don't feel like myself. But there are also some pretty strong reasons why I can't get myself into my seat to write. They're not as strong as explosive diarrhea, maybe, but they're strong enough I don't know if I'll be able to get over them.

1. Maybe I'm not that good

When somebody asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she said, "Because I'm good at it." I don't draw or paint precisely because what I create is ugly, and it gives me no pleasure to look at what I've made when I'm done. With writing, though, there are at least some occasions where I will re-read something I've written and feel joy reading it, the same kind of joy I would feel reading something somebody else had written. 

But for almost three years now, I've just been unable to get anything published. Part of that is on me. For all that time, I've only been sending in work to top-tier journals. After I won New Letters' Robert Day Fiction Contest in 2020, followed soon after by publication in The Bellevue Literary Review, I felt like I had drawn pretty close to my goal of writing fiction good enough to be published in top tier journals. It's not that I'm a journal snob. I was always gratified and grateful when any journal, no matter how small, accepted my work. But I want to be read. When I was sending out to every journal on Earth, it was partly about trying to figure out if I was in the right ballpark. After twenty or so of those acceptances, I had the feedback I needed. If I want to be read, it doesn't do any good to be published in a smaller journal. 

Since 2020, I've written five short stories that I think are better than anything I wrote before. None has broken into a top journal. I've still had plenty of encouraging rejections, including from The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Agni, One Story, The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Colorado Review. Some have given me positive feedback more than once. 

Maybe I ought to keep plugging away, feeling like I'm close and I just need to bide my time and wait to get lucky, but I feel now like "almost good enough for a top-tier journal" is my limit. I can't write better than what I've done in the last three years, and it's not good enough. I understand that sometimes, it's a matter of luck. Every journal gets tons of great stories and can only publish a few, and they're looking for a blend of perspectives, so I might just not fit that particular edition. But if I were as good as I want to be, I'd be impossible to reject. I'm not, and I don't think I ever will be.

When somebody tells me I should keep going with writing because I'm almost there, I always think of this gambler's fallacy meme my son showed me.

2. For a variety of reasons, I don't think it's realistic I will get better

I might never have been talented enough. I'm sure there's a certain neural makeup to a great writer that's partly there when they're born, and that also has to be nurtured a certain way early on. It's possible I was doomed from birth, or doomed from early childhood because I missed certain developmental processes necessary to building the right neural network for a creative writer. 

But even if that's not true, even if I still had a chance in adulthood, I don't think I have a chance now. It's true that if you work at something, you tend to get better. I've definitely improved greatly since taking writing seriously in my early 40s. But I'm in my early 50s now, and I feel myself slipping cognitively in a general sense. It's maybe not serious yet--I forget a word here and there while speaking more than I used to, I find long hours at work less easy to endure--but it's enough that I'm probably not really building the new connections in my brain necessary to improve creatively. It's like where I am at the gym now. I'm not really out there to be the strongest I've ever been. I'm just trying to slow down decline. 

Even if I were younger, I've always had a stumbling block to developing as a writer, which is that I can't read prodigiously. I'm a good reader, but I can't read for long stretches most of the time. I get too caught up in my own thoughts about what I'm reading, and I have to take breaks to walk around and think about what I've just read. I've always been this way. It's always been a bit of an embarrassment for me around literary friends, who talk about reading a hundred books a year or more. I do read, of course. I don't do it efficiently, and so I don't read as widely as many serious readers do, but I try to make up for it by reading well when I do read. If I have to take a test, I'm capable of focusing for hours at a time, but I can't maintain that every day.  

Reading well if not much is fine for much of the kind of analysis I do on this blog, but I think you have to read both deeply and broadly to improve as a writer.  A would-be great writer has to fill their mind all the time with the best writing. I can't do that, and even if I could, I'm probably too old for it to have the impact it would have on a younger mind. 

3. I can't get away from the world

I recently read Sigrid Nunez's "Life and Story" in The Sewanee Review, in which she ponders the "why write" question at great length. It's a great summary of the many explanations people have given to this question, along with many of the doubts a writer faces if she has any sense. Many are the same doubts I've expressed over the years, such as the question of how to justify writing about unreal things in a world with so many real problems. 

One problem Nunez focuses on is how much concentration writing takes. All that concentration and focus and wrangling means time not spent with those around you. It means time not spent fixing the storm door or edging the lawn. It means time not spent on your day job, the one that pays the bills. 

Nunez recalls how her mentor, Susan Sontag, encouraged her to let writing be the central focus of her life:

"While it seemed everyone else wanted to know how I intended to earn a living, or when I was going to settle down, Sontag was talking about something else. Put the writing first, she said. Teach if you must, but don't feel that you have to become affiliated with an institution. Don't give up your independence. Forget the safety of tenure. Forget safety, period. Forget everything but the work."

Living in financial uncertainty while devoted only to the work has been a popular choice for writers, perhaps second only to having enough of a fortune, through heredity or marriage, you don't have to think about survival at all. There's nobility to it, the same way there is nobility in those who choose penury and celibacy in the service of God. I was planning at one point on that path, but I fell in love and had a child, and at that point, I realized I HAD to care about safety. 

Almost twenty years later, now with two kids, both of whom are struggling to figure out their own path to financial safety, the demands of the world are as great on me as ever. It has an effect on my writing. Even when I try to conserve some energy for writing, the effort and time I put into my job robs me of those same resources I need for arduous creative work. It fills my head with the wrong kind of energy.

Of course, other writers have managed to succeed while working for a living, but I think most succeeded at a younger age than I am now. I have writer friends who work and raise kids and write, mostly at teacher or editor jobs that don't pay as well as my job does, which means they have extra financial concerns I don't. But the thing is that none of those friends are doing any better at succeeding--based on my definition of the term--than I am. That's in spite of the fact that their teacher/editor jobs give them a better network to publicize their work with than I have. Writing is hard to do well even if you mortgage everything to focus on it, and anyone who's trying to both raise a family and cut open their spiritual veins to bleed onto the page is going to have an even harder time of it.

In my case, because my day job I've ended up in could be thought to be important in a cold and calculated "real world" sort of way, I often wonder if the morally right choice isn't to shutter writing altogether and focus on my day job. There's a good chance that an improvement in my ability to do my job could have more of a positive impact on the world than anything I'll write at home. The only reason I've continued to write is because my own mental health couldn't stand not doing it. I wouldn't have been able to do my day job at all if I didn't write, I reasoned, because I'd have killed myself or ended up in a loony bin. Sometimes, though, I think that my indulging of my writing habit is just my own selfishness or ego. 

4. I'm exactly the wrong level of educated as a critic now

Since fiction writing wasn't working out how I'd hoped in the near term, I felt like I'd found a nice niche writing analysis of literary fiction on this blog. This was mostly of short story anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories and, if I had time and energy for it, Pushcart or O. Henry as well. It felt useful to me, because I thought that as a veteran of graduate-level studies in literature, I could be something of a bridge to ordinary people looking to investigate literary fiction. I've certainly been grateful for podcasts from philosophy Ph.D.s or other experts who seek to open up their disciplines to curious outsiders. I hoped to do the same for literature. 

I realized I wasn't quite a full expert. I didn't go on for a Ph.D. myself, and there are gaps in my understanding of literary theory as well as the history of literature and literary criticism. Still, since as one of my favorite professors as an undergrad said, you can never go wrong with a sensitive close reading, I felt like performing my close readings for all would help them to do their own. 

I was happy with my approach of close reading with occasional supplements from theory or literary history until last year. The mistake I made was trying to take criticism more seriously. I'd decided that since I was unlikely to ever make the breakthrough as a fiction writer I hoped to make, I should focus instead on doing the best job of writing the blog I could. I tried to go back and fill in gaps in theory and history.

All I succeeded in doing was to become more aware of how great a gap I have between the knowledge I actually have and what I'd like to have. To fill that gap, I'd have to quit my job and spend years pursuing the expertise I lack. All so I could write a blog that maybe a few hundred people occasionally look at. If I wasn't going to abandon my life for fiction, I certainly wasn't going to do it for writing about fiction. 

So I've ended up in a place where I can't go back to just doing close readings, and I'm nowhere near being able to write what I'd like to be able to write, so I don't want to write anything. My shoot-from-the-hip close readings no longer seem to be enough, and what I'd like to do--a still-accessible but more informed flavor of criticism--is beyond me. I feel like the incarnation of Pope's a little learning being a dangerous thing, only I'm aware of how dangerous I am. 

My cycle

So that's where I am. I'm miserable not writing, because it doesn't feel like me, but I'm also miserable writing, because it feels pointless. Yes, I know that many, many writers offer the therapeutic advice that you should write for yourself and whether it gets published or wins awards or earns praise isn't the point. But I do not want to write just to amuse myself. If nobody is ever going to read what I write, I don't want to write. That's not human connection, which, I think, ought to be at least part of why someone would write. 

My day job values being succinct above all other writing virtues, and they love it when you can draw a picture for something instead of making people read words, which everyone hates. So I've summarized all the above verbosity into the following flow chart:

Looking for life after literary fiction

Can one Marie Kondo one's reading life? Decide to leave unread that which does not bring one joy? It seems obvious that one could, although since my late teen years, I've made a lot of my reading decisions based at least in part on what I thought I should read. In fact, I probably weighed should over want to most of the time. It comes with making literature your major, I guess. You fall into a habit of thinking that if you're not reading something on an assigned list, you'll pay for it in the end. 

Since I took up writing seriously ten years ago, I've probably gravitated toward literary fiction at least in part because I thought it was what I should read. It wasn't the entire reason, though. There were at least two other reasons. First and by far the larger of the two reasons is that I read seeking answers to life's big questions, and I thought I'd find that more in literary fiction than in, say, books about sexy cowboy werewolves. I mean, I'm sure Renee Rose and Vanessa Vale have a lot of great thoughts about why there is something rather than nothing and the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, but perhaps it's fair to say that these thoughts don't quite make it into their fiction. I wanted fiction that met my expectations of substance. So in a very real sense, literary fiction is what I want to read. The second reason is because I felt like my own writing was probably more like literary fiction than anything else, and I wanted to learn from others to improve my own work. 

After ten years of it, though, I've been a little disappointed in literary fiction's ability to come through in either category. On the one hand, I can count on one hand the novels and short stories I've read in the last ten years that I found deeply transformational in terms of how I view my place in the universe. Meanwhile, although I've definitely improved as a writer and now accomplished things that are pretty good for an amateur, I'm stuck and unlikely to get unstuck. My ceiling seems to be to occasionally get a good response from the top tier journals but never quite make it in. Since I do not wish to only be a consumer of fiction but a producer as well, I've found my participation in a scene I can't break into very frustrating. Frustrating enough that I will drop my annual critical project in the middle because a story rubbed me the wrong way and I wasn't quite able to explain why. 

But it's not like I'm going to quit reading altogether. At times over the last ten years, I've wondered whether I really am a lit fic writer (or primarily a lit fic reader). I love a well-made sentence, or a voice that sticks with you for days after you read it, but there were times I found myself wishing I could read a story once in a while where you could summarize the plot in a few sentences. Or where I could even tell what the plot was the first time through reading. 

So after putting down this year's Best American Short Stories, the first thing I picked up was an anthology of science fiction short stories. There wasn't an obvious equivalent to BASS in sci-fi, but "The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023," edited by R.F. Kuang, had "American" in it, so I picked that. 

It's different, all right

The first story in the anthology was first published in Conjunctions, which I know as a publisher of lit fic, so I was wondering if I'd even made a change. This story, "Readings in the Slantwise Sciences" by Sofia Samatar, could have been in BASS. Well, kind of. If could have been in BASS if the guest editor were really into hippie fantasy. But in general, it was still what I would characterize as being a somewhat language-centric story. 

After that, though, there started to be a real divergence from lit fic. One thing that surprised me was the prevalence of fantasy. I guess the name of the book did have fantasy in it, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was sort of guessing the mix would be about 17 sci-fi to 3 fantasy. Some of the stories were a little bit tough to classify as either, but I believe the anthology more or less alternated between sci-fi and fantasy, with some of the fantasy entries being horror.

I did not care for most of the fantasy, and I found myself wishing the publishing industry did not find it necessary to package sci-fi and fantasy together. I don't find they really have that much to do with each other or scratch a similar itch, and rather than making each other strong by joining forces, I found that the combination was in danger of causing their mutually assured destruction. I'm not going to go into depth about why I disliked most of the fantasy entries, because it's not my thing and that really is all there is to it. I find few things less magical than magic. "Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology" by Theodora Goss was an exception, but for the most part, I was much more interested in the sci-fi stories.

One of the difficulties in writing science fiction is how to explain how your world is different from the reader's world (and often how your world got to its current state from the reader's world) without boring the reader with exposition. 

This is an especially perplexing problem for a sci-fi short story, which has very little space in which to build an alternate world. Consider "Rabbit Test" by Samantha Mills, one of two stories in the collection reflecting concerns in the current, real world about bodily autonomy in the wake of the overturn of Roe v Wade. The world of this story has a whole slew of new controls on nubile and especially pregnant women to introduce, so how does it do it without a lame screen scroll type of information dump?

Guest editor R.F. Kuang, echoing advice she herself has received, recommends dealing with the problem by writing "not from the point of view of someone encountering a world for the first time, but of someone who has lived in this world all their life...What do they notice? What is new to them? What is so natural to them that it hardly warrants comment? What are the bizarre pronouncements that only they could make?" 

Some of the stories in the BASFF anthology pull this off better than others. "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" goes in the complete other direction. It reads like a mockumentary, and at least half of the narrative is exposition, the kind that would be given to the viewer of a non-fiction documentary. I found the effect a little bit dull, and this was one of the stories I struggled the most to get through. Other stories pulled off Kuang's advice much better. "Termination Stories for the Cyber Dystopia" by Isabel J. Kim, "Pre-Simulation Consultation" by Kim Fu, and "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente were the three best stories in the collection. "Termination" in particular was extremely adept at getting the reader to understand its world without breaking from the narrative to explain it. 

Committing to the bit

Huang expressed her love in her introduction for stories that "commit" to whatever storytelling choices they make. This love spills over for her into "camp, silliness, and everything stylized." This includes Moulin Rouge, which I also love, but also the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, which I detest. She loves ""genres that lean fully into what they are," stories that "take themselves completely seriously."  She is tired of "leather-clad superheroes winking to declare, 'Don't worry--I'm not taking this too seriously." She is wary of irony, which she feels often substitutes for wit. 

Compare this to literary fiction. If literary fiction had a motto, it might be an adaptation of what Harold Bloom wrote about poetry in his introduction to the 1997 Best American Poetry series' "best of the best" anthology. He said that "all bad poetry is unfailingly sincere." I think this could well be the motto of a lot of literary fiction as well. It might believe that all bad fiction is unfailingly sincere. 

So we have two poles here, lit fic preferring cool detachment over sincerity, and Kuang's vision fo alternate world fiction as charmingly naive and self-serious. Since I've been reading literary fiction for a long time, I've probably come to identify a little bit with the idea that I should have some level of detachment from my own work, that I need to be its master and, no matter how emotionally I identify with its subject matter, that I should make decisions about the story with an objective eye.

There were times while reading BASFF that I could, in fact, have lived with a little less "commitment"  and a little bit more attention to language, form, and style, the very things I've been thinking literary fiction overemphasized at times. I'm not going to name stories here, but a few used words wrong or had a style that was so "sincere," so untainted by discipline and art, it became jarringly unpleasant.

However, on the whole, I found it a welcome reprieve from literary fiction. I liked stories where plot was at the center. I liked stories that were quixotically taking on universe-sized questions rather than soberly putting a small portion of existence under the microscope. While my literary fiction reading might have occasionally made me too snooty for some parts of the anthology, I also found myself wishing that many literary fiction stories could allow themselves the openness, silliness, or lack of concern for propriety in the stories I was reading. 

I suppose it should be no surprise that my preferred style might be somewhere between high art and low. I need enough plot and "commitment" to be engaged, but also enough skill and control to be entranced. I don't want so much earnestness there is no thought of form, but I don't want form to take over so much there is no possibility of earnestness trumping form, leaving some parts technically imperfect but emotionally resonant. 

Politically, I'm too conservative to be a liberal and too liberal to be a conservative, so why shouldn't I be in a no-man's land aesthetically in writing as well? In any event, it was enjoyable to do something different, so I'll probably continue with "different" for a while. 

 

 

Enough for now

I've sworn I was finished with writing and blogging about writing and so on enough times now that nobody will take me seriously if I swear I'm done again, but I am taking a break. The last story was a good place to end, what with its relevance to current world events and the fact that almost the last words in it were "I am sorry, Jacob." Kind of like the universe was talking directly to me in response to my complete failure to accomplish what I wanted to as a writer. I'm not in any kind of place to give myself over to the stories in BASS this year. 

This fall is the twentieth anniversary of the end of my time in graduate school, and it's been ten years since I picked up my notebook again and actually gave writing a sustained try. Right now, I feel like all of that was a huge waste of time. I don't really have anything great to replace it with, but I don't want to keep going enough that I'd rather deal with a big empty place in my life than with continuing to fail. 

Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to keep doing this. That's why I gave BASS another try this year. But the few people who comment on here aren't really enough for me to say this is a good use of my time and effort. 

Pulling at the fringes of the universe's tallis: "The Master Mourner" by Ben Ehrlich

It's pretty obvious that "The Master Mourner" belongs to a class of stories that could be grouped under the category of "stories with ambiguous endings." The way you're asking yourself "What did he say to her" at the end of Lost in Translation, or the way you're wondering what was real and what was an implanted memory at the end of Total Recall, or the way you're asking yourself "What the hell did I just watch?" after 2001: A Space Odyssey or Inception, so at the end of "The Master Mourner," I think it's pretty easy to find yourself asking what has gone on. The story itself encourages the reader to look for secret conspiracies and hidden shenanigans, beginning as it does with the Hebrew school teacher who once helped the Irgun to carry out a terrorist plot against British occupiers of Israel by distracting them with her piano playing. The reader at the end of "Master Mourner" is justified in wondering if he, too, has been distracted throughout in order to be surprised by a bomb at the end. 

There are hints throughout the story that a secret plot--in both the literary and espionage meanings of the word--is going on beneath the surface plot, which resembles a familiar Jewish coming-of-age story. Jacob, son of Henry Singer, fails to emotionally connect to his mother's death when he is young. Jacob only experiences mourning as series of social obligations he must fulfill: "...to open the door with my face prepared with a mourner's mixture of pale sorrow, stiff resilience, and a hint of eye-smiling gratitude for the offering of yet another fruit basket." He looks upon his duties as a mourner much like he looks upon singing and praying at church--as something to be endured until it's over. Meanwhile, Jacob's father seems to check out emotionally after the death of his wife. He retreats to a "different realm," one in which nothing reaches him, where even if Jacob tries to yell to him or to buy the wrong eggs to "get him out of reverse," the sound is "inaudible to him." As opposed to the Hebrew teacher with her three hearts allowing her to be resilient even through trauma, Henry stops running, a hobby he seemingly enjoyed, because, he claims, he has a bad heart. Bad heart, indeed. 

That's the surface story, at least, but there's another story straining to be heard throughout. Even inanimate objects seem to be trying to let Jacob know something is afoot. The pews in synagogue squeak "No!" and "Please" to him. The floors of his house say "No! Stay!" when he goes to answer the door in the middle of the night. 

Then there's Jacob's understanding that the universe is full of mysteries to be solved and resolved. When he attends temple as a boy, impatiently waiting for the end of service, he spends "most of the time playing with the fringes that dangled from my father's tallis. I tugged at them, pretending they were levers that opened the ark or did some other unexpected trick." Jacob hopes to open the ark, the replica in the temple of THE ark, the ancient religious relic that supposedly housed the glory of the Lord God himself. Jacob hopes, that is, to unlock the mysteries of the universe. 

However, he is doomed to disappointment. Moses-like, he hears the voice of God as a young man when he is coming out of the drug store where he picked up medicine for his ill mother. Jacob is wondering if he will end up like his father, and God Almighty answers: "Of course." Near the end of the story, Jacob, having tried to embarrass synagogue icon Bernie Bernstein, is ashamed when he realizes Bernie lost a brother in the Holocaust. At this point, Jacob realizes "that everything I thought I was I was not and everything I would be I would never be and everything I assumed I would never be I would most certainly be." Jacob's not going to live up to his big dreams of penetrating the big mystery of it all. Can the reader hope to escape the same fate?

God's presence everywhere can be viewed as either a balm or a menace. 

Who is Bernie?

After opening with the former-terrorist-turned-Hebrew-school-teacher telling Jacob's class that God is everywhere, the story then encourages us to equate the suggestively named Bernie Bernstein with God Almighty. The idea of God's omnipresence could be viewed as either reassuring or a threat, but in context, it feels more like a threat, given that it's coming from the woman who once played piano until her listeners ended up in chunks all over the keys. It's more "God can get you anywhere, any time" than "God is always there to help in time of need." This affects how the reader feels when Bernie replaces God in Jacob's mind: "This was after my mother passed, during the time when I realized that God is not everywhere; Bernie Bernstein is everywhere." So Bernie feels like a vague threat throughout. But is he?  

The first thing you'd have to say about a name like Bernie Bernstein is that it's an obviously Jewish name. Sure, "Bernie" doesn't have to be a Jew, nor, technically, does "Bernstein," although most people with that name are Ashkenazi Jews. But I doubt anyone would hear that name and not assume the person answering to it was Jewish. It literally "doubles down" on its Jewishness. You couldn't have that name and pretend not to be Jewish if you were ever in a position where you thought it was dangerous to be Jewish. Henry Singer isn't the same. The surname Singer has been pared down from the one used by "longer-surnamed shetl dwellers from the morasses of Eastern Europe" who are Jacob's ancestors. Henry (a name more German than Jewish) might have wanted to distance himself from his Jewishness, a feeling Jacob shares, as he doesn't like to think about the people from whom he is descended. Bernie has taken the opposite approach from blending in. He's not just Jewish; he's Jewish, damnit. 

A second unmistakable thing about Bernie is that he's an important member of the congregation. Henry's the one who first identifies him as such. He receives congratulations at the end of every Shabbat service for nothing more, Jacob thinks, than having survived another week. 

Henry actually seems to like Bernie, in spite of how one seems to value his Jewish identity and the other seems to downplay it. Before long, Bernie is Henry's only friend. They're both in the same business together, and they meet once a week to talk about the old times. 

Punishment or sympathy? 

So what the hell happens with that ending? One possible way of reading it is that Bernie has killed or attacked Henry. We've just learned that Henry is the only member of the congregation who violates the laws of the Sabbath by driving to temple rather than walking to it. In this sense, one could read it that Bernie, the image of the traditional Jewish community, is taking the place of the omnipresent God who can punish us when we do wrong. If this is what happened, then Henry's saying "I'm sorry, Jacob," is him apologizing for doing "what had to be done," the same way Morah Lev did what had to be done when fighting for Jewish independence. 

I don't think that's what happened, though. When Jacob sees Bernie at the door, it's with a torn shirt, which could suggest that there was an altercation between Bernie and Henry. But it's much more likely that this torn shirt is the traditional torn shirt of shivas, the mourning ceremony. The story is called "The Master Mourner." Jacob believes that he's mastered the art of mourning, by which he means looking grave and telling people thank you for bringing over a whitefish salad, but it's Bernie who is the real master mourner. The torn shirt isn't a sign that Bernie has attacked Henry; it's a sign that Bernie has joined Henry in genuine mourning, at least partly in order to help Henry with his own loss. In this sense, the "I'm sorry" isn't "I'm sorry I did something terrible," it's a genuine expression of sympathy. 

Bernie has already had a lifetime of practice in mourning, having lost his brother in a concentration camp years ago. If we extend Bernie from an individual to being a larger symbol of the Jewish community and its ability to endure suffering over the ages, he's had much more than one lifetime. This symbolic reading is suggested by Jacob's inability to guess Bernie's age: "He could have been anywhere between thirty and three thousand." If Bernie isn't just one person, but a symbol of Jewish endurance over the ages, then this explains why his continued survival from week to week is such a cause for celebration. 

With all this practice mourning loss, Bernie is the perfect person to help Henry. He's not God's terrifying presence seeking vengeance for sins to the ends of the Earth; he's the comforting presence of Jewish tradition there to help Henry. Bernie isn't interested in punishing Henry for driving himself to temple. Henry has said he's too "heavy" to walk; Bernie merely wants to help lighten Henry a bit by mourning along with him in his loss. Bernie has already had one opportunity to get angry about another driver, that being Jacob when Jacob almost ran into him with a shopping cart. Bernie didn't get angry, though. He merely advised Jacob to "drive the cart" rather than "let the cart drive him." Bernie doesn't object to traditions changing. The important thing is that as they change, they should serve the people who carry them out, rather than the other way around. 

What's up with Morah Lev?

Reading Bernie as a symbol of Jewish tradition and its ability to provide comfort makes sense to me, but what, then, to make of Morah Lev, the Hebrew teacher who once duped a room full of British administrators carrying out the Palestinian Mandate to their deaths? Some people today will argue that Irgun wasn't a terrorist organization. They will point out that Irgun at least occasionally attempted to minimize deaths. I hardly qualify to pass judgment on this. I will only say that Morah Lev might signify a counterweight to Bernie. If Bernie represents the ability of a people to endure through resilience and tradition, Morah Lev is the voice that insists that a people can only endure if they fight for it. Bernie is a people enduring through culture; Morah Lev is a people enduring through defending themselves by any means necessary. 

To strengthen herself for her role as defender of the people through violence, Morah Lev carries out a series of rituals of her own. She uses three colors of lipstick at once and braids her hair (using three strands, I presume--is there another way to braid hair?), rituals meant to reinforce the three levels of heart she has to maintain. 

Henry doesn't have much to say about Morah Lev except to call her "colorful." Morah Lev operates on her own logic. That logic might serve to prevent some tragedies for the Jewish people, but it has nothing to say once loss has already occurred. She is unable to unsee the blood and flesh on the white keys of the piano she used to distract her victims to their death. Mourning isn't for her. Her three hearts keep her strong, but they are too strong an armor to pierce through mourning in order to heal.

It's the cultural symbol of endurance in Bernie, rather than the military one in Morah Lev, that ultimately stands as the hope in the story. At the end, having shared in real mourning with Henry, Bernie hands Jacob literal keys, which are hard not to also read figuratively as unlocking some kind of code for life. Having received the keys, Jacob then runs upstairs to see his father. That is, Jacob is ascending a stairway to Heaven. In the original, Biblical account of Jacob seeing the stairway to Heaven, God reaffirms his covenant with the Jewish people, in which he promises to make of them a great people and to give them a land to dwell in. Jacob isn't running to find his father dead. He's running to join with his father in continuing life.  

The story doesn't deny that situations may call for Morah Lev's ways, but they do seem to suggest that the key to a continued future for the Jewish people has more to do with the comfort and encouragement of tradition and culture than through the might of arms and the cunning of plots. 

Timing

This story was published in Gettysburg Review (RIP--the loss of which may require its own mourning) months ago, but it comes out now as part of Best American Short Stories at an interesting time. Yet another terrible chapter in the long history of irrational hatred for Jews has taken place, leading to yet more mourning, to more torn shirts and paltry-feeling signs of sympathy from the community. Israel's government, led by a ruling party which is in some ways a direct political descendant of the Irgun, has launched a counter-strike, which some say is too much, but which Israel justifies, given the extremes of inhuman hatred its people face. 

I've been debating continuing with BASS blogging for some time, or even with literature and writing as an earnest pursuit. One of the reasons I always feel this way is that blogging about a short story seems so irrelevant, given the number of people suffering in the world. This story, though, seems to be arguing that without an identity beyond survival, survival will ultimately be pointless and short-lived.