I spent a year as an editor/reader for the Baltimore Review, mostly to thank them for being the first journal to publish one of my stories. I've also been the lead fiction reader/editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House, the co-op publisher that put out my only book a few years ago, for the last two years. As a reader who gets hundreds of entries for a very small number of openings, I often rejected stories after one page. I felt bad about this at first, but it's really unavoidable. We don't have enough readers to get through everything if we're going to read it all carefully from beginning to end. And besides, readers are going to be even more fickle than editors: if I don't want to keep reading after a page, what reader, who has no obligation to keep going, is going to keep going? So we limit ourselves to work that compels reading from page to page.
Of course, you want writing to be compelling, so maybe this is just a quick way of getting to the good stuff. But as I've been doing more serious review/critiques for the last year, it's required an entirely different kind of reading from me. I read every story twice. Often, my opinion of the story completely changes between reading one and reading two. I've frequently been ready to rip apart a story, then something about it opened up upon further reflection, and I ended up writing a very positive review.
In theory, that's how you should read every story. A story written seriously deserves a serious reader. No journal should expect they will fill their pages with stories worth reading seriously if they don't take the time to read seriously. But nobody can really do this.
So how do stories like the ones in Best American Short Stories, stories that don't reveal their secrets until you've poked and prodded at them a bit, get published? I think the answer, for the most part, is that they're written by people who already wrote enough of the kinds of stories you need to write to get past editors, and now are given enough rope that they can write a different kind of story. Yes, there are new writers in BASS every year, but it's mostly filled with established commodities, people who probably got a different kind of reading when they sent work in than others did, a more sympathetic kind of reading.
It's an old realization that readers approach a known commodity differently from an unknown one. If you put a story in front of college literature students and told them it was written by Joyce Carol Oates, you'd get a completely different reading than you would if you told them it was a story by another student submitted for a workshop.
After getting several stories published and then the book, I tried to transition to a different kind of story, one that was a little more at the core of the things I care about. Some of the stories ended up being longer. All are a lot more uncomfortable. I've had some positive feedback from editors, but the things they've pointed out about why they didn't ultimately accept the work seemed to me to be the kinds of things you'd say if you hadn't read very carefully. Two have opined on a story in a way that made me think they didn't read the key passage in the story, the one that (I hope) tied together all the questions about the main character.
This is really at the heart of why I've been in a place for a few months where I just can't even write. I'm never at a loss for words or stories or ideas. It's not that I have writer's block. It's that I don't trust myself as a writer. That's largely because I no longer trust myself as a reader. If I can write a story and put it aside long enough to look at it from the outside, and I see something in it that no editor sees, the problem isn't me as a writer, it's me as a reader. That's kind of an identity crisis for me, because if there's one thing I've always felt pretty confident about, it was that I was a fairly insightful reader.
So what do I do? Write "in the manner of a story that is likely to be published," or write my stories, even though experience should have taught me by now that's not a way to succeed? For the last few months, the answer for me has been to just not write.
Most writing advice websites emphasize how important it is to keep going through rejection. I wonder how many will tell you that at some point, rejection isn't an obstacle to push through, but a sign to be heeded?
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Not really filling me with confidence here
I took a little break after finishing my critique of all the short stories in this year's Puschart Anthology. In my own fiction writing life, it's been more of the same: a bunch of near success, a lot more not-so-near success, also known as failure, and then the questioning of whether I want to keep doing this.
This last question has been a never-ending loop of self-inquisition for me, not just for the last six years I've been seriously writing, but for the twenty years since I first picked English as a major in undergrad. There are so many problems in the world that need addressing, and my life is passing by. I've had a small impact on a few things that maybe made the world better, but all in all, I don't know if I can really justify the resources the world put into making me who am I now when measured against what I've given it back. I believe stories have value and that they can make the world better. But how much better? And is it likely I personally will make the world better through stories?
As I was pondering whether a long-odds attempt for literary relevance is a good use of my remaining time on Earth, Literary Hub just posted an article about the role of fiction in addressing climate change. I think it was meant to be inspirational or enlightening, but it had the opposite effect on me. Climate change is obviously a massive threat to our species, and there aren't really many more critical issues in the world. So if fiction had a role to play for the better, you'd think it ought to have something to do with climate change.
The article is basically a couple of paragraphs of introduction followed by one or two paragraph statements from a number of writers who've recently created literary fiction with climate change as a major element. Here are the five main moments of this article for me:
1) "...smart policy is needed as much as great art" -from the introduction:
In reality, one drop of good policy is worth an ocean of great art, and an ocean of great art is worthless without good policy. They're not equals.
2) Two writers noted that the main thing fiction does well is create empathy, and this might be a way to engage people to do something about climate change. First, empathy might move those who aren't immediately affected to care about those who are. Secondly, empathy might motivate everyone to care more about the world that stands to be lost.
That's true; creating empathy might be what fiction does best, its most redeeming characteristic. But if I'm being honest, I feel a lot more empathy for the species being wiped out when I watch a nature documentary than I do reading a story. Only the best of the genre, like Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence," can create that level of feeling for another species in me.
3) But even if I do feel empathy, so what? One writer wrote rather anemically that "The fact that we can’t put out the fires and lower the seas with words or pictures or music doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for trying." But how is trying to create empathy really trying to save the world? As fate had it, I also just read an article from the Atlantic about Just, a company trying to master lab-grown meat (or, as they would have it, "cultured meat"). If successful, it would eliminate the suffering of millions of mass-grown animals. But the CEO of Just understands that the company's future isn't in satisfying people like me, the guilty carnivores who fail through on-again, off-again vegetarian periods. As CEO Josh Tetrick aptly put it:
In other words, without giving a damn about the welfare of animals at all but by just applying good science and business principles to a problem, Just and companies like it might do more for animal welfare than all the activism in the world has ever done.
4) "One hard lesson I’ve learned from my fifteen years as a community organizer is that changing the minds of our enemies is less important than giving hope and power to our friends. I’m not writing for the people who are against us. I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to convince people with great art—other writers might legitimately feel like the role of fiction in the climate change fight is to convince the skeptical—but that’s not my priority." -Sam Miller
What did I draw from that? It merely reinforced for the millionth time how similar the literary community is to the evangelical Christian churches I once attended. "Do I focus on evangelism or on discipleship?" is the Christian version of this issue Miller is addressing. And right now, "if they don't get it, then let God deal with them" is a pretty ubiquitous stance among literary folks. This has made literary gatherings feel fairly insular to me, and even the attempts at whatever the liberal political and literary version of evangelism is seem rather lame.
5) "I doubt that many people in power are poring over speculative literary fiction for inspiration to enact climate change policy. But they should be." -Helen Phillips
Yeah, but the thing is, they don't. Maybe they should be, but they don't. And I have to think that if people have to be shamed to read literary fiction, the fault can't entirely be with the people who don't want to read it.
Yes, fiction can be powerful. In the mosaic of intellectual tiles that have made up who I am, a couple of stories are among the most important pieces. But if fewer and fewer people are going to read what I would call serious fiction, fiction that has the power to be transformative, then the possible space to find a wide enough audience to make fiction matter is shrinking. The odds that fiction will be a useful endeavor--by which I mean an endeavor that makes life better for others--is small. It might be small enough that it just doesn't make sense to keep doing.
Or maybe I'll keep going. But this article wasn't the help it meant to be.
This last question has been a never-ending loop of self-inquisition for me, not just for the last six years I've been seriously writing, but for the twenty years since I first picked English as a major in undergrad. There are so many problems in the world that need addressing, and my life is passing by. I've had a small impact on a few things that maybe made the world better, but all in all, I don't know if I can really justify the resources the world put into making me who am I now when measured against what I've given it back. I believe stories have value and that they can make the world better. But how much better? And is it likely I personally will make the world better through stories?
As I was pondering whether a long-odds attempt for literary relevance is a good use of my remaining time on Earth, Literary Hub just posted an article about the role of fiction in addressing climate change. I think it was meant to be inspirational or enlightening, but it had the opposite effect on me. Climate change is obviously a massive threat to our species, and there aren't really many more critical issues in the world. So if fiction had a role to play for the better, you'd think it ought to have something to do with climate change.
The article is basically a couple of paragraphs of introduction followed by one or two paragraph statements from a number of writers who've recently created literary fiction with climate change as a major element. Here are the five main moments of this article for me:
1) "...smart policy is needed as much as great art" -from the introduction:
In reality, one drop of good policy is worth an ocean of great art, and an ocean of great art is worthless without good policy. They're not equals.
2) Two writers noted that the main thing fiction does well is create empathy, and this might be a way to engage people to do something about climate change. First, empathy might move those who aren't immediately affected to care about those who are. Secondly, empathy might motivate everyone to care more about the world that stands to be lost.
That's true; creating empathy might be what fiction does best, its most redeeming characteristic. But if I'm being honest, I feel a lot more empathy for the species being wiped out when I watch a nature documentary than I do reading a story. Only the best of the genre, like Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence," can create that level of feeling for another species in me.
3) But even if I do feel empathy, so what? One writer wrote rather anemically that "The fact that we can’t put out the fires and lower the seas with words or pictures or music doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for trying." But how is trying to create empathy really trying to save the world? As fate had it, I also just read an article from the Atlantic about Just, a company trying to master lab-grown meat (or, as they would have it, "cultured meat"). If successful, it would eliminate the suffering of millions of mass-grown animals. But the CEO of Just understands that the company's future isn't in satisfying people like me, the guilty carnivores who fail through on-again, off-again vegetarian periods. As CEO Josh Tetrick aptly put it:
“I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, so imagine one of my friends who doesn’t care about any of the shit that I’m doing now,” he said, while perched on a bar stool in front of Just’s test kitchen. This hypothetical friend goes to a Piggly Wiggly to buy burgers. Except—oh wait!—next to the animal-based patties wrapped in clear plastic, he sees a Just burger patty for less money. “That, to me, is what it’s gonna take in order to break the dam of a habit,” Tetrick said.
In other words, without giving a damn about the welfare of animals at all but by just applying good science and business principles to a problem, Just and companies like it might do more for animal welfare than all the activism in the world has ever done.
 |
| The article said this company also makes plant-based eggs, which are available at the Silver Diner, a restaurant in my area. I intend to try them soon. |
4) "One hard lesson I’ve learned from my fifteen years as a community organizer is that changing the minds of our enemies is less important than giving hope and power to our friends. I’m not writing for the people who are against us. I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to convince people with great art—other writers might legitimately feel like the role of fiction in the climate change fight is to convince the skeptical—but that’s not my priority." -Sam Miller
What did I draw from that? It merely reinforced for the millionth time how similar the literary community is to the evangelical Christian churches I once attended. "Do I focus on evangelism or on discipleship?" is the Christian version of this issue Miller is addressing. And right now, "if they don't get it, then let God deal with them" is a pretty ubiquitous stance among literary folks. This has made literary gatherings feel fairly insular to me, and even the attempts at whatever the liberal political and literary version of evangelism is seem rather lame.
5) "I doubt that many people in power are poring over speculative literary fiction for inspiration to enact climate change policy. But they should be." -Helen Phillips
Yeah, but the thing is, they don't. Maybe they should be, but they don't. And I have to think that if people have to be shamed to read literary fiction, the fault can't entirely be with the people who don't want to read it.
Yes, fiction can be powerful. In the mosaic of intellectual tiles that have made up who I am, a couple of stories are among the most important pieces. But if fewer and fewer people are going to read what I would call serious fiction, fiction that has the power to be transformative, then the possible space to find a wide enough audience to make fiction matter is shrinking. The odds that fiction will be a useful endeavor--by which I mean an endeavor that makes life better for others--is small. It might be small enough that it just doesn't make sense to keep doing.
Or maybe I'll keep going. But this article wasn't the help it meant to be.
Friday, April 12, 2019
Unjustified optimism, necessary optimism: American attitudes about the future in the 2019 Pushcart Anthology
Millenarian beliefs that the deluge is nigh are not new, but it's not a stretch to say American culture is experiencing a high tide of fin-de-siecle sentiment. We've been drowning in post-apocalyptic stories for years. Perhaps somewhat differently from past concerns about the impending end of the world as we know it, today we can actually point to rational, scientific concerns. Superbugs, climate change, dwindling water to satisfy a growing population, an overdue supervolcano beneath Yellowstone--there are plenty of reasons to feel dread that don't require any religion at all.
Add to that the unusual nature of the current political cycle. While we've had dramatic swings in political philosophies before, we've never quite had this kind of politician whose entire appeal is that he has come to destroy politics. Trump's appeal to the far right--even if he doesn't have enough of a political philosophy to be far right himself-- is now engendering an almost equally radical swing from the left, and we may well end up with a choice between two highly unconventional candidates in 2020. This swing to the extremes seems to also be limiting the space Americans have for common understanding, making us more likely to hate the other side. There is stress on our institutions.
If we look for reflections of this stress in a literary anthology like the 2019 Pushcart--an anthology that, with its focus on smaller presses, can possibly boast to be somewhat more representative of the concerns of ordinary Americans than other anthologies with big names who occasionally make a living out of art--we can certainly see this angst informing narratives. Several stories reflect contemporary nervousness, such as Julie Hecht's "Taco Night," about an aimless woman experiencing a sort of fugue on the night of Trump's election. Or Poe Ballantine's "Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests," in which Vietnam is a stand-in for contemporary concerns about unending wars and the effects of those wars on those who fight them and those who don't. In the entire anthology, no story reflected a basic pessimism about the future as much as Julie Burnstein's "All Politics."
Western optimism in general and American optimism in particular owe their philosophical roots to humanism, an outcropping of the Renaissance that stresses the centrality of humanity and believes in the ability and duty of humanity to use reason to overcome its problems. Humanism gave us modern universities. But in Burnstein's story, the university--in particular, humanities departments, which have the specific task of propagating humanism's core tenets--are rotten to the core and utterly beyond redemption. Because humanities departments themselves are in thrall to their own perverse politics, they are unable to have any impact on politics in the general culture. Without the spirit of humanism to guide them, Western political bodies and the cultures they prop up don't have much hope.
Along with the pessimistic, though, and actually outweighing it, there are stories that reflect a fundamental optimism about the future, be it the future of humanity, of Western culture, or of basic cultural institutions like family.
I noted a similar swing from a renunciation of the values that have dominated Western culture for centuries to an attempt to restore those values in some way after reading through another anthology, the 2018 Best American Short Stories. This doesn't mean that we are going to see an upswing of writers of serious fiction calling for a genuine return to the values of yesterday, or to make Western culture great again, but it does mean I see modernity struggling to find what it can salvage of humanistic values from the ruins.
This is true from the opening story, Karen Russell's "Tornado Auction," about a man who is obsessed with selling baby tornadoes the way many people now sell prize animals at auctions. It's a world that's mostly like ours, but under a little more environmental stress: some people make a living creating rain or wind. The protagonist is alienated from everyone in his life, especially his children, who do not appreciate his dangerous and unprofitable passion. But we find in the story's most touching moment that his hobby, misanthropic as it seems, is actually what he clings to desperately in order to prevent him from becoming overwhelmed by how powerfully he feels the weight of human bonds, especially the family kind. It is his way of escaping suicidal feelings or the oppressive weight of "something worse than freedom" he feels when he realizes he is a father to children he loves more than he can handle.
Russell's hero, Bobby, faces a very modern conundrum. We fetishize individual freedom, but it is also what is killing us. Jonathan Franzen explored this at length in the novel Freedom, how in the name of freedom, we allow people to waste and consume to the detriment of all. Bobby doesn't give up his freedom. He tries to turn the power of the freedom he loves into an instrument to keep alive the very bonds he seeks to run from. It doesn't work out well for him, and in fact, the story itself is nearly destroyed by the power of the ideas it is working with. But it's clear in the end that the sentiment of the story is in favor of a belief in the family ties that bind.
The best two stories of the collection both exude a fundamental optimism, even while presenting a world that is basically doomed, either environmentally, as in David Naiman's "Acceptance Speech," or emotionally, as in Lisa Taddeo's "Suburban Weekend."
In "Acceptance Speech," a gardener expounds upon how the way of things in nature is self-destructive: bacteria in a petri dish will eat their food faster and faster until they choke themselves. She claims that man is headed in this direction, and the sooner we get our own destruction over with, the happier she will be. But the whole time she is weaving the thread of the futility of life in the natural world, she is knitting herself into that tapestry of life. She reveals at the end that she has become purposefully and happily pregnant.
It's not clear exactly how she progresses from misanthropic nihilist to born-again optimist, but it's clear she didn't do it by closing her eyes to all that is wrong in the world. She embraces the future while still realizing it is, almost without any doubt, doomed. Her award for which she is giving her speech was given for ripping out every beautiful plant from her garden and putting ugly things in their place. But when she got to the end of ripping the beautiful things out, she felt that her very honesty about how the ugliness of the world was, in fact, a kind of lie. She felt this when she juxtaposed her own honest pessimism to the self-blinding optimism of her husband: "I knew, from my husband's wounded puss that the garden, however glorious, was no reply to his infant questions unanswered, but a terrible lie."
Her pessimism does not disappear, but rather, she finds a way to merge it with her husband's optimism. Having torn out everything beautiful, she finds there is yet something in the garden left to love. But she is only able to find this out after tearing all the beautiful things out, much as our culture today is only able to find a remnant of humanism worth clinging to because it has so mercilessly attacked the foundations of humanism for so long. Nothing still left standing can possibly be the weak stuff.
In Taddeo's "Suburban Weekend," we have the familiar "love and family are a lie" theme challenged, however, timidly, by a bumbling hero who spends most of the story eclipsed by the person she is trying to save. It is interesting that the suicidal friend in need of saving is named "Fern," making her view of the world the more "natural" one. Liv--whose name is almost comically on-point, because it is her goal to help her friend to do just that--is a comedian who is nearly unable to deal with her own personal issues. This brought to mind Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival, in which the theme is advanced that comic mindsets are better suited to survival than tragic ones. "Suburban Weekend" is sort of an exploration of whether that philosophy has an evangelical side to it, whether it can not just save those who follow it, but whether its followers can use it to save others.
In the end, it isn't clear that Liv can save Fern. (That is, in a sense, that she can save the natural world.) But the reader admires the love she shows when she tries to save her friend, and the reader ends up wanting to show that kind of love, too.
Even a cynical story like Sarah Resnick's "Kylie Wears Baliman" finds something to admire in the dying world of tabloid journalism it skewers.
The most interesting exception, although I found it to be not a very interesting story in its own right, is Robert Coover's "The Wall." Coover combines the ancient tale of two lovers separated by a wall with the modern political resonance of a wall--although the later is never overtly stated. Coover seems in this parable-like story to examine the idea that troubles tend to be mounted by the societies that face them, but that this just leaves society with another wall to get over. The wall might be psychological, and it might just be the realization that every freedom brings new chains, or that there is never any end to walls. Rather than being overtly pessimistic or optimistic, it is philosophical about the whole notion of pessimism and optimism, and, really, about the future. It's old-guy lit.
The point has been made many times that American optimism is unjustified and quite possibly dangerous. We don't take seriously the idea that we might destroy the world because we always think Elon Musk or John Wayne will be there to save it for us. I have often thought that America could use a good dose of reality to cure it of its confounded optimism and bring out the dour Calvinists we all might have been.
But then I'm reminded of something Frodo Baggins said about another group of foolishly optimistic and inward-looking fools: "...there have been times when I thought the inhabitants (of the Shire) too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them." He says this just after Gandalf has revealed the truth about the one ring and the threat Frodo brings to everyone in the Shire by keeping the ring there, the moment when Frodo decides he must leave to save it. When the time comes to leave and he thinks about having once felt this way about his fellow hobbits, he concludes, "but I don't feel that way now."
Frodo has to face terrors and truths and become wiser than any inhabitant of the Shire in order to save it. By doing so, he becomes unable to live in it any longer, but he is content to have saved it for his gardener friend Sam. Which brings me back again to "Acceptance Speech." The wisdom the gardener finds that makes her rejoin the world around her isn't a philosophical argument, it's the sadness in her husband's face. She's not unaware of the cold truths of the world in which cute otters rape baby seals. But when she returns from plumbing the depths of rot in the world, she doesn't leave the garden like Frodo left the Shire; she decides to return to it, a goth Eve with her fool of an Adam.
The sense from Pushcart and from intelligent, liberal-minded folks in the world who have spent the last few decades tearing down pillars of classical humanism is that we need to find something left with which we can plant a new garden.
Add to that the unusual nature of the current political cycle. While we've had dramatic swings in political philosophies before, we've never quite had this kind of politician whose entire appeal is that he has come to destroy politics. Trump's appeal to the far right--even if he doesn't have enough of a political philosophy to be far right himself-- is now engendering an almost equally radical swing from the left, and we may well end up with a choice between two highly unconventional candidates in 2020. This swing to the extremes seems to also be limiting the space Americans have for common understanding, making us more likely to hate the other side. There is stress on our institutions.
If we look for reflections of this stress in a literary anthology like the 2019 Pushcart--an anthology that, with its focus on smaller presses, can possibly boast to be somewhat more representative of the concerns of ordinary Americans than other anthologies with big names who occasionally make a living out of art--we can certainly see this angst informing narratives. Several stories reflect contemporary nervousness, such as Julie Hecht's "Taco Night," about an aimless woman experiencing a sort of fugue on the night of Trump's election. Or Poe Ballantine's "Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests," in which Vietnam is a stand-in for contemporary concerns about unending wars and the effects of those wars on those who fight them and those who don't. In the entire anthology, no story reflected a basic pessimism about the future as much as Julie Burnstein's "All Politics."
Western optimism in general and American optimism in particular owe their philosophical roots to humanism, an outcropping of the Renaissance that stresses the centrality of humanity and believes in the ability and duty of humanity to use reason to overcome its problems. Humanism gave us modern universities. But in Burnstein's story, the university--in particular, humanities departments, which have the specific task of propagating humanism's core tenets--are rotten to the core and utterly beyond redemption. Because humanities departments themselves are in thrall to their own perverse politics, they are unable to have any impact on politics in the general culture. Without the spirit of humanism to guide them, Western political bodies and the cultures they prop up don't have much hope.
 |
| Now this, THIS is a humanities department that can change the world. |
But there's a lot of optimism in Pushcart 2019
Along with the pessimistic, though, and actually outweighing it, there are stories that reflect a fundamental optimism about the future, be it the future of humanity, of Western culture, or of basic cultural institutions like family.
I noted a similar swing from a renunciation of the values that have dominated Western culture for centuries to an attempt to restore those values in some way after reading through another anthology, the 2018 Best American Short Stories. This doesn't mean that we are going to see an upswing of writers of serious fiction calling for a genuine return to the values of yesterday, or to make Western culture great again, but it does mean I see modernity struggling to find what it can salvage of humanistic values from the ruins.
This is true from the opening story, Karen Russell's "Tornado Auction," about a man who is obsessed with selling baby tornadoes the way many people now sell prize animals at auctions. It's a world that's mostly like ours, but under a little more environmental stress: some people make a living creating rain or wind. The protagonist is alienated from everyone in his life, especially his children, who do not appreciate his dangerous and unprofitable passion. But we find in the story's most touching moment that his hobby, misanthropic as it seems, is actually what he clings to desperately in order to prevent him from becoming overwhelmed by how powerfully he feels the weight of human bonds, especially the family kind. It is his way of escaping suicidal feelings or the oppressive weight of "something worse than freedom" he feels when he realizes he is a father to children he loves more than he can handle.
Russell's hero, Bobby, faces a very modern conundrum. We fetishize individual freedom, but it is also what is killing us. Jonathan Franzen explored this at length in the novel Freedom, how in the name of freedom, we allow people to waste and consume to the detriment of all. Bobby doesn't give up his freedom. He tries to turn the power of the freedom he loves into an instrument to keep alive the very bonds he seeks to run from. It doesn't work out well for him, and in fact, the story itself is nearly destroyed by the power of the ideas it is working with. But it's clear in the end that the sentiment of the story is in favor of a belief in the family ties that bind.
 |
| Nothing is freer of human ideals of right and wrong than an act of God, but also, nothing is more destructive. |
The best two stories of the collection both exude a fundamental optimism, even while presenting a world that is basically doomed, either environmentally, as in David Naiman's "Acceptance Speech," or emotionally, as in Lisa Taddeo's "Suburban Weekend."
In "Acceptance Speech," a gardener expounds upon how the way of things in nature is self-destructive: bacteria in a petri dish will eat their food faster and faster until they choke themselves. She claims that man is headed in this direction, and the sooner we get our own destruction over with, the happier she will be. But the whole time she is weaving the thread of the futility of life in the natural world, she is knitting herself into that tapestry of life. She reveals at the end that she has become purposefully and happily pregnant.
It's not clear exactly how she progresses from misanthropic nihilist to born-again optimist, but it's clear she didn't do it by closing her eyes to all that is wrong in the world. She embraces the future while still realizing it is, almost without any doubt, doomed. Her award for which she is giving her speech was given for ripping out every beautiful plant from her garden and putting ugly things in their place. But when she got to the end of ripping the beautiful things out, she felt that her very honesty about how the ugliness of the world was, in fact, a kind of lie. She felt this when she juxtaposed her own honest pessimism to the self-blinding optimism of her husband: "I knew, from my husband's wounded puss that the garden, however glorious, was no reply to his infant questions unanswered, but a terrible lie."
Her pessimism does not disappear, but rather, she finds a way to merge it with her husband's optimism. Having torn out everything beautiful, she finds there is yet something in the garden left to love. But she is only able to find this out after tearing all the beautiful things out, much as our culture today is only able to find a remnant of humanism worth clinging to because it has so mercilessly attacked the foundations of humanism for so long. Nothing still left standing can possibly be the weak stuff.
In Taddeo's "Suburban Weekend," we have the familiar "love and family are a lie" theme challenged, however, timidly, by a bumbling hero who spends most of the story eclipsed by the person she is trying to save. It is interesting that the suicidal friend in need of saving is named "Fern," making her view of the world the more "natural" one. Liv--whose name is almost comically on-point, because it is her goal to help her friend to do just that--is a comedian who is nearly unable to deal with her own personal issues. This brought to mind Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival, in which the theme is advanced that comic mindsets are better suited to survival than tragic ones. "Suburban Weekend" is sort of an exploration of whether that philosophy has an evangelical side to it, whether it can not just save those who follow it, but whether its followers can use it to save others.
In the end, it isn't clear that Liv can save Fern. (That is, in a sense, that she can save the natural world.) But the reader admires the love she shows when she tries to save her friend, and the reader ends up wanting to show that kind of love, too.
 |
| Liv can't have less luck at saving a Fern than I have had in my life. |
The not really exceptions
There are some stories that seem to possibly challenge the fundamental optimism of most of Pushcart, but they are actually just validating a humanistic view of progress and the future by way of pointing out exceptions. Gabriel Brownstein's "No Time Like the Present" is about the disasters that can happen when we fail to get a hold of our psychological disorders, the things that rob us of peace. But by critiquing the inability to fix the problem, the story is also asserting a classical humanist concept: that problems can be solved if the right solution is applied through hard work. Similarly, Victor Lavalle's "Spectral Evidence" sounds like it ends in a very dark place. When the narrator ends with the promise that "from now on whoever comes to see me is going to hear truth," it's not a comforting truth she's going to tell. It's that whatever comes after death is frightening and best not to think about. But again, this is the failure of reason showing that the solution is to apply reason correctly. It's an injunction against becoming obsessed with what one cannot control and focusing on the here and now. In its renunciation of the after-life and its recommendation to focus on the physical world, it is perhaps the most classically humanist story in all of Puschart 2019.Even a cynical story like Sarah Resnick's "Kylie Wears Baliman" finds something to admire in the dying world of tabloid journalism it skewers.
The most interesting exception, although I found it to be not a very interesting story in its own right, is Robert Coover's "The Wall." Coover combines the ancient tale of two lovers separated by a wall with the modern political resonance of a wall--although the later is never overtly stated. Coover seems in this parable-like story to examine the idea that troubles tend to be mounted by the societies that face them, but that this just leaves society with another wall to get over. The wall might be psychological, and it might just be the realization that every freedom brings new chains, or that there is never any end to walls. Rather than being overtly pessimistic or optimistic, it is philosophical about the whole notion of pessimism and optimism, and, really, about the future. It's old-guy lit.
Because I make everything about Lord of the Rings
The point has been made many times that American optimism is unjustified and quite possibly dangerous. We don't take seriously the idea that we might destroy the world because we always think Elon Musk or John Wayne will be there to save it for us. I have often thought that America could use a good dose of reality to cure it of its confounded optimism and bring out the dour Calvinists we all might have been.
But then I'm reminded of something Frodo Baggins said about another group of foolishly optimistic and inward-looking fools: "...there have been times when I thought the inhabitants (of the Shire) too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them." He says this just after Gandalf has revealed the truth about the one ring and the threat Frodo brings to everyone in the Shire by keeping the ring there, the moment when Frodo decides he must leave to save it. When the time comes to leave and he thinks about having once felt this way about his fellow hobbits, he concludes, "but I don't feel that way now."
Frodo has to face terrors and truths and become wiser than any inhabitant of the Shire in order to save it. By doing so, he becomes unable to live in it any longer, but he is content to have saved it for his gardener friend Sam. Which brings me back again to "Acceptance Speech." The wisdom the gardener finds that makes her rejoin the world around her isn't a philosophical argument, it's the sadness in her husband's face. She's not unaware of the cold truths of the world in which cute otters rape baby seals. But when she returns from plumbing the depths of rot in the world, she doesn't leave the garden like Frodo left the Shire; she decides to return to it, a goth Eve with her fool of an Adam.
The sense from Pushcart and from intelligent, liberal-minded folks in the world who have spent the last few decades tearing down pillars of classical humanism is that we need to find something left with which we can plant a new garden.
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Mistakes editors make: "Brace Yourself" by Leslie Jill Paterson
This is a good story. I don't have to assume my reluctant role as a pissy critic, but I do have a bone to pick with how the Pushcart editors framed this one. It's the last story in the 2019 Pushcart Anthology (which means I managed to blog all the way through it and actually did something I said I was going to do). Unique among all the stories in the anthology, this one includes, at least the way it was printed in the book, the original note from the judge who picked this story for Prime Number (full story online here):
If I had read those words before the story in the original journal, I wouldn't have thought much of it. That's just the normal work of a journal promoting itself and its writers. But for Pushcart to have transplanted that introduction into its anthology struck me as a rather profound statement. It was saying two things:
In my forty-four years of teaching and editing, I’ve read countless stories about abused women but never one like this. Without a single scene of abuse (and the sensationalism such scenes almost inevitably create), the story parses its soul-shattering effects. At one point, the narrator says, “It’s odd, even savage, how lies are sometimes tender while truth can surprise you, like a backhand across the cheek.” This story surprises us with just such a truth. Reader, brace yourself.
If I had read those words before the story in the original journal, I wouldn't have thought much of it. That's just the normal work of a journal promoting itself and its writers. But for Pushcart to have transplanted that introduction into its anthology struck me as a rather profound statement. It was saying two things:
- The reader is too stupid to get how brilliant this story is unless we add a note to explain how this is better than other stories the reader may have come across with similar subject matter.
- Pushcart's editors REALLY thought this story was something special, because they included the original journal's own hype for it.
 |
| It's more fun to just ride with a story on your own that have someone tell you how to read it. |
That's a lot for the story to live up to. It's the last story in the anthology, meaning the editors thought it was strong enough for the anchor leg. But beyond just its position, the story gets called out--the only story in an anthology full of presumably great stories--for how special it is. Brace yourself! This story will blow you away! There is literally no way we can oversell this!
In reality, it's a very solid story, but not something I found I needed physical support to sustain me after having read it. It's very good on its own terms, but I was denied those terms by how the story was presented.
As promised, it's about a woman who has recently escaped a physically abusive marriage. And true to the judge's words, a strong point of the story really is that it avoids putting the abuse on screen. It's told in second person--which is now the new first person, it's become so common--meaning the main character is just "you" throughout most of the story.
Perhaps the weakest part of the story is the explanation of how "you" actually end up in the place you are. You've wandered into a bar in Colorado, where you've apparently run in a great hurry. There, some cowboys find you and, because it's so obvious to them that you're running from an abusive relationship, invite you to an "equine program--where women caught in hazardous marriages learned to tug a rein resolutely, steering their lives away from vows they should have never spoken."
This means that "you" have somehow packed a bag in haste, run off with no plan, and somehow gotten lucky enough to walk into a bar where cowboys who run a halfway house with horses happen to hang out? This turns out to be especially lucky, because Billy, the old, Wilford Brimley-looking cowboy who runs the ranch, spends most of his life at the ranch in the mountains, we later find.
There's a lot of tenderness as Billy tries to figure out a way to draw your story from you. There's a bit of tension held to the end, because we're not quite sure these cowboys won't be rough themselves. And your backstory is weaved in deftly throughout with the present action so nothing gets bogged down in exposition. But it's still really weird that Billy runs this thing for women. He doesn't even have electricity, he says, so how does he advertise for his halfway house? Does he just go down to the True Grit saloon and look for women who look a little lost? He mentions having taught handicapped kids to ride horses, so maybe his business model is just a ranch for non-cowboys to learn to ride horses, but it's still a rather incredible stroke of lucky for unlucky you that you stumbled across him in the bar.
Or is it? At the end, you are drinking beers around the campfire with three cowboys you barely know, and you realize it's dangerous. The final line, "And one of the three cowboys starts humming, soft as a fiddle," sounds like a happy ending, an ending where you will be able to learn what life is like around men who don't knock you senseless. But it could also be read as a menacing final line. Your abuser was like that, too, quiet and non-threatening, until he lashed out suddenly. The hazard is that men who are abusive don't have a lot of really easy to read signs. Like with horses, it takes someone very experienced to know how to read small differences between danger and safety.
In any event, it was a nice story, but it's a much better story when it's able to develop quietly on its own rather than have chorus of trumpets announcing its arrival.
I'm going to take a few days, then come back with some thoughts on Pushcart as a whole.
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
I learn that I am the kind of asshole to diss a story where a man loses the woman he loves to cancer: "Do I Look Sick to You?" by C.J Hribal
Last week, I mentioned that I still don't know if I think the movie A Star is Born was a great movie or just an okay movie with two great performances from Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. I definitely was into the scenes where Lady Gaga was becoming a star, especially her debut performance on stage with Cooper. It's very easy to root for the two main characters. In theory, this should also make it easy to feel sad when Cooper commits suicide. (Oh yeah, spoilers.) But I just wasn't quite sure. The film's makers said all the right things about this being meant to bring attention to mental illness, but I couldn't quite escape the feeling that part of what the movie did was quasi-cynically capitalize on feelings of pity for a romantic and tragic suicide victim. It even had the added Byronic touch of him killing himself out of mistaken self-sacrifice. The point was to give us the big moment with Lady Gaga onstage and the audience crying and, in a perverse sense, enjoying its sadness.
I was similarly split while reading "Do I Look Sick to You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)" by C.J. Hribal. We've got a spunky cancer patient everyone at the hospital loves. The narrator loves her, too. Everyone is sure "she is going to kick cancer in the ass." The moment I read that, I was certain she was going to die, and it was going to be an attempted tear-jerker.
It's a sad cancer story. Taking the general idea of death from cancer and making it concrete through the repeated attempts to make love was a good, old, college try at shaking the cliche from the formula, but ultimately, it's a cancer story. I felt something, because I'm not really that empty a husk of a human being with a stapler where my heart should be. I just didn't feel all that much. It's a really difficult story to drain pathos from, because the sad terminal cancer patient story has been done. I admire Hribal for coming close, much as admire the performances Cooper and Lady Gaga gave in a well-worn story. But that doesn't change what the story is.
Maybe I just instinctively resist it when I know a story is trying to make me cry. Maybe I'm the problem here. Yeah, let's go with that. Assuming the problem is me is an algorithm that hardly ever fails. It's a perennial classic. Just like stories about dying cancer patients.
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