American Blurt: The quest for the hot take is not good for literature

I have humble goals nowadays with this blog, but even those humble goals seem to get waylaid. I had planned to blog through the O.Henry Anthology, but unlike last year, I was only going to blog stories I really connected with, rather than the whole thing. So it was supposed to be easier on me. But after reading Rachael Kondo's "Girl of Few Seasons," the fourth story in the anthology, I got a little sidetracked. Then I got a lot sidetracked, and this post is the result of that sideways meandering. I didn't really have strong feelings about Kondo's story either way, and I could have just passed it by, but I was interested in Kondo's use in the story of Hawaiian Pidgin, also known as Hawaii Creole English. I wondered whether she might have been a user of the language at home, or if she had just used it in a story. Most of the use of HCE in the story was pretty light, the kinds of things most people who live in Hawaii (I lived there for four years in the 90s) pick up and use casually, stuff like "pau hana."

It turns out Kondo has written engagingly and thoughtfully on the subject of using HCE in literature. Pidgin is, in fact, part of her heritage. Her grandmother was among those Japanese imported laborers who helped create the language we now have, although it has morphed from what her grandmother once spoke. The use in Kondo's story of HCE was the story's biggest success; she used it to effectively establish scene and tone. It wasn't overdone, and it felt like it belonged.

Still, I wondered whether there might be some who would take offense to her use of HCE. Although Kondo's grandmother spoke it at home, I get the sense Kondo herself doesn't, or at least not beyond the casual level of most Hawaii residents. She--to her credit, with a great deal of honesty--explains how she grew up programmed to think that speaking "correct" English put her family on a level above the kids around her who spoke HCE. Although her understanding of the language has since matured greatly, I don't get the sense she speaks HCE at home currently much more than any resident of Hawaii. (Even the most foreign haole who lives there for a while will eventually pick up at least some.)

Last year, I wrote about a controversy within literary circles that erupted when a white poet wrote about the experiences of a (possibly) black homeless man. Some readers took offense to the poem's use of what they viewed as African-American Vernacular English. More accurately, they seemed to take offense to the poet's use of AAVE, charging (without proving) that the language was inaccurate and exploitative. Kondo's story, however, didn't seem to enrage anyone. Not that I thought it should, but I wondered rather vaguely why this story didn't, but a poem like "How To" did.

Maybe one of the reasons Kondo's story didn't cause any controversy is because Hawaiians seem to be pretty chill about the use of racial stereotypes. This photo is a comedian born with the name Shawn Kaui Hill, who, using the stage name "Bu La'ia," was all over Hawaiian TV when I lived there in the 90s. As you can see, he is wearing an afro wig and has a tooth blacked out. I was always shocked by his act and the fact it was considered so non-offensive, he was used in commercials doing his over-the-top goofy pidgin schtick. If nobody objected to this, it's hard to believe anyone would object to a story like "Girl of Few Seasons," which is obviously aiming for a sensitive portrayal of characters who speak HCE. It likely wouldn't matter to the community that the writer isn't fully a native speaker.  

American Dirt

I'd have just passed on from thinking about this story without feeling the need to write anything about it, but then the whole public storm surrounding American Dirt happened, and I've been mired in thinking about that and trying in vain to write about it ever since. It's a bit of a personal issue for me. I'm a white, male author who writes a lot of his stories from the point-of-view of people of color. To me, there's nothing exploitative about this. I'm a translator. I'm fascinated by the people I've come in contact with as a translator. I've bought my access to their stories the hard way, by putting in the work to learn other languages and cultures. But some of the dialogue online about Dirt seemed to take the same assumption some took about the poem "How To": if you aren't yourself a member of the same racial and socio-economic community as the characters you write about, you shouldn't write about them, ever. As a guy who wrote this story about an Ethiopian maid and this story about an Ethiopian-American runner and this story about a couple of Eritrean refugees and this story about an Ethiopian-American translator dating a Korean girl, I was sort of dismayed by some of the posts I saw about this book.

The actual story, not the story you'd get on Twitter

My dismay had something to do with how I came to learn about it mostly through posts I saw on Twitter. I'm not going to dignify the posts I saw by re-posting them, but I think they're probably good examples of the inherent limitations of Twitter. It's a great place to recommend thoughtful pieces posted elsewhere, and you can show your support or dislike for the story in an abbreviated form, but almost anytime anyone tries to express something substantive about real ideas, it inevitably gets turned into exaggeration and gratuitous provocation. The quest for traffic, clicks, and overall relevance leads to always looking for a hot take. It's not enough to say that a book may have meant well, but the decision by the publishing industry and Oprah to turn the book into a pampered darling is puzzling, given that there are far better treatments of the same subject by more talented writers who know the subject better. You have to instead scream about how white writers can never, ever write about people of color because it's always exploitative and appropriative.

Among all the heat created by Twitter, I managed to find a bit of light on Latino USA, which interviewed four people, including the author. There is also a nice chronology of the controversy on their page, including how one particularly stinging attack on the book by Myriam Gurba came to be. How it all went down was something like this:

-American newsrooms started getting advanced copies of American Dirt in late 2019. There were blurbs from respected authors, including Don Winslow, who called the book "A Grapes of Wrath for our time." The author praised writer Luis Urrea in the introduction, whom she said she read thoroughly as part of her research.
-Some Latina writers also praised the novel, including Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Reyna Grande.
-Myriam Gurba wrote a fierce take-down of the book, but had a hard time getting it published, because, according to what she says she was told, she was too negative.
-After the book came out, nothing much happened, but then Oprah put it in her book club, which is about the best thing that can happen to a writer as far as sales go.
-At that point, people actually started to notice not only Gurba's criticism, but that of other Latinx writers as well.
-Some people, like actress Salma Hayek, took back their support for the book. One person who did not retract her support was House on Mango Street author Sandra Cisneros, who insisted she thought the book had merit.
-Twitter lost its mind.

The rest of this long post, condensed

When you actually listen to the four people on Latino USA, you'll find that even the most strident of them (Gurba) isn't saying anything like "white people shouldn't write about people of color." That's Twitter dumbing down the conversation. I think literary figures should be very careful of how they interact with Twitter to keep from being part of the dumbing down the medium often leads to.

The longer version

I'll start by condensing what Gurba, Cisneros, Luis Urrea, and the author of American Dirt herself said about the controversy during the hour-long Latino USA program. I think everyone had at least a decent point or two.

Gurba: The book is trash. It wasn't well researched, it was schlock, it traded on a certain version of Mexico that only exist in the uneducated white imagination. She doesn't buy that this book needs to exist in order to humanize Mexicans to Americans who otherwise wouldn't engage with a book like this (i.e., who wouldn't read a book by a writer with a Latino name). She feels Mexicans are capable of telling their own stories. Ultimately, she says she wouldn't have been so angry about the book if it hadn't been billed as such worthy fare, if it hadn't been compared to Steinbeck. If it had been sold as a narco-romance piece of mierda instead, she wouldn't have fretted about it.

My take: In many of her comments, she is presenting her beef as with the publishing industry even more than with the book. She's right, of course. It's mystifying why some books become media darlings and some get gently ignored. There have been great books about the border already, none of which got the media push this pulp novel did. I do think her piece is a little heavy on its joy in Spanglish swear words and a little light on actual literary criticism and interaction with the text. It's going for the hot take, and as a result, it's not great criticism. Instead, it's a polemic about a number of things, only one of which is this book. She starts off her essay by saying that when she tells gringos her father was a publicist in Mexico, their eyes get wide, meaning they are all surprised Mexico even has publicists. I have to wonder if she is intentionally seeking out the stupidest white people on the planet. Starting off in this way makes me think that, even though she said her objection isn't to who wrote it but how she wrote it, it's also maybe a little bit about who wrote it.

And while I accept that Mexicans can tell their own stories just fine, thank you very much, my life's work is in translation, and it is possible that a white writer who really does the work (which American Dirt did not do) to understand his subject may be more successful translating that work into the target audience's idiom than a Mexican writer. When I translate Korean to English, what I really want is to have a native Korean speaker who learned English and a native English speaker who learned Korean working together. Those produce the best overall translations. I think stories in the real world might also work best if we had natives of multiple worlds trying to speak to certain topics. Of course, the problem with American audiences is that we tend to only lean on the work "in translation," the one from the writer who comes from our own community. It's hard to even get Americans to watch a movie that has subtitles.

Cisneros: If you've never heard Cisneros speak, her voice is a little distracting. She's got kind of a Mickey Mouse squeaky voice. And some of what she said was a little nuts. She had a valid point that there's room for more than one person's story. A white lady can tell a story about the border and so can a Chicana from Matamorros and so can a Chinese journalist from Chengdu. What she's mostly been criticized for is saying that American Dirt is necessary because some people just wouldn't read a book by someone with a Latino name. At first, I didn't think that's what she was saying in the interview. I thought she was saying someone would read Dirt because it was a trashy beach novel but they might not read someone like Reyna Grande because it's "serious" fiction. But the interviewer asked if she meant people wouldn't read someone with a Spanish name, and Cisneros agreed that's what she meant.

My take: Cisneros is definitely wrong to co-sign the publishing industry pushing a book about Mexico by a white lady if they're only doing it because they think they can sell that better than a book by someone named Hernandez.

While I agree that there ought to be enough room for everyone to tell their story, I wonder if the fact that pragmatically, there really isn't enough room for everyone is part of why Gurba is so angry. There can only be so many Oprah Book Club books. If this one gets in, there won't be room for a Latinx writer to get a book about the border onto her list. The book industry's quest for equality sometimes helps writers of color, but it can also hurt them. A publisher might not take on a second Chinese-American writer if they already have one who sells well, because they'd think they'd be cannibalizing their own sales. Ethnic groups are sales niches to them, and there's a zero sum game competing for the dollars of a shrinking pool of readers. If a Latinx writer wrote a book about the border this year, nobody would touch it, because we already have one of those. It's kind of easy for Cisneros to talk about there being room for everyone when she's living off the royalties of a book that has sold millions of copies to school children. I have to really ask myself, if I ever really break through, am I possibly making my voice the one American readers will read on certain topics, and if so, is that right? Like most writers, I couldn't stop writing if I tried (I've tried! I'm trying right now!), so I doubt this concern will make me stop, but it ought to sober up my dreams a bit.


Urrea: Luis Alberto Urrea has written a couple of stunning books about the border. They were non-fiction. The best-known is The Devil's Highway. That book is a generation old now. A few people have pointed out that American Dirt seems to plagiarize from Urrea.  Luis spoke slowly during this interview, audibly a little angry, I think, which is probably as strong an indictment of this book as any I can imagine. Luis was an instructor of mine for a poetry class in graduate school. He's as gentle a man as I've ever met. So if someone has made him upset, that person likely really did something wrong. Anyhow, Luis spoke mostly about his sense of violation, because his research had been lived research. "I buried that person," he said about a child in a scene that American Dirt most obviously "borrows" from. Urrea, however, also was the most overt in making it clear that the problem isn't that Cummins is white. "Lots of people have written great stuff about the border from an Anglo perspective," Urrea said. The problem was that the book was derivative and lazy.

My take: I love Luis.

Cummins herself: I totally get that the publishing industry is unfair to people of color. The frustration I'm hearing is totally fair. But I'm not responsible for all that. I wish people would talk about the book and not the industry.

My take: I read one chapter of her book. It wasn't good. Nothing is fair. Publishing is stupid. Publishers are idiots. I don't hate her for writing a bad book. I hate the game, not the player.

This all comes home for me

If you get away from Twitter, everyone seems to be saying the right things. The problem isn't that she's white. It's not who wrote it, but how she wrote it. But I can't help sympathizing with Cummins in one way. She says she wrote an earlier version of the book with a white narrator who was observing, rather than writing from the perspective of the immigrant herself. She later tore that version up and started over, because "who cares what I have to say, really?" In other words, she was more interested in the people she had researched than she was in her own role as researcher.

I can sympathize. I write my fair share of stories about white people in middle class situations, but I really love stories about people who are different from me. They're more interesting than I am. I like stories about Ethiopians and Eritreans and Koreans and Latino migrant workers and the kids from Baltimore Mrs. Heretic taught. Sometimes, when I write about them, I do it from the point of view of the white observer. I did that in this story, about a white father trying to figure things out when his family adopts a black girl. That was an easy way into the story for me, because I've really played that role in my life. That's actually the way I know the "character" I got that story from. But I don't always do that. When I told a story about an Eritrean woman at a refuge center in Italy who needs to decide whether to abort the child she was impregnated with by rape from a kidnapper during her flight from Eritrea, I didn't tell it from the perspective of the white nurse aid worker. I told it from the POV of the girl, Hiwet. Why? I don't know. In my mind, I saw her. A story from the POV of the nurse would have been about craft and technique and how to tell a story through learned details. The story I told was about the girl, what happened to her, and what she did about it. I didn't want a complicated story. I wanted to keep it simple. That felt more respectful to what she went through, and what so many real people like her went through.

I've told stories about Koreans and been told by white editors that they thought I was falling back on cliches. I don't believe they'd have told me that if my name was Pak Nam Won. I think they assume lack of authenticity on my part. Most white editors have no idea what authenticity in a Korean character would look like. One editor responded to a story by telling me he asked his brother who has been to Korea if he thought a Korean would act the way I made her act in a story, and the brother said no. How do I get anywhere with that kind of refusal to accept an ethos I've actually worked to earn?

The winning book

I'm now the lead fiction editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House, the small press that published my own book a few years ago. We publish one poetry book and one fiction book a year. We recently picked this year's winning fiction book, The Rest of the World, by Adam Schwartz.

Like many presses, ours is always looking to try to bring some fairness to publishing by actively looking to publish writers of color. However, we also run a blind contest, meaning we don't know anything about the writers when we're reading their work. We have to pick based on what's on the page. When I was reading Adam's book, I was blown away by a few of the stories. Even though this year had the best crop of books since I started judging the contest three years ago, I knew his was the winner. Four of six judges agreed with me. The two who didn't still thought it was tied for first or in second.

The stories are largely about young people of color in Baltimore, most of whom are living in tough circumstances. I knew the stories rang true, as did the occasional use of dialect, because I've spent enough time with the kids Mrs. Heretic used to teach in Baltimore to have a decent sense of authenticity. I was really excited, because I thought we had a book by a person of color that was a stunner.

I was stunned myself when I realized, after picking the book, that it was written by a white guy. But that white guy came by his authenticity through hard work. He's been a teacher in Baltimore for twenty-two years. I had the chance to meet with Adam recently. His love for his kids is real, and that's what powered his fiction. He has an ear for the language his kids use because he loves them and he pays attention.

I had picked the book blind, so I knew I had to pick it even after I knew who Adam was. But I was worried. Would anyone criticize the press for an American Dirt kind of publication?

It wasn't an idle concern. Adam has recently faced something like that. He got a story (one of the stories that's in the book) accepted for publication in a pretty good journal. The editor said she loved it and he was all set to go. But then, she showed the story to a "sensitivity reader" who found problems on every page. The reader thought Adam was preying on negative stereotypes of poor, black kids. I've read the story. I don't understand how having a story with a young, black man in tough circumstances is the same as trafficking in negative stereotypes. And I don't believe a black writer would have to face these questions about authenticity.

Adam shouldn't have to, either. He's a teacher of young, black kids, many of whom have stories that would crush your heart to hear. That's not white imagination. It's black reality, a reality Adam lives in and does his part every day to try to turn around. Mrs. Heretic still has never recovered from teaching in Baltimore, because her poor, empathetic heart couldn't stop sharing in the trauma of her students, until it became her trauma, too. Adam's not an outsider to the communities he writes about. He's a vital part of those communities.

That incident with the journal wasn't the only time he's faced these kinds of accusations. At a writer's conference, he workshopped the same story. He told me about a fourth of the class was openly hostile to it, calling it "voyeuristic" and an example of the "white gaze." (If there's one thing that's worse for literary criticism than Twitter, it's mediocre intellects who only half understand the jargon of literary theory.) One person cornered him after the session to tell him he shouldn't write about people of color.

This was all for a story whose underlying main plot point came right from a student Adam had. This wasn't a white guy watching rap music videos about gangsters on his couch and letting his imagination run wild. In the words Luis Urrea used, Adam "buried that kid." Adam earned his stories by living within both physical and emotional hearing distance of their origins, then applying a caring and intelligent mind to shaping them.

All that matters is if the story is good

The most-read post I've ever written on this blog was about Danielle Evans's short story "Boys Go to Jupiter," about a white girl who wears a Confederate flag bikini. The third most-read post I've ever written was about Danielle Evans's "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," about a couple of white, emotionally challenged women. Nobody questions whether she ought to be writing about white people as a black writer. Nobody questions whether she is exploiting negative white stereotypes.

The reason nobody questions Evans isn't some reverse racism. It's because Evans absolutely killed those two stories. Her authority to write about white women comes from writing them really well, nothing else.

I'd like the same authority for myself when I write about the people I do, including some people of color. I don't believe there's any kind of reverse racist code keeping me from it, but I do think that for people like me, trying to get our foot in the door, we face a lot of people who don't know the difference between fake authenticity and real, so they rely on the identity of the author to help them. They will make assumptions. There's a reason Michael Derrick Hudson couldn't get a poem published until he said his name was Yi-Fen Chou. Again, I don't think it's an affirmative action program as much as it's befuddled editors, looking for something they haven't seen before, swamped with work that largely seems of roughly equal quality, and looking for some kind of clue to help them out.

I don't want to be mistaken as saying I think the industry is stacked against white men. It obviously isn't. There are numbers to back that up. But getting into the industry is tough for a white guy writing particular kinds of work. I'm as disturbed as anyone when the wrong novel by a white writer writing about people of color gets support it doesn't deserve. It's bad for me. A novel like American Dirt getting unfairly praised, supported, and rewarded--and then lambasted--will only make the top of the industry less likely to pick works like this. The bottom of the industry is likely to follow suit, in a crude, robotic, and likely not very thoughtful way. (Adam Schwartz pitched a similar book to the one we're publishing to an editor before. She said she loved it, but "couldn't think of publishing it in this climate.")

This isn't a manifesto of white male grievance. It's not Matthew Binder's piece. I want to see publishing (if it survives at all) pushing more stories by people of color, not for abstract reasons, but because people of color are so often the right people to tell stories. I don't believe white men are in trouble, or unfairly pushed out of writing. This isn't about any of those things. It's about how gatekeepers pick crap, and how this affects people at the bottom. It's about how for every American Dirt, a book written by someone without the bona fides to tell it that gets unjustified support, there's an Adam Schwartz, being told he doesn't deserve to tell a story he clearly does. It's about how quickly a rational, nuanced discussion of the role of white writers in telling stories of people of color beomes "shut up, cracker," on social media, and how social media then becomes the only version of the discussion that exists.

At the bottom of all this is the quest for the hot take, the spicy take-down. Hot takes have been an unfortunate part of academic life for centuries, as critics writing about literature people have been reading and commenting on for hundreds of years try to find something new to say. Twitter is just a very condensed version of academic nonsense. But unlike academic work, which most people ignore, Twitter drives sales, which means that as vapid as the discourse on Twitter is, publishers can't afford to ignore it. We all have a part to play in not feeding into talk that's more for public consumption than serious talk about serious issues. When we feed that beast, we help contribute to the production of more bad literature from a shaky and uncertain industry. More importantly, we bring literature down to the level of pop culture, or worse, a cheap imitation of wannabe pop culture, every bit as pathetic as a church trying to look relevant by running commercials about how hip it is.

Yes, it's normal for a literary journal to ghost on you after they accept your work

Long ago, this used to be a blog about writing fiction and the travails thereof. It's been more of a blog dedicated to analyzing and reviewing short stories for about the last year. In part, that's because it's been good for me as a writer. Forcing myself to pay close enough attention to what some of the year's mostly highly regarded short fiction is doing, enough that I can write about it without making a fool of myself, has really helped me develop as a writer of fiction myself.

Proof of this came about a month ago, when I got notice that a journal I really like wanted to publish a story of mine. It's not the New Yorker, but it's a solid journal. I was actually surprised they picked me, because I kind of thought they were too cool for me. The great thing about it was that they wanted to publish a longer story of mine. It's very hard to get longer fiction published, so the fact they were willing to publish my story must have meant they really found it appealing.

The acceptance letter mentioned that I should sign the contract attached. That's pretty normal stuff, except there was no contract attached. I sent an email profusely thanking them for believing in my story and explaining that there had not been any contract attached, so could they please send one. I got no response for a week, so I emailed again. Two days later, I got an email that said, "Here you go," along with the attachment.

That was a little curt, but it was what I wanted, so I signed it and sent it back, along with the other things they asked for, like a photo and a bio. I later realized that one of the attachments I'd sent them was the wrong one, so I sent another email explaining everything and including the right one.

I didn't get any response on that. Two weeks later, someone responded in Submittable, the online website where a lot of journals handle the business of accepting submissions for stories. That person said "Sorry!" and attached the contract again, seemingly unaware that I'd already gotten it and responded through email. Whoever answered the email for the journal obviously hadn't seen my response, or hadn't forwarded it to the person who answered in Submittable.

So I attached everything again in Submittable, then sent an email just asking to be sure they'd gotten everything, explaining what seemed to be redundancies in replies I'd gotten from them. I asked to get a reply just so I knew they had what they needed. I've not heard anything in another two weeks since.

If you are a new writer who just got accepted for the first time or is hoping to get accepted for the first time soon, I want you to know how normal this is. I've now had eight stories accepted for publication. Six of them were like this. So if you struggle and struggle to get that first acceptance, and as soon as you acknowledge their acceptance you stop hearing from them, that's normal. If you end up freaking out and worrying that they forgot about you, or came to their senses and decided they don't want to publish you, that's normal, too. If you don't hear from them for seven months and then finally find out your story was published three weeks ago, that is also normal.

The people who run these journals are not getting paid. They're squeezing in time between life and work and their own writing to put your work out. They don't usually find time to hold your hand and make sure you know everything is going to be alright. But if they said they'll publish your story, they'll publish it eventually.

It was hard getting this far, I know. That doesn't mean the next steps are really any easier. But hopefully, if you at least know that it's normal for the next steps not to be any easier, that'll make it easier to deal with how it's not any easier?

Is literary society monocultural? On that Quilette opinion piece by Matthew Binder

Occasionally, news happens in the literary world with enough noise, even my non-literary friends hear about it. That's what happened when Matthew Binder, author of the soon-to-be-launched novel The Absolved, posted an opinion piece on Quillette on Friday. I actually heard about it from a mathematician friend before I started seeing literature folks posting about it.

There's not much controversial in the novel he wrote, it seems. It's a futuristic piece about the world of 2036, in which automation and AI have replaced nearly all the meaningful work in the world, leaving humankind listless. Binder compares the concerns of humanity in the 2036 of his novel to those of various groups in the 2016 election, only now, "they've gone beyond demagoging foreigners and immigrants, and are going after machines."

Sounds interesting enough, and probably timely, although the first thing it made me think of was how much it sounds like Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano, which already was looking at themes like this sixty years ago. (I can't believe this novel of Vonnegut's isn't studied more. Unlike most of his work, the specific apocalyptic element in this one--much of humanity left without meaningful work to do--seems like a real threat in my children's lifetime.) But I'd have maybe been interested enough in the novel's premise to buy it, assuming reviews came in somewhat favorably.

What caused the fuss

What caused the fuss wasn't the novel, it was Binder's discussion of what it took to get the novel published. While working the literary circuit in New York, trying to find a sympathetic agent or publisher, Binder found two things: a homogeneously extreme liberal political mindset within publishing, and a prejudice against new, white, male authors.

As proof of the first characteristic of literary culture in New York, Binder offers the events of parties he went to, parties where Trump's America was routinely described as "fascist." Binder claims this view of politicians as fascist extended even to New York's centrist Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo.

Binder's proof of a bias against white male authors--or at least new, white, male authors--by the publishing powers-that-be comes from specific setbacks he faced in trying to publish his book. Assuming the things he claims happened really happened to him--and I have no reason to think they didn't--then his case is mildly compelling. He claims one acquisitions editor from an independent press showed interest, but this interest was blunted by the editor's boss, who sent an email (which the editor showed Binder) saying "We're not taking on unknown white guys this year."

Binder also says an agent scolded him for "bigotry" because his novel includes a successful Muslim revolt in Paris in the future. Another said the novel was "misogynist" because the main character--whom, Binder stresses, is an intentionally highly flawed anti-hero--was no longer attracted to his wife. A third basically said most readers are female, and the distinctly male voice of the novel would not resonate with them.

The reaction

I was especially struck with the reaction of Julie Barer on Twitter. Barer is an extremely successful New York literary agent. Her list of clients includes some powerhouses. She was the first agent I tried to pitch my novel to, partly because I studied under Luis Urrea, one of her clients, and I hoped (even though Urrea never answered my email to him) that this might give me some kind of in. Not surprisingly, I got a no.

Here's what Barer wrote on Twitter about this article:

Flaws in this reasoning

She's a major agent and probably has a much better sense of the industry than Binder does from his two years of struggling to publish a novel. I do think, though, that there might be some logical flaws in what she posted here.

First, her proofs she cites that men are doing fine are somewhat arbitrarily picked. It's like when you see those lists of "spooky coincidences" between Kennedy and Lincoln's deaths. Granted some of these things are true, do they really mean that much? For example, so only two of the top ten writers on the NYT Fiction list were women (actually, when I checked, it was three of ten). But six of the top thirteen were women. Next month, it might be six women out of ten. What does one week's list tell you? And how many of the top 100 are women?

Similarly, are last year's Pulitzer and Nobel that meaningful? In 2016, the Nobel for Literature went to Bob Dylan, so how much does the award really even matter to anyone anymore? I don't know how "top paid authors" is measured. When I think of really rich authors, I think of J.K. Rowling, E.L. James, and Stephenie Meyer, all women. I believe Barer's statistic about the top five, but I think there are probably enough high-paid female authors that the profession isn't really a patriarchy, at least not when it comes to money.

Much more importantly, though, Binder's opinion piece wasn't really about the literary world being anti-male or anti-white. It was about it being homogeneous, both politically and aesthetically, and it being difficult for an outside voice to break in. Binder claimed that the publishing industry eschewed profit for ideology. The things Barer said about the industry could be true and still completely vindicate what Binder wrote; if men are popular and sell well, surely, Binder would argue, that's a reason for getting more of them published?

Not really an endorsement, just a reminder that not being all right doesn't mean he's all wrong

It's tempting to give in to all-or-nothing thinking here. Either Binder's all right and the literary community is full of hypocritical ideologues, or he's all wrong and just whining about the world not immediately falling at his feet for a book that doesn't really sound all that original. We ought to avoid this kind of either-or thinking.

Binder's anecdotal evidence doesn't cement the case that publishers rabidly enforce a political orthodoxy, but I've certainly felt there is some evidence for this same thing. I'm center-left with a smattering of center-right or libertarian-leaning ideology, and I've often felt that's not nearly left enough when I hang out at literary gatherings. Being pretty far left is the assumed political ideology in literary fiction. Like Binder, I've also felt that I needed to keep quiet in certain literary circles and not say things like, "Are you sure Trump's America is actually fascist and not just potentially so?" This, even though I genuinely cannot stand to hear Donald Trump speak. It's not enough to dislike him; I have to believe he's actually Satan incarnate. 

Binder's work might not be that great. Many people commenting on Barer's tweet opined that the sample passage from his book sounded somewhat south of virtuosic. I'd agree with them. If I were judging on it, I probably would have passed. It's not bad, but it's also not scintillating. It's mid-range sci-fi writing, suffering from the typical sci-fi flaw of trying to explain everything about the universe in frequent asides. 

But it's too much to say Binder is just being petulant. For one thing, petulance is a pretty common reaction to being a new writer. My early blog posts are a testament to that. That just comes with the territory. You can write well and still get nowhere, and it's very hard to accept that. Assumptions that the game is rigged come kind of naturally. 

Furthermore, NOT accepting rejection can be a healthy trait. Binder continues to believe in himself even after extensive failure. That might have something to do with why he's got a novel coming out and my novel is still looking for a home. Stubborn belief in oneself might be annoying, but it's also effective more often than it's not. 

I've learned to accept that when I get rejection, it sometimes really is about me. That's been a hard lesson. I still have a tough time believing that someone like me, with a growing list of publication credits and a deep background in an important subject that no literary fiction writer has ever had, can forever keep failing to get my novel published, but I also don't think it's a conspiracy. It just hasn't happened yet. Partly, that's my lack of persistence. Binder is persistent, and his persistence extends to stubborn faith in his work even after frequent rejection. Maybe he could use a little more of the humility I've learned, but that's not a reason to hate him. If it weren't for his brashness, we wouldn't have read anything from him to begin with. 

Just take the evidence he offers for what it is

Binder offered anecdotal evidence of his experience and drew some conclusions from it. We can reject his conclusions, but the anecdotes themselves must mean something. You don't have to end up thinking that every publisher and agent in New York is a hypocritical fool. I certainly don't. I assume they work in a business, they know the business, and they generally have sound business-based reasons for the decisions they make. If it's hard to break in as a new white male writer, there are societal and market-driven reasons for this that have nothing to do with ideology. But if the things Binder said happened to him--and I think they probably did--then that means SOMETHING. 

Ultimately, my concern is twofold. First, America is becoming more polarized. I mean this in a literal sense: not just that we are disagreeing more, but that opposing sides are actually becoming more ideologically distinct. Republicans are getting more conservative and Democrats more liberal. That's not something in Binder's imagination. The Pew Research Center found in 2014 that "median Republicans polled as more conservative that 94 percent of Democrats (up from 70 percent twenty years earlier), whereas Democrats were more liberal than 92 percent of Republicans (up from 64 percent in 1994)." (Quote taken from the Times Literary Supplement, 10-26-2018, in a review by Eric Ianelli on two books looking at modern horror stories.)

This means you can no longer be a Democrat without being a complete Democrat, without accepting your party's full platform, preferably of the more extreme varieties, just to be safe. This doesn't seem healthy for America. There is no consensus to build. There is only winner-take-all war. 

Secondly, I'm concerned about the influence of literature. Agents and publicists are making, I'm sure, what they think are the best choices in order to stay alive, but literature is so small a part of American public discourse now, if it becomes any less a part of public discourse it won't be part of it at all. This isn't mostly publishers' fault, of course. There are macro-forces at work in society to make literature less influential. But I don't think Binder is off to think that publishers are hurting themselves by giving America what those publishers want to read themselves rather than what America wants to read. The choices now are thoughtless and mainstream or thoughtful but somewhat fringe and alienating. This while the Golden Age of Television is giving us countless choices that are politically mainstream but still intellectually challenging. 

Binder might irritate some in publishing with his observations, but they will ignore him at their own peril. They don't have to like him, but they ought to pay some attention to what he said, or they'll end up like characters in his story, looking for any kind of meaningful work to be had. 

Why I care if people read what I write

I posted last week about how to deal with it emotionally when a writer seems to get more than they deserve. Frequent commenter Badibanga--who is a friend of mine in real life--asked why I care. His comment:

...why do you want to fit in so badly? Great fiction is a coterie of usual suspects who will be unknown and unremembered 30, 20 years from now. That is the rational gamble here. The "great" writers often were not appreciated by contemporaries. So do you want to be of the moment? If so, then behave accordingly. Do you want to do what suits you, then do that, accept the consequences, and do not whine about it. Rare, rare is the person who is appreciated both by contemporaries and subsequent generations. I guarantee, however, that many of the truly great did not give a shit about fitting in or being some sort of also ran to a bunch of celebrated hacks.

We discussed this in person last week, after the ablutions demanded by sacred tradition were first performed, but because I thought it was an interesting conversation, I'll share my view here.

Badibanga has a point. And lately I've been thinking a lot about that Borges story...the one I referred to in that post, where a man writes his masterpiece entirely in his head a split-second before he is gunned down by a firing squad. I think anyone who's going to write seriously will have to internalize that story at some point, because the odds are long for nearly every writer that anyone will ever seriously give a shit what you write. So yes, on some level, you have to write to please yourself.

That being said, what primarily motivates me to write is a sense that some disconcerting truth about existence has lodged itself in my brain, and nobody that I know of has ever mentioned it before. Am I wrong about it, or is this really a truth nobody has ever mentioned? I pick at it and pull at this notion and keep trying to give words to the thought it until I'm done. But the only way to know at that point if I've really arrived at some hitherto unspoken truth is for others to read on it and comment. So I need readers.

As much as folks romanticize the writer who was only discovered after death, that's actually not all that common an occurrence. And I have to believe it will become even rarer as time goes by, and the world is ever more and more caught up in the moment, caught up in today, and forgetting whatever happened five minutes ago.

As Badibanga says, it's likely that even if I became a well known writer today, I'd be forgotten soon after. It's far, far more likely, though, that if I am unknown when I die, I'll remain that way. It's very hard for me to imagine a future where a child or a widow goes through my thumb drives after I'm gone and manages to find a publisher--if such a thing even still exists--who will take them on.

Even many of the authors cited as examples of people who were discovered after death had at least some recognition in life. Phillip K. Dick was a well known Sci-Fi writer, he just hadn't crossed over into mainstream appeal until some of his books became movies. Edgar Allen Poe achieved mild success in life, albeit not the financial kind. Long before critics hated Moby Dick, they liked Melville's Omoo and Typee. Even Emily Dickinson had a few poems published before she died. In order for future generations to find gold floating in the detritus of the past, you have to at least get your work into that detritus. And the more of it you get there, the more likely it is to be found.

So yes, I do want to be read, which means I crave publications and awards and notoriety. That leaves me with a tough choice ahead of me. The more seriously I pursue writing, the more it becomes clear that what I want will probably elude me. The latest round of stories I have sent out were the best shots I had. I put everything into them, and they're coming back rejected. So I either have to keep plugging away with a growing sense of hopelessness or give up.

Gradually, I am arriving at a position that is something of a paradox. If I write only to be published, then I won't write anything worth writing. But having written that true verse in the darkness, I have to then become another person who cares very much about getting them published. I have to not care what people think when I write, and then care very much what people think when I'm done writing.

I used to not understand why writers so frequently suffered from a variety of psychological maladies, but the longer I'm at playing out this paradox, the more sense it makes to me.

What being in writing workshops with Nnedi Okorafor taught me about the goal of writing programs

You may not, at this exact moment in history, grasp the significance of the title of this post. But it's likely you soon will. Her fantasy novel is about to be made into an HBO series, and it's backed by none other than George R.R. Martin himself, leading to inevitable claims that her series is the next Game of Thrones. Nnedi's done alright by herself.

That's fine with me. I only remember two people's names from my program in graduate school, and she's one of them. (I was talking recently with a woman who described her graduate writing program as an incestuous group where everyone hung out together, slept with each other, and gossiped about one another. Mine was nothing like that. We were friendly, but there were never any social events other than readings. Or maybe there were, and I just wasn't invited?)

What I remember most about Nnedi is that nobody knew what to do with her novel when it came up in workshops. Graduate workshops are generally geared toward literary fiction.

Defining what literary fiction is isn't easy. It is sometimes defined in opposition to other types of literature, which are tarred with the term "genre fiction." "Genre fiction" may or may not be seen as pejorative. I would say literary fiction is fiction which aspires to be regarded as serious, which hopes to say something significant about the human condition, about society, about the universe. It is literature the author hopes will be assigned as reading in universities one day.

That's the model for graduate writing programs at American universities. The programs teach students to write like the works those students are reading in their literature classes. (Most MFA's have at least some reading component, and my M.A. program was exactly half literature study, half workshops.)

Nnedi wrote YA post-apocalyptic fiction with a Nigerian bent, even then. The class wasn't rude about it. We commented on her work as energetically as we did anything. As I've said before, I don't think the feedback from classmates was useful to me at all. If it wasn't useful to her, I wouldn't be surprised. (I did once give her this feedback: I thought it seemed morally questionable for the children in her world to have super powers as a result of nuclear fallout, because that might make young people think nuclear war was desirable. I guess I can say I once gave advice to a famous writer.) I wouldn't presume to speak for her on how valuable she found the workshops. She stayed for her Ph.D., whereas I left after my M.A., so I'd guess she found some value in it.

Post-apocalyptic fiction, but from an entirely different cultural wellspring than what we're used to

What seems interesting to me looking back on it now is the conversation we had one day about her work. I want to say a comment by the instructor started it. It wasn't a particularly nasty comment, or even dismissive. My advisor was a fairly supportive person. I think she may have asked a question about the book and qualified it by saying she herself did not read a lot of this kind of fiction. Whatever she said, the class ended up in a sidebar about the merits of YA fiction, namely whether there were any. Nnedi and quite a few others defended YA. They declared that Harry Potter--the YA champion of the time--was actually quite complex and sophisticated and had intrinsic worth beyond being a bestseller. (I had no opinion then. I've read Harry Potter now, because now I'm a father, and I agree. It's a great series.)

It wasn't really a vitriolic conversation, but it seems odd to me now that it was a conversation we had at all. In law school, I doubt whether anyone has conversations over whether tort law is real law or just something for ambulance chasers to make a buck off of. I doubt if the status of plastic surgery is looked at askance in medicals schools. That's because these are really professionalizing programs. The end goal is to perform in an industry. To use an example more directly analogous, do drama programs only teach Shakespearean stage performance? Or do they also teach how to act in a movie or on TV?

I'm not sure why teaching to the job market is not a model for writing programs. Or maybe it is. It's just that when literary fiction is the presumed type of writing, the reality is that the vast majority of graduates won't be able to make a living writing. So the academy is teaching students to teach writing workshops as much as teaching them to write. To the extent it is teaching writing, it is teaching how to write stories that will be published in places where most of the readers are other writers who graduated from the same types of programs and publish in the same types of journals.

A few lucky literary fiction writers do succeed commercially, of course. They are the ones who won major awards so that their books were assigned in universities, or who got onto Oprah's book club and became one of the few "good for you" books Americans can be shamed into reading every year. But they are very much the exception that proves the rule.

I've been out of grad school for 15 years, of course, and the game may have changed. But I wonder why these schools don't offer mystery, fantasy, YA, romance, or any of the other genres that actually DO sell as part of the curriculum.

Part of it assuredly has to do with universities justifiably feeling that their mission is to promote human knowledge. But I'd bet there's at least some fear behind the choices. What if graduate programs cannot produce commercial success in fiction reliably? Right now, they're not really expected to. They're simply expected to produce occasional bright lights who can get published by the kinds of journals the school itself probably runs. They're expected to produce writers who win awards proctored by other MFA grads. You can teach people how to write for a system. But teaching people to write to be read widely is tough. Agents and publishers, whose whole lives revolve around trying to bet right on it, fail all the time at guessing what the next hot item will be.

That's why writing programs are as much about teaching students to teach writing programs themselves as they are about teaching them to write.

This shouldn't be seen as a personal complaint, by the way. As I told a friend the other day, even if I wanted to write genre fiction just to be read, I wouldn't know how. I don't have one in me. My literary hero in grad school was Herman Melville, a man whose greatest work was ignored in his own lifetime. So this isn't sour grapes that nobody taught me to write a NY Times bestseller. This is just to note that Nnedi's wonderful success was such an unusual dream for a writing program student back then that we almost didn't know what to do with it.

Keep this in mind if you want to follow her path to greatness.

Congratulations to Nnedi. I'll be getting some of her books and reading them. I like fantasy enough to know every single thing the Lord of the Rings movies did wrong, but it'll be nice to see what someone can do with it drawing from a completely different mythological tradition. 

On people getting what they deserve (or more than, or less than)

Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? -Hamlet, Act 2, Scene II. 

I was just checking out the sales of my book on Amazon. A few people bought the e-book, which made me happy. Then, I saw sponsored links to other e-books. One was Rebel Cowbear: Paranormal Werebear Romance (Lone Star Cowbears Book 1). There is also a sequel in the Wearbear Cowboy romance series. I was tempted to laugh, but then I saw the book had 58 comments on Amazon. My book has three. 

Earlier this week, I read a couple of installments from this year's Best American Short Stories anthology. The second and third stories in the anthology were from big names who'd been published recently in the New Yorker. I found both stories to be rather lazy efforts undeserving of the attention. They weren't terrible, they just didn't feel like they'd been written with any real urgency. They felt like something a professional writer thought would make a good story, so the writers put into them the stuff they usually put into a story to make it work. And because they are big name writers, they got into the New Yorker and the BASS anthology. 

You won't always feel as a writer that others are getting things they don't deserve and you do. Sometimes, you'll feel that even whatever credit you have gotten is undeserved, and you are a fraud and a hack and a terrible writer. Sometimes, you'll feel both cheated of your due and undeserving of any due at the same time. (Just this morning, I deleted the first page of a rough draft I wrote last night, and asked myself why I ever write anything, because I am obviously terrible.) 

However, when you do start finding yourself as a writer feeling cheated, that others are getting more than they deserve and you are getting far, far less, I find these thoughts help me:

-The Kardashians are all rich without having any apparent abilities between them. This is a much greater injustice than a writer continuing to be published by big journals in spite of having peaked years ago. So if T.C. Boyle phones in some crap sci-fi trash about designer babies, it's low on the list of cosmic injustices when that story gets love. 

-It's almost certainly much worse for minority writers. The market can only support one niche writer at a time. So if you are a Rohingya writer writing about Rohingya issues and the market has already picked who its favorite Rohingya writer is, you're out of luck. Somewhere, there is a Chinese-American female writer who has been waiting for Amy Tan to die for about twenty years. Even when that happens, that new writer will spend a decade being called "the next Amy Tan." 

-Both "Everyone is getting more than me" and "I am terrible" are irrational. I know that being irrational helps write great fiction, but when it starts to unsettle you emotionally, go try some other writerly activity like getting piss-drunk or philandering with half your neighborhood until you feel better. 

-There is a Borges story called "The Secret Miracle." In it, a Jew who has been sentenced by the Nazis to die by firing squad is sad that he will never be able to finish writing his play. As the bullets are about to fire, God stops time. The man is able to complete the play in his head. The moment he completes the play, time resumes, and he is instantly killed. I often think of that story, imagine that each story I write has a private audience of one. If it is ever shared beyond that, this is a bonus. But writing the story is something I have to do. I'm only responsible for writing it. What happens beyond is not my responsibility.

E-book is out

If $17 was too much for a paperback, but you've just been dying to get my book to see if I can actually write anything worth reading (because this blog sure doesn't fit the bill), you can now get the much cheaper $8 e-book version.

I've just committed to buying books at a local book store if I can, but I really don't know another way to get an e-book than Amazon/Kindle. Here's the link for the Kindle version:

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Wait-Called-Jacob-Weber-ebook/dp/B076H8FKNZ/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1508290153&sr=8-1.

Thanks to the folks who already got the high-priced paperback, and huge thanks to the people who have wanted to talk to me about it. I wrote the book for the same reason I write anything: to say things I think people will find worth reading, and, hopefully, talking about.

Thanks to everyone who ever checks out this blog.

Washington Independent Review of Books reviews my collection of short stories

Let my friend Chris know that I actually did manage to do one thing right as a self-promoter of my book: I got a review from Washington Independent Review of Books.

I didn't know for sure that they were going to review it. (In fact, it's been up for three days and I just now saw it.) I sent them two books, because the folks at my publisher, Washington Writers' Publishing House, suggested it. A woman on the WWPH staff knew someone at WIRB, but when I sent them the books to review, I forgot to include my email address, because I am a moron. So I never heard from them. I also saw on Amazon that there was a used copy of my book for sale at the Goodwill right by the WIRB, so I wondered if they just dumped it. But it looks like they did a real service to a local writer and used one copy to get it reviewed.

They don't normally review a whole lot of books from small presses like mine. I believe this was a solid they did me because I'm local. That's darn nice of them.

It's especially gratifying to see this now, because I'm in the middle of doing my own literary good citizenship right now. I'm doing a review of a book someone asked me to do. Turns out, it's a much harder assignment than I thought it would be. The American Review of Books actually wants a short academic paper. I haven't written anything like that in years. I'm not sure I'm up for it, but it's my job to do this, and I know if I were the author, I'd want me to put some effort into it. So I'm struggling through it. Nice to see karma paying me back for it ahead of time.

Confessions of a literary journal reader: overcompensating, and not the penis kind

I've written before about the fallacies, logical and otherwise, that might befall a literary journal editor, and how these fallacies might affect whether your story gets picked for publication. Editors are humans, and sometimes, the things we do are just weird.

You can control a lot with the way you write a story. Your skill as a writer can probably control, with about an 80% degree of accuracy, whether your story gets looked at more closely by the front-line readers or tossed aside. But when it gets down the the tough decisions of whether to publish the many stories a journal gets that deserve publication--many more than they can actually publish--there may be some things going on that you can't control.

Here's one I've caught myself doing lately

Although I neither like cars nor guns, in other ways, I kind of fit the male American stereotype. I like sports. I like sex. I like a particular kind of narrative voice, aggressive, quick-hitting and jocular, that tends to come from male writers. I'm aware of this tendency, and sometimes, I find myself overcompensating for it by intentionally trying to vote for female voices, sometimes even ones I don't really like. Maybe I'll vote down that hilarious story about the misogynistic womanizer with a secret soft side, or I'll vote up the story about consignment needlepoint workers in Kenya even though I could barely get through it. I don't exactly keep affirmative-action type quotas, but I am aware, usually, of whether the last few stories I voted for were written by men or women, or whether they featured male or female characters.

In case you were wondering--ladies--I do not drive a sports car. I have an old Corolla. So I'm not overcompensating. Or am I aware that people know men with sports cars are overcompensating, and I'm overcompensating for that? Hmmm...

This is similar to the other fallacy I wrote about, where I am more likely to vote for a story if I haven't voted for one lately, and less likely if I just recently voted for one. I'm not sure exactly what kind of cognitive bias this is--it's something like an availability heuristic, but maybe also something like the gambler's fallacy. I'd call it a fairness bias--a sort of one for you, one for me, incredibly clumsy kind of thinking.

Even being aware of it, this is still lurking at the back of my mind. I'm not only aware of it, I'm also aware of being aware of it. I don't want to give in to it, and I also don't want to swing too far the other way trying to avoid it. It's a very uncomfortable thought looking over my shoulder as I read and do my best to get it right.

There's really nothing you, as a writer, can do about this kind of thing. Which is why one point I keep trying to get across is to take all rejections with a grain of salt. It'll be a grain of salt in your wounds, I know, but really, just don't beat yourself up too much. 

Two posts, one day: my book is on Amazon! (pre-order)

I didn't even realize this when I posted an hour or so ago, but my book of short stories is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Here ya go:

Me reading...me...beneath a tree on a summer day

I got my preview copies a few days ago, and I gotta say, even though I was really over the whole experience of having a book published and thought it was lame to get emotional about it, I got kind of emotional. My stories seem so much more grown-up in a book than on my hard drive next to my son's plagiarized homework.

Word to the wise, if you're thinking of ordering it to be nice to me or whatever: there will be an e-book version, so you can save yourself $8 or something by waiting for that to come out. Not sure I'd pay $17 for a paperback. But then, I don't love anyone like you all love me, right?

No for three in a row: WIHPTS, "Midterm" by Leslie Johnson

For this round of Would I Have Published this Story (WIHPTS), I make my second foray in recent memory into the seedy underbelly of the teenage, American, female psyche. A few months ago, it was for 13 Reasons Why, but today it's for the next story in this year's Pushcart Anthology, "Midterm" by Leslie Johnson.

The usual caveat: this isn't exactly "criticism," although my views on the story sort of come out while answering the question of whether I think I'd have recommended this story for publication as a reader at a literary magazine. The bigger point, though, is to look at the reasons, logical and illogical, why one editor might accept or reject a story, and to use that to help writers out there understand why their own stories might get rejected. 

How would I have voted?

Yet again, I'm fairly certain I'd have voted no. And yet again, I think I'd have probably been wrong.

Why would I have voted no?

There might have been a bit of an irrational reason to reject the story for me: the other day, Anis Shivani, something of a literary man crush for me, commented on my humble little blog. (Or it was at least someone convincingly playing the part of Shivani.) Soon after, I got his first book of fiction, "Anatolia and Other Stories." One of the stories in there is about a man at a writer's workshop retreat, who rather drolly notes that all of the women in his workshop seemed to be writing about anorexia. Which kind of made me subconsciously roll my eyes in sympathy with that main character when I got to "Midterm," about the struggles of a college freshman girl with anorexia named Chandra. I may have taken the proximity of Shivani's story as a clue I should reject the one by Johnson.

Even before I read that story by Shivani, stories about anorexia would have been a tough sell for me. They're kind of--and this is really not to dump on people who have it--played out and after-school-specially to me. My blogging buddy Karen Carlson said the voice of the lost-in-the-sauce female protagonist was "off-putting," even while it was the right voice for the story. Even Johnson herself seems well aware of how many readers might take such a character, and tries to let the reader know she has guessed the reaction by having Chandra's professor beg her not to write "another paper about anorexia" for class.

Johnson actually correctly guessed my thoughts twice in the story. The other time was when Eli, the boy who takes interest in Chandra, starts talking about his philosophy of how we all need to just be present and live our lives. It's the way only a self-important college student tool would talk, which is why Johnson has Eli say, after one monologue, "I sound like an asshole?" Well, now that you mention it, yeah...

Johnson understands that her story is a tough sell for the reader, but she's determined to make us care about Chandra anyway. Just because Chandra's troubles are kind of cliche, first-world troubles doesn't make them less troublesome for her. In fact, that's what makes it so pernicious: she looks very much like she's on her way to becoming a statistic, another girl who washed out of college in the first year. And she's such a cliche, the people in her life seem unable to summon the energy to help her adequately.

Johnson manages to make the reader care about Chandra, in spite of all the obstacles, which is quite an accomplishment. But I kind of think I'd never have gotten far enough as an editor to find out that she'd done it. I don't want to put hypothetical votes into the mouths of other editors I work with, but there are a couple of women at the journal whom I've seen on more than one occasion reject a story with the note "a little too 'YA' for my taste." If either one of them had said that about this story, I'd have probably agreed without thinking too much about it.

It's really remarkable this story managed to get past the inevitable knee-jerk reactions against it. I have to give the Colorado Review props for having accepted it in the first place. It shows a lot of willingness on the part of their editorial staff to hear a writer out. I'm not sure I'd have done as well. 

If I wrote blog posts modeled off glam rock ballads, this is what I'd write

The other day, Mrs. Heretic and I, nostalgic for Korea, went to the get some 잡채 and 콩나물 for a late lunch, then followed it up when we got home by drinking soju on the back porch. After a while, we moved from the porch to the kitchen table, where we passed the time watching music videos from the era we regard as our childhood, more or less the 80s. Unlike my feelings for Korea, I'm not at all nostalgic about the 80s. I regard it as the time in my life when I realized I was not good enough at sports to become a pro athlete. I dislike almost all of the music I grew up listening to. For some reason, though, with enough soju, it became fun for a while to listen to these songs as Youtube chose them for us and be reminded why I dislike almost all of them.

At some point, Youtube moved us back to 1977 and Meatball's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," which we listened to, even though I was too young when the song came out to remember it from back then. I don't think I even knew who Meatball was until my late teens. I have no strong opinion on whether "Paradise" is a good song. I'm nearly serious opinion-free on music in general. It's never been a huge part of my self-identity. As a kid, I mostly listened to what was on the radio so I could keep up with conversations at school. (Edit: Mrs. Heretic says people will not get that "Meatball" was a joke. Fine. He's the other staple ground beef meal in American homes.)

I'll say this for the song, though: it's long and it's several things at once and it's self-assured and indulgent and there's a certain joy in that. The song would never get made now; it's too unwieldy and hard to program. It's a vestige of a time when rock stars made the fucking songs they wanted to make and people could play their songs or not. (I guess. I don't know anything about rock and roll history.)

It reminded me of Lydia Davis's "After Reading Peter Bichsell," which I blogged about recently. I said that if I'd seen the story come in to my literary journal as an editor, I'd almost certainly have voted no on it, but reading it gave me a strange pleasure, in part because it took certain liberties I don't think writers take much anymore.

I seem to be doing the same thing with this blog post. I've already spent over 200 words just introducing the concept of the structure of this post. And now here's where the song changes.

Today was one of those "hit a great shot" kind of days

Golfers often talk about how they spend most of the time hating golf, but then once in a while, they hit a great shot, and it keeps them coming back and suffering through a terrible game for a while longer. That was me today. I was really giving thought (again) to pitching it all, mostly because of how unhappy the whole publication struggle makes me sometimes.

Then, today, I had two things happen that were encouraging enough that I'm probably still in it for a while longer.

One was actually a rejection. But it was an encouraging rejection, and it was from The New Ohio Review, which is a really good journal. I have a friend to whom I've tried to explain what writing is like for me, and his reaction to the notion that an "encouraging rejection" is actually a thing was an incredulous "Fuck's a rejection encouraging?" but it really can be. It means that something about the story made them at least take notice. It means there really was something in that story.

The second thing that happened was another agent asked to look at the manuscript for my novel. This could very well just end in disappointment again in a few days or weeks, but at least I'm getting some movement with it.

Those don't sound like very impressive things now that I've written them down. But that's what happened, and now I'm back to grinding some more.

Fucking Anis Shivani

I've quoted this lightning rod critic/poet/novelist several times on this blog. I find much of what he says instantly compelling, because his critique of the academy, of M.F.A. programs, and of modern writing in general seems to match conclusions I'd arrived at on my own. He's suspicious of M.F.A. programs because they're really just socialization of writers, a socialization that teaches us all to be nice, to say nice things about our betters, and that if we do, we'll be rewarded with occasional publications and maybe writing jobs. He says this has led to an insular type of academy-proctored writing, one that is divorced from the public, who largely ignore everything this system produces.

Last year, Shivani was giving an interview. He was talking about his rather ascetic personal training as a writer, in which he turned away from family or even sex, and more or less locked himself away and read. He started to talk about how much reading a writer should do, and said this:

So my question to you, if you want to be a writer, is: Are you willing to shut yourself down and read, read like a writer, the ten or twenty thousand books you need to read before you can know anything about writing? Are you willing to give the best years of your life to reading and writing, are you willing to make writing the first and only priority in life, more than your family and the people you love or money or health or security or anything else? And all by yourself, in solitude? If yes, you can be a writer, if not, you can’t. Community is optional and dispensable. It’s something you do, perhaps, after you’ve established your identity as a writer, not before. But today the cart comes before the horse, it’s the opposite of what it should be.

Those are the kinds of statements that make me think I should pack it in as a writer. I'm not that dedicated. I'm not willing to punt my family for my writing. And maybe, as a result, I'm not that good.

But something about that doesn't sit right. Shivani has himself criticized writers who have no real life experience, who know only teaching and books and the narrow things one learns from domestic life, such as having children and divorce and parents dying. They lack Melville's misery on a merchant ship, or Faulkner's experience in the factory. I've written before about how I prefer to read Carl Sagan, a scientist who writes, to Andrea Barret, a writer who sciences. It's maybe okay if I'm not a pure writer, if I'm a guy who's done some stuff, read some stuff, thought about it and is trying to learn to write well enough to share it.

I haven't read 10% of what Shivani has probably read. When he mentioned the Italian hermeticists in this essay, I had to admit that I didn't even know who the fuck the Italian hermeticists were.

But do I just give up because of that? I do have some stuff in my background that makes up for not being the most well read person out there. (And that's not litotes when I say "not the most well read." I'm not woefully under-read. But I am a slow reader, and I've spent a lot of time reading in foreign languages, books that sometimes took me months to finish. It's limited what I've been able to get through in my life.)

There is enough going on in my brain that it's worth trying to squeeze out, and I'm not just talking about the perfect .gif from a contemporary American sit-com. In any event, I'm not yet despondent enough that I'm able to overcome the compulsion to write.

WIHPTS? "After Reading Peter Bichsel" by Lydia Davis

It's time for another round of Would I Have Published This Story (WIHPTS), in which I attempt to demonstrate the arbitrariness of short fiction publishing by taking stories that have earned critical praise and trying to guess if I'd have voted for them to be published in the small literary journal I work for if I'd have seen them come in without anything to flag them as special.

The first two times I did this, I was pretty confident I'd have voted to publish the acclaimed stories, which kind of undercut my theory of arbitrariness. Let's see what happens this time, with "After Reading Peter Bichsel," originally published in The Paris Review and later re-printed in the 2017 Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Here is my caveat about what this game means and doesn't mean:

This isn't really literary criticism, although I guess my opinion on the story will sort of come out in the wash as I try to guess what my own reaction might have been. The bigger point than just criticism of one story is to cast a light on how fickle publishing is. This is a story that has been deemed one of the year's best, but that doesn't mean it might not have met a different fate, that there wasn't some luck involved.

Short Answer: Would I have published this?

No! I'd have rejected it, probably with extreme prejudice, after reading perhaps two or three pages. And I'm relatively confident other editors would have agreed, and our journal would have rejected it with a non-personalized note. There is one other editor in particular I'm thinking of who would have called this story "thinly fictionalized memoir."

Synopsis

This is an achingly slow and subtle story, something the narrator (author?) offers a bit of apologia for early on. She recounts being given a book of stories by Swiss writer Peter Bichsel. She wants to read the book to improve her German while she is traveling throughout Germany and Switzerland. The narrator remarks on these stories that:

He (Bichsel) will also sometimes begin a story, or remark in the middle of a story, "There are stories that are hardly worth telling," or "There is almost nothing to say about X," and then sometimes follow that with a "but": "But I have wanted to tell this story for a long time now," or "But it has to be told, because it was the first story in my life, the first one that I remember." He then goes on to tell a lovely, quiet, modest story, a story that glows with human kindness, or love, or some combination of compassion, understanding, and honesty. (Or am I, these days, finding this quality so marked in his stories because I am seeking it?)

The narrator says, before launching into the main narrative, that this characteristic applies to her own story: "I wanted to say...that there was not much to tell...there was a scene, one that involved a peculiar character, and later a coincidence." Not very promising to be warned early on that there isn't really much of interest in the story.

Why would I have voted no on it?

1. I already alluded to the main reason: it feels like memoir. It sounds like a travel anecdote, barely fictionalized. I'd have wondered if the writer meant to send this to  the creative non-fiction category.

2. It's adjective heavy: In the first page after the main narrative launches, we get: "small, undistinguished, reliable, attractive, crowded, noisy, buxom, energetic, peaceful, small (again), large, placid, agreeable, vague, comfortable, companionable." I don't have quite the revulsion to adjectives that some writers/editors do. Sometimes, I'd rather have one succinct adjective rather than a long rendering of why the author applied that adjective. That is to say, sometimes, it's okay to tell, rather than show. But so much of this right at the outset of the story, after first being waylaid by a lengthy framing of the story, would have made me feel the story had something of an amateurish feel.

3. Putting in the bit about reading some Swiss writer--in the original German--felt to me like a humble brag on the part of the writer. Actually, if this had been presented as creative non-fiction, I'd have accepted this much more readily. But labelled as fiction, this felt like there was too narrow a distance here between the narrator and the author, and the author was trying to show off that she spoke a foreign language and that she read someone in that language. Given that I've pushed through my share of novels in foreign languages more difficult than German (my own humble brag), I wasn't that impressed.

Of course, we might have been totally wrong to overlook this story

The point I want to make through this WIHPTS series isn't that some stories get praise without deserving it. It's more than your story or mine that has been overlooked might not have deserved to be overlooked. With this story, I'd have applied some pseudo algorithms I've developed over time to help cut down on my work load and get through the slush pile more quickly. One is that if I don't want to keep reading after a page or two, neither will a magazine reader.

But reading this story not as a slush pile candidate but as an already validated and lauded story, I can see something of why people see value in it. The point of WIHPTS isn't criticism, so I'm not going to go into it deeply here, but there is definitely something interesting in the reaction of the narrator at a few points in the story. She hesitates to give a woman a pen, although she has a spare. She wants to ask something about the woman when she sees her again later, but she is overwhelmed by the logistics of getting through it in German. She reads to improve her German, but doesn't actually speak to anyone, which, of course, is also a way to learn German. At the end she sees a man on a train who is an avid reader like herself, and when the train moves, he braces himself against its movement. Is that what reading is to some people? Just a way to prevent being moved, being changed?

When I made myself read the story, I actually somewhat liked the non-hurried pace of it. So many literary magazine stories are frenetic, because we writers are told how critical it is to keep the story moving. This has a feel to it like a story from a century ago, when writers were still self-assured of their own raison d'etre they weren't always in a rush, didn't always have to have explosions.

So this story might very well deserve its place in an anthology of the year's best, although I'd still have rejected it from our small literary magazine in ten minutes or less. I'm pretty sure an unknown author would have had a very hard time publishing this story.

Spamming the A button FTW

My son tells me that "FTW" is old and lame now, but I don't know another way to user gamer lingo to refer back to my "spamming the A button" technique of literary submissions I recently decided to follow. Basically, I decided to submit a lot more.

I kind of needed a win. 2017 started off pretty good, with a story getting accepted in January and then I got the call about the book in February. Since then, it's been a shut-out, even though I feel like what I'm putting out now is the best work I've done.

But two weeks into my submit-your-ass-off technique, Drunk Monkeys just accepted a story, so I'm off the schneid.

Actually, this is a story that wasn't even in my head until Friday night. I was driving to a friend's house for a reading discussion of The Enchiridion, when the story just sort of came to me. Parts of it fell into place while I was stuck in traffic, and I was actually tempted to skip my quaff of Lyon's Rum and an evening of camaraderie to hurry home and write before I lost it. Instead, I wrote down what I knew of the story on a receipt lying on the floor of my car, spent the evening with friends, made it home by 1 AM and wrote the beginning of the rough draft until 2. The next day, I went into work to catch up on some work I was behind on, then came home and finished the rough draft.

I showed Mrs. Heretic the rough draft, talked it over, fixed it up, and then sent it to Drunk Monkeys' 24-hour response on Sunday. Today, I got an acceptance. So a story I had never thought of 76 hours ago will now have a home soon.

Let me here just put in a plug for that 24-hour response. It's three bucks, which is what a lot of journals are now charging as a reading fee in order to wait for six months.

Let's play "Would I have pubished this story?" (WIHPTS)

It was unfair, of course. Was it monstrous? A mistake had been made, but the numbers all but guaranteed mistakes. The sheer numbers. Every system had its failings. -Chris Drangle, "A Local's Guide to Dating in Slocomb County"

I've been reading the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart anthologies pretty faithfully for the last four years, figuring that's a pretty compact and efficient way to keep up with what's good--or at least critically well reviewed--in American fiction. When I read these stories, I often like to play a game with myself. It goes like this: If this story had come into the literary journal where I am a fiction editor, and I knew nothing about the author or had anything to mark this story off as special, would I have voted for it to be published?

Here, I offer to the public the latest round of this game I've just played, which was with Chris Drangle's "A Local's Guide to Dating in Slocomb County." This is an appropriate story to show how the game works, I think, partly because of that epigraph above. The story is about how an injured veteran's wounded dog, who is also a war veteran, is accidentally put down by a clinic, and what happens when the veteran comes to pick up the dog he thinks is still alive. It could also be a metaphor for the editing process at any literary journal: we have so many stories to go through, it's inevitable we're going to make mistakes and "put down" the wrong ones sometimes.

Quick Answer. Would I have voted "up" for this story?

Yes. It's a compelling story with a clear conflict, and the central conflict is introduced within the first page. We have two characters drawn with enough detail that we, the readers, are troubled to see them as they unintentionally come into conflict with one another.

There is a caveat to my yes, however. Our journal has a 5,000 word limit, and this story goes well over it. It's always strange to me that so many journals have 5,000 or 3,000 word limits, and that it seems easier to get a story published if you can get your word count down, but for the anthologies, it seems most of the stories are longer. I think there's still a feeling that a really short story isn't serious, somehow, even though all writers trying to break into publishing are pushed to write shorter pieces. 

What might have made me vote no?

1. A confusing passage early on.  There are two female characters, Portia and Naomi, who both work at the animal shelter where the dog is accidentally put down. Naomi is the one who fucked up. Early on, when we're still learning how to differentiate the two, we see Naomi leave a room and check a few things to see if it was her fault. We then get Portia again. Here's the passage:

     Back in the staff room, Portia was biting her nails and Dennis was stirring the instant tea.
     "How did it happen? "Dennis said.
     "I don't know."
     "This is so fucked up," Portia said.
     "Shut up," she said. "No, sorry. Let's just think."

I was confused about who "she" was in that last line. We've had Portia's name twice since we last heard from Naomi, so I'd think it was her. But it can't be Portia, because then it wouldn't have been a new indentation and a new line. Eventually, I got that it was Naomi, still in the scene, talking. But getting confused early on in a story, even for a second, sometimes puts an editor off for good.

2. Screwing up a detail about military life. There is a section that gives the back story for Fisher Bray, the wounded veteran, about how he ended up in the Army, how he met the dog, and how get and the dog were injured. I think Drangle did enough homework to get through that section without messing it up. But before that, Fisher explains that he was in the "First Battalion, 25th Infantry." If you know anything about the Army's makeup (or just look here), you know that "25th Infantry" is a division. Below a division are several brigades, each of which has several battalions. So there are many "First Battalions" in the 25th Division. Fisher Bray wouldn't say "First Battalion, 25th Infantry," in other words, unless I'm missing something.

I wouldn't have disqualified the story for this, even though I've kvetched before about people screwing up this kind of thing. It would just have given me a slight, instinctive nudge toward a no vote, and I'd have added a note for the writer to edit it. (Drangle might also have been wrong about Fisher shaving at 4:40 AM in basic training; when I was in boot camp, hygiene came at night. But that was the Marines, not the Army, and it was a long time ago, so I might be wrong. It wouldn't be a meaningful mistake, anyway.)

3. Would Fisher have really liked Megadeth? Infantry guys are know to like their hard-core rock, but this seems like something a Gen-Xer would have liked, not a kid who was 19 around 2007 or so. Again, not a big thing.

4. My often-felt uncertainty about an inconsistent narrative distance from the character. Just for review, third-person limited, which is the most ubiquitous point-of-view choice in literature today, means we, the readers, can only see the story through the five senses and the thoughts of one character. This story has different POV focus characters in different sections, which is fine. That doesn't violate point-of-view. That's just rotating third-person limited. Lots of people do it. No problem.

There is also an aspect of distance to point-of-view, however. That is, how far the voice of the narration varies from that of the point-of-view character. For example, it's very rare that a third-person narrative would have a character speak in dialect during dialogue and also have the main narration keep this dialect. The main narration has a distinct voice from the point-of-view character.

But how far this distance between narrator's voice and character's voice should be is not something discussed much. I don't feel it's something most editors read into too closely. But it does bother me sometimes when a nameless, invisible narrator gives us descriptions the main character himself/herself couldn't have come up with. That's part of the light criticism I made years ago of the story "Long Tom Lookout" by Nicole Cullenhttp://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-to-be-lazy-as-shit-as-writer-and.html. Sometimes, the narrator's voice is actually the thoughts of a character. Sometimes, it's a voice that is saying things I don't think the main character would think. If this distance from the main character is too great within the same passage, I find it a little jarring. Here's an example from "A Local's Guide":

     After lunch she stepped out for a short walk. It was seven thousand degrees outside. The cotton field behind the shelter was halfway into flowering, the dark bolls splitting around the cloudy blooms. In a month the strip picker would start lumbering down the rows, huge tires and green chassis and bright yellow teeth in front, thoughtless and methodical.

The "it's 7000 degrees out here" thought is Naomi's. The poetic rhapsodizing about the strip picker and the bolls and the thought that the strip picker rolls on impersonally like so many forces in life--that's all Drangle.

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I don't think there's any "rule" against this kind of mixing in writing how-to thought. It's certainly done all the time. I do it. But it's kind of a cheat for a third-person limited narrative. The idea of the third-person narrative is that the writer is going to give you a catharsis through the life rules and philosophy of the character, not the author. But authors sneak their own thoughts into third-person limited stories all the time, and sometimes they do it though a bit of supernatural intervention into the universes they've created.

None of these quibbles would have kept me from voting for it, I think. It's an excellent story, with a sharp conflict and plot that suggest strong themes. But one never knows. If I'd been in a bad enough mood that day, maybe I'd have looked at how long it was and thrown it out as soon as I got confused for a minute on page two.