Once, a long time ago, fiction was published by slick magazines like Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s and Collier’s and Cosmopolitan and the Atlantic and Good Housekeeping and especially one called Esquire, which is now only a fashion magazine that still wants to pretend it has literary relevance or credibility but doesn’t. Way way way back when I was a lad, though, Esquire was one of the best slick fiction outlets in the country. Gordon Lish was fiction editor from 1969 to 1976, and he published stories by Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Barry Hannah, Cynthia Ozick, and many others. Then, somewhere along the line, as readers seemed to lose interest in fiction, Esquire, like most slicks, stopped publishing fiction and focused its attention primarily on wingtips, bosoms, and how to impersonate manly men. But here’s the weird part. They couldn’t quite let go of their reputation for publishing good fiction. They didn’t continue to publish much fiction, but they wanted to be affiliated with it. As a result, their relationship with fiction is now based primarily on gimmicks.

A couple years ago they launched the Napkin Fiction Project, introduced on their website as follows:

Matt Cashion’s story, “Last Words of the Holy Ghost,” appeared in Willow Springs 63 in 2009. It’s a really strong, funny, Southern, sort of sexual coming of age piece, the first line of which still makes me laugh: “Harold’s mother, Jude, said he shouldn’t worry about getting saved or baptized or having to speak in tongues if all he cared about was sex.” The story maintains that playful tone even as it takes on gravity as it unfolds, ending with these lines nodding to Faulkner: “His heart was a trout lying in the woods. A sun-baked trout whose mouth kept moving, spilling final words from the Holy Ghost. A trout whose eyes had turned to scales, who couldn’t cry enough tears to save itself. He wanted to wander through the woods until he found it. He’d put it in his pocket, or wear it around his neck, and present it to the first girl who smiled at him.”

The story’s been adapted into a film, directed by Ben Sharony, and will premier this Wednesday at the LA Short Film Festival. It’s a great story. I want to see the movie.

An interview with Richard Russo, from Willow Springs 68

But every year in the PhD program I became more unhappy. I had started down a road that was only likely to get worse. I was looking at my professors at the University of Arizona, the people in literature, and seeing how difficult it was for them to find ever more and more obscure things to write about. You couldn’t just teach the books you loved, because you would never get tenure that way, and so I found myself starting down this road toward scholarship regarding second and third rank writers and some of their most obscure books. I found that I would have to buy that franchise. I would be serving that food, and you’ve got to defend it against other franchises, or other people who want into your franchise. So you become the Twain scholar or whatever. By the time I’d finished my course work and was starting to write my dissertation, I was in a pit of despair. I realized I’d made a terrible mistake that was going to affect and infect the rest of my life. I could see absolutely no way out of it, until I discovered creative writing. I discovered that, in doing all of that reading, I was studying to be a writer. Creative writing gave me another avenue, and it saved my life.

This is the most powerful album I’ve heard in years, somehow feeling both brand new and really old–like weirdly ancient–at the same time, the whole thing getting way, way under my skin.  Also (and from Harvey’s site), “Award-winning photographer Seamus Murphy has produced a series of short films – containing footage shot around England and performance footage of Harvey – for each song on the album.” The complete video album is here. Unlike so much “video” that goes with music today, these short films are much more than marketing tools.  My only complaint about the films is that, while watching them, I can’t pretend that I’m in the 18th or 19th or early 20th century, which is where much of the music somehow seems to take me, though I don’t know what I really mean by that. Sometimes it’s like I’m in some kind of Shakespeare zone, with the witches from Macbeth, say; other times I get this Ford Madox Ford feel. A lot of the album seems to have the weight of modernist work, evocative of the years after World War I, all that loss and decay. It’s an incredible piece of work.

An interview with Lydia Millet, from Willow Springs 67

I once wrote a vicious review of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which would fall into a middle-aged, Hermes-scarf-wearing female-bonding category…I detest that kind of thing. I find it materialistic and status-quo promoting and “let’s all play bridge at the country club.” Or the uber-commercial chick-lit products like the Sex in the City franchise: Let’s all bond by wearing designer clothes. Sex in the City is the equivalent of setting up a huge line dance by lung-cancer patients singing a glittering show tune about the fabulousness of their premium-brand cigarettes. Which would at least be funnier. What amazes me is that so many women, some of them actually smart, delude themselves that the Sex in the City line dance, with skinny chicks belting out the praises of their high-heeled shoes, is empowering. That kind of presentation of female bonding is vile to me.

That was the subject line of an e-mail I got Tuesday from my dear friend StoryLink. When I opened the e-mail, there was a picture of a happy, confident, bespectacled, maybe 53 year old man. It was John Truby, of course. The text laid over the right side of the photo read: “John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story Master Class.”

Below the photo was the meat of the thing, which has been wearing me out with worry and regret since I first read it. But it’s brought hope, too. All kinds of struggle. Here’s what it said:

Anyone can tell a story. We do it every day. “You won’t believe what happened to me at work.” Or “Guest what I just did?!” The challenge comes in crafting a truly great story that resonates with today’s audiences.

In The Anatomy of Story Master Class, John Truby not only explains how a great story works, he also gives you all the principles and techniques needed to create your own blockbuster. Over three intense days, you’ll learn a practical method of storytelling you can use whether you’re writing a screenplay, novel, TV show, play, or short story. Truby will show you how:

• Great story is organic – not a machine, not something that can necessarily be reduced to a 3-act structure – and a living body that develops
• Storytelling is an exacting craft with precise techniques and principles that will help you be successful regardless of your genre or medium
• Your writing process is also organic, meaning you’ll develop characters and plot that will grow naturally out of your original story idea

Drawing on a broad range of concepts and archetypes from writing, philosophy, and mythology, The Anatomy of Story Master Class offers fresh techniques and insightful principles that allow the writer to design an effective, multifaceted narrative. Truby’s former students have earned more than $7 billion at the Box Office, with hits including X-Men, Shrek, House, Pirates of the Caribbean, and much more!

And you know what I wondered?! Why have I been wasting all this time at my desk trying to learn how to write, when John Truby was practically begging to “give [me] all the principles and techniques needed to create [my] own blockbuster.” Talk about a wasted life. I love my office, but I often sort of hate sitting at my desk, when the writing’s not going well, when I’m on strike, refusing to write, when I realize I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. I mean, this has been going on for years. But now…. But now…

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Neil Genzlinger has a few things to say about “the problem with memoirs” in this week’s NYTBR. Like this:

So in a possibly futile effort to restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre, here are a few guidelines for would-be memoirists, arrived at after reading four new memoirs. Three of the four did not need to be written, a ratio that probably applies to all memoirs published over the last two decades. Sorry to be so harsh, but this flood just has to be stopped.”

And this:

If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.”

And other things, too.

Shira’s post below reminded me of a story by Shawn Vestal, called The Pig of Happiness, which is one of the best short shorts I’ve ever read. It starts like this:

The story is called The Pig of Happiness and you’ve read it out loud for days now, it seems, when the only thing that will make baby calm down are the pictures of these pale pigs and your voice describing the way that one of them decides to be happy and spread happiness into the world like a neutral-colored paste sneaking from the leghole of an improperly sealed diaper.”

The story continues for another four paragraphs. Short shorts seem to almost always require surprise at the end, some kind of hard turn that makes the reader want to go right back to the beginning to read again. And again. Vestal’s has that, sort of, but the big shift is actually much more gradual. The story takes on weight and context line by line, the narrator becoming kind of disturbing as the piece goes on and he’s sort of torturing his kid. It’s also hilarious, not only regarding being a parent, but in the way it comments on stories themselves or how we sometimes talk or think about them as writers. Like any good short short, “The Pig of Happiness” is striking because of how much ground it covers in such a small space. And when I get to the end, I always think, How did we get here? thrilled that the story has done so much and landed so far from where I thought it would or could possibly go, and all in under 400 words.

Asunder, a collection of stories by Robert Lopez, was released by Dzanc last month. I love this trailer, and the book is fantastic. Willow Springs first published several of these stories, including Bleeders and Vaya con Huevos, two of my favorite stories of the last four hundred years. You can buy the book directly from Dzanc here. Or you can buy it elsewhere. A review of Asunder at The Rumpus asserts that “If Lopez’s earlier books didn’t prove to readers that he is a word-storm, a force of literary nature come unhinged, blowing shutters against readers’ houses, then Asunder surely will. This is a collection as proof, a collection as loveliness, a collection as rippage, and we are lucky to get it into our waiting hands, its words into our heads.” Asunder is a great new book of stories by one of my favorite writers.

Hobart is a cool magazine, the current issue of which feature work by Peter Markus and Steven Rinella, among many others. Hobart always promotes itself with vice items at AWP, ashtrays, shots, etc., which I think is funny. Right now, a subscription to Hobart comes with a flask and a chapbook. What a phenomenal gift for that boozy, literary someone in your life. Hobart also offers discounts to teachers (an almost free desk copy) who use Hobart in the classroom. These all seem like smart ways to promote a magazine.