Your Momma’s so out of shape, she runs out of room evens when she sets.

Your Momma’s so dirty, her writing has to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb.

Your Momma’s so cheap, she plagiarizes from Project Gutenberg.

Your Momma’s so simple, she always asks if it’s copy edit, copy-edit, or copyedit.

Your Momma’s so repetitive, she dittos quotation marks.

Your Momma’s so old school, she thinks the Chicago Manual of Style is the Marshall Field’s catalogue.

Here’s the bracket:

Fight 1: F. Scott Fitzgerald vs. Franz Kafka

Fitzgerald shows up drunk, on a butcher’s tricycle, and has to be lifted into the ring. He saunters over to the opponent’s corner where he has a conversation with the stool. He calls it Zelda, hugs it, then falls asleep. Meanwhile, Zelda Fitzgerald, his manager, is nowhere to be found. (Suddenly hip to technology, she’s back in the locker room playing the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on a Gameboy.)

Initially, Ezra Pound had informed everyone that the charity matches would be a professional-wrestling style match and told everyone to wear a costume that representative of their work. Soon thereafter, Hemingway suggests they make it a more manly sport, and suggests boxing. Pound agrees, but never gives Kafka the news that the format has been changed. Kafka, having no idea how to represent himself, let alone his work, decides to dress in a giant beetle costume like a post-metamorphosis Gregor Samsa. For added effect, he brings along his manager, a boa constrictor named Indiana.

Result: Fitzie is disqualified.

Fight 2: Edna St. Vincent Millay vs. Hemingway

Edna St. Vincent Millay starts off furiously with a flurry of quick jabs, and then she distracts Hemingway by leaning down in her low-cut blouse. The pig can’t resist leering, and she catches him with an uppercut, then another. Soon, he’s leaning into the ropes, and it looks like she might upset the self-proclaimed “best boxer in this bunch.”

Soon, however, Millay begins to tire. She heads back to her corner, where she throws in the towel saying simply, “I cannot last the fight.”

Result: Hemingway wins by default. After he’s declared the winner, Hemingway jogs around the ring triumphantly, arms raised, even though all he did was get hit in the face about fifty or sixty times.

Fight #3 Ginsberg vs. Frost

Ginsberg enters the ring at the end of a long procession of what appear to be monks of some variety. Ginsberg is playing a lute, which Frost snatches away and snaps in half. Before the referee can even start the fight (or get their gloves on), Ginsberg and Frost are swinging at each other. Soon, it turns into the equivalent of a mixed-martial event.Knees and elbows are thrown and Frost pulls on Ginsberg’s beard, before Ginsberg manages to get Frost into a rear-triangle choke, and Frost reluctantly submits.

Result: As no actual boxing occurred, the referee has to find a different way to justify a winner. He calls the match for Ginsberg because Frost was mean and broke Ginsberg’s lute.

Fight #4: Walt Whitman vs. Ezra Pound

When the match starts, Walt Whitman initially walks up to Pound and tries to shake his head. Instead of fighting, he suggests that everyone goes and “plays base-ball, the American game.”

Pound responds with a quick body blow, then an uppercut to Whitman’s chin. Whitman again tries to reiterate his desire for a non-violent sport, but Pounds repeated jabs soon goad him into a real fight. Like a rabid mountain man, Whitman lets loose with wild haymakers and bolos, and they connect—1, 2, then 3 in a row. Soon, Pound is bloodied, but Whitman doesn’t let up, soon even Whitman’s great beard is swaying like a heavy bag.

Result: The ref gives Pound a standing count and calls the fight.

Fight 5:  Ginsberg vs. Whitman

Just as Ginsberg and Whitman are about to start the fight, Ginsberg bashfully asks if Whitman would like to go out sometime, maybe they could have dinner or catch a base-ball game. He suggests that maybe they could stop at one of the local supermarkets in California to pick up grub. Whitman agrees and they depart.

Result: No match on account of love at first sight.

Fight 6: Kafka vs. Hemingway

Because of the result of the Ginsberg-Whitman match, the Kafka-Hemingway match becomes the championship bout.

Kafka enters the ring, baffled, still not sure why he’s there—or anywhere, for that matter. Kafka sets his snake/manager on the stool and waits.

Hemingway, talking smack, doesn’t care about Kafka’s confusion, and implies that Kafka is simply yellow and doesn’t want to fight. As the fight begins, Hemingway comes out swinging, landing a few good punches, but they don’t do much damage because of Kafka’s elaborate beetle costume.

Kafka doesn’t throw any punches; instead, he simply ambles around the ring in his beetle costume as Hemingway pummels him. Eventually, the audience begins to boo because of his inaction—and because Hemingway’s punches have no real effect.

To liven things up, Andre the Giant, who is in the audience because Pound had invited him to participate in the originally planned professional wrestling-style event, decides to enter the ring.

As Hemingway wails on Kafka, he climbs up the top rope and when Hemingway steps back to regroup, leaps onto Kafka, knocking him out. The ref counts out Kafka, and Hemingway, the consummate jerk, doesn’t hesitate to start punching Andre, despite the fact that Hemingway’s body blows hardly have any effect.

Andre begins to grapple with Hemingway, then hoists him and throws him into the third row of seats. Everyone applauds when this happens.

Andre raises his hands in victory, and heads over to Kafka’s corner to sit down. Then he sees the snake. Andre, reputedly deathly afraid of snakes, faints.

The referee shrugs, holds the snake in the air, and declares it the winner of the tournament.

*Williams Carlos Williams is the ringside doctor.

*Time machines would be required to make this a fair (and possible) tournament.

This is perhaps the the greatest hang-up of the modern novelist — that fiction is somehow unsophisticated or inherently cliché if it is rooted in the writer’s own life, and that writers should be creative enough to invent entirely new worlds and find drama only in the unfamiliar.

This may be a familiar topic of conversation for you. It’s come up in form & theory courses or  dinner conversations or late-night debates at the bar. It’s something I find fascinating: there seems to be a prevailing attitude that knowing a work of fiction is rooted in autobiography makes it lesser than. People argue that knowing it’s autobiographical distracts the reader, prevents them from suspending disbelief and embracing the world of the novel. Knowing it’s autobiographical means it was less finely crafted, that the author has less skill, imagination, or both, and (my favorite) must mean that it was therapy for the writer.

But wait, we might say. Didn’t Hemingway advise to write what you know? Isn’t all fiction, to a degree, autobiographical? Isn’t writing fiction about exploring what it means to be human? Aren’t all fiction writers like crows, picking up the shiny, unusual things we come across in our own lives, taking them back to our nest and hoarding them until we decide what to do with them?

So what gives? Where do we draw the line between whether a work of fiction with autobiographical elements is working or not? Or, better question, why do we feel the need to draw a line at all?

In my experience, MFA students of fiction, especially, are horrified if they catch a whiff of anything seemingly autobiographical– in published work, at least. Our own seems to be another matter. Part of this seems natural: we’re at various stages of development in our writing, we’re figuring out how to do things, we draw off material in our own lives. It happens. We’re learning how to weave together the imagined aspects of the story with the shiny pieces we already have in our nest, the ones begging to be used, that are just so darn handy.

I worry about this in my own work. A project I worked on during grad school  featured a young female protagonist who had very different life experiences and goals than I’d had at her age. A large part of my initial process was trying to figure her out, trying to make a living, breathing character because I didn’t much about her life: I’d never done most of the things she was doing. But somewhere along the way, when I really needed to crank out some pages or when I felt like I had no imaginative energy left, I went to my little nest and used tiny details from my own life: maybe an observation that I’d actually make, a personality trait, or a bit of family lore.  At the time, I told myself I could always go back and change those details later. But as you may already know, though it took me a couple of months to realize: that’s not how writing a novel works. Once you use something, even if it’s small, then some important lines get blurred, and for me, at least, it’s hard to redraw them. It’s tough to go back and pinpoint where, exactly, you started making your character just a little too much like you. That’s a problem, and I still haven’t quite figured out how to fix it. I’m learning. Or trying, at least. But the fact remains: I’m defending the right of other writers to successfully incorporate their personal histories in their fiction, while at the same time, I’m adamantly opposed to writing characters who are fake-me, because that feels cheap and cliche, and I tend to hold peer work to the same standard- I get uncomfortable when I think a protagonist is fake-them. Ignoring the difference in skill level (aka I believe Dorothy Allison can do whatever she wants because she’s amazing, whereas I’m a toddler-writer and therefore maybe just don’t know how to do it the right way yet), what gives? I hate hypocrites, but maybe I’m just a giant one myself.

Those of you who teach must navigate this minefield all the time. Of course fledgling writers are going to start by drawing off their experience, and while it’s a cliche that we all start by writing thinly veiled versions of ourselves– well, maybe it’s true. But even if you can ground the conversation firmly in talking about the character, the shape of the story, and the like, at some point, both you and that student know that when you ask why the character does/says/thinks a certain thing that the writer’s answer, even though they wouldn’t admit it, would be, Because that’s what I thought/felt/wanted. This seems like dangerous ground, no matter how carefully and consistently you figure out a way to talk about the story in terms of craft.

So is learning how to weave material from our own lives into our fiction a natural part of our evolution as writers? Is it one of these things that’s different for everyone- some can make it work effectively, while others can’t or don’t like to? Is it a matter of skill or personal preference? I’m not sure. My instinct would be to say that if a piece works, it works, and it’s success or failure doesn’t rest solely on whether it’s drawing off material from the writer’s life. I think it’s more complicated than that, and that condemning a work solely because it’s autobiographical is simply an easy way to dismiss it, to tidily assign blame so a person doesn’t have to think too hard about what’s actually not working in the piece. But at the same time, I can certainly think of novels that were deeply autobiographical that I didn’t like at all, didn’t think were working, and I wonder how much we’re influenced by knowing that information before we read a book.

This post is far too long, and I have more thoughts on Hemingway and John Irving and literary snobbery. So for now: Are there novels you love that are heavily autobiographical? What are some that you didn’t think worked?

For instance, after a recent controversy in poetry land, there was this comment:

The entire official world of poetry publishing is corrupt from the top down to the smallest little contest – and the NEA is a facilitator of that. It is a world of mutual back scratching MFA grads with middle names like “Lavender” who elevate the word “vanity” to heights never before seen. Geoffrey Gatza (yes, I published with BlazeVox and donate to them) is one of the handful of honest, innovative publishers who are trying to deal with the real issues facing real poets and their readers – hence the hatred heaped on him by the officials patrolling the boundaries of verse culture.

This made me think of something from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

The notion of resentment is central to the book. In it, he makes a distinction between “slave morality” and “noble morality.” He writes:

…Slave morality from the start says “No” to what is “outside,” “other,” to “a not itself.” … In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself.

Or as the philosophy department at Lander University puts it,

For Nietzsche, vanity is the hallmark of the meek and powerless…Vanity is a consequence of inferiority.

So when certain crowds get riled up, you see comments like this:

Two of the best considerations on this matter…were published last fall by…one of the central figures on the Buffalo poetry scene.

There’s a profound sense of self-importance—and yes, vanity—in that statement. It almost sounds like a perverse version of John Winthrop’s famous “city on a hill,” as if Buffalo were a beacon, preventing wayward poets from entering perdition.

Needless to say, the very notion of a “scene” speaks to a dichotomous, us. vs. them approach; “scenes” are defined entirely by them, by the Hegelian “Other” (which Nietzsche was damn familiar with).

And does Buffalo’s “scene” merit that much importance to begin with? While I admire a number of Buffalo poets and presses, I have to say that Buffalo’s crowning achievement is its hot sauce. (Frank, of Frank’s hot sauce fame, is surely what Hegel would call a world-historical individual.)

That’s the thing: I’m far less interested in a scene—I’m far more interested in good writing wherever I can find it. Needless to say, there are numerous great poets scattered across the country, and many of them aren’t any part of a “scene.” Case in point: One of my favorite poets works at car service on the West Coast.

Moreover, the folks in favor of a “scene” always seem to attack the opposition, as Nietzsche puts it, “in effigy.” In other words, it’s one big straw man argument. Even though that’s a logical fallacy, it doesn’t mean it’s not convincing; folks use fallacies for a reason: they work.

Contests

Contests have been perhaps the most maligned aspect of literary land. I’ve run a pair of contests. I’ve got one going right now, as a matter of fact. I’ve never met—let alone conspired with—any of the winners from either contest; hell, I only knew of one of them, and when it came to selecting winners, neither I or my co-editor made the final call.

But if you ask the paranoid-fringe, I must have! They must have all been MFA students with whom I was familiar! And similar conspiracies must have taken place “from the top down to the smallest little contest.”

Really? Bullshit. Yes, the fine folks at Foetry unearthed quite a bit of corruption and nepotism and nonsense in contests, but that doesn’t mean it’s ubiquitous throughout all of poetry. On the contrary, from what I could tell from Foetry, a lot of the corruption happened towards the top. You had big-name writers giving big-money prizes to their students; it wasn’t like there was ballot rigging at the Podunk Review.

Think of it in terms of math: What’s more likely? That we live in a universally corrupt world where nearly every contest is rigged and it all depends on the editors you know—or that folks make such general claims because they feel left out? Occam’s razor suggests the latter.

I have a strong suspicion that resentment is also the reason for all of the incessant claims about how pernicious MFA programs are. When there are more folks writing there is more competition, and therefore a lower batting average for all involved when it comes to publication.

There has to be another reason for all the anti-MFA cant. You’re really sneering at people who are spending two years of their life (and some serious money) reading and writing?

Really? OK, fine. But if we do that, then let’s yell at English majors, too, as they are essentially doing the same thing (and often go through creative writing workshops). And they too are likely to submit to magazines. Here, I’ll do it for you:

 I hereby declare to all English majors: Damn you, for reading that Petrarch and that Hemingway and that Flannery O’Connor! A pox on your family! (You have to admit, it’s kind of fun to wish a pox on someone’s family.)

English majors, don’t you know it is all a racket?! That all is stacked against you!? That it’s a Ponzi scheme in which you will be defrauded?

Let’s go even further. To those that are merely poetically inclined, let’s say:

Go away! We don’t want more writers! NO VACANCY.

A good deal of all this started with Donald Hall’s, “Poetry and Ambition.” I think it’s the best bad essay ever written. He’s correct about many things—and I love that he delivered it in 1980 at the AWP convention, the veritable lion’s den—but one of his main arguments is simply sloppy. He argues that MFA programs create MFA poems, or as he calls them, “McPoems.” Hall argues that such poems (and their poets) are no longer ambitious; instead of striving to write great poems, we simply seek to get published to advance our careers. In other words, we no longer have our eyes on the big prize—Hall argues that we are simply social climbers. The resulting poets—and their poems—aren’t good, they are simply famous.

Instead of striving to become Shakespeare, Hall argues that we want to become Snooki.

It should be apparent that this is simply an unfounded generalization. MFA programs produce whatever their students produce; it depends on those students and their reading, their experiences, who the hell they are. Sure, a lot of it is dreck, but a lot of everything is mediocre, in every field, creative or not. Painting. Food. Website design.

Yes, the volume of extant work has changed, but if there are more writers on aggregate, all things being equal, it follows there will also be more great writers. So instead of one Yeats and Eliot-quality writer per generation, perhaps you get two. Maybe they go undiscovered, buried in the dreck. But maybe not; maybe good writing, like the truth, will out. That’s a lovely thought, yes?

Besides, the volume of everything has changed. When your planet’s population is an interconnected 7 billion, good luck finding something you’ve got all to yourself. Such a desire seems to hark back to the good old days when there was a smaller playing field and you knew your work would get published because there were only so many folks in the game. That sounds a lot like the conspiracy that folks are alleging in the first place.

And one more thing: Write whatever you want, publish whatever you want, but there’s nothing inherently noble about doing so. We’re not tending to the sick, for Chrissakes.

On the contrary, we’re spending a lot of money that could go, say, to here: Oxfam, here: Unicef or here: Doctors Without Borders. So ditch the all-important, woe-is-me tone.  It’s useful to keep in mind that we are literally fighting over a luxury.

After reading the interview, I wanted to address one portion of the interview.

About halfway through, Mr. Gatza says:

I would like to make it known that in our offer to publish books with a co-operative donation, if the author did not want to participate in this we also made an offer to publish their work as an ebook in Kindle and EPUB and PDF format and have it available on Amazon.com and iBooks. And if that was still not acceptable, we could wait until our financial outlook was stable and we would then publish their book without a donation. I think that this is a fair arrangement, as do many writers. I think that this is a very successful program and we were able to promote good writers. (Note: Emphasis is mine)

The problem is, he’s not telling the truth.

In my correspondence with him, I specifically asked him if my book would be published if I did not contribute. After I got Gatza’s initial acceptance, I emailed a few pals and they said that they had been given the “offer” and declined, and Mr. Gatza had published their book later, sans donation. I was hoping that this would be the case. (I would have been fine waiting.)

Instead, when I asked him if my work would be published if I did not donate, his response was “No of course not.”

I point this out, not as an accusation, but as a matter of fact. On this matter, Mr. Gatza is simply not telling the truth. I feel obliged to correct him, not because it speaks to his veracity, but my own.

Many in the poetry community seem to view Mr. Gatza as something like a saint. Given his substantial contributions, that may be justified, but even saints are capable of lying.

Claire Dederer, writing at Slate, hates this book. I have yet to read it, so I cannot address what should be the bulk of her critique–the actual book.  But I can rebut Dederer’s unfair, childishly immature, and Gawkerish interpretation of Shriver’s author note.

There’s so much that’s wrong with this paragraph. First and foremost, there’s Shriver’s condescending tone about provincial Americans of 1998 and their supposedly dismissive attitude toward terrorism. (In 1998, al-Qaida bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.) Shriver, American by birth, has lived for over 20 years in the United Kingdom, and there’s a whiff of snobbery in the implication that she used to be one of those people, but fortunately has moved on to the higher cultural elevations of Europe, leaving all us dumbasses behind.

Why won't you call me?

You don’t know why it didn’t work out. Maybe you cheated on them. Or maybe they cheated on you, and after a week straight of them having to work late in the office you finally realized that they’re unemployed. Maybe the sex was no good. They called you by other people’s names or they were catatonic during, and with a closed mouth and glazed, dead eyes they stared up watching you the entire time. Maybe the sex was too good. After a marathon lovemaking session, where orgasms were exchanged like gunfire in a war zone, you walked bow-legged outside realizing you missed three days of work. Maybe they never loved you to begin with. You don’t know. The fact is its been a week, a month, a year and you’re still waiting for their call.

In many ways waiting for a positive response from a literary magazine is like waiting for that awkward phone call from an ex-lover. The opening scene of the movie Swingers perfectly captures the psychology of what it’s like to send you work out into the world, and the anxiety associated with that uncertainty. Pay close attention. The strength of this metaphor hinges on your cooperation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

When you’ve submitted out a story, an essay, a poem, whatever, there is absolutely nothing you can do beyond that fact to help matters. As with ex’s, the only thing unwanted contact can do is make things substantially worse. If a month, even a couple months have passed and you shoot the editors of a magazine a message asking them what the hold up is, you’re more than likely going to piss someone off. While all magazines have different response times, none of them are holding on to your work for the sake of torturing you. Their main goal is to burn through submissions as quickly and accurately as possible and brace for the next wave. In pestering an editor, or an ex lover you’re coming across as impatient, even desperate, and any good will you’ve earned in the past with personal rejects might be burned by this negative association.

When you do finally hear from them, when you get that fated call, it will be when you’ve forgotten about them. You’ll have moved on. You’ll have started running distance races again and will have taken up Korean when you notice the acceptance email waiting for you in an almost defunct mail account nine months after the fact. The best way to reconnect with someone, and the best way to wait to hear from the New England Review and maintain sanity, is to put them out of your mind completely.

Patience is hard when getting out of a relationship, or if you’ve gone a long while without getting anything picked up. It’s hard not to get a little overwhelmed after receiving a chain of 30 rejections in a row. The worst thing you can do at this point is to scan duotrope and submit out to an obscure e magazine with an acceptance rate of 25 percent. Imagine what that would look like as a rebound in an actual person.

Meeting a stranger in a bar with those odds of success would be a little gross. That rate suggests that they are posting several pieces of work daily, without giving attention to detail or STD probability. Much like your new publication in the fishspawnmagazine.com you probably don’t want to show him/her off to your friends or parents. The point is, don’t force it.

When you’re ready, when you’ve finally moved on to a healthier place, and unfortunately when you least expect it, you’ll find the right magazine. Maybe it’ll be that hail Mary you threw out in submitting to the Paris Review, or the New Yorker (don’t count on it) maybe it’s that magazine you’ve read and watched from a distance but haven’t had the guts to approach. Maybe it’s a publisher who deals with the apocalypse who’s interested in your stuff and wants to build a personal relationship. The fact is, when you find them, you’ll know it. You can revel in the joy of having found a compatible fit for just long enough to distract you from that voice gnawing at the back of your mind, asking when the next phone call will come.

My voice is hearse. At least that’s what I’m telling my unemployable self.  Thinking of my own history, it’s fully responsive with all the touch-patterns, like gently moaning in your sleep or the outer stretches of terrain you scarcely knew existed.

If you haven’t stopped reading allow me to make a few suggestions.  You need some ‘me’ time.  Eat some food. Create successful images. Beg forgiveness. Keep on rolling.

I’ll admit I got sucked in. I made a substantial commitment and spent a lion’s share of my time keeping up.  The prototype means artistic pursuits—spontaneous bursts of passion—are utterly elusive.  Users create stunning commentary and careen through slushy streets.

The outrage over leaving the passenger seat can be utterly liberating so don’t ask permission.  Too few are listening.  10,000 variations of nomads make a Pulitzer Prize winner look like a Billy-Goat troll amid a thousand bohemian chumps who look just like me. Like the bald eagle that flew between two clear-cut hills and disappeared, I’m in favor of being stupid in all the right ways.

In “Assassin of Secrets,” he found thirty-four instances of plagiarism in the first thirty-five pages, taken from sources ranging from multiple Bond continuation novels to James Bamford’s 2001 nonfiction book about the National Security Agency to Geoffrey O’Brien’s 1988 account of the nineteen-sixties, “Dream Time.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/13/120213fa_fact_widdicombe#ixzz1oRwiUgaA

*Bark (March 1st-6th)

1. Post something incendiary about gender or race. If you could get something like a transcript of a Caitlin Flanagan interview, that’d be awesome. Or you could just take quotes from her book and put them in Q&A form. Wait…DIBS.

2. Insult a famous writer who most literary people consider a god. But choose carefully. Look, it’s not shocking if you don’t like Munro, okay? We don’t need to hear you describe at parties how you don’t like her stuff, as if you were soooo anti-establishment for not liking her work, and you want to make sure everyone knows how anti-establishment you are. If you don’t like that aesthetic, you don’t like it. Cool. But to make a really controversial post, you’ve gotta go after someone legit in a way that isn’t lame. It’s gotta be semi-researched and vaguely believable, but mean as hell. Throw in some cheap shots for good measure, to ensure the crazies comment on it.

3. You’ve always got an ace up your sleeve: the ol’ MFA or anti-MFA debate. Everyone whines about how they’re tired of arguing over it, except that those same people read the arguments and comment like crazy. You could get away with between 4 and 16 of these a year, maybe more. You can point-counterpoint that baby to your highest traffic of the year.

4. This is key to any literary blog: if you are the main person running it and everyone knows you’re the main person running it, you’ve gotta promote the shit out of yourself. Your story just got published? One of your editors should probably mention that in a sidebar. You have a film coming out? Your blog should review it, and that review will be favorable, of course, even if it’s tempered with a few gentle criticisms like, “I questioned the casting of the sixth-most-important character” or “I thought it could have been longer.” Your band is playing a show after the local Rotary Club meeting? Perfect. Make sure to use your blog’s social media to promote your personal accomplishments. That’s what it’s there for, right?

5. Lists. If there’s one thing literary blogs excel at, it is motherfucking lists. You’ve gotta be on top of that. You’ve gotta have lists in your arsenal for things that haven’t even happened yet, like The Top Ten Books Margaret Atwood is Reading After Being Jailed for Stabbing a Mountie, or for things the other guy hasn’t thought of, like the Top Five Poems You Suspect Were Composed On the Toilet. People consume lists like candy and cocaine. They can’t get enough of them. Want proof? You’re still reading.

6. Milk the end of the year like there’s not gonna be another year. This is closely related to #5. You’ve gotta start posting your end-of-the-year lists in like, August. I swear I saw one in October 2011, and I don’t read that widely. I guarantee there were some before October, and you’ve got to be ahead of the curve. Year in Review, Year in Books, Year in Music, Year in Literary Controversies; Year in Literary Gossip; Year in Publishing; Year in the Evils of Amazon: there’s so much to cover. No wonder you have to start in August. Wait, scratch that. You should probably start writing these in March, to make sure you’re ready to post them by July/August. Plus, you could guarantee yourself 40 posts a day for two months straight by having EVERY PERSON YOU’VE EVER MET write one. They’ll think you’re asking them because you value their opinion or respect their taste, but instead you’ll just be firing those lists at your readers like fucking machine guns. You’ve got to be reviewing the current year before anyone else and in more ways than anyone else. Otherwise, your literary blog will become irrelevant and die.

7. Closely related to #4: Favorably review books by your friends. It’s not a conflict of interest, dude, because you really fucking loved that book. Doesn’t matter that part of the reason you loved it is because you’ve read it seventeen times in its entirety because you’re the person’s main reader, or because the two of you were taught by the same person and therefore your aesthetic and his/hers are so similar as to be nearly identical. And it definitely doesn’t matter that you’re super proud of how you changed the last line of chapter four, and now the line is so killer that you’re pretty confident it will blow that whole “so we beat on, boats against the current” shit out of the water. (Intended.) You’ve got a blog, your friends have books. It’s a natural fit, and gray areas are for people who live with their mothers and never have sex.

8. Get weird. You’ve gotta post some really fucked-up stuff on a semi-regular basis, to prove you’ve got street cred and you’re savvy to counter-cultural shit and you know all about the world of S&M and hard core drugs. Otherwise you’re not really literary enough.

9. Make lots of hipster jokes. Even if you wear skinny jeans and smoke incessantly and brag about how your taste in pretty much everything is better than everyone else’s, just give it those goddamned hipsters as often as possible. Even if last weekend you told someone that no, you couldn’t come over for dinner because you’re allergic to gluten and lactose-intolerant and a vegetarian and also you hate being around other people, mostly. And even if you write your angry diatribes about hipsters on your IPad while driving around in a car your parents bought you, listening to your IPod full of indie music that your favorite indie magazine told you to listen to…that’s fine. But man, fuck hipsters.

10. Start a war on something. There’s a War on the Poor and a War on Women and a War on Christmas and a War on War, so why not? Declare your own, rage about it, whip your friends into a frenzy about it. As soon as someone on Twitter uses your “War on…” phrase, you’ve won.

11. Jump on every bandwagon you can. By this I mean, are the other literary blogs talking about it? Well, you better goddamn well be too. Especially if it’s sordid. Because even if your post is a basic summary of all the crap other people have said about the given issue (see: Marie Calloway) people will read it. It’s like taking candy/cocaine from kids.

12. This is very important, because it’s coming up: sleep with every person you can (preferably famous) at AWP, and then write about it. Also, definitely write about every embarrassing or noteworthy thing that you see famous writers do at AWP- what they’re eating/drinking/saying/who they’re sleeping with. Or the posts can be like those trashy magazines that show celebrities doing normal things (OMG! Eugenides ties his own shoes!) People love that stuff.

Final tips: Curse a lot. Be as pissy and angsty as possible. Drop the names of every famous or semi-famous person you know, and if you don’t know any famous people, latch on to whatever six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connection you can find. You both lived in New York during the year 1993? Well fuckin’ A, man, you practically hung out and did lines together. Also, mention New York or your previous time in New York as often as possible. If you don’t talk about New York with authority, no one will take you seriously/sleep with you/pretend to read your blog.

There you go, kiddies. Twelve steps (because ten is so passe, and you’re already doing one 12-step program) to starting your own literary blog. You’re welcome.

The consequences of the book tax for print literature have been grave. Readership is way down and people aren’t buying books. They are, however, using the internet. Chile has the highest internet usage per its population in South America, beating out even Brazil and Argentina. The most frequent internet activity is checking one’s email. 9 out of 10 internet users have Facebook, but more and more of these users are also accessing their news online.

As a writer who is interested in publishing in both Chile and the United States, these statistics offer a practical lesson. I’m realizing that an important part of being a writer is more than just “knowing your audience.” You have to know how your audience is accessing what its reading. If I want my work to be read in Chile, print publishing is clearly not the way to go. Yet its hard to find online venues that pay authors.

This dilemma has guided me to the study of literary journalism and those writers whose brief but essay-driven prose have been published in Chile and Spain’s major newspapers. That is to say, good nonfiction is alive in Chile’s press.   In 1997, Jorge Teillier started a piece for Chile’s most read widely-read newspaper, El Mercurio, with an anecdote about his childhood: “Allow me to remember a summer afternoon in Lautaro, my childhood town….” Jorge Edwards published this opening sentence of his literary chronicle “The Legends of Mississippi” in the national newspaper El Pais in 1982: “We were in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, in the south of the United States, together for an international conference about Yoknapatawpha and William Faulkner.” Just today, guest columnist and director of the National Museum of Barcelona, Manuel Borga-Villel, published a literary essay about artist Antoni Tápies, also in El Pais, called “This Unspeakable Magic.”

Literary journalism does not have a very large market in Chile, but it is an appealing option for a writer abroad. Is it also a realistic option for nonfiction writers in the United States?

Works Consulted

Impuesto al libro, impuesto al conocimiento http://www.elciudadano.cl/2009/03/04/6354/impuesto-al-libro-impuesto-al-conocimiento/

Chile cambia “dictadura” por “régimen militar” http://www.museodelaresistencia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=394:chile-cambia-qdictaduraq-por-qregimen-militarq&catid=62:internacionales&Itemid=224

Internet Usage South America   http://www.internetworldstats.com/south.htm