Toad Suck Review

If you are a person who is getting (or has gotten) an MFA in creative writing, there is a high likelihood that you are also a person who has at least toyed with the idea of starting your own literary magazine. Don’t even pretend like this isn’t true. I know you. Don’t lie.

And if you have considered starting your own literary magazine then you know there are a lot of big decisions to make before undertaking such a project. Like, you will probably need to figure out how to get a lot of start-up cash and a Web site and a printer you like and trust and other smart friends who will help you edit it and many other things that you haven’t even thought of because logistics are boring and therefore not a part of anyone’s literary magazine daydreams. In the land of what-if-I-started-my-own-magazine, there is really only one concern that reigns supreme.

What am I going to name it?

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Photo Credit: Cold Front Magazine

I have minimal investment in the Bark/BlazeVOX conflict. I’ve had friends and teachers publish with Blaze, but have never actually submitted there myself. I’ve also never met Brett Ortler, and likely never will, despite both of us being fellow Barkers. Still, I’ve watched events unfold these last few days, and though I may not have the same history with Bark, the same experience as a seasoned MFA, I feel compelled to speak. My opinions are neither those of Bark, nor of Eastern Washington University. But I speak anyway.

The world of letters is viciously competitive. It is a world filled with talent and ambition, but also with frauds and hucksters, entities like James Frey who would take the naive or the desperate and exploit their hard work for profit. I do not sincerely believe BlazeVOX to be among this number, and indeed I was disheartened to think that they would shut down. I am glad now after all that has transpired to see that they may not. That said, it is still hard to look at their correspondences with Mr. Ortler and not feel that they have crossed an ethical line. At best their model is ill-conceived; at worst it is dishonest. If one wishes to charge authors to cover the costs of publishing, then fine. That is one’s prerogative. But if such is the case, one should not cloak one’s intentions in the latter paragraphs of an acceptance letter, or fail to keep one’s numbers completely consistent. Read more »

What I did over my summer vacation

You know how, as writers, we often feel ineffectual and separate from all those other people in the world? Okay, maybe I’m just speaking for myself, or for poets. Alright, for myself.

Regardless, the question of the usefulness of writing is one that I’ve been asked more than once in more than one venue. I remember just a few months ago one of my well-meaning developmental writing students came into my office, presumably to cheer me up or something, when he said something like, “Jaime, I have to be honest with you. You’ve seemed really tired this quarter, and I just don’t know if teaching writing is worth wearing yourself out over. I mean, seriously, I’m not going to use this stuff outside of school, and I don’t think most other people do either.” Sigh. He was right, I was tired, but not of teaching writing or even of hearing students tell me things like that. He was, after all, telling me the truth as he experiences it.

Besides, there was some wisdom in his statement. A lot of students really don’t use the academic skills we teach them: MLA format, essay organization, how to locate a scholarly article on a library database…. But, whether they know it or not, they do use the less tangible, more cognitive skills we teach them: to look deeply at a text, to analyze an argument, to question authority.

These are the reasons I enjoy teaching college composition, but I often struggle with the applicability of it. When, as my student asked implicitly, will they ever use the academic skills I’m charged with teaching them? When will essays ever become relevant to anyone outside of academia?

I know of at least two places (I’m sure there are more.) where essays are not only relevant, they are promoting social change. The first is my own, newly started nonprofit organization, Dream School Commons. The second is Eastern Washington University alumnus Ross Carper’s website, Beyond the Bracelet.

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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:

As committed to web by a plebeian intern. Fellow first-years and aspiring undergrads take heed: the modern writer’s market is certainly crowded, yes, but also not without hope.

1. There are many MFAs in this world, and with good reason. It’s true. Nearly every author I see submitting has made the study of craft a personal pursuit. I know Ann Patchett  says that an MFA is irrelevant to being a good fiction writer, but I take some exception to this. Based on the successful writers I’ve known, it seems that if you want to write well, it pays to commit to a few years of serious study, learning your skills and going up against opinions you don’t always share. Sure, you can learn to play guitar in your garage, but that doesn’t make a classical background in music theory worthless. The same goes with writing. Read more »

My first submission was to Fresh Yarn, which I think no longer exists. And  after searching for the rejection in my gmail, I’ve determined that I never heard back from them, six years later.

A wonderful HTML Giant article by Blake Butler about lessons he’s learned over years of submitting work (and like most of us, often times having it rejected.) In this piece Butler talks about seeking out magazines you’re familiar with, that you have a similar aesthetic to, and have actually read as opposed to scanning down a duotrope page and picking out the most obscure journal possible with a 44.78% acceptance rate (“my piece was published in the Bleeding Goat Online Journal, Mom!”) This year has been particularly exciting for me because I was able to pick up my first three acceptances. While the magazines are not the Atlantic, I really respect their experimental nature and like that they are toying with conventions of language and genre. The first was Berkeley Fiction Review, the second the Rio Grande Review (a biligual publication out of the MFA in Creative Writing  program at The University of Texas at El Paso) and Revelation Magazine, an independent publication devoted entirely to apocalyptic literature. While acceptance was wonderful encouragement to keep plugging away, I realize that I’m still very young in this process and am using every story as a learning opportunity, knowing that I’m years, decades, maybe even lifetimes from “being there.”

Blake notes the importance of researching magazines in saying “Send to places that might actually like you. To do this you probably need to read them or at least pay attention to something about them so you know if you even have a foot in the door aesthetically. It doesn’t hurt to send to places that you don’t really feel a fit for, or who have weird profiles anyway and you can’t tell if you’d fit there because it’s kind of vague, because why not. I’m just saying you’ll have better results when you actually pay attention.”

Some other particularly poignant rules:

12. Writing and submitting don’t go hand in hand. Writing is yours. Submitting is a fucking video game. Play the game hard when it’s time to play it, but don’t get eaten. I would set aside time (sometimes whole days) where I did the research and work of submission. Then when it was time to write, that was the last thing on my mind.

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My two contributor copies of Willow Springs 68 arrived a month or so ago, and even as I admired the cover design, and perused the table of contents, I knew the first place I’d head: A Conversation with Richard Russo.

Almost exactly a year and three months ago, my crack interview team: Laura Ender, Sam Edmonds, and I, sat down at the Davenport Hotel with Richard Russo, armed only with notepad full of questions, the product of several meetings in which we discussed our battle-plan, and maybe too-much knowledge of Russo’s work, a result of each of us reading just about everything he’d ever published.  As a second-year-student at the time, Willow Springs had put me in charge of the interview, and even if Russo hadn’t been one of my literary heroes I would have been nervous as all hell.

I discovered his books in high school, and devoured them greedily, wondering why all novels couldn’t be this insightful, funny, and easy to read.  Realistically, I wanted to write books like his.  Adorably naively, I wanted to marry one of his daughters, (who were about my age) despite being barely able to talk to girls, so I could see him every Christmas in Maine.

I’d been a member of the finely-tuned Jess Walter interview team earlier that year, so I had a sense of how these things worked.  But Editor Sam Ligon led that interview, and he and Jess were good friends.  And this moment, meeting and running an interview with Richard Russo, was the biggest, at least socially, of my budding literary career.  I planning on staying cool, and praying the tape-recorder would keep working the entire time. Read more »

Way back in February, I took a fateful hike through the woods around beautiful Lake Liberty. Thus began my journey into the world of literary rejection. This post is not about the negative (or Beautiful) aspects of rejection but instead I thought I would share two awesome experiences that prove rejection isn’t all bad.

The first being an email I recieved from an  editor of Arcadia Literary Journal. I’d submitted three poems, the first poems I’d ever to submitted (and I now wish I had been in a more optimistic mood when sending) and they couldn’t be more different in terms of topic (the desire to be domestic, a virgin drug experience and obesession). The email from Mr. Giles started with the standard, “Thank you for submitting your work but we will not be able to publish it at this time” but then kept going…into a solid paragraph. I got the email on my phone and as I scrolled down the tiny screen of my blackberry I am sure my eyes were the size of quarters. Mr. Giles had taken the time to explain why it had taken so long for me to hear from his journal and not just explain, he broke it all the way down – all the way down- to a word. One word that created a phrase that was the hinge of my poem. This phrase, that depending on the reader, could make or break if the poem “worked”. I couldn’t believe it. Here was the reason that I continued to write because while writing had always been something I did for me, it was something I kept doing when it became something I could see connecting me with other people. It wasn’t real to me that someone actually read and enjoyed/ fucking hated my work until I got that email. What a heady feeling. My head was in the clouds for days.I thanked Mr. Giles for his time and effort and became determined to submit more work. I’d heard from all of the first wave submissions except one and as time passed I started to get excited that maybe I would have my first acceptance soon. Read more »

Does this heart bother you? Well get over it, this is my Bark post.

Since the academic year ended and “summer” (when does it get warm here?) started, I’ve written one poem. It’s an alright poem, with some poetic elements - a metaphor or two- but really it’s not  worthy of editing to put in the maybe pile for the thesis I’m supposed to be writing. I woke up today and it was July and I swear I’ve become Rip Van Winkle because a deep sleep is the best excuse I can come up with for my lack of productivity.  See all year when classmates and professors suggested books for me to read or gave me writing prompts, I told them and myself that I would get to them in the summer. The SUMMER became this seemingly endless span of time, with no obligations, no required reading and a promise of a tan that would last well into November.  Near the end of spring quarter, I would zone out during long arguments over commas and imagine myself lounging under the pines of Coeur d’Alene park, a copy of Li-Young Lee’s The City In Which I Love You open on my lap and a notebook and pen at my feet. It was those daydreams of summer that kept me motivated through those last few classes when my brain had turned to mush.

And now it’s summer. Whoop-de-freaking- do. All those things I said I was going to do haven’t happened so far.   I know part of my problem is motivation. There’s no workshop or homework. Also it’s nice outside, as in there’s no snow. And September really does feel like it’s months away because, ha!, it is months away but that’s not the sum of my writer’s block. No, this goes back to my original conuudrum as a writer and my conviction that no one cares if you fall in love and therefore, no one (i.e. literary journals) wants to read your sappy love poetry. Because Love Poems are so last century.

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