A Rumpus Meditation on Editors, Ambition, and Angry Dependence (in 33 loosely jointed parts):
1. On July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Kevin Morrissey, took his life. His note stated that he “just couldn’t bear it anymore.” His sister – from whom he was estranged – assumed “it” was his long-standing depression. When she talked to colleagues at the magazine, they claimed Morrissey had been deeply troubled by his relationship with his boss, editor Ted Genoways. Phone records showed Morrissey contacted officials at the University of Virginia (which houses VQR) seventeen times in the last two weeks of his life. Police descended on the VQR offices. Reporters arrived shortly thereafter.
2. The national media’s take on the story was exemplified by a Today show report which cast Genoways as an unrepentant “workplace bully” who drove his underling to suicide. It was rich with innuendo and tabloid gravitas, which was how you know it aired on national TV.
3. Genoways’ defenders insist he is an editor of rare talent and vision, who worked relentlessly to transform a smallish literary journal into a nationally recognized magazine and, in the process, made some enemies.
4. I basically agree with this characterization.
5. For the record, Genoways asked me to write a humor column for VQR back in 2004. He also asked to see my fiction. It was an odd experience. After soliciting work, Genoways would often fall out of touch for months. Eventually, he would send an apologetic note, accept my work, and solicit more. At which point the cycle would start again. It was sort of like having a bad boyfriend.
6. I stopped submitting to VQR after Genoways informed me that he was taking the magazine in more serious direction, and that my recent stories struck him as too familiar, and sub-par.
7. He was right – both about his magazine and my stories.
8. Still: the way he did business generated a lot of unnecessary drama. His last note to me, for instance, came only after I sent him a series of increasingly confused and distressed emails. The subject line of the final one was: You Are Behaving Like a Bully.
9. Treating Kevin Morrissey’s death as some kind of lurid whodunit is degrading conduct, as is maligning Genoways from afar, or anonymously. It’s interesting in precisely the way Fox News is interesting. It provides aggrieved people an excuse to feel angry rather than feel sad.
10. But it is sad.
11. It’s sad that Morrissey is dead and that his death will haunt Genoways. It’s sad that people will (at least for a while) associate VQR with this mess rather than the remarkable work published therein. It’s sad that Genoways’ talent as an editor has been overshadowed by his alleged conduct as a boss. And yes, it’s also sad that certain editors, endowed with so much power by a growing army of insecure writers, don’t exercise that power more responsibly.
12. My own sense of Genoways is that his ambition outstripped his empathy. He had the drive to put VQR, and himself, on the map. But as he rose to prominence, the demands on his time overwhelmed him. Here were all these writers and underlings demanding his attention, sending him needy, guilt-provoking notes (like mine) and so he punished them with neglect. Most of this, I suspect, was unconscious. He lost touch with how he was making those around him feel.
13. This happens all the time. It’s happened to me. And to you.
14. Earlier this year, Genoways wrote an impassioned piece for Mother Jones lamenting the decline of the literary journal. He expressed disgust for the ranks of newly minted MFAs who want to write but don’t bother to read, and for those authors who “seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues – as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.”
15. As cri de ceours go, this was right in my roundhouse. But there was also a curious impatience in his tone. “Stop being so damned dainty and polite,” he concluded. “Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake, write something we might want to read.”
16. It was almost like he was angry at the people who submitted to him.
17. Then again, it must be incredibly stressful to edit a large literary magazine, to have to scrape for funding, to have an army of neurotics ready to blame you for not anointing them, to dash so many hopes every day. To become, in effect, a figure of transference to thousands of angry dependents. You’d have to be a saint not to get resentful at some point.
18. Then again (again), I’m not sure Genoways is firing at the right cultural perpetrators. What of the masters of Hollywood, who boil our lust and shame and aggression into a kind of pornographic gruel, and call it entertainment? Or the media companies who routinely place profit above a serious investigation of our global predicaments? Or the politicians who refuse to face the moral imperatives of our age? Or even those of us with the “right values” who continue to vote foolishly with our time and money every day?
19. I have a hard time begrudging anyone trying to make literary art. It seems to me the rise of MFA programs is mostly about people going in search of themselves, people who feel the emptiness of our historical moment, who feel unmoored from family, adrift in a sea of marketing, who seek to find a cure in storytelling.
20. Are some of us needy, entitled narcissists who are in it for the wrong reasons?
21. Yeah.
22. But we’re all in it for the wrong reasons, at least some of the time. We’re all weaklings when it comes to our ego needs. The question is whether we have the patience to outlast these needs, and the doubts that energize them.
23. This is why agents drive me nuts. They feed on the ego needs of writers. They set themselves up as the folks with the tickets to the golden kingdom of Success. They love writers, but too often it’s an erotic brand of love, one that’s about possession, about having power over someone whose creative power you envy. The worst of them take real pleasure in the angry dependence of their clients.
24. I once had an agent say to me, after failing to sell a book of mine, “I sometimes think I take it harder than my writers.”
25. When you think about it, that kind of solipsism is almost poignant.
26. I’ve worked with a few editors, by the way, who behaved in ways that struck me as cruel. These were the same ones who, years ago, harbored dreams of writing.
27. And then sometimes I think about C. Michael Curtis, the former fiction editor of the Atlantic. That guy sent me countless rejection letters over the years, each with some vague and vaguely passive-aggressive dismissal. A few strong moments here, but we remain unconvinced. Stuff like that. These notes used to drive me crazy. I had the guy pegged as some bitter old vampire, who got off on blue-balling aspiring writers. And maybe he was. But probably, he was just rooting for me to write that one story he couldn’t dismiss.
28. That’s what most editors and agents dream about – that one story or novel or memoir they can’t dismiss. And we all want to write it. We all want to summon within ourselves such a voice, such courage, such attention to pain and beauty. But most of us fail. Our days rank as failures. And so we send out work that – as Genoways did me the great favor of pointing out – doesn’t honor our talent. And who do we blame? We blame the editors and agents, who are often merely stand-ins for the parents and siblings who thwarted us long ago.
29. But the blame rests with us.
30. To a lesser but crucial extent, it rests also with those fellow travelers who have turned away from the necessary pleasures of art, and retreated into the frantic enticements of screen addiction, into false narratives designed (actually) to keep the turbulence of their internal lives at bay.
31. Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. It’s hard to make this case, though, if all we do is squabble with each other and lament our obscurity.
32. I am talking to myself mostly.
33. Please don’t pollute this comment thread with garbagio about VQR. Go somewhere else for that. Seriously. Genoways isn’t the point. We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others. One way to do this – the best way – is via our imaginations, via storytelling. It’s our job to help spread that particular virus, in our work and our lives. The point isn’t to take sides. There are no sides. There’s just the one side. And we’re all on it.
***
Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.
Listen to the Rumpus Radio interview with Steve Almond here.
104 responses
This is a great companion piece to the recent discussion on We Who Are About To Die about Duotrope and writers who over-submit. Thank you for this.
Once again, thank you Steve Almond for clearing that up for me. I’m not sure about number 32 though – though I know the feeling.
Fantastic. Thanks for this.
glad to have read this post.
On no. 19 (“…the rise of MFA programs is mostly about people going in search of themselves, people who feel the emptiness of our historical moment, who feel unmoored from family…who seek to find a cure in storytelling.”): Steve Almond touches on this idea briefly in his Rumpus Radio #8 interview as well. It’s interesting, essay-in-its-own-right material.
yes!
ego vs empathy – a prizefight?
most cannot resist the lure of ego when power is achieved
thanks for a refreshing stream of thought
“…We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others. One way to do this – the best way – is via our imaginations, via storytelling. It’s our job to help spread that particular virus, in our work and our lives. The point isn’t to take sides. There are no sides. There’s just the one side. And we’re all on it.” Nurturing the sympathetic imagination is the point, isn’t it? If we only see one another as “the other” and as obstacles to personal or selective group desires, we fail in recognizing our shared and imperfect humanity.
Love 19-23
Not just MFA programs, its a rise in writing in general
‘We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others.’
YES. dostoevsky would be happy to read this. as am i.
In following the various discussions going on about “writers and publishing these days” (as a definite outsider, being just a reader not a writer)I can’t help thinking of the Zimbardo/Stanford prison experiments, whereby it seems a given that anyone with complete authority over a vulnerable population will turn into horrible bullies. Zimbardo’s instructions to the “guards”: “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”
So: Bring on the self-publishers, web sites, new ways of circumventing the big dog publishers who, like the music industry, have based their business models on the huge hits and no longer nurture writers or acts.
I wonder what happened to the editors of old, like Saxe Cummins at best and maybe Gordon Lish at worst (?) who seemed to struggle side-by-side with their writers but were willing to stand in the shadows as it were. Maybe you writers here can speak to what kind of “nurturing” you get but so often as I read the “biggies” these days I can’t help thinking, “Geeze, did anyone edit this stuff? Do they just let these writers go?” What do editors do these days anyway? How has the job changed? Maybe, like college presidents, they’re just supposed to raise money now. Money changes everything I guess.
Hope this doesn’t go against your #33.
I like the puppy dogs.
This was a great post.
The annoying list structure of this article made me want to take my own life.
“We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others. One way to do this – the best way – is via our imaginations, via storytelling.”
thanks, steve. i keep forgetting what writers are really for.
love to friends and family of mr. morrissey.
An engaging and thoughtful post. Thanks for this, Steve!
thoughtful and thought-provoking…. so glad to have read this (or, so glad you wrote it, and Rumpus published it, so I could read it?)
#31 hits a solid mark. Having lived through some recent suicides (I am doing a long meditation on one to be called Benson’s Ending), I think there is a bitterness that often takes over literary people, even some who have great talent. The bitterness and reaction to obscurity are completely understandable and there are no perfect antidotes. I do think the suffering that goes on in some of these poetic lives is real enough; I’ve been an editor, even recently started a new magazine, Sol, and always try to be kind to writers who submit work. I rarely send out anything these days (after years of rejection slips), but rather publish my own and have a POD press, Rough Road Press. I am not at all sure we know how to assess ourselves as writers, but it is probably true there is a lot of cruelty amid the jockeying for position in what is probably an important but somewhat small realm of human activity. But let us all keep at it; and hopefully the demons that lay hold of some writers can (hopefully be kept at bay by the community of souls that often bands together to bring work of depth to readers of all kinds.
I love this post, and I’m a scientist. These days, I feel a similar concern over the public’s lack of attention to the continually unfolding story of what we know about how the world works. There are a few talented science writers out there with the ability to synthesize large bodies of primary literature into accessible, yet rigorous explanations of what we know about how things work- but I feel like only other scientists bother to read the stuff. We (other scientists who work in the trenches but don’t write pop sci) must do a better job as well of convincing the public that there are much more constructive ways to spend their time. People need to read more, period. Too much video entertainment is simply causing us to lose our way as a species capable of symbolic information storage and retrieval.
Thank you.
This has left me thinking all morning about the concept of punishment by neglect.
“He lost touch with how he was making those around him feel.
This happens all the time. It’s happened to me. And to you.”
I work for a literary publication in the DC area, and after weeks of impassioned discussions and arguments between friends and colleagues on the unfortunate incident, this is a welcome reprieve. It’s nice to argue for humanity as the culprit. Thank you.
I really liked this post. Thank you.
Steve, you rock.
Mike Curtis has not left The Atlantic, he is still the fiction editor.
This is wonderful, Steve, in so many ways.
The stuff about MFA programs…..I used to half-joke and tell my students that MFA programs like Iowa and Irvine and NYU are the (meager) modern equivalent of Paris in the 1920s.
And they’re probably also a response to the drift of literature into the periphery. The evolution of the ecosystem. Most writers I know who go to get an MFA are hiding out. University as last refuge. Looking for a place to breathe…a safe haven in which to exist and write and be quiet for a while. Nothing more. The degree is immaterial.
When I started grad school, I was immediately struck by the comfort I felt in the classroom. The human part of it — not the academic part. How nice it was to be in a room with other people who wrote, other people with the same bug. It was like an AA meeting or something: “You too, huh?”
Point #19 in high relief.
Anyway. A salute. As usual, tremendously well said.
Thanks for being the voice of humanism. When the initial stories popped up about this, the whole melodramatic tone left a terrible taste in my mouth. All I could think about was how sad Kevin’s mom must be–it didn’t occur to me to wonder about the state of publishing or the careers of the two men invovled.
In unrelated news, thank you for inciting writers and readers to encourage reading and writing. One of my nephews is in kindergarten. He asked me if I liked Family Guy or The Simpsons better. When I said I didn’t have a TV, he grew concerned. “But how do you know what your favorite shows are? If you want, you can live with us. We only have one TV, but it’s bigger than Grandma’s.”
Nicely done, Steve. I wondered where it was going and am delighted it went where it did. And wonderful illustrations. So rarely do we combine visual and written.
Been on the editor side and writer side and yeah, ideally, these should be the same side, the same as the reader one. So now there are three sides, which makes a triangle of some sort. Or maybe a line if you think same-sidedly. However what undergirds the triangle (and the line) is a circle, we just can’t see it sometimes.
Someone could write a book on this essay (though most readers wouldn’t want to read it).
The sad part is sad. My condolences to families, friends, co-workers. As with most suicides, no one can say for sure what happened. Probably we won’t ever know.
Steve Almond just wrote a manifesto for the Twenty-first Century.
Some people publish early and often whereas others seem faced with an almost Sisyphean task. Each situation has its own dangers.
Our greatest good fortune as people who care deeply about literature is that we do care! We have access to the magic.
It is tragic that Mr Morrissey’s demons got the better of him. Perhaps we should be thankful to have escaped his fate–the fate of far too many in this game.
What a lovely, thoughtful piece.
(Bad news, though: C. Michael Curtis at least used to write the exact same rejection letters to everyone: “There’s something compelling in the tone here, but in the end it doesn’t add up to much.” I think he must have a computer program to generate them.)
I’m all about #31. Thanks Steve. I agree with René: this is a manifesto.
Great piece from Steve, as always. There’s so much here that I’ll quote to my students and friends who are interested in pursuing the MFA and/or submitting their work for publication. The concluding sentences in part 33 are worth repeating every day:
“We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others. One way to do this – the best way – is via our imaginations, via storytelling. It’s our job to help spread that particular virus, in our work and our lives. The point isn’t to take sides. There are no sides. There’s just the one side. And we’re all on it.”
I’m putting this excerpt on all my syllabi and on an index card next to my computer.
Thanks for this. And in regards to MFA programs: I am in one, and I did it so I wouldn’t feel lonely for a few years. Writing is madness, with only yourself to talk to, especially if you’re a young nobody. Everybody needs to be reminded that art is worthwhile, that you’re not crazy for loving it, and an MFA is a good place for that.
Yet again, Steve. This was a really great post. The way you talk about your failures as a writer is remarkably honest and candid. Frankly, it’s inspiring. Thanks for this.
Thoughtful & I thank you for writing it.
I especially love #33. Its call to humanity is (unfortunately) such a necessary thing right now–especially when discussing something as squeamish as this.
” Then again, it must be incredibly stressful to edit a large literary magazine.”
I really hope this phrase was used ironically. Stress is living through Katrina, through the Haitian earthquake.
Regardless of how self-important one is, even the editor of a “literary journal” has responsibilities to others, and those he employs. Isn’t that ‘Human Being 101’?
No excuses for an a** h^le.
Steve, you’re as brilliant as brilliant gets, and you have cojones of steel. I would love to be you (minus the actual cojones) when I grow up.
As a literature professor at a (possibly up and coming, possibly down and outing) 4th tier university in the south, my purpose in life is basically to combat the widespread sense that reading is a static, soon-to-be-outmoded extravagance for the elite (i.e., Obama and six other Muslim socialists from Hawaii and Harvard). My 4000-level Contemporary Lit students form a great oasis for me this term. To keep things kinetic, we’re doing mock trials in “Literary Court.” I started them off arguing the validity of Mona Simpson’s prophesy that “Alice Munro is the living writer most likely to be read in 100 years” using the collection _Hateship…_ They did a great job, but I still left class wondering this: Will anyone (beyond a tiny academic circle) be reading anything in 100 years? I mean, if it isn’t assigned reading?
Next month we tackle _Which Brings Me To You_, a lyrical and underappreciated novel if there ever was one…
Good. Thanks. Agreed. http://www.carytennis.com/video.html
“He lost touch with how he was making those around him feel.”
This happens in offices all the time. This is not unique to a literary journal or even to publishing. There are people who are brilliant at their jobs but have no business managing people, yet end up doing so and making their employees miserable. I don’t think the problem is one of literature and literary journals. I do agree that’s it’s one of people forgetting our humanity. I have worked with far too many people who have forgotten to treat their colleagues with respect and kindness. The worst offenders are usually the brilliant ones – likely because they’re the ones who can get away with it.
Rene & January, I agree–this is manifesto-ish. Love it! About #33: “We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others. One way to do this – the best way – is via our imaginations, via storytelling. It’s our job…” This reminds me of a favorite Denise Levertov poem – “Making Peace” – where she quotes Muriel Rukeyser: “The poets must give us/ imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar/ imagination of disaster.” Also, I’m still reeling from #10, #17 & #19. Thank you for this Steve!
If you are over the age of 5 and you still need to be reminded to have empathy for other people then you are lost.
You are either nice to people or you are not. If you choose to be mean to people then you should be prepared for the consequences.
And I have an MFA. I got it because I wanted to learn how to write. I got it because I wanted to educate myself. People in the literary/publishing industry who take shots at MFA’s and MFA programs stand on the summit of Mount Asinine.
Bravo.
Well stated.
Dear Steves Almond, It’s “cris de coeur,” not “cri de coeurs.” That is all.
There are parts of this I’m going to copy and hang to my wall, possibly tattooing it to the inside of my eyeballs. Thanks, Steve. We must pursue this like a holy calling. And we can’t vote our time and money away.
“I have a hard time begrudging anyone trying to make literary art. It seems to me the rise of MFA programs is mostly about people going in search of themselves, people who feel the emptiness of our historical moment, who feel unmoored from family, adrift in a sea of marketing, who seek to find a cure in storytelling.”
This bit has just assured my decision against an MFA. I have more to search for about others, my mom is dying, and this is one remarkable time in history desperate for its retelling. Oh, and the market? That’s the castle the MFA built.
Beautiful commentary.
Why are the paragraphs numbered? Am I missing something here?
This–is great. I knew Ted well, as a friend, many years ago. My friends and I have been trying desperately to parse this whole “thing” that’s now invaded the public sphere for no good reason save that the Today Show–spurred, apparently, by a reporter previously criticized by Ted (hello, conflict of interest)–elected to catapult this to the nation’s attention.
You have, however, better than any of the articles out there–and we’ve read the all–brought this back to its core, and in a sense, you accomplished what Ted set out to do in that Mother Jones article. And you’ve done it oh, so beautifully. “Write, write, write… and write like you mean it.” Ted was right. You are right. Your #33 completes Ted’s #15.
Writers everywhere, take note. Managers everywhere: remember your roots.
Thanks Steve! -J.
Speaking as one who has done a lot of time in the editorial harness–and is grateful for the opportunity to have done such work, and is grateful to be done with it–I can ratify a great deal of what this post says. Editing has its own special pathologies, and I think anyone who has a soul and stays in that line of work very long will fall prey to at least some of them (and likely invent some new ones) Anyone who has no soul should be barred from the profession (and most other professions as well–let them become politicians). The job epitomizes a bizarre combination of stress and loneliness to be encountered just about nowhere else. And while an editor may turn into a kind of monster, he or she also witnesses, on a daily basis, writers turning into equal and opposite, or at least oppositional, monsters. On the one hand, you can’t please anybody, and on the other, nobody seems to care one way or the other what you do, except when it relates directly to them. Regardless of how this may sound, I’m not complaining: I learned enormously from working as an editor; I gained indispensable insights. But the work is hard.
The commentary about Michael Curtis is a small outcropping of the kind of issue I am talking about. I know Curtis, and I know what a good and conscientious editor he is; his track record is visible to all. To kvetch about the nature of his rejection notes is to forget a number of things. How many years did he do that job? And he was not editing The Podunk Review; he was editing The Atlantic Monthly’s fiction. Mail trucks came with literal mountains of short stories every single day. How many short story submissions went through his hands–and through his mind as he read them? And yet he BOTHERED TO WRITE NOTES to people. Were they repetitious? Well, were your stories repetitious? Not personally, as in: were John’s stories repetitious: but in the aggregate? Did he read the “same” story over and over and over? You’d better believe it. And yet he WROTE to you. If you wrote, oh, 150,000 notes of rejection to people, would your notes ever repeat themselves?
This is a rhetorical question: leave it alone.
I point all this out just to say: if you have never been an editor, you cannot know what an editor is up against. When you’ve done the job, you’ll be, I think, less apt to complain.
As to the VQR situation, it breaks my heart. I know Ted, and I knew Kevin. I have no idea what went on. Neither, I think, does anyone who was not there. I send all my empathy to the good people involved. I am terribly, terribly sorry.
Thanks, Steve, for writing this good piece. And thanks, Rumpus, for publishing it.
https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/08/interview-with-arthur-ganson-the-man-behind-the-machines/
I read to cross-train. I think it’s a good practice; look at other art, other making. And I like what he has to say about being known at all.
I’ve wanted to be famous all my life. But it’s the work, the work, just the work. And your life, a growing up. Not that one doesn’t ever put the work out There, “submit” it. But the reception doesn’t actually matter. No act too small, nothing that isn’t heard or seen, if only witnessed by its making. Forget fame – better to be famous after you are dead. Less of a hassle, less of a temptation.
18., 22., 28., and 31. “Lamenting our obscurity.” That’s it. And grieving these deaths that are so unnecessary, so unfair, so wrong.
Always respect a comments thread that ignores the trolls.
“Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui.”
well, you’ve done your job — pushed me to get back to reading more and self-medicating with tv drivel.
Thanks Steve
This more internal view of the giant drama is excellent.
Dear T. R. Hummer–
Oh, I didn’t mean to kvetch at all! The rejection notes I got from Mr. Curtis and the conversations I had with my friends about them were one of the first things that made me feel like A Writer, connected to the world and lore of writing. Which is to say, I don’t mean to complain, I mean to joke. If you can’t joke about rejection, then you won’t last long as a writer.
I once met Mr. Curtis at a party and thanked him for the notes.
Not an answer to your rhetorical question, just a clarification.
Yes. Thank you for this.
An excellent explanation and examination of a difficult dilemma, namely, how we all feel about the tragic events at VQR. Bravo!
Dear Elizabeth: I didn’t mean to single out your comment–Steve Almond brings it up first; your note in the thread is a play on his comment. Sorry; tone in thread commentary, as in email and elsewhere, is difficult to get just right.
Bravo. Well said.
The Manifesto has manifested itself here on the Rumpus. Steve Almond has managed to broaden the VQR “situation” into a discussion about something that speaks deeply to all of us–writers, editors, bread-deliverymen alike. There are so many good things about this essay, I don’t even know where to start.
Okay, what about here: “Then again (again), I’m not sure Genoways is firing at the right cultural perpetrators. What of the masters of Hollywood, who boil our lust and shame and aggression into a kind of pornographic gruel, and call it entertainment?”
Bravo for all 33 loosely jointed parts.
It’s a great piece, Steve; however, I would raise some objections/observations.
I write what I need to write, and what is authentic to me. If my work is rejected from publications on the grounds of content (not craft, or lack thereof) then I can’t really do much about that (but I don’t begrudge publications for rejecting it, either. It is what it is). I’m not about to pack up my things and go out to Darfur just to get a story that is noteworthy in today’s swollen market of travel narratives/culture narratives/social justice narratives; nor am I going to write a literary abomination that appeals to certain audiences (Vampires, for example) just because that happens to be the flavor of the moment.
So while I do understand that certain publications are known for publishing certain kinds of content (and often submit to them anyway, knowing full well that it would have to take an act of God for my work to be accepted) perhaps the point where I draw the line in the sand and let out a Captain Picard-esque, “THE LINE MUST BE DRAWN HERE! THIS FAR: NO FURTHER!” Is at points 14 and 15, where I tell that editor that he can pull his head out of his ass. Maybe the reason so many “freshly minted MFAs” are writing that sort of thing is because it is culturally relevant and/or significant to them. “Older” people said the same thing during the 80’s and early 90’s about MTV and the nation’s youth. Instead of addressing the issue, they bungled it, and we ended up with folks like a family member of mine who got nearly perfect SAT scores but still has no clue what to do with his life and feels like humanity has no interconnectedness whatsoever.
Maybe, as much as writers need to be honest with themselves about their work, (I err toward dishonesty in my overly-critical attitude toward my own work, convincing myself it is worthless to anybody but me) editors need a reality check. Maybe they haven’t been reading what’s out there; or, worse, they’ve only been reading what you find on the first five tables as you enter a Borders or B&N. Maybe editors are as much victims of marketing as everybody else.
Bravo to you, Steve! Both for the ideas/feelings you express and the interesting format you express them in. Reading you is always a pleasure.
Your definition of “our job” resonsates with me. When someone on occasion asks me what religion is, I answer, “literature.” Everything we need to know about the human race can be found in great books. So for me the line about the “direct path to meaning,” well, Steve, you’re singing to the choir.
“I had the guy pegged as some bitter old vampire, who got off on blue-balling aspiring writers.” Well, after that line (and this piece in its entirety), my day is a whole bunch better. Thanks Steve!
The Rumpus comment threads are so nice, ya’ll. T.R. Hummer and Elizabeth just APOLOGIZED to each other. ON THE INTERNET. Thank you, T.R. and ELizabeth. You guys are the best. You guys should get today’s Internet Award For Decency and Reasonableness.
This was very well considered and presented; thanks much for that.
I am intermittently on the staff at a literary journal (Brain,Child Magazine) that tries very hard to nurture its contributors and would-be contributors. We often publish writers after multiple rejections, and from the start the founding editors vowed that every piece would get a personalized rejection. We are perhaps not in the same league as VQR or some of the other prominent places you mention, but perhaps this idea of prominence is part of the problem — our writers go on to publish elsewhere, we have won many prizes over the years, without (yet, anyhow!) becoming embittered or competitive. So I hear what you’re saying and know that it happens, just wanted to say it’s not the only model out there.
Also, re 23, I have an agent I love. He can’t change a lot of the crass, commercial and just plain desperate stuff going on in book publishing right now, but he’s a good guy and seems to operate without ego problems.
Chin up, peeps, it’s bad out there, but it’s not all bad.
Steve, these are 33 heartening paragraphs. They answer back to the ego-issues of #22: because our need to pull meaning out of loss, chaos and sheer frustration is surely a prime motive for picking up a pen (pardon the proud anachronism.) Call it the Rumpelstiltskin Imperative.
This is the most reasoned commentary I have seen on this subject. You are an inspiration.
Isn’t the VQR thing more of a management issue than one pertaining to writer/editor relationships? Writer/editor interaction are usually so fleeting, it seems unlikely an editor could drive a writer to such despair. A boss is another matter, but I tend to think that suicide has more complex and pervasive causes than simply a bad boss.
As a former editor, I feel that T.R. totally hit it when he wrote: “were your stories repetitious? Not personally, as in: were John’s stories repetitious: but in the aggregate?” That’s the crux of the problem: For the writer, that piece is personal, and everything that happens with it is personal, but for the editor, any story that doesn’t work for the publication is a tiny fraction of an aggregate. A really, really overwhelming aggregate. Writers read great significance into things like delayed responses, hastily dashed-off notes, etc. that are mostly just the result of editors scrambling to get it all done. That, of course, is no excuse for being cruel, but I think that instances of deliberate cruelty, as a opposed simple carelessness, are rare. As an editor, your priority is the story you *want* to publish, and these are harder to find that people might think. Rejections are more like housekeeping, and like housekeeping, it can get sloppy when you’re crunched.
On the other hand, when you’re working overtime just to get back to hundreds of people who mystifyingly keep sending you stuff you would never publish in a million years, and one of them decides to be a “memorable character” or goes off the deep end or otherwise behaves in an aggressive way, you can get snappish. It can be hard to remember that the writer may also see editors as an aggregate and lump you with all the editors he feels have slighted him over the years.
Obviously, there’s a power imbalance between aspiring writers and editors, but that doesn’t mean editors feel powerful in their work. Usually it’s the opposite — editors feel beleaguered, and this can make them inconsiderate.
Simply brilliant. Thank you.
Steve cuts through the crap once again, brilliantly and forcefully. And so many kind, thoughtful commenters to follow. Gives me hope for the world and reminds me why I love writers.
This post made me kiss my computer monitor. Not in a crass way. More like how I do to my nephew.
Honestly, it’s maybe the best thing ever flipped on the rumpus griddle.
I second the praise to everyone who has responded to the piece in the spirit it was intended — as a chance to enlarge the conversation, rather than point fingers or vent spleen. One of the sad truths of the internet is the way conversations get personalized and dragged downward. To put it another way: the Rumpus is probably the only place that would run such a piece — other venues would want some “news hook” — and I take the comments here (being the wild optimist I am) as evidence that there are others out there just as sick of the grievance and petty feuds that dominate most comment boards, and as eager to connect around our shared mission.
I agree that editors are often mid-level managers who are being squeezed and shat-upon from above, and nagged from below. I’m sure agents suffer a lot of the same frustration on behalf of their clients. I also think — consciously or not — that a lot of that frustration gets passed on to writers. It this great, unspoken layer of emotional bureaucracy that I was trying to peel back.
One more thing I’d add is that every time we, as citizens, give in to the “tabloid” impulse, to gawking at some tragedy, or treating the minstrel ravings of some charming psychopath as “news” we fall a little further away from the mercy necessary to solve the crises that face us as a species. I talked about literature in the piece, because that’s the little world we all share. But I might have been writing about any of the sad things that our mass media grinds into pulp.
Let’s keep talking, and keep drawing the necessary connections.
PS — Isaac, let’s correct “cri de ceours.” (Based on what I could find, it’s “cri de ceour” not “cris.”)
Really interesting article. After thinking on it for a day I like it a lot more than when I first read it. It’s a shame that pedagoguery has usurped the role of humanism in mass media (that is, of course, making the large assumption that that hasn’t always been the case). The stream of consciousness list was (maybe a little distracting) probably the best way to frame the ideas. Great job.
@Steve: Corrected Brother!
Thank you, Steve Almond. You have induced a cri de coeur in me.
Re 33. No, the point is that there is a dead guy in this story, in this room. You have written beautifully about the furniture in the room and weather outside the room. But there’s still the bothersome dead guy. Right there in the room. And the discussion is whether or not he’d still be dead if Genoways had bothered to treat him differently. Or whether that’s the way to bet. And a universal theme might be does it matter how we treat each other? Or — is making and editing fine art above all that and are dead guys who took it all too seriously simply collateral damage? That said, your piece is brilliantly written –even though you pre-judged my comment as pollution and garbagio.
A good piece. Small correction: C Michael Curtis still edits fiction at Atlantic–I just worked with him on something of mine in the summer Fiction Issue of the magazine, and on a short story for the Kindle edition. He once told me that he gets 3500 manuscripts a week. He is a great editor and a good man.
Dear Steve:
“My own sense of Genoways,” you write, “is that his ambition outstripped
his empathy,” and then cite as evidence the “neglect” you experienced
when Genoways failed to answer your emails. But during this same period
VQR featured extraordinary long-form journalism and photo-essays on the
influence of big oil in Africa, on the global AIDS pandemic, on the
suicides of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course
on the suffering of the Iraqi and Afghan people themselves.
Everyone seems to be nodding in agreement that Genoways’ success led to
a failure to “imagine the suffering of others,” as you put it, as if his
empathy for writers waiting to hear about submissions is somehow equal
in importance to his obvious empathy for those suffering in the war-torn
and impoverished countries of the world. I understand that Genoways
made enemies while working as an editor, but the magazine itself is
tangible and compelling evidence of his extraordinary ability to imagine
the suffering of others–not the writers waiting longer than they would
like for a response, I admit, but all the victims of war and violence
and terrible injustice, whose stories have filled the pages of VQR over
the past seven years.
I don’t doubt that Genoways sometimes neglected the flood of emails
coming into his in-box, and instead worked tirelessly to tell the story of the innocents being murdered by drug lords in Juarez, Mexico. It is absurd, but utterly typical of America at this moment, to suggest that
those two are of equal importance.
Kept reading in hopes I’d learn what MFA stood for (without Google) but in any case, it’s not just editors who fail to respond. In our culture, sending a note or email acknowledging just about anything is a lost art. Sad…
Patrick — I hear what you’re saying but can’t help pointing out that your argument is doing exactly what Steve implores us not to do in his last lines. It’s that thing about taking sides. Is it more important to edit articles that shed light on serious humanitarian issues, or to be kind to those with whom you have your daily interactions? Does doing one necessarily excuse you from the other?
I’m late to the conversation, and I hesitate to comment. For one thing, this will be too long for a “comment.†But I’ll offer a full disclosure up front and then proceed. I’ve had the privilege of editing Steve’s work a few times, first at Tin House, then for an anthology I did, and most recently at Ecotone, where we published what I consider a remarkable and ambitious story called “Hagar’s Sons.” I’m also privileged to be publishing Steve’s next collection of short stories, God Bless America, in fall 2011 through our new imprint, Lookout Books (whose debut is released in January). My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow are both impressive books that contain stories that do what Steve elsewhere has said that he hopes for all art, including his own, to do: awaken us to mercy. And yet as good as those books are, I think his newest just might be his most daring and original to date. I can’t be deemed impartial, but I think he’s taken seriously his own admonition in this essay to dig deeper.
Throat-clearing accomplished, I turn to the matter at hand. Since I learned of Kevin Morrissey’s death, a day hasn’t passed that this unrelievedly sad and irrevocable situation has been out of my mind. Like Terry, I know Ted and knew Kevin — not as friends, just as colleagues. I don’t want to speak to the situation with VQR except to say two things: first, that the reporting of it has been incredibly reckless and irresponsible, often rife with little beyond conjecture, has caused lasting damage, and has done a disservice to the life of Kevin Morrissey and to the inscrutable mystery at the heart of any suicide; and second, that the University of Virginia’s decision to cancel the winter issue is distressing as a harbinger, and that regardless of anyone’s feelings about the matter it is a fact that the literary community will be the worse for it if UVA elects to shutter VQR.
Steve says, rightfully, “There are no sides. There’s just the one side. And we’re all on it.†There are in every endeavor people with impure motives. Yet I think every good-hearted editor in America would like to convince writers that what Steve says is true. If an editor can publish, say, twelve stories in a year but receives thousands, arithmetic tells you he or she will be disappointing a lot of people. What can be done about that other than to ask for some understanding on the part of the writer? And remember that an editor of integrity must turn down work by even the most accomplished writers. The good editors, of which Mike Curtis is one, readily cop to their mistakes. (Curtis admits rejecting Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,†now one of the most anthologized American stories of the past quarter century.) I cannot speak for other editors, but there’s really only one reason I’m doing this, and that’s for the chance to be a part of something lasting, to midwife a piece of art that someone might still be reading in fifty years. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,†one of the greatest American stories ever written, was first published in the Partisan Review in 1957. It’s still read. That story means everything to me. The chance, however slim, that Ecotone or Lookout Books may publish something that reaches across the time and space of fifty years to touch the heart and mind of a fellow human being is the reason I do what I do. If you’re a writer, isn’t that one of the reasons you write? If I have my druthers, I want to be gobsmacked by a piece of writing, and I can honestly say that I do not care who has written it. The next issue of Ecotone will include a few people you might have heard of, like Annie Proulx and Ron Rash and Nick Flynn, but it will also feature, for instance, a mind-blowingly good essay about the giant ichneumon wasp and the afterlife by Jill Sisson Quinn, a writer whom you probably haven’t heard of yet.
Meanwhile, re: editors’ responses, surely everyone has by now realized that the demands of that taskmaster called e-mail are impossible. You can e-mail all day, or you can get your work done. You cannot do both. John Freeman, the editor of Granta, dissected the trouble recently in a book whose subtitle tells you about all you need to know: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. There are writers right now to whom I owe a response on their work. I’m not going to accept something they’ve submitted and I need to let them know. They’re at the top of my mind but are probably wondering why they haven’t heard from me. The reason they haven’t is that I hope for enough brain space to write something measured and respectful rather than something hasty. To do that takes time, something that Terry pointed out.
Perhaps writers imagine that editors are at leisure to do nothing but read all day, write a few notes, and then edit the pieces they accept. Writers who imagine such an idyll ought to know that many editors are forced to be at least part-time hucksters. This enforced shilling is not something I consider ignoble. We should get some historical perspective on it. All the hand-wringing that’s going on now about the dire financial straits of publishing or of little magazines in particular couldn’t possibly be older news. I just read a letter of Chekhov’s in which he was complaining about humiliating himself by having dinner with one potential donor after another in an effort to find a publisher for a journal he really admired that was in danger of folding: viz., “I’m upset by such manifest stupidity,†he writes, “and find it very hard to accept.â€
Yes, aren’t we all upset by such manifest stupidity? And so not a little of my time goes to writing grants, trying to interest people with money in what we’re doing, poring over distribution reports to see if there are bookstores we should be going to but aren’t or ones we’re in but shouldn’t be, &c., ad nauseam. It is all done out of an inexplicable art-crush that those who possess know very well. And if Chekhov isn’t too good for it, neither — surely — am I.
It’s a good night here in Wilmington. Some of you may have seen that there’s a tropical storm coming on. I’m looking out at the darkened silhouette of the swaying pecan tree beyond my window. Deadline for fall is fast closing. I’ll be up until the wee hours reading and editing, and then I’ll grab a few hours of sleep and be up at 6:30 to get my daughter breakfast and hustle her out to the bus stop. Tomorrow: press repeat. I’ll do it because I love literature, I love writers, and I love the words and images and characters writers make that are living even right now inside me.
Again to go back to Steve: There’s just the one side. We’re all on it. Subscribe to at least one of your favorite magazines. If you’re a writer, keep at it. Nothing I or any other editor says to you can ever withdraw permission to write. Remember Rilke: “What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end — that is what you must be able to attain.†This is one of the most difficult things of all to do well. Its fruit — literature that is profound and has something to tell us — will always find a home in the world.
Thanks for the post. It made me thoughtful, and yes, sad…just a tiny hint of what people closer to the epicenter of the tragedy must be feeling.
At first I was confused with the numbering. Then it hit me, maybe it was the author’s attempt to organize the impossibly unorganizable conflict in his mind? This is about life and death and the needs of the human ego, after all. Chaotic stuff.
Best.
Thank you, Leslie H., for bringing it back the actual place and death. This does feel almost like a theological discussion, if literature is your religion. There is so much in this conversation that I find valuable as an artist. But something kept bothering me, and you named it.
11…”It’s sad that people will (at least for a while) associate VQR with this mess rather than the remarkable work published therein. It’s sad that Genoways’ talent as an editor has been overshadowed by his alleged conduct as a boss.”
Actually, what’s really sad is that a man killed himself and somehow his boss’ role is more interesting even here than the inscrutable mystery (as someone put it) of this suicide. I’m not suggesting raking over the events to solve the mystery. Just that maybe it is appropriate when the managing editor of a publication kills himself to “shutter” the publication, at least for a season. Is the literary community harmed by that? I’m not saying practically or politically, as an outsider with no knowledge of the inner workings of this world, that it isn’t a harbinger. Just that it seems that one way to show respect for Kevin Morrissey would be to lie fallow for a season. Not the only way, but certainly one.
This whole conversation makes me very sad. Power has no place here except in writing itself.
What if we thought of writers as athletes?
If writers were marathoners, running would be what they did.
As part of their training, they would lift weights.
Sometimes they would appear in other, smaller events, such as 10Ks, maybe.
Those smaller events would be part their training, and there would be other kinds of training activities, like wind sprints, that they might do that would in turn be targeted to those.
When it came to lifting weights, it wouldn’t matter where they did this, as far as their legitimacy as an athlete went. Maybe richer marathoners would hire personal trainers or work out at ritzier clubs, but others might have home gyms or go to the Y.
It would be a mistake to focus on weights at the expense of diet, stretching, other activities in their lives such as day jobs, family, ACTUAL RUNNING…
I would suggest that reading is to authors as weight lifting is to marathoners. Critical, but not the focus. And for most writers, short-story writing is some novels as 10K racing is marathons. So reading journals is to reading novels as wind-sprinting or doing squats is to an overall training regimen.
First you live life, whatever that means. Then you balance training and ACTUAL WRITING/RUNNING in whatever proportion makes you strongest.
So let’s come back to weight lifting and where that has to take place. Where do you have to read a journal? Do you have to own it? Do you actually have to read a *journal,* or do you have to read short stories and poems, wherever? Is it your journal muscle you need to exercise or your story/poem/literary scene and conversation muscle? If I’m a painter or a musician do I need to own work, or can I go galleries/museums/concerts/raves/parties/read reviews/blogs and discuss a lot of stuff? If I read online, pick up leftover magazines on trains, borrow from libraries, read authors’ collections, go to blogs, read reviews, argue with people–do I really, truly need to buy your journal?? What if I go to your site, scan your TOC and see that in fact I have read 75% of your authors? Am I not qualified to submit to your journal, if I think my work is a good fit?
The point is, I am up on the scene, I am paying attention, I am creating work that I feel is part of the dialogue and belongs out there among the stream that you are participating in. Why is that not enough? It is up to editors and ultimately readers to decide whether it furthers the literary conversation. But that decision should have NOTHING to do with whether I made a financial contribution to a journal, anymore than a marathoner’s fitness to race should be based on what gym s/he belongs to or whether s/he trained at home.
And if editors were focused instead on serving readers by hacking up stories more thoroughly (I’ve only ever had a few commas moved around), getting rid of “top-name” writers who clearly aren’t drawing in hordes of subscribers, spiffing up the formats, and finding better promotional venues, maybe there’d be more good feeling and empowerment all around, before it’s too late.
Because it’s getting late. We were needing some editors who could be doing some editING and promoting and hooking us up. But more and more we’ve been doing this on our own. So it just seems that our training is getting strong in ways were weren’t expecting and it’s not clear what help we still need. Or will be needing in the next 2-3 years.
I am sorry this man Morrisey was in so much pain and unable to find the right balance of treatments that might have steered him through. In such times the quality of the people around you matters much.
I would like to see a reframe that was less around the power of the people or even the role and more about the power of the work. Finding the work that burns and shudders with power. No matter what work it will take to make it publishable. Only publish the work that either everyone agrees totally on or everyone violently disagrees on. Splits down the middle and half DO NO WHAT IT DONE and the OTHER LOVE AND SAY IT MUST. FIGHT IT OUT> Don’t compromise the work, come to a compromise, and don’t publish it to you do. Knowwhy you’re publishing it when you do. GO back and read the story around Jackon’s THe Lottery. Make people cancel subscriptions. Get serious. Find the power. then tune it.
sorry for all the typos. I have been on deadline at Microsoft till3AM and not the ambien is kicking it… 😀
Excellent piece by Almond, with useful addenda by the readers, which always adds valuable dimensions.
What a thoughtful piece. This is a reminder that for those of us who teach, in our undergraduate classes especially, our most important goal–our obligation–should be “to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui.”
Like many have said in the thread, the line that knocked me out was this: “We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others. One way to do this – the best way – is via our imaginations, via storytelling.”
I was just today talking to some kids about how they may need to use their imaginations, be creative, to be empathetic or show compassion to others, and how compassion is absolutely necessary for us all to get along. We also talked about how compassion and creativity are courageous acts.
Now, a quick story about sadistic editors: I worked as a columnist and contributor to a national glossy magazine for 15 years through a host of managing editors, all of whom demonstrated awful communication skills like the guy Steve mentions. I tried to empathize with the workload and the crappy pay I knew they had to endure, but it was always a challenge b/c it seemed that I, the lowly writer, had to succumb to their whims, but to get my way — either with pitches for features or word choice or more adventurous content — I had to battle ferociously. I’d win often, but it wasn’t a pleasant process.
There was this one editor who really seemed to enjoy himself by being (for lack of a more appropriate term) a dick. He was aggressive, abusive, name-calling, cynical, and self-righteous. He’d fire off these brutal “tongue-in-cheek” emails, to which I’d sometimes reply in kind, yet whenever I met his attitude w/ the same — hey, we’re just fooling around b/c we do respect each other’s work and so, well, yeah: fuck you, too — he’d get defensive and resort to more abuse and childish name-calling. It was an ugly cycle, but I put up with it — for 15 years — b/c I liked publishing in this magazine and I knew I was bringing a necessary alternative voice. Also, this editor only worked there about a third of that time on the front and back end of my tenure.
Finally, after the disrespect also started coming from the publisher and the accountant in the way of not paying me on time or as agreed upon and not owning up to their accounting errors even after I documented said errors, I knew it was time to bail. The aforementioned editor sweetly — honestly, it seemed (yeah, I’m naive) — asked me to stick around, but I wrote him and CC’d the publisher and accountant and other editors that I couldn’t work any longer for set-in-stone deadlines with undetermined dates of remuneration. I wrote this respectfully and thanked the publisher and editors for the time we had spent together. After 15 years and scores of deadlines, I never heard a word back from any of them.
Compassion and empathy often do require incredible powers of creativity.
This piece goes way beyond the VQR tragedy and is excellent advice for writers.
Thanks.
“It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning…”
I respectfully wholeheartedly disagree-such a job description would omit Joyce,Pound,Woolf,in fact pretty much all great 20th and 21st Century poetry and fiction. It’s our job to make it new and to be true to our own vision, readership be damned.
1.You always come through. Yet I can’t help wishing national TV would invite you to comment.
2.Every writer, I think, struggles with his or her artistic failings.
3.When I’m on vacation, I read more than I do anything else. But if I’ve been writing with all I’ve got for most of every 24-hour slot? I need to get outside. So I count not-reading-enough among my other painful failures.
4.I liked reading this, however, despite my exhaustion.
Just read it. Almond’s is the first article that felt right. Thanks. Prompted this:
“Depression is wicked ugly; blame is wicked beside the point.”
http://my3000lovingarms.blogspot.com/2010/09/depression-is-wicked-ugly-blame-is.html
Yes, I’m self serving. Like soft ice cream.
As a contributing editor to a small print journal – Pale House – I feel my position is a fire starter and this is a wonderful fire. As long as there are kings and queens at editorial boards, wicked or kind, I guess, we will have victims, martyrs and assassins. How beautiful and exciting.
Steve,
Thanks for writing this. My condolences of course to family, friends, & loved ones of Mr. Morrissey. The lit-world is indeed full of jerks, always has been. My stint as Fiction Ed at the then-ambitious NEW YORK STORIES underscored the truth that, yes, there are pressures on all of us, but also that, far more often than not, if you give a writer, agent, or editor a little power or success, he/she will become more or less impossible to live with. We can all talk about how people who are/were depressed need to get help or take some g.d. prescription, but such talk merely distracts us from the ridiculous & debilitating viciousness of our milieu. (No wonder no one reads: the people who put out what’s there to read are preoccupied in an endless, contagious catfight.) How to solve this problem–which sooner or later affects all of us–is something I’ve only begun to consider, & I invite suggestions from the kind-hearted & gruff alike. I will say this: a good portion of the MFA workshops that are meeting for the first time right about now will soon slip into a semester of backbiting, head-gaming, & sabotage–that is, unless the people who teach them make clear how counterproductive such “writerly” shenanigans are. But then again, workshop teachers are writers, & if most writers, having dealt with jerky editors, are themselves jerks, it would seem we have little but proliferation to look forward to.
Still, people could try, right? If nothing else, pledge to notice the goodness that exists among us (&, yeah, it does exist) & respond to it in kind?
Great comments about the state of writing. Especially Genoways statement about those who “seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues – as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.â€
And this: “…It’s hard to make this case, though, if all we do is squabble with each other and lament our obscurity.”
Although I’d like to see more squabbling and less lamenting…if the squabbling can become genuine debate.
Amen, Mark.
Thanks for this, Steve. It’s just right on.
No, really, it’s “cris de coeur.” Look at Merriam-Webster.
Thanks for such a thoughtful and honest piece.
Someone get this guy some good pot. Stat.
Thanks Todd, that was awesome. Man, Todd, I just laughed at laughed, then I told like 8 people: “Hey, this guy Todd, he said “someone get this guy some pot” after reading this introspective thing a writer wrote about the meaning of literature and the death of someone he knew and how it was treated in the media and what it means to try to be a writer and make things that are important to you in 2011. It was great!” Shoot: “Someone get this guy some pot”. Totally man! Pot! Ha! You should write for Louis CK and they should open a 24-hour blowjob farm just to service you.
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