Friday 2/21/25
We've spoken about One Story before in some of these prose offs, and we'll be getting more into their editor, Patrick Ryan, who is good friends with John Freeman, someone who may be the very worst person in publishing; or, at least, you can't a better (worse?) example of what this system is and how it works better than Freeman, a man who once told me that if I wrote the Bible he wouldn't publish it because he had his friends to hook up instead.
The way that One Story works is that each issue features one story. A writer can be in there once, and that's it. This magazine is sufficiently odious that they seriously have a literary debutante ball. As I said before, that sounds like I'm making it up, but you can do a search and see for yourself.
This is as Brooklyn MFA writer as it gets, which is to say, not only does all of the fiction in One Story suck, but it sucks in the same prosaic, predictable way such that the stories are virtually indistinguishable from each other, marked by qualities of flatness, lifelessness, the absence of any stakes, the evidence of any talent, and which, if you try to read any of them, just about beat you over the head in their humdrum ordinariness.
We're going to look at four recent examples here--so it's four against one--with this prose off. Writing should never make you think, "So? Who cares?" which is exclusively what the writing by these people, in venues like this, makes you think. It's as if there's no effort made to write well, to do any editing that might improve the writing where it so plainly needs it.
There are these pathetic attempts to sound writerly at times, because, again, you have debutantes without any ability trying to come off a certain way. They're working with nothing. Then you just have people like Patrick Ryan--who is the same--doing what all of these people do and looking after their own: Someone equally as bad at writing, from the right background, with the proper blue blood in their veins, who went to the right school, and of course has that MFA or something similar.
So here we go. This is from William Lohier's "Drapetomania."
I first heard the running at school. Jackson had been fidgeting all week, though the rest of us pretended not to notice. He raised his hand for the bathroom, leaving us hunched over a midterm exam, and we heard footsteps circling the hall for the rest of the period. No one went to check on him. Even Ms. Price soldiered on, gripping the chalk so hard it snapped in half as she marked the time we had remaining.
Maybe we should have acted sooner, understood the danger when the first reports of manic running appeared on our timelines and newsfeeds. At first people thought it was a prank, some viral stunt for media attention. Parents started taking their kids’ phones and petitions were circulated to ban the latest social media. We were two weeks into the semester when the first runners began to collapse. Interludes between classes were hashed out in fierce whispers as we huddled around videos of them, crumpled on the ground, coughing up blood.
Jackson didn’t come to school the next day. During attendance Ms. Price stared at her clipboard, then at her students. She had everyone seated behind Jackson move up a row. We swallowed his absence and moved on to the next lesson.
There's no life in the language and no life in these paragraphs. The value of a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of life it contains. Could you not do this? Anyone could. What ability does this take? What's the point of this? Do you want 4000 words more of it?
"We swallowed his absence..."
You swallowed his absence, huh? A collective swallowing of someone's absence? You see what I mean about trying so hard to sound like a real writer? That's embarrassing.
And interludes were hashed out? Do any of you people even know the basic meanings of words? Because you write like you have no clue. How does one hash out an interlude?
William Lothier is from Brooklyn--doesn't just live there but is from there--and graduated from Harvard and is represented by Madeline Ticknor at Janklow & Nesbit, which is fortunate for her because otherwise she might have to swallow his absence.
Next we have Jeneé Skinner's "Shadow Memories."
I was born with a song in my back. You said it’s because my father played the guitar and sang to your belly all the time when I was on the other side of it. Sometimes when I lie cradled in bed, somewhere between sleep and eyes wide open, I hear the timbre of my father’s voice. It’s funny I remember his hum as a silver thread weaving its way along your lips, but his face is long gone from memory. His absence was the most bitter song, one you didn’t know how to stop playing.
You slept in bed next to me for months, feet dangling off my mattress. I pretended to be asleep, but I always felt how your tears made my neck warm then cold. When my father’s guitar still hung by the front door, you’d get on me for eating mandarins in bed. But after he left, you burrowed your head in places it didn’t belong—in my hair, between the couch cushions, under the kitchen sink, even in the oven one time. But your head sank deepest into my pillows, where shuddering breaths shifted to soft snores. I hated the age seven and the odor of citrus because they both reeked of grief.
"I was born with a song in my back."
Again: See how they try to be "creative"? A song in your back, huh? Do you have a hump? Kind of suggests a hump, right? And silver thread, eh? Would that be from "Silver Threads and Golden Needles"? I like that one.
If you're going to do a metaphor like this, the thing that the thing is going to be in has to have a vessel-like quality. Or, it has to be nebulous enough that a vessel-like quality can be ascribed or isn't contradicted by the on-hand visual image. We can say that there's a song in the heart, because the heart has the vessel-like quality. But the back is what we think of as linear or planar. This isn't the genius stuff like what we're going to see below to finish off the prose off; this is about just not getting things wrong and failing.
Then we're going to do the second person thing, which, as we've discussed time and again, these people often resort to in yet another attempt to show that they're super creative! When you have nothing to work with, you try to cover that up, which is what the second person usually means for them. The age of seven smells of grief? You don't see a mixed metaphor problem there? The whole age? What are you doing? Oh, I'm just eating some mandarins in bed. Again: It's so forced and forced is fake and fake makes for bad writing, every time.
Again: Note the vanilla language. There's nothing happening in it. There's nothing memorable. Nothing unforgettable. It's blah reportage via Creative Writing 101. An assignment from the first day, not even the end of the semester when we might have seen a little improvement.
"But your head sunk deepest into my pillows..."
Is that supposed to be a euphemism? Yikes. That's funny. And if it's not supposed to be a euphemism, how can you not realize how that reads? I don't know which would be worse, attempt at euphemism or accidental euphemism.
The story does the color thing, because that's what Cooper does every time. Color color color color color. It's all she can do. Color color color color color color. "Story? What are you talking about? Color color color color."
She has an MFA from Iowa. Because of course. And won the Jesymn Ward Prize. Who knew there was such a thing? We've already done a prose off with Jesymn Ward's own shitty writing. Color color color color color. Race bait, race bait, race bait.
And how do you burrow your head in someone's hair? That's not what the word "burrow" means, even within the framework of a metaphor. But a Patrick Ryan is going to let that slide. First, he has no clue himself. Second, this is just box-checking. The writing is mere formality. The last thing anything here is about is the quality of the writing. Please. A Patrick Ryan could care less about that, save when it's writing on a level infinitely removed from his own. Then we got a problem. Especially if it's from the wrong kind of person. Tut tut.
Next we have Molly Anders' "A Straightforward Matter," which is basically code for a story in which fuck-all happens.
Every other Wednesday—for almost as long as they were married, come to think of it—you could find me sitting in their kitchen losing money.
Bridge is a game for couples and I was alone, so Lily always got one of her friends to come play on my team. One time she brought her cousin, a diabetic young woman named Mary. Mary was nice. Lily was always trying to play matchmaker, I guess because it’s easier to keep up a regular game with another couple, but this was not the case with Mary. With Mary, I learned later, she had only wanted me to play bridge. And yet Mary was the only one Lily brought me that I fucked. By the time this became clear to me, it was too late. That’s me: always figuring things out too late.
In fact, on that same night, the night I met Mary, I was late getting to the house because of a car accident. No big deal. Or maybe it was. The truth is I panicked and fled the scene.
Again I ask you to look at the flatness of the language. There is no rise and fall, no sonic architecture, no linguistic engineering that in turn facilitates meaning. Nothing is indelible. Nothing makes a mark, rouses the mind, the senses. Stays with you. You read this and it's instantly forgotten. You don't even know what you've read.
And here we see another one of the preferred desperation techniques by these people: You're going along, this is super boring, here are some more boring words and then..."Ha ha ha a I said fuck and you didn't see that coming, did you?"
It's so childish.
if I told you these stories were all by the same person--or had I presented them that way--you wouldn't have been incredulous at all. You'd be like, "Okay, sounds right."
So you tell me: If we put stories next to each other, if you're, um, I don't know, any good, shouldn't we be able to tell which one is yours and shouldn't what you write be something else that no one else could have written that sounds like nothing by anyone else?
Any of these people could have written any of these stories. They're the same. The flatness and lifelessness--that ordinariness--are the constants. That's not supposed to be how it works.
Molly Anders has an MFA from Syracuse. She's had fiction in Ploughshares and won the Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize. We'll circle back to this with upcoming entries on here--as luck would have it--about Ploughshares and their impressively disgusting editor Ladette Randolph, with whom I once met and who told me that if I wanted to be in Ploughshares, I needed to be friends with the right people--and good old JCO, who is humorously bad at writing and yet has all of her crap trotted out by these frauds.
But for now, we'll conclude this portion of the prose off with Lauren K. Watel's "Trampoline."
The morning the trampoline was due to arrive, Mim made her daily exit from the house and out into the world, where she could encounter creatures other than her family: squirrels and chipmunks and birds and also the occasional neighbor, people she used to be close to, who now, in lockdown mode, waved tentatively from the other side of the street as she passed. It was a sunny Saturday in spring, the season that best suited her city, which donned the dazzling azaleas and dogwoods and magnolias that gave it that glamorous aura of growth, exuberant, lush, verdant and fragrant, the hedges haloed in bees, like minor saints in the city’s church, the church of growth. Growth first to last, the air humid with growth, the heat, the ever-expanding suburbs, the ever-curving streets, no grids here but windings, cutbacks, cut-throughs, growth in the city’s blood, that’s why they had moved here, to Selfridge, Georgia, an intown suburb of Atlanta, why everybody moved here: to grow.
These excerpts, you should know, are what One Story make available on their website. You'd think that they'd pick what is most likely to get you to subscribe. In other words, this shit here is what Patrick Ryan and company think is the most memorable parts of these stories. This is as good as the writing in them gets. Or, if not as good, then at least what makes you take notice of these stories as much as anything them. This is what grabs you.
Seriously? This is what you're going with?
Does any of this shit grab you at all? Could you care less? Look at the last example. What makes that good writing? Name one thing in it that makes it good writing. Because everything is spelled correctly? (Then again..."intown...")
You could say, at best, that it's fine. But you can say that about a random work email. Okay. That's the bar here?
Watel has a book out this month from Sarabande, and wait until you see the email that Sarabande editor--this will be a good one--Sarah Gorham sent me in the first entry that's coming about her, and how delusional, how arrogant, how corrupt, how blatantly discriminatory this very dumb woman is. I've been saving that one. She's not a stable person. We'll get to it.
What? Did you think I was going to forget? Don't be silly. You just don't know when it's coming--but always know that it is.
The bar has to be higher than all of this. Remember, these journals, according to the publishing system, feature the best fiction in the world.
Are you kidding me? This is the best? I mean, honestly. Look at these prose offs. They always start out the same way because there is nothing else out there. All of these people are the same. They all write the same.
And then there's someone who doesn't, who is as different from these people as someone can be, all of which is a problem for the Patrick Ryans of the world.
And now we come to the good part. You can try to get away with being a massive, massive bigot, if you're someone like David Ryan, John Freeman, Emily Stokes, Michael Ray, J. Robert Lennon, the clowns at American Short Fiction, the peachy delight that is Wendy Lesser, Deborah Treisman, Carolyn Kuebler, etc., but the problem is that the proof is always in the prose. And none of you discrimination-loving, broken, embittered, envious, empty, talentless, simple, petty, toxic people can deny that what you're about to see isn't infinitely better than 1. What you can do and 2. The shit you run out there for the reasons you know as well as I know.
The above excerpts weren't that long, so I'll just do two paragraphs myself of a new one from this week. Here we go:
He hadn’t been in the cafe long enough to order his drink when a plate fell to the floor. No time to absorb the warm, nighttime glow from a patch of shared space that normally made the cold, restive darkness outside look peaceful and quiet—stilled and stilling—whether it was or wasn’t, an effect he sought to internalize all the same.
The plate didn’t break but instead gave brief voice to a strain of clattering echolalia that sounded as it’d been dying to get made. The man whose plate it was had been eating a pastry—there were flakes of it on his lips and a broken, vascular smear of what may or may not have been blueberry—but now he held his chest with one hand and the edge of his table with the other. He looked like he was in a new form of agony that had yet to go to market or acting in a bizarre play that called for an over-emphasis of movement and then he, too, fell to the floor where he became motionless as though some triggered mechanism encoded in the tile had caused everything in him to shut off and the pastry flakes in the corners of his mouth to suggest sawdust.
Kind of different, huh? Not very close, right? How do you measure the gap between that right there by me and all of that from these people? You can't. There's no way to quantify that.
We have the likes of
Mary was nice.
and the likes of
He looked like he was in a new form of agony that had yet to go to market...
I don't even need to complete that sentence, do I? It's that obvious with the clause.
I know you disagree, Patrick, but once again, there really is more to life than shitty writing and bigotry. I get it, they're what you're all about, and making sure only the right kind of people who are like are allowed to pass, but you look ridiculous here, just as you'll look ridiculous again soon enough.
And all you can do about that is be exposed for what you are.
That sucks, huh? Think of it like the writing you publish, if that makes you feel better.
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