Saturday 3/29/25
How about a Saturday morning prose off beat down? Shall we? Yes, let's do it.
Remember Paula Deitz, editor at Hudson Review, with her giant, irrational crush on Mark Jacobs and his boring-as-can-be fiction?
Backstory: I'd send her things for years, but because they came from me, and given that they were infinitely better than the shit she ran, it was an automatic, boilerplate response every time. Because this is how the bigot works. It has nothing to do with what you have or do. There's no level playing field, there's no way to open the door. It's automatically shut. No matter with what you have to offer. Done deal before it starts.
And Paula Deitz is a bigot. Someone, too, of no skill, whose whole life was wasted being like this. Someone who will die and have done and left nothing of any value in this world. Someone whose entire life was predicated on gatekeeping a lunch table where only the biggest losers were welcomed.
Right, Paula? Coming to the end. That must be an awful thing to know about yourself, and believe me, these people always know deep down, which is where it hits the hardest.
You ready to be bored? Because that's a guarantee with Hudson Review fiction. In addition to being the right kind of person--humorless, lifeless, and old--as in emotionally desiccated from the day you were born--you have to be as dry and monochromatic as chalk in your writing for Hudson Review.
This prose off aligns nicely because I have a school story I'll use for my half of it, which I've been working on this morning. Actually, most of what you'll see is brand new as of today. It's not in the eight in the morning. Already did that 2000 word entry on here. I've written more this morning than these people will all year in most cases, and that's before we get into the quality side of things.
You'll find, of course, a lot of stories about college and graduate programs in all of these places, because these people have no imaginations, they went to school for as long as possible--and yet, no nothing about anything--and they typically work in writing programs. They just reach into their meaningless lives, change some names, and call it fiction.
Thus, we have what you're about to see from a story called "Full Term" by Reyumeh Ejue in the winter 2025 issue of Hudson Review. Ready? Here we go:
First came the drama, meeting the man who would become the baby’s father. On her way back to the dorm room from seeing the movie Body Snatchers at the makeshift cinema in the theatre department of the University of Calabar. A hot day, the sun high in the sky, forcing her to check her step so that she would not sweat. The baby’s father, who had not been at the film, caught up with her and said, “I know I want you, even though I’ve only seen you from behind.”
Weird. But also lovely in a certain light. She was twenty-two years old, dark. A friend had said she looked like a Benin bust with her full lips and pronounced forehead. She had seen photos of those sculptures in a book in the library, and she didn’t like them. Relatives called her a great beauty like her mother. She didn’t believe them—they said the same thing about her three sisters. But this man, a stranger, unable to hide his appreciation of her looks, moved her.
“Would it be too much to have a drink with me?” He pointed in the direction of one of the drinking parlors on campus, where you could buy anything from dry gin to fresh orange juice.
The sun prickled the back of her neck. An invitation to a chilled glass of juice didn’t seem the worst thing in the world. “Okay,” she said, following him.
At the parlor, some of the young men swiveled in their seats to look at her when she walked in. As if I were an actress, she thought. The breathy, petite damsels she read about in her LA novels. It made her a little shy, but beneath that shyness was a thrill, like she was hiding to use her mother’s lipstick for the first time.
“It is a wonderful thing to run into someone like you on a hot February day.” He spoke clearly, in a deep voice. “God sent.”
“God has nothing to do with it.” She was raised Catholic. Didn’t have time to ponder the philosophical shortcomings of religion, but detested the regimental aspects of her faith, all the rules and consequences. One of the things she liked about university was that she no longer had to go to mass, and she could lie about it to her family back home, and know that they wouldn’t find out.
What are you doing? Are you trying to bore us? Did you ever have a single thought like, "Will people want to read this?" or "Is this worth reading?"
How do these people never ask themselves those questions? It's all just a vanity project for the broken, entitled, lazy, and unimaginative.
It's not possible for someone to care about the above, and it's certainly not possible for them to want to read 5000 words of it, or a book, or ten books.
It's not a thing. It's not even a conceptual thing. An "in theory" thing.
And it's just so gappy and random and nonsensical and stuck together without design or thought or reason or logic. There's nothing even saveable here to work over in, say, 100 drafts until something maybe emerged and a small bit of what was present could be carried forward. It's both nothing and mistake-laden nothing.
People, too, will think that Body Snatchers refers to one of the versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and that the author got the title wrong, thus taking them out of the story that they were never going to get into, which a half-competent editor should know, but that's not Paula Deitz and she put this in because it 1. Sucks and 2. It's by the right kind of person. You can include the film you want, but you need to set it up right for the reader. You have to take care of them and make sure they stay within the story.
As for the above 1 and 2: That's all it is. That's all it ever is.
And it's so easy to come on here and show that time and again. There's really nothing easier.
And look at that flat, plastic language. Notice how rarely you can tell these writers apart from each other? Shouldn't I know it's you and could only be done by you if you're great at this?
But, of course, all of them are terrible at writing. And worse yet, terrible in the same ways.
I like this part. That moment just before the thrashing. But let's get to that, shall we? This is from a story of mine called "By Water":
“Kevin,” Ms. Marquetta said once more, doubling down in her rebuke on the boy’s name so that it took on an additional degree of remonstrance in her commitment to showing who was the boss here and who was in the wrong. “Don’t be a churl.”
She didn’t even know that she knew the word and yet out it came. She probably had read it somewhere. Mrs. Marquetta was always reading. She read on the train she took to the bus where she read some more before it dropped her off a quarter of a mile from the school and would have read as she walked were she able to get through more than a page and she hadn’t been the times she’d tried it. She read at her desk as the kids took their tests and she tried to angle herself so that she could catch enough of the light from the TV to read when she sat to the side and her students watched a video. She read with the totality of focus she preferred and which was easier to come by in the teachers’ lounge where no one could remember Ms. Marquetta having ever said a word and where it was also understood to leave her to herself such that Ms. Marquetta was all but shielded by a force field of silence, as with an ancient Sequoia tree. One sees it, but it does not see you, and wouldn't if presented with a choice.
Mr. Kelber wanted to ask her out now that his wife had been gone a full month, that being the timetable he had fixed for himself, but he wasn’t a bookish man, a presumed deficiency on his part of his intellectual mettle that he regretted whenever he saw Mrs. Marquetta in the teachers’ lounge with her legs crossed and her thin ankles protruding from beneath the table after he had come in to get some coffee. He could never think of anything to say about the book nestling in Ms. Marquetta’s hands that wouldn’t have made for an intrusion—and one as violent as taking a chainsaw to a Sequoia within the the peace of the forest—or just come off as plain dumb, a potentially bigger disaster because at least in the first instance he could have apologized, whereas you can’t undo stupid.
Mr. Kelber was a dedicated ankle man. Others, he knew, baser in substance, would trade away years of their lives in exchange for an endless supply of breasts (or worse, as Mr. Kelber expressed it to himself, believing himself emblematic of a bygone age of morality, if not exactly of a bygone age) as if they’d been dumped out of a truck, burying their recipient beneath a happy, mammarial sea of globular delights, whereas his lips would, in the right environment—a bubble bath setting being ideal—instead produce a single refrain of, “Show me thine ankle,” this current style of phraseology resulting from Mr. Kleiber’s efforts to read a book of romantic poems by Elizabethan courtiers. After all, if you don’t better yourself, no one’s going to do it for you, and though blank verse almost surely wouldn’t win Ms. Marquetta’s heart, the well-chosen series of rhyming couplets might. Without hope, there is nothing, which was also what Mr. Kleiber’s wife said to him on the day she left.
Whoa, what do you know, that's a little fucking different in quality, isn't it? How do you classify that gap? How do you measure it? Can't. And again, you could be a stone and you'd know this. Paula Deitz knows it. Anyone knows it. And yet, Paula Deitz still said what she said to me for all of those years. That's a bigot. Which is very easy to prove. The work does it. And we're even leaving things the track, and that I'm not some odious person--or a rapist or a sexual harasser or a plagiarist or any of the things that so many of these people are--out of it.
In some cases, the words of this journal will ultimately be like the words on someone's headstone. They'll be the take-away words, the what-you-were-known-for-and-all-you-were-known-for-in-the-end words.
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