Thursday 11/7/24
We've spoken before about Carolyn Kuebler, editor of the New England Review and writer herself, who once wrote to me to say that I just wasn't very good at writing. Simply didn't have the stuff.
Okay.
We'll do another prose off on here soon--it's back in drafts--involving her own fiction, but let's look for now at a story that Carolyn Kuebler chose to publish in a recent issue of her New England Review, which, according to Carolyn Kuebler, is indicative of a talent beyond my own.
I'm sure we all find that totally creditable and something she believes rather than something she said because she's an envious, hateful, well, nothing. She's this: The editor of the New England Review, a literary journal out of Middlebury College in Vermont. That is the sum of what she is in life and will ever be in life. If you'd like like to get your credit card out, you can pay them to upload a story to their online submission manager while Carolyn Kuebler hooks up people as talentless as she is, from backgrounds like hers.
People like this often think that something being in the second person makes that thing extra super duper creative. That's why you'll see these stories in the second person that have no reason to be in the second person. They read like someone telling themselves things they already know. And obviously that doesn't work. You need a legit reason for a story to be second person, or move into the second person.
This is from "Mirror," by K.R. Mullins, the whole of which--it's short--you can read on the New England Review site, in case you had any doubt that the full text comprises a nothing story with no stakes nor depth, a story to make you go, "So? That's it?" and no, it's not a case of additional levels of meaning coming clear on subsequent readings. There's just so very little there at all.
It’s the third time your son’s called you that evening. You’re at a bar two towns over, a dive bar, the sort of place you swear you hate. The bartender is attractive, though, and your husband moved out three months ago. He left a wilted plant and a hissing cat.
Family? the bartender says, looking at your buzzing phone.
Jordan, you say, and you flip the screen over. Grown son, you add.
You order another drink. As the bartender turns away, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror above the rum. When you think of Jordan, you think of how spectacularly he grew into the nose you gave him, how many times his voice cracked before it settled into the rich baritone of his father’s. All your life, you’ve wanted to be a house with enough rooms to protect every soul you love from the damages of the world.
There’s a quiet alley out back, the bartender tells you. If you need to answer.
You would love to run your hands through this bartender’s hair. You would love to drive to your ex-husband’s apartment just to see a light in his window. You would love to pull a handsome stranger into the back seat of your car and press skin to skin until you feel yourself leave your body behind.
The therapist suggested not leaving Jordan alone for too long. Your company, she said, is the best thing for him now.
Something happened. This you know. Jordan slid through depressions in high school but he was fine when you went to visit him at college a month ago, vibrant and surrounded by friends and textbooks and cups he stole from campus dining. You left relieved, a son safely deposited away from the carnage of your shattered heart. But then something happened to him, something that you don’t know yet but you can feel, like that first crack of lightning when the rain hasn’t yet started to pour.
It's hard to summon any energy to say anything about this crap, but a few points: A bartender would never make that family inquiry. It's not something anyone would say. "Family?" I get it, you're trying to plant the seed of some sexy sex happening and the bartender is clearing the runway by finding out if there's a husband! Momma got needs!
You're not pulling that off, and even if you were, so what? How is that notable? Why should we care?
Also, no one would answer with the Christian name of the person calling to a stranger who had no idea who that was, even if they added clarification after.
Further, no one would tell anyone that there's a quiet alley out back. A quiet alley? Step into the alley, lady.
This is false writing. It's not true to anything. (Query: Do these people ever so much as go outside into the world? Or are they just sitting in their English departments picking lint out of their navels and calling it fiction?)
And the metaphor of the house with the rooms and the protected souls makes no sense and is just stupid.
You have a writer trying to wring drama from a non-dramatic situation and a non-existent narrative. Ain't gonna work.
But then there's this, and it's worse: We never find out what happened to Jordan. You even gave us the italics. Not even worth mentioning, though? Nothing to show us? And the therapist said the best thing for the guy in college is to be with his mother? Really?
We're left with this thing that is not a thing, a placeholder that never gets filled, which was inserted to make the story look more significant than it is, but the writer wasn't smart enough to think up what that thing was. And the story is not an authentic story, with authentic characters, so it's not like they could tell the writer what their story is.
So then it's just some college-aged kid who is sad that his parents are divorced and now his mother is at a bar having a couple drinks?
Wow. How will I so much as stand up again today after having had my emotional world rocked in this manner? What will I do? Better cancel the stairs.
This is someone trying to fake a story because they don't have a story to tell. It's so short, word count-wise, but it's even shorter practically speaking, because there's nothing here.
Here was the very simple recipe behind the writing of this story: Do the second person, put in the red herring, plus a wishy-washy metaphor about a big house...and count on Carolyn Kuebler to publish it because you're the right kind of person to a person like that.
I think we all know that's exactly what happened here.
But okay--that's more writerly ability than I've ever displayed. Perfectly believable.
I'll carry on nonetheless, though, with a part of something of mine. Note how much is in what follows. The levels, the stakes, the depths. So many elements coalescing. So many things to mull, feel, pick over, connect with, recall, relate to, get hit with anew--and perhaps in different ways--on further readings.
The girl turned over. She’d been crying. She must have indeed been sick again after witnessing what she had some five minutes’ prior back in the bedroom, because her breath was redolent of mildew and gingerbread, which is how it always smelled after she threw up.
“Where’s mom?” she asked, looking both wounded and appalled, or as if the state of her mother’s safety needed to be ascertained. Maybe she thought that he’d been hurting her, given the sounds. No. She knew better. Comes a time, comes an age. And there’d scarcely been any noise anyway. These days were different. They’d been different for a while now.
The man wanted it to be the three of them, if he had his druthers. He thought this the most whenever he was alone with the girl and he thought it again sitting on the bed. Thought it as deeply as he ever had. Deeper than the last time, which was how each of the latest times always went. He loved the three of them. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t love the four of them. Or the four of them even more. He only knew what he knew right now, if that.
“She’s resting,” he answered, which somehow sounded a lot dirtier than he wanted it to.
The girl’s eyes flashed in a downward direction. For a second they appeared as if they were loose in their sockets and she might be sick again right then and there.
“Are you still hard?” she asked, disbelieving what life had come to but more certain than at any other point up until now of what life was really like.
The man tried to keep his voice level and failed.
“No, of course not,” he countered, as casually as he dared, or as if she meant something else other than the status of his erection. Was using some new lingo that was for the most part lost on his generation, though he was willing to pick up on it for her sake or at least so that she’d see how willing he was to try.
“I can see it through your boxers.”
He fought against checking with his own eyes, as though they couldn’t wait to give him away with some telltale flicker when he saw and confirmed what she had already seen and knew.
“They’re shorts, not boxers.”
Then he made it worse some more.
“I waited.”
These people are something else, aren't they? Your Carolyn Kueblers of the world. What is more blatant than what someone like that was up to and what their motivation was? Because this guy is that much better than you at writing and that much better than everyone you publish, you needed to do him dirty when all he was doing was trying to give you the best work there is for basically free?
There's certain symmetry, though, because instead you get a nothing story published by a nothing person.
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