Tuesday 10/15/24
I'll have to keep this one brief, as American Short Fiction is no longer running stories in full on their website--or at least not since February. Perhaps because that makes it easier for me to reveal these discriminatory editors Nate Brown, Rebecca Marvkovits, and Adeena Reitberger for what they are.
But, fortunately, we can still carry on, because the truth is, you need to see so little from anything the people of this system write to know just how bad it is. To know that it's worthless. To know that is has no value for the world. To know that any other one of these people could produce the exact same crap. It's not like you're reading, you're reading, and then five pages in you realize the thing isn't any good. Let your eye full anywhere on what these people write, and you will see that they have nothing to say, nothing to offer a reader.
American Short Fiction does put up a few lines, or a few paragraphs, from the stories in their new issue, which they did recently. Each of these are dreadful, so I wasn't even sure which one to pick, but we'll go with JoAnna Novak's "Mirror Lake."
You know what I never want to do when I read any fiction? I never want to be able to say, "That's just you." It's just you. It's just your life. And you're turning it into fiction because you can't think of anything. You have no story to tell. Not a single one.
And if you're one of these people, there's no way on earth you're interesting. Stories about MFA programs and literary journals and writing conferences and all of the bullshit that makes up your empty existence, is not interesting. It has no value for anyone, save for the broken, talentless people of your evil, incestuous system, who can say, "I have an MFA, and there's an MFA program in this story. Nice. I work at a literary journal, and I like that there's a literary journal in this story. Well done."
These aren't stories. They're just you. And what you are is nothing interesting and nothing different from all of the people doing what you do, from the same schools, the same programs. You can't write anything with less value. There is no writing with less value. There is no writing that has less of a reason to exist.
Let's just get this out of the way. You ready? This is what American Short Fiction has up on their page for their new fall issue. Presumably--because that's how these things work--this is what is meant to "grab" you and get you to buy the issue. This is the enticement.
My wife and I were drinking Gibsons outside at a supper club on Mirror Lake, trashing “the artist Eve Di Nardo.” To celebrate our tenth anniversary, we had come to Wisconsin.
Eve Di Nardo had been married to our friend Timo for years. Timo was a poet. He edited the literary magazine Substance! Nosense!, ran a guerilla reading series called EPA out of an old gas station, and was the author of a book-length poem about longboarding and chronic pain published by a Kenosha-based indie.
What are we doing here? Why are we doing this? Timo. Book-length poem. Literary magazine. Reading series.
Fuck off with all of that.
Again, it's like the people in the jeeps who honk at each other. "You have a jeep? I have a jeep! Honk honk!"
You suck at writing, you come from a privileged background, you're not intelligent, you have no talent, you're pretentious, you rattle off a few of their favorite terms--like the above--and you basically have no soul--you certainly have no artistic soul--and in your story goes courtesy of these bigots, who are the exact same way. Allowing that they've confirmed how much like them you are. That you're the right kind of person. Same as how it used to work at the country club--wink wink--right?
Imagine doing this?
You can write anything, and this is what you do? This is all you can do? Then you teach other people like you to do it? Which is what JoAnna Novak does, because of course she does. What else is she going to do?
Why? I can't think of anything more pointless.
This is wearying.
You can be like, "Fleming! You purposefully picked the worst one! I'm sure the others were masterful!"
Okay. Like I said, this is wearying, but I'll play along with the would-be devil's advocate. Here's another. This is from Laura Grothaus's "A Place Where Sadness Cannot Go."
I loathe Beast Friends. I loathe their charming colors, their sunny dispositions, and their huge, smugly innocent LED eyes. Their personality is like a loaf of wheat bread holding a hymnal. But to be fair, Beast Friends are not unique within my loathing. I loathe Axalon and all their products. I loathe most technology because I know to be afraid of things I cannot see, like God and cell phone signals. I would prefer that Kate contact me by looking up at the sky and thinking hard, but she does not “abide such nonsense,” so I have a small, outdated mobile phone, whose keys I punch like faces of my enemies.
So the loaf of bread has arms? Little wheat bread arms and hands?
Is the loaf like the bread version of that Time for Timer guy? Except in church, too?
Wow. That's super smart. What great writing.
Remember: This is supposed to be the best writing in the world, or it's up there, according to the people of this system.
There is it: Best writing in the world.
Can any of these people maybe, I don't know, stop and think? Can we really not stop and think about anything? None of these writers can? None of these editors can? They can't say, "Wait...so it's like the bread loaf has little hands...and it's sitting in church...in the choir...hmmm...maybe there's something better than that?"
Nah.
It's like they're trying to suck as much as possible. But they're not. They just suck that much.
And they're so arrogant--and, in reality, they work at writing so little--that they don't even try and get better.
But man can they lock arms (bread-based arms?) and close ranks and look after their own.
Do you even know what Beast Friends are? Axalon? Plenty of people don't, right? Most don't.
Again, this is what is supposed to grab you. The idea is that what you see above is the most enticing part of the story. That's what these editors thought. Should we doubt them? I thought they were really smart? No? They're absolute morons and frauds?
Yes, of course they are, but it's still mind-blowing that they can't ever say, "Wait, let's think for a second here, is this the best way to go?" There's no policing. There's no checks and balances. No prying eyes. Because they've made it so that no one in the world could care at all about anything they publish, award, puff, what have you. So round and round and round goes the shit in the bowl.
But yeah, fascinating, gripping stuff. Very consequential. No doubt we'd all have our humanness enriched by reading the full texts of those stories.
I'll keep mine short, too, okay? We'll be fair. One Fleming paragraph. It's from a story told by a woman.
Guess what Colin isn't? That's right, he's not female. He's not a woman. He's not a mother.
It's never me.
I'm story.
I never knew I was familiar with that war song, “Over There,” until it struck me what wasn’t right about it. You feel like you’re in this pocket, with only you. A pocket of grief. Everyone else is over there, over there. Spaces aren’t shielded, though. Over there is also a here. The pocket is turned inside out, but you still see the dark. You realize that life happens in the open, all of it, which isn’t the same as all life gets seen. New people follow so fast. If a beat got missed, the next measure supplied the difference. People down the hallway. Around the corner. Outside a door. People in sight of the people you just left. That’s how quickly it starts again because nothing else stopped. People who have no idea what’s happened. But you don’t know any better about them. You’re just playing percentages. You could be coming from anything so far as they’re aware. Having any kind of day in the world, though they’d almost never guess correctly. You can’t tell them what’s really behind whatever it is they’d say they were looking at had they been goaded for an answer by some voice hanging around in the air. Another face in another day. There’s no shattering line of division between the past and the non-past. They’ll just see you, like you see them. A person with eyes and a mouth and a nose. Everyone gets to have eyes and a mouth and a nose. Except her. Because of you. I got your nose. The game you played that made her laugh every time. First laughter and last. Squib of your thumb that looked so pink pressed between your fingers. Very nose-like. And now there it is.
Yeah...kind of different, no? We're doing the whole different level thing, and nothing is more obvious than that. Nothing is more obvious, even, to these mentally-foreshortened bigots in Nate Brown, Rebecca Markovits, and Adeena Reitberger. The person who is not like them produces work infinitely better than they can or that they publish. He's not friends with their friends--who aren't actually their friends at all, because nothing is real in the lives of these people--he doesn't sound like them, look like them, he knows all of the things about everything, his work appears in hundreds of places all without any of the cronyism and instead a wall-to-wall attempt at what's tantamount to tribal banishment, he's an actual good person, of character and honor, and the genius that they're both frightened and envious of because of how legit that genius is and how legit he is.
And now, for the latest time--that search bar on the site is your friend--they're being revealed as all of these things and called out for it, and there's nothing they can do about it, save hope for the best, because they know it's all true.
See that part that begins, "If a beat got missed"? Look at the sentence before that one. "People down the hallway." It's a sentence that's not a sentence. Like a part of a measure. Like a beat. Then we have that next sentence about supplying the difference. Then another sentence that is also a beat. Followed by two others.
The word "people" links the two sentences on either side of the "beat got missed" sentence, which itself caused a beat to be skipped in that particular progression (sentences that aren't technically sentences with the word "people" in them). That's why there are more beats on the other side--what the sentence says about beats being made up in the next measure is put into practice right there in the prose.
It's just one thing. I could go through everything I write and talk about what every last part is doing. Now, when you read this, you don't consciously note what I just said. Technically you could. I would. But most people won't. But they're still reaping that effect, it's not being lost on them; it's playing out in their minds, but back a bit.
And that's where a lot of powerful things happen. They can happen without you knowing they're happening. You have those overall takeaway of being absorbed, blown away, being where you should be, where you were waiting to get to, and now you're here. That's part of where that comes from. It's not just on the top, on the surface, where you go, "Okay, I think this." The reader doesn't have to do connective work. The work is going to do a lot of the work. Then you're just having an experience. A life experience which adds to your life.
You wouldn't know it from any of these other people, but that's how it's supposed to go.
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