Tuesday 2/4/25
Something a writer has to ask themselves--which none of the writers of the publishing system ever do--is "Who is this for?"
The answer to that question can't be "pretentious people so they can scan it and know I'm one of them."
The question must be asked with readers in mind. For the purpose of reading. The question contains other questions: "What is the value of what I'm writing?" "What will this add to lives?" "Is this meaningful?" "Is this important?" "Is this entertaining?" "Is this moving?" "Will this impact a person?" "Is their life richer after reading it?"
No one else asks these questions. They are the questions that I think about in every second of my life, because there is not a second in which I'm not writing, and I don't think there is any point in writing anything that has no value for anyone.
What we see as the first entry in each of these prose offs--every last one--is writing devoid of any value whatsoever for a reader.
I think that's inarguable. I know it is. And anyone who sees these prose offs knows that as well. Including the people who do that writing, the people who publish it, the people who give book deals to the people who did it, the committees that hand out the awards, etc.
I've talked about The Missouri Review and editor Speer Morgan before, as well as former associate editor Evelyn Somers Rogers. My dealings with those warped, tiny, resentful creatures began when I was months out of college, and Rogers let me be her little book review whore, so long as I knew my place.
She'd talk down to me, and dish out what she pretended was wisdom like she was literary magazine Yoda, and it was all dead wrong. It was just an idiot who'd done nothing, and would never do anything, scratching the itch of power. Cosplaying.
There I was, polite as could be, just getting started. And they watched as I went out and did things they could never do. Thousands of works by me were published. And they became resentful. Envious. They put the screws to me. They didn't look at it like, "Wow, here's this guy who started out as our review whore that we shat on, and now look at him, look where his work is, look how good these stories are that he's offering us, we can play him up as being home grown."
I should have been like this example they wanted people to know about, right? "This guy started doing this with us and look what he went on to do."
It went on for twenty years. They published the shit they published, and they wouldn't let me in with real work, stories infinitely better than any they published, for those two decades, until I said, you know, fuck this.
Because I knew what was happening. I knew at the start of those twenty years. These people were failures in what they wanted to be. They had no talent. They'd never gone anywhere, they weren't going to go anywhere, and the end was coming along fast.
This is a prose off with a lesson. And that lesson is about audience, value, and how the writer must regard readers. You work for them. The reader is who and what is most important. They must be given something they can use.
This is from Anne Korkeakivi's piece, "Lemonáda," which features on the Blast section of The Missouri Review's website, where they include work that they describe as "too vibrant" for the print magazine. I want you to remember that as you read what you're about to see. That this is billed as "too vibrant." Because it's a remarkable, absurd, laughable claim. If this is too vibrant, then how dull is what you feature in your award-winning--the most meaningless term in all of publish--journal?
But here we go:
I watched her every day at noon, seated alone under the shade of a large parasol, unfold her white linen napkin and lay it neatly across her lap. Despite the relentless Greek sun in July, she appeared perfectly cool, not a crease in her tailored summer clothes, not a strand loose from her brief silver ponytail, held in place with a discreet silk bow.
Three courses: first, olives, fluffy white bread, and a small cup of lemony avgolemono soup or a saucer of hummus with a couple of kolokithokeftedes zucchini balls; next, a plate of grilled sea bass or lamb with salad; finally, a dessert, usually sliced peach or watermelon. Always she drank one glass of red wine during the meal and a shot of dark, dark espresso after.
During the weeks that our stays overlapped on the Greek Peloponnese, in the unassuming seaside village of Galatas, I never encountered her at any other time than lunch. And I never saw her accompanied by any person.
Still, she took her time. Her manners were perfect. Indeed, I was the one who spoke first, a nineteen-year-old girl on her first trip out of North America, too young and too naïve to realize how rude it might be considered on much of the European continent to strike up a conversation with a stranger while that person is dining.
She was gracious, nonetheless, inviting me to take shelter under her parasol.
I sat.
She ordered me a lemonáda.
For the next few weeks during that hot confusing summer, many years ago, this became our routine. I joined her when she was on her dessert course, she ordered me a glass of tart, freshly squeezed lemonade, and together we chatted until she was done with her coffee. She was in possession, I’d swiftly discovered, of something I needed. She was French and did not speak English. After Greece, I was heading to Paris for the following school year, having only pretended to be competent in the language for the application. I was to matriculate at Paris IV of the Sorbonne, with one additional course at the prestigious grande école known as Science Po. In French, all in French.
Do not say “quoi” when you do not understand something, she told me briskly during our very first conversation. This is vulgar. You must say “comment.”
I’ve never made that mistake again.
I learned other things from her as well as finer language, although in retrospect not that much about the particulars of her life, other than that she herself was Parisian and for the past decade she had spent three weeks alone every July in the same little pension in this same unprepossessing Greek village on the Peloponnese along the Aegean Sea. I learned that it was possible to swelter and remain unruffled, to be ancient and still beautiful. I learned that if what a woman wanted was a glass of red wine with lunch, although she was on her own, although the sun was beating down like a ferocious animal, she could have one.
For fuck's sake...
What's more boring than that? Who is it for?
She ordered me a lemonáda.
Whoa. Talk about relatable. I'm out of breath with excitement. She ordered you a lemonáda? Damn.
You must say “comment.”
High-stakes emotional drama.
And during their first conversation. Sounds believable. And totally pleasant. The usual tin-ear dialogue from these people, with no basis in reality, how anyone speaks, or how characters would.
Doesn't this sound exactly like the writing that would be done by someone whose biography proudly states that they're a fellow at Yaddo?
Always the same shit by the same kind of person.
I learned that if what a woman wanted was a glass of red wine with lunch, although she was on her own, although the sun was beating down like a ferocious animal, she could have one.
Sounds like someone's living their best life!
You see the standard shtick-tricks here. Rich people stuff. Another trip to Europe. Foreign words. They love when they can use italics like that.
These people--pretentious, simple morons that they are--equate those foreign words and phrases with being cultured. Specifically, that they are cultured--they confer the idea upon themselves--because they have seen such a thing in a story like this and they have published it.
See how that works?
That's the level of person you're dealing with in a Speer Morgan and the like. All of these people, at every MFA program. Which is where all of these people come from, and where many of them remain because there is no getting on with life, and there is certainly no getting on with good writing.
Note, too, how the syntax breaks down in the very first sentence of that story. Look at it again:
I watched her every day at noon, seated alone under the shade of a large parasol, unfold her white linen napkin and lay it neatly across her lap.
We have a clause, another clause, and then a third clause which is meant to connect with the first clause; knit up.
Read it out loud. Do you hear that bit of jaggedness when you hit the word "unfold"? Think of a writing--or a first sentence, in this case--like a panel. You want to be able to run your hand across its surface and do so smoothly. But here, we hit that jagged point. The reader will do a double take in their mind. They've been taken out of the story in that story's very first sentence. They have no reason, as of yet, to continue reading.
Do you think the title did it? A title can, but this one didn't. It's meant to be pretentious. That was the mitigating factor in its selection. Which is off-putting. We've now been put off twice. Click. Goodbye. There are a trillion other things for us to spend our time on. God knows how many screens for us to click into, as it were. You have to get this first sentence right. And more than "not wrong." It has to compel us. Strike something in us. Join with us. Make us feel like we are in something together with the story. Move us along. These are meant to be legato lines; flowing. Which is not precluded by having multiple clauses; but the line itself, if you will, must flow through the clauses. Instead, the syntactical error introduces the staccato.
That's bad, awkward writing--and editing. Again, we must remember: There is nothing easier for anyone to do than to stop reading something. Depending on what it is, of course.
And now we'll do actually vibrant. My stories take all forms and modes. In doing so, they can rewrite the possibilities of what a story can be, by the conviction and force--the sway and push--of what they are.
This is from a story called "Hero of Mine," in which the attempt to define what a hero really is serves as the protagonist. There's an interactive quality to the story, too. There aren't names, there isn't a setting per se, other than the purely fictive plane. Here we go.
What is a hero?
Do you know?
Have you ever tried to figure it out exactly?
I don’t mean used the word to describe your favorite player or a character with a mask in a movie.
I mean understood for real. So that you could tell someone. And if they didn’t know before—in a way that they could understand and tell someone else themselves—they’d be able to after.
Are your parents heroes? Is your child? Your sister? Was the nurse a hero that time you were in the hospital? Or that girl who told those bullies to knock it off while a whole group was laughing?
How about your best friend? Your grandmother’s neighbor who lives alone and usually looks sad but came over to see if she needed anything after that big snowstorm? Your teacher? The person you knew who was suffering and still put that other person first and helped them when they needed help? The soldier who once came to your school? That lady from long ago you read about in a book who remained true to herself no matter what anyone said or did to her?
How about the mom who lost her precious little girl and later rallied the whole town around the family whose youngest got the scariest kind of sick? Or the person you didn’t even know who asked you if you were okay as she looked at you with a smile that was meant to show that she cared on what you thought was the worst day of your life?
One of the hard things about being a hero is that they sometimes find themselves in pieces. Part of them is over there, another part is over here, another part is way off in the distance.
Or it can feel like that. Then the hero has to gather up all of those parts and put themselves back together before they do what they have to do.
That’s why heroes often miss people who never were or whom they never knew, as well as those who have gone before, because they want them to be by their side.
It’s easier for anyone when they don’t feel alone. But that’s part of what makes a hero a hero. Because even when a hero feels alone, and even when a hero is alone, the hero doesn’t stop doing what they believe is right.
Heroes do what they do as if whatever that is counts for more than what they are, and it ought to be done by them as much as it ought to be done by anyone else because it’s also part of who they are.
If they weep, they dry theirs tears so that they can see better. The know that the road isn’t the only thing you must keep your eyes on.
They may tremble in the lonely darkness for what tomorrow could bring.
They can become as afraid as anyone has ever been, but they realize this doesn’t make them weak, because a hero understands that being scared and keeping going is the strongest kind of strength there is.
They hold on when it would be easier to let go or find something—anything—else to do instead. They try to help others hang on, too, and thrive.
“We are not giving up,” they say. Heroes are big “we” people. It’s never just “me.” Doesn’t matter if they’re acting alone or they feel alone.
What they really mean is, “I am not giving up in what I’m doing and believe is right and I’m not going to let you give up on you either.”
Even if there is no “you,” because there could be.
You might happen along. There’s a chance you wandered over. Word may reach you. Words get passed, and maybe someone passes those words to you, on purpose or not.
Or you could be running away from something, and there was a voice of someone who wanted to help you, so you followed it.
You never know.
A hero keeps the doors open in case someone else should have need to enter the room. That’s a hero of mine, because that’s a hero for everyone. No matter if we haven't met them or know of them. If we have no idea they’re out there. We still might find ourselves outside of that room someday, and there’s the open door, just waiting for us to come in and be where we need to be.
What we have here is a case of opposites in terms of utility.
It feels, in reading the excerpt of the second story, like it was written for that one person specifically who is doing the reading. If you write something for one person--or as if it was for one person--and you can even have a specific person in mind, if you wish--and you write that story as well as it can be written, it will be a story for everyone equally.
None of these people know that. It would never occur to them. But in that last paragraph, there is more knowledge about how writing works and must work in order for it to be great, than has ever been handed out in all of the MFA programs combined over all of the years they've sucked the writing talent out of America.
We're seeing bits from all of these stories, right? How different is that from "Thank You, Human"? From "Big Bob and Little Bob"? "Dead Thomas"? "Your Mother's OnlyFans Page"? "Finder of Views"? "Dot"? "The Ghost and the Flame"? Any of them? All different from each other.
But they have certain things in common: things I've been talking about in this entry among them. Things of value. The manner in which they value the reader.
Nothing that you're doing as a writer, if you are any good, can be for the sake of checking the boxes of warped, bitter bigots like the Speer Morgans of the world, and by world I mean this revolting system of bad writing and incestuous evil. You have to be thinking of readers. The world.
And I get it, people will say no one reads in that world, but I'd also suggest that they have no reason to with what is currently being produced. There is genre inanity about wizards and owls--one carbon copy form of would-be escapism after another, which is defined primarily by the lack of variance and the absence of anything better on offer--and "literary fiction" shit, which we see go first time and again in these prose offs.
Who is any of it really for?
The answer--if there is one--is the writer. And it can't be for the fucking writer. Get a diary then. And by writer, I'm talking about their ego; the attention they want from people like them who don't even mean the half-assed compliments they're slapping out there on auto-pilot.
It's not so you can walk down the hallway in your creative writing program and in essence brag to your fellow loser of colleague that you had something in The Missouri Review.
Something you wrote that wasn't for readers, that didn't have a single reader in mind, that no one will ever read, that no one would ever want to read, that would not offer any value to any person in the world if every last person in that world was forced to read it.
Why fucking do that then? Why bother? And I get that these people don't work hard, so it's not like they're really spending that much time on any of this. And that also assures that no writing of value can be produced, because there is nothing harder you can ever do than write. The actual act of writing. There are infinite possibilities. You play basketball, and there's only so much that can happen, so much you can do.
There are no limits to writing. You may command as much as you are able to command. You can do things that go beyond everything else. But it takes every last thought that you have to get better at it. To keep getting better. To so much as get to a point where you have something that offers anything, let alone can offer more than anything else.
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