Prose off: Witty and masterful Joyce Carol Oates story--sure!--put forward by lying, angling, hook-up dependent editor/writer Mitch Wieland in the Idaho Review v. Fleming story

Thursday 4/3/25

Do you understand how bad Joyce Carol Oates is at writing? I will help you understand.

Here's how it works with Oates. She types something, which is all it is--just some typing. Could be anything. Doesn't matter. It's has her name on it, and then these fools, simpletons, frauds, and idiots at the literary journals are going to automatically print it, in part for fear of offending her, but the gist here is that, like I said, the name reads Joyce Carol Oates at the top.

I'll give you an example of one of those people: Mitch Wieland.

He was the editor of the Idaho Review, which, as is typically the case with these literary journals, is housed within an MFA program--at the University of Idaho, in this case--where Wieland taught.

He's not the editor there anymore--but he's around--and nothing ever really changes with these places. Same people often, same kind of person, and same bad, lifeless writing that no one would ever actually want to read or be glad that they had read it after they did--allowing that you could force them to.

Idaho Review comes out once a year, and it's a hook-up fest, featuring the likes of Joyce Carol Oates. That ilk. They charge to have people upload submissions, when they way it works is that everyone going in is just hooked up. It's a scam.

But what Wieland made sure he did was every now and again include like one person who paid that money to get the money from other people who'd think, "That could be me in the pages of Idaho Review!" despite no one reading Idaho Review, Idaho Review not paying any money for being in Idaho Review, or taking ten seconds to look at the table of contents to see who was in there, which should tell anyone all they need to know.

First off: it's insane to pay someone to read your work. Insane. I don't care who you are. I don't care if you're unpublished. In what other industry would something like that be a thing? But here's it's part of what's really a criminal undertaking, because this is obviously a scam. It's theft under the guise of "operational costs."

Here's a thought for the scam-artists themselves: Stop fostering a system of incestuous evil that produces only shitty writing that has no value to a single person's life and then you can maybe find some good writing to publish that is actually worth reading.

Whoa, what a crazy concept, right?

Every now and again, someone who paid the fee at Idaho Review would have their work selected just so that Wieland could make a big deal about it in a newsletter-y kind of way, to get more people to pay that fee, which is the only money that Idaho Review could bring in.

I'd send him things via email, and he'd do what he did because he was up to no good.

One time, he went fishing, because that's how a guy like this works and what he's about. He said that he saw my work in Rolling Stone, and then started going on about his drummer son, hoping, of course, that I'd hook him up with some coverage or some such.

Are these people ever not sickening?

When?

How long did that go on?

Eleven years.

When did I know what he was up to?

That would be from day one.

That will give you a sense of how much I take from these people. This isn't a "That was your chance, now I'm gonna get ya!" deal.

Look how much rope I give them. Look at my patience. Look at how long I let the bullshit go on.

I don't do anything on here rashly. This isn't some reactionary endeavor. The evidence stacks. Often over years, even decades. Because I am not a confrontational person.

But as I said this very morning: "I'm not going to lose respect for myself by letting people get away with what they're trying to get away with. Then I'm like an accomplice. And I have to live with myself. And I need to be a certain person morally in order to do that. I can't think I tucked tail and ran, I can't think that I'm a coward, and I can't live with myself knowing I didn't do the right thing."

Wieland wrote a novel called Willy Slater's Lane.

Sounds like that's probably amazing, right?

What are we doing here? You know it's going to suck right from the title.

His lane?

Good grief.

But Wieland gets blurbs from the people whose shit he was automatically shoving into the pages of Idaho Review--Charles Baxter, Anthony Doerr, and throw in good old Diane Williams to boot--and these people like him are so simple, so stupid, so full of shit themselves, that they make this mean something to them.

Do I even need to tell you that he was going to be in Yale Review? Probably not, right?

You can go to his website and read about the book he has coming out next year from Regal House Publishing. Which I'm sure they decided to publish because it was so awesome.

I'm looking through emails from this fraud today, and it's the normal facile BS. "I don't feel strongly enough about these stories to publish them."

Right. That was definitely it. You honestly read them, honestly gave them a chance, and you honestly didn't feel strongly about them--they just weren't good enough--but you totally, totally, totally felt strongly about this slop that we're about to see from Joyce Carol Oates.

This is the start of a story--and the whole thing is like this, as you can see for yourself--called "Welcome to Friendly Skies" by Joyce Carol Oates in the Idaho Review, selected by one Mitch Wieland, because he felt strongly about how awesome this fiction is, which, again, is totally believable. Ready?

Ladies and gentlemen WELCOME to our friendly skies!

WELCOME aboard our North American Airways Boeing 878 Classic Aircraft!This is North American Airways Flight 443 to Amchitka, Alaska—Bird-watchers and Environmental Activists Special!

Our 182-passenger Boeing Classic this morning is under the able command of Captain Hiram Slatt, discharged from service in the United States Air Force mission in Afghanistan after six heroic deployments and now returned, following a restorative sabbatical at the VA Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Wheeling, West Virginia, to his “first love”—civilian piloting for North American Airways.

Captain Slatt has informed us that, once we are cleared for takeoff, our flying time will be between approximately seventeen and twenty-two hours, depending upon ever-shifting Pacific Ocean air currents and the ability of our seasoned 878 Classic to withstand gale-force winds of ninety knots roaring “like a vast army of demons” (in Captain Slatt’s colorful terminology) over the Arctic Circle.

As you have perhaps noticed, Flight 443 is a full—i.e., “overbooked”—flight. Actually most North American Airways flights are overbooked—it is Airways protocol to persist in assuming that a certain percentage of passengers will simply fail to show up at the gate having somehow expired, or disappeared, en route. For those of you who boarded with tickets for seats already taken—North American Airways apologizes for this unforeseeable development. We have dealt with the emergency situation by assigning seats in four lavatories as well as in the hold and in designated areas of the overhead bin. Therefore our request to passengers in Economy Plus, Economy, and Economy Minus is that you force your carry-ons beneath the seat in front of you, and what cannot be crammed into that space, or in the overhead bin, if the overhead bin is not occupied, must be gripped securely on your lap for the duration of the flight.

Passengers in First Class may give their drink orders now.

SECURITY:

Our 878 Classic aircraft is fully “secured”: that is, we have onboard several (unidentified, incognito) federal air marshals for the protection of our passengers.

Under Federal Aviation Regulations, no federal air marshal, pilot or copilot, or crew member is allowed a firearm onboard any aircraft, for obvious reasons. However, under extenuating circumstances, in the event of the aircraft being forced to land unlawfully, a pilot of the rank of captain or above is allowed one “concealed weapon” (in Captain Slatt’s case, a .45-caliber handgun worn on his person); with the captain’s permission, his copilot is similarly allowed a concealed weapon. (In this case, Copilot Lieutenant M. Crisco, much-decorated ex-navy pilot, is also armed with a .45-caliber handgun.) Federal air marshals are armed with Tasers of the highest voltage, virtually as lethal as more conventional weapons, which, as they say, they will not hesitate to use “if provoked.”

You liar, Mitch Wieland. Can you be more full of shit?

Go click on that link. See the whole thing. This is what JCO does. She types shit. Then she sends it to someone like Wieland, and in it goes, no questions asked. Bradford Morrow is another. But really all of them are. And this woman types a lot of crap, so a lot of crap with her name at the top runs.

Say no to JCO?

Hell no.

Anything this lady types, they're going to run it, no questions asked.

In the past, we've talked about how these godawful writers use exclamation points as a stand-in for actually being funny. It's their way of signaling to each other, "This is supposed to be very witty and hilarious" when they are incapable of writing anything that is actually those things.

God that's embarrassing. I'd be mortified to write that.

Can we give the drummer some?

Thank you.

These people all do things for each other.

What can I do for you if you're one of these people?

I can beat the ever living snot out of you on a level playing field with my work as compared to yours. There's that.

But I can't hook you up, I won't carry your fucking water, I won't lie about you, I don't have a place to publish your shitty work, I'm not playing grab ass with you, and I don't suck like you suck, which is a big deal--and is tantamount to a vital thing they do for each other--because it validates them in some twisted way, and allows them not to face the truth about their writing.

By the by: When I was putting together that Yale Review prose off the other day exposing Yale Review editor Meghan O'Rourke, I almost did use a Joyce Carol Oates story that O'Rourke selected for publication, which--again, steel yourself for a massive surprise--is about a professor. Starts off with this thrilling scene in which the professor gets to work. Maybe we'll do that one later.

But for now, let's complete the beat down--my bad, prose off--with the start of something I've been working on. I'm thinking of putting it in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, but I don't know yet.

I bought this type of subscription that wasn’t what it should have been, which isn’t a matter of opinion or me being a presumptuous asshole because it’s the type of thing that everyone knows the deal with including even older people who once had to think about showing too much ankle and call you asking what to do about their laptop running out of power.

And if that wasn’t enough on its own, there was the profile photo this woman used which didn’t leave much to the imagination as none of those profile photos do and had me picturing a cartoon eagle saying, “Now that’s spread!” in a thought bubble.

But when you paid and got the access to her page, you discovered that the videos were just of her sitting in her car. Clothed. Bundled up, depending on the season. The skin you saw was her face and hands. Those parts of her. And her hair. The other stuff you could have found in a store. The windbreaker. The hat. ChapStick she fidgeted with.

Sometimes she’s drinking a coffee like there’s nothing more important to her in the world, this beam of light in a Starbucks cup for the darkened path that she’s had to go down.

After she takes the first sip of it she’ll say something like, “I really needed this today so bad” or “This is my little treat I got myself,” and then sort of laugh uncomfortably as if she’s embarrassed that this drink is so important to her, but you can tell that it is.

It’s one of those laughs that could change within a fraction of a breath—like when it’s barely gotten over the lips on its way out—into someone crying instead, and then when you realized that wasn’t laughter anymore but tears you’d be like, “Wait, what’s going on here?”

Once she’s taken the sip and laughed without quite getting to crying and has kind of settled into herself, she starts talking in these life lessons from wherever it is that she’s parked her car about seeing the best in people and how you really do reap what you sow.

The first time I heard that—and she says it a lot—I thought there was no way she wouldn’t spell sow like sewing the activity with the needle and thread and that wouldn’t have bothered me as much if she was doing what she was supposed to be doing instead of sitting in her car making like she was the star intern at the fortune cookie factory who’d gotten her big chance to write the messages that week.

The setting for her videos is always the same, an outpost of a parking lot with trees instead of somewhere bustling like outside a Target. No middle aged housewives passing in the background and chirping into their phones on their way to the nail salon.

There’s a hint of light in the sky by the time she gets there—same hint, regardless of the season—but you know it’s going fast. She has these older videos on her page from when it was warmer with the window down and I was pretty sure I could hear running water, but not a huge amount, more like a babbling brook that’s all spirit and not so much content.

As per usual, what is there to say? We all know what's going on here. You know, I know, Mitch Wieland knows, all off the people like him know.