May 24 2013
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BOTH ALWAYS EVER

By J.C. Hallman

It’s often said—or, at least, I’ve often said it—that in order to write a book you have to have a combination of profound hubris and crippling insecurity. In my experience, book projects begin with just one of these emotions, and for a while it seems as though what you do is swing back and forth between the two. Last month, I published one book and finished writing another—and that’s an odd position to be in, as it contains both emotions simultaneously.

Here’s what generally happens. I start thinking about some things, and they seem like good things to be thinking about, in the sense that I feel better for having thought about them. In fact, they’re such good things to be thinking about that before long I can no longer imagine myself not having thought about them. The person I was before is gone, and now there’s this new and improved version of me. Wonderful! Of course that thought leads to another: what if other people thought those same thoughts? Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t the world be a better place – no, wouldn’t it be vastly improved—if some other people, maybe a whole bunch of other people, thought the same thoughts I’d thought? Before long I’ve begun writing something.

And that gives way to insecurity, which may be more universal. Because what happens is that as soon you start trying to write down your thoughts, you discover that you’re not really cut out for this, it’s all coming out wrong, and why in the hell did you ever think that you, of all people, would be able to produce something that anyone else ought to read? But that doesn’t last. Not too long, anyway. Because somewhere in the work you alight on something, you get something just right, and that brings it all back: this is the thing you were born to write, as they say, and it all begins it click, as they also say. You’re completely buoyant for a while, confident and productive, and you absolutely know that it’s only a matter of time before you begin to tire of glancing down at your smart phone vibrating with the news that you’re going to be recognized by yet another auspicious prize committee. Why can’t they just leave you in peace?

Finishing a book may require a dozen or more pendulum swings between these two dramatic extremes. And to those who live in close proximity to you as you veer back and forth—those who, were you a detonated bomb, say, might wind up as collateral damage—these radical veerings will likely appear as symptoms of some deadly ailment, for which they will feel qualified to prescribe a range of treatments and pharmaceuticals. You should ignore these rude metaphysicians. I do. I find this particularly easy to do as I approach the end of a book, because of course approaching the end means that the hubris side of me has won out. How else could I have seen it through? And from there, there is always an extended period, from the finishing of the book to its publication, when the hubris side holds sway. Sometimes this period is too extended. The lag between delivering a completed manuscript and seeing the finished product on the shelves is generally about a year, but can sometimes be much longer. This is both a gratifying and excruciating time because while it’s frustrating not to see your work out there in the world, it’s also satisfying because you know that it’s only a matter of time before it does get out there in the world and make all the difference that you once suspected it might. 

That all comes crashing down when you finally get published. Regardless of whether you become a huge hit or vanish with a whimper, the actual reality of publishing is kind of anticlimactic. Even if you do win prizes, publishing a book never truly satisfies the confidence you initially had to have to undertake the project in the first place.  And that brings back the old crippling insecurity. But now it’s different. Now you realize that you hadn’t ever actually been swinging from hubris to insecurity. Rather, the insecurity was always there, lurking deep inside you, like herpes virus hiding in your spinal column. You don’t talk about this, of course. No way!  Your publicist has taken you aside (actually it’s a phone call) and made sure that you know that no one wants to hear about your insecurity. You receive strict marching orders: in all of your radio appearances and Facebook status updates you will make the publication of your book seem like a dream come true. You will publicly smile, and privately wallow, and it will be in those private wallowings that, after a time, you will begin to toy around with new thoughts, thoughts that maybe some other people should think, too.

And that’s why my current predicament is strange. For the past 14 months, ever since I finished writing the book I just published, I’ve been slaving away at another book, fretting almost constantly that I was a fool to have undertaken it. I’ve managed to stay at even keel only by reminding myself that I had another book in the can, as they say, and that it would be only a matter of time before those thoughts got out in the world. That all changed the moment the finished book appeared and I completed the book I was writing. It became apparent, very quickly, that the now published book wasn’t going to be read by everyone. And not a soul less would have satisfied me! That was sad, but I had a salve—the new book, which with a burst of hubris and energy I had completed! Quite obviously, it was only a matter of time before that book got out there in the world and made all the difference. 

And that’s the real writing life, I’ve realized. Hubris and insecurity don’t take turns or strike some constructive chord. You need equal dabs of cocky and cowardly, but you don’t really swing between the two and it’s not a particularly harmonious note when they both sound at once. Rather, the real writing life is some version of the “ever not quite” credo of pragmatism. It’s both always ever, as it ever was and will be.

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Apr 29 2013
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A Count of My Own: In Praise of Certain (Male) Editors

By Shannon Cain

Backlash this week in the ongoing struggle against institutionalized sexism in the literary world—by which I mean the aggressively male table of contents in the current issue of The New Yorker and Wikipedia’s bizarre behavior in the wake of a New York Times piece on their erasure of women from the “American Novelists” category—has me thinking and rethinking my own experiences with rejection.

In his post here last month, Major Jackson revealed a dirty secret of literary publishing: we are a culture of rejection. I’ll share our corollary secret, and an even more scandalous one: we’ve all implicitly agreed upon the necessity of this culture. Nobody’s suggesting we eliminate this most brutal and fundamental principle of the game.

To imagine literature without editors is to imagine chaos. These valiant gatekeepers do the hard and tedious work of seeking the good and eliminating the mediocre, so that readers seeking beauty and truth will find what they came for, and so that writers will know when their work doesn’t (yet) measure up to that standard. Diligent and caring men, like Major at The Harvard Review and Sven Birkerts at AGNI, have saved me from myself, over and over again, with a simple and eloquent No.

I have collected hundreds of rejections for my short stories. The number, to be exact, is 234—and these are for just the nine stories that ended up in the table of contents of my book. The title story alone was rejected 23 times before Steven Donadio at The New England Review accepted it; the following year it appeared in the O. Henry Prize anthology. My story “Cultivation” was rejected by almost as many magazines before the team at Tin House, led by Rob Spillman, gave it a home, and the editors at the Pushcart Press subsequently saw fit to include it in their annual volume.

In between the rejections, I revised. I worked those stories, hard, until they shone. And I am left feeling grateful for male editors like Steven, Rob, Major and Sven. The Harvard Review was one of the few literary magazines to undergo a self-assessment in the wake of the 2012 VIDA Count, that elegant exposé of institutionalized sexism in the literary world. And Erin Belieu, the co-founder of VIDA, earned her chops working for years alongside Askold Melnyczuk as the managing and poetry editor for AGNI. My informal count reveals the two most recent issues of AGNI contain more female authors than male.

So I did a count of my own, as a writer who spent years of her life submitting stories to literary magazines. It turns out that the majority of the stories in my collection—six out of nine—were originally acquired by male editors.

The results of my count surprised me, although they shouldn’t—the gender imbalance of litmag editors in the U.S. mostly explains it—but as a former editor for a women’s literary press and a lifelong activist for women’s issues, I did not expect to discover such approval of my work from male gatekeepers. Certainly not my work, which is overtly political and fundamentally feminist.

Major feels lousy for giving only two minutes to a poem. Yet a two-minute rejection from an editor like Sven or Major isn’t so much a rejection as it is a free opinion from a master of the craft. A don’t call us, we’ll call you from Major is far more valuable to a new writer than a similarly silent rejection from an intern assigned to the slush pile at Harper’s. If my story can’t hold the attention of an editor like Sven for two full minutes—two minutes is an eternity!—then it means I need to fix it. It means I haven’t achieved what he—and I—want literature to achieve. The moment “when I am admitted into the language,” he writes, “when I feel the writer’s rhythms resonating with mine. Then I have the sensation … of being very near to the movement of another human consciousness.”

Yes. This is what I want my work to do. And I don’t know about most writers, but I need a good editor to tell me whether I’ve succeeded.

Major says he often questions the authority that forces him to play literary gatekeeper, which for me is signal enough that his is the kind of gatekeeping we need. Our problem isn’t the fact of gatekeeping; it’s that so few of those guards ask this question of themselves.

Although I am full of righteous indignation against the men who presumably dismissed my work because it was written by a woman, I find myself more interested today in praising those men who not only transcend their privileged status as keepers of the literary gates, but who also use it to advance social equity. Editors of this ilk understand how to keep American letters relevant and vibrant. I send my work to men like Sven and Major because I know if they reject it, they’ll have done so not because a woman wrote it, but because she didn’t write it well enough.

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Mar 29 2013
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Time & Poetry: The Other Side of the Rejection Letter

By Major Jackson

I have a guilty confession: on average, I spend about two minutes on each submission I read as poetry editor of the Harvard Review. My guilt arises out of the disparity of time some optimistic poet put into drafting and redrafting their poems: fine-tuning line breaks, retooling similes, tweaking syntax, questing for the bon mot that would land the poem into pages that would afford the poet a national audience of readers. The longer the poem, the greater my guilt. Using my own ROW (rate of writing, when I am writing) as a standard measure, I imagine five poems (average number of poems per submission) probably took a month out of someone’s life, sitting mornings deliberating by a window listening to birdsong with a cup of coffee, while they transcribe what they consider to be their most profound and cherished thoughts. Every submission is a container of time. In the days before online submissions, add an additional forty-five minutes to an hour just to write the cover letter, stuff the envelope, and drive to the post office to deposit into the big blue mailbox.

What happens when it arrives on my desk or across my screen? Truth is: I barely get beyond the fifth line of a poem. I’ve already assessed its value, determined its fate, predicted its performance. Poems are actors on stage before my mind’s panel of judges. I’m the casting director who interrupts the young actress performing a monologue by Masha from Chekhov’s The Seagull, who says, “Thank you. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.” Only the poet is never present or privy to the swift means by which I have made my decision to send a polite rejection letter. What happens in that two minutes? I’ve discounted the poems in that submission as derivative, unsophisticated, underwritten, inauthentic, feeble, mediocre, lacking substance, hyper-articulate, dispassionate, overly demonstrative, overly inventive, too familiar, given to abstractions, inadequately composed, lacking music, excessive, bloated, banal, unimaginative, lacking vision, and so forth. I exercise judgment faster than I can read, faster than a microchip carrying its 0s and 1s. I feel rude and compulsive, and often question the authority that forces me to play literary gatekeeper.

Then again, it is virtually impossible to read every word, line, and sentence from beginning to end. The Harvard Review receives hundreds of submissions per month. The journal has one and a half full-time staff, and only a handful of interns. Generally, I have refused graduate students and interns as readers. We can only publish a small fraction of what we receive. The dirty secret of journals and probably what defines most of the literary world: we are a culture of rejection, and I am doing my small part to keep the status quo.

But then occasionally, very rarely, a poem, by the sheer force of its aesthetic and thematic power, will grip me so tightly as to very easily have me drop all of my critical walls and waltz me beyond my normal stopping point, all the way down to the last line. During such moments, while I am reading, I can hear my heart racing and a lump forms in my throat; I do not want this poem to drop me, to falter, to make the false move. Yes, the feeling is transcendent. I do not feel time impinging. I marvel at its performance of language, the pitch and uniqueness of its song; I gather and attune my spirit to the contours of its cadence and measures. The implications and arguments inside the poem interweave and graft like branches across the tree of books and memorable lines of poetry that I have read before. Its implications are manifold and I know it to be the most inevitable object in my hand or before my eyes; as inevitable as the magnolia tree outside my backyard that I am looking at right now. By poem’s end, I have had an experience with language that feels unparalleled. I’ve determined not to reject, but to publish this poem. I must play impresario and introduce the world to this most authentic utterance that testifies to our very existence, either as a reflection of our raw existence, or as a word creation that advances the technology of human expression.

Who is this person? It is then that I go to the cover letter. (I almost never read cover letters; I do not want my reading of a poem to be influenced by where the poet has gone to school or  in what journals the poet has previously published. Frankly, I wish cover letters were banned and that only poems were sent as representative of the poet.) Mediocrity is rampant and a reality of modernity—a phenomenon to which I am accustomed and have acclimated. Yet, when one encounters a work of art that challenges and reaffirms, that seems magical by its mere existence, one can only say Amen and feel blessed for once again having been baptized in the art of poetry.

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Feb 20 2013
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What’s to say (besides everything)?

By Sven Birkerts

When I find myself getting far from writing, from whatever it was that delivered the original thrill, and start to feel out of sync with the whole business, spending my time on tasks that don’t re-pay, on being dutiful, not writing what I want or need to be writing, not even sure I can identify what that even is; when I find myself, like Melville’s Ishmael, wanting to step into the street and start methodically knocking peoples’ hats off—then I know it’s high time to get to a stylist. Not of fashion, or hair, god forbid, but of prose. A sentence maker, a maestro, someone who with his or her particular way of putting words together has struck in me the tone of the clearest recognition, reminding me, for I have forgotten, what words have it in them to do, what they are for, why I so long ago decided to make them my trade.

Sentences. I could go looking now and find dozens, but I know what would happen. I would turn to one of my authors—I have them here, in a stack—one of the ones who has over and over made me catch my breath and start bobbing my head, to Joyce or Hazzard or Woolf or Fitzgerald or Nabokov or Welty, and then I would get stuck in the pages, trapped, unable to decide on this over that, but also unable to stop myself from looking further, as if somewhere there really were a capper, an incontestably best sentence. I would find, too—for I have tried such extractions in the past—that almost any great sentence loves its neighbors, that the one I have in mind is so much more effective when you see how it arises from the one before, and even better to go back another few; and by the same token, its brilliance is most manifest when you see how it leads to the next, for sentences are always part of a larger life, at very least the life of their paragraph.

So though I meant to make a little gallery, setting one jeweled thing alongside another, I got no further than Saul Bellow’s Herzog, which happened to be on the top of said small stack of authors already named, authors I did not have to go about the house searching for, because, as is always true of the things most deeply loved, I know exactly where they are to be found. Not only did I get no further than Herzog, but having opened it—to page 1, like a good citizen—I discovered I could not get off that page. There was no reason to. The joy of the Bellow’s prose was right there. How does this work? I moved my eyes left-to-right exactly as I had just a short time before with the newspaper, and with a perfectly interesting essay on the movie Lincoln, but now, just a few phrases in, I felt myself, figuratively speaking, come to real attention. How? Why? It is one of the mysteries.

It was the peak of summer in the Berkshires. Herzog was alone in the big old house. Normally particular about food, he now ate Silvercup bread from the paper package, beans from the can, and American cheese. Now and then he picked raspberries in the overgrown garden, lifting up the thorny canes with absentminded caution. As for sleep, he slept on a mattress without sheets—it was his abandoned marriage bed—or in the hammock, covered by his coat. Tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings surrounded him in the yard. When he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases—minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.

What’s to say—besides everything, I mean? There is nothing to explicate—it is so simple, there for the taking. But if it is so simple, why is the business of style so arduous, why do so few writers really get to me? I can point to the subject—distracted, forlorn man living alone—and to the humble accuracy of the details (the Silvercup bread in its paper package, the thorny raspberry canes, the seedlings, the stars, the hammock…), the juxtaposition of ground-level particulars with the sighting of great “spiritual bodies,” to the rhythm and pacing of the prose, but nothing quite accounts for my reaction.

There are more venturesome tours de force in Updike or Wallace, subtler syncopations in Lydia Davis, blacker perfections in Beckett. But, for me—and this is what I want to say—there is no better congruence, no larger Venn overlay, than this. The best reading happens—I know this now—when there is circulation, when I am admitted into the language, when I feel the writer’s rhythms resonating with mine. Then I have the sensation—it could be an illusion—of being very near to the movement of another human consciousness. We all make our nods to the certifiable greats, but don’t we also keep a smaller shelf, unique, of the writers we feel are our very own—the writers who somehow got the curtain to part, the distance to collapse, putting us suddenly there? Whatever there that was, and is. And though it has been crusted over by the repetitions of habit and rendered so rare as to feel almost extinct by the incessant manufacture of rhetoric and solicitation, some vestige of the real, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “dearest freshness,” does survive. When I find it, I am finally brought to myself. Mere language, letter-shapes arranged on a page, but they are like those gases, eloquent at five in the morning—or any hour really. And wasn’t it the selfsame Bellow who defined a writer as “a reader moved to emulation”? It all comes around; it all adds up.

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