Running across Michael Copperman’s short story “It”—and his accompanying craft essay “Race, Authenticity, Culpability”—in Copper Nickel‘s new online venue COIN reminded me why I read literary magazines. Life is hectic. Motivations can get confused. Students and neighbors alike look at me quizzically when I tell them what I’m reading—the new issue of Conjunctions at the moment—and I have long since given up mini-lecturing people about lit mags, and now just say something along the lines of, “It’s like The New Yorker,” and quickly change the topic to craft beers or The Daily Show. More personally, in the fog of MFA programs, conferences, lit blogs, etc., it’s easy to forget why I spend so much time constantly checking out the newest issues of, say, New England Review, Open Face Sandwich, and Zoetrope. I’m the first to admit how easily distracted I am by other, perhaps less important reasons for reading: awesome covers (I’m a big cover nerd), names (hard to pass up an issue with Jim Shepard‘s or Kelly Link‘s name on the cover), grad school nostalgia, a general print/pixel fetish, etc., etc. I often read for different reasons than those I tend to tell my students or my children about.

So what did I remember about lit mags from reading Copperman’s story? Sort of what Emily Dickinson got when reading a poem:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?

Lit mags have, historically, been the home of the avant garde, or at least a good portion of the best avant garde we’ve got. What many of us hope to find in their pages is, if not the Poundian new, at least something distinct, different, maybe even problematic. Something amarketable, if that’s even a word. Something hard to pin down. And, if that is combined with a great deal of literary panache and empathy, than there is often nothing better.

But, more than just moving me, than just having “the top of my head were taken off” reading—which specifically happened in the last line of the piece—Copperman’s story and complimentary essay engaged my intellect, as reader and writer, forcing me to confront the basic notion of representation in creative work. And this, all the above taken together, the moving alongside the problematic, the new and the empathetic, is, I suppose, what I’ve long read lit mags for, have read them for since I first picked up a copy of Paris Review in the Southern Oregon University library and read Shepard’s “Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea.” It was Garcia Marquez’s Kafka moment. It was “Awesome!” combined with “Writers can do that?!”

Along with a great story, lovely writing, and compelling characters, what is interesting about “It” is its direct engagement with the core element of creative writing: imagining others (even if that means imaging our past selves). Representing the other in literature has long been a bone of contention, at least since Philip Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy” in the 16th century, and probably as far back as Ancient Greece, if not before, anytime someone questioned just what gave the author the right to do what he/she was doing. William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner was the center of a heated controversy over the author’s right to fully imagine the voice of an other—an other race, an other sex, an other nationality, ad infinitum. And it is this fully imaging of an other’s voice, or dialect, that Copperman is interested in—interested in both the doing of it and the controversy surrounding it. For COIN readers, Copperman has offered up both story and essay engaged in dialect writing, together making a very persuasive case for the creative artist’s imaginative right to cross any biological and cultural boundary.

Here’s a particularly dialect rich portion of the story “It,” which is told in the voice of Shandreeka, a schoolgirl in Mississippi, where Copperman taught for a time in the Teach for America program. In this part, Shandreeka relates what Corneil, a friend, is saying:

He tilt his big head sideways and grin. “So like I been said, I was over at them ball courts at Benton Middle, and Felicia Jackson come up, look round for who she gone start in on, and start talking my ear off bout ‘Pipe one ugly black boy can’t play no ball,’ and Pipe hear his name, he come up and she keep on, and he say he gone knock her upside her head, and she say, ‘Go on then, boy, hit me,’ and he make like he gone do it. She look him straight in the eye, don’t move when he swing his hand. She don’t move an inch. Pipe, he just shake his head, say, ‘Girl, you out your mind,’ and go back to playing ball.”

Like the rest of the story, this part is fast, musical, and I can’t help feel this style of voice—of both Shandreeka and Corneil—helped Copperman write the story, as the work has a sense of the organic that I feel is hard to find in the contemporary short story. Though Copperman admits the fiction of Toni Cade Bambara is close kin to his story, he says “if there’s really a book that inspired me to try such a formally difficult task, it’s Huck Finn first and foremost, and then perhaps Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City.” Like the voices of many characters of Twain and Jones, Shandreeka’s voice seems to fall out in one captivating rush, not sloppily, but ordered, like the 19th century well made play or DNA. Everything is part of a larger whole, such as Shandreeka’s early tossed off description of a boy as “smooth, that what he is”—a description resounding only later in all its threatening power (that last line that took the top of my head off). The entire work is powerful, compact, and I can’t help but feel, in its emotional intensity and sense of risk (for both writer and characters) it stands out in the landscape of contemporary short fiction.

Copperman’s thoughts on using dialect in fiction—an argument for the author’s right to embody the voice of an other, an argument that engages in literary history, politics, the landscape of literary magazines, and writing craft—are as captivating as his fiction, and I urge people to read the essay for themselves, excerpting here a key passage:

I don’t suggest that we should open the gates, and encourage anyone to write and talk black, that it should ever be appropriate to fetishize the black experience and AAVE dialect as entertainment. But I think there’s a serious risk in the position I’ve encountered at panels at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, where I once heard a well-published black writer make fun of a white graduate student for asking a question about the speech of a minor character in their novel-in-progress before suggesting that no writer should ever represent a black person except a black person like . . . herself. This declaration was met with thunderous applause. Such a position segregates black literature, is self-marginalizing. It refuses to allow representation to be particular and complex. It divides on the basis of past division, insists on a demarcation predicated on a construction of identity that is unresponsive to the present. In reacting against the status quo, it inadvertantly affirms it.

I have trouble choosing the words, so I repeat them with variations. The problem is the verbs. The past tense, I suppose. The past tense is the sad one, the nevermore. But it’s more than that. I didn’t cry when I heard the news. I didn’t cry in her little room, where she smiled and told jokes about morphine. I didn’t cry at the silence in me when her faith in heaven didn’t break, when she was resting in cliché, and my critic’s hat fell off. I cried a little at her funeral. But I cry more now because I want to write words about her, and it feels violent. Like carving up a tombstone.

—from ”Mortal Grammar” by Adam Smith from Brevity 36

Normally the term is used in reference to technologies that send out information to specific groups (eg, email lists). But every technology is an extension of a mental state—so a narrowcast refers to more than just a technology, it refers to a state of mind.

When I write a blogpost with a specific audience in mind—when my writing is “meant for” a specific group—my attitude is narrowcasted. Like preaching to a choir. In contrast, if I’m looking to communicate with anyone and have no particular audience in mind, then my attitude is broadcasted.

Similarly, independently of my intentions, if my writing only gets a small emergent readership, then it’s narrowcasted. And if it gets a wide readership (“goes viral”) then it’s broadcasted.

I can control the first one. It’s my will, my intention, and my decision to communicate with a specific group in mind or with anyone who will listen. The second I can’t control. It’s who ends up listening independently of my intentions.

What’s the attitude in online literature: broadcasted or narrowcasted, and what’s the emergent readership like? Are we writing for anyone and everyone, or are we writing for a specific audience (parents, friends, MFA communities, the “literary minded”)? If so, is that who ends up reading it?

I guess a boiled-down version of this question is: What are our intentions when we publish literature online? Are we hoping to go viral, shout into nothingness, build our CVs…?

If we think of literature, in any form, as something that enhances experience in some meaningful way, and non-online literature enhances non-online experience, then, technically, online literature should enhance online experience. But most of online literature is just analog literature that’s digitally accessible (stories and poems online). Is there a difference between literature that just happens to be on the Internet and online literature? Have we seen any literature that enhances online experience, or just non-online literature posted online? Have we seen any online literature?

http://www.fictionuncovered.co.uk/

http://www.fourthirtythree.com/

http://shortstoriesforwomen.wordpress.com/

http://www.litro.co.uk/

http://ponytail-zine.blogspot.com/

http://www.shortfirepress.com/

http://alliteratimagazine.com/

http://www.spiltmilkmagazine.com/

http://spillinginkreview.com/

http://qarrtsiluni.com/

http://www.otherother.org

http://www.penpushermagazine.co.uk/

http://sidebmag.com/

http://www.lightningflashmag.com

http://naplitmag.com/

http://willowswept.com

http://taintedtea.com

http://asymptotejournal.com

These are just a few of the questions Defunct, a new literary magazine, raises. In his essay Sum of Zero, Chris Offutt writes about the defunct literary magazine, Zero, A Review of Literature and Art, published just six issues between 1949-1954, and its last issue in 1980. Most famous for its publication of James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which declared Richard Wright’s Native Son a failure, effectively ending the friendship between the two men, Offutt notes Zero’s lasting impact on the literary landscape. The Paris Review published its first issue four years after Zero’s, and copied their style and format as well as the now standard practice of publishing unknown writers alongside established ones.

Offutt writes:

The bulk of our contemporary literary magazines still rigidly follow a style established by a pair of bohemian, far Left, proto-beat poets engaged in something fresh and original and rebellious. How drastic it must seem to them now!  Their revolution in Art and Literature gave birth to the prevailing style– revolution co-opted and homogenized for the masses, producing the same jarring disconnect of stepping into an elevator and hearing sanitized tones of The Stones, The Clash, Nirvana, or Ludacris.

For Offutt, it is the duty of young writers to battle with the vanguard, and that “the best and most lasting assault is by making work as good or better than them.” He also warns young writers to heed the errors of the past. Baldwin regretted the loss of his friendship to Wright all his life. Offutt’s call to arms is a brilliant polemic and heartbreaking analysis of the cost, material and otherwise, of producing literature.

Shaking Like a Mountain is an online literary journal featuring writing about music. The journal is edited by Wayne Cresser, Vito Grippi, Jed Griswold, and John Hames, with contributing editors such as Amity Bitzel, Janice Eidus, Marion Winik, and others. Francesca Macchiavelli spoke with co-editor Vito Grippi.

Francesca Macchiavelli: How long have you been working with Shaking Like a Mountain?

Vito Grippi: We published the first issue in the summer of 2007. But the conception and planning began winter of 06/07. Things came together pretty quickly.

Macchiavelli: What are you trying to accomplish?

Grippi: Initially, our purpose is to provide a space for writers to display their work. Taking that further, we specialize in lit about music because we think such a large connection exists between the two artistic mediums—really just to add to the overall literary conversation, but specifically to highlight work that is somehow inspired by, or written as a reaction to music.

Macchiavelli: What drove you to create a new online literary journal?

Grippi: Mostly money, or the lack of it. Total cost to get started was something like $150. Now that the online part seems to be established, we are considering the possibility of releasing some print editions—maybe something like a year “best of” collection.

Macchiavelli: How do you decide what Shaking publishes?

Grippi: The publishing process at Shaking Like a Mountain, I think, is not too different from that of other journals. We have a group of readers that includes myself and my co-editor who read through submissions as they come in. We then add the submissions to a spread sheet and initial a corresponding “yes,” “no,” or “yes, but…” column. (I suppose this would be considered the slush pile.) At this point we’re really looking for a few things—primarily, whether or not they fit the journal. In other words, seeing if the author actually read the submissions guidelines and/or read the work on the journal itself. We get a lot of really beautiful work that does not connect with music in any way. Here we’re also looking to see if a piece moves us immediately. We want the piece to make us react.

After a piece makes it through the first round, it is then sent off to our group of contributing editors by genre. We have a group of poetry editors and a group of fiction editors that includes writers like Janice Eidus, Marion Winik, Crista Mastrangelo, Fred Shaw, among others. This group usually makes the final decision. There are instances where we like a piece that isn’t quite right, has a lot of potential. In those cases, we often ask the submitting authors if they are willing to revise and resubmit (they usually do). So, in some rare instances, a piece may go through multiple revisions and submits before we accept it. Overall we try to keep the process as democratic as possible, because art, as it should, affects people differently.

Macchiavelli: What do you look for in prospective pieces?

Grippi: I’ll start with the blog or nonfiction work that appears on the journal. These are often assigned to someone in our trusted group of writers, or in some cases pitched to us. Initially we’re looking for work that somehow balances relevancy (the music angle) and literature. We look for pieces that are well written, fun, and add to the conversation of music, literature, and art.

For fiction and poetry, what we look for is not that much different. We want pieces that are, first and foremost, good. We want them to stand on their own as a piece of writing. Then they have to have a connection to music. Our guidelines on that end are pretty loose. Mostly we look for something that takes chances and isn’t too obvious. Too many poems try to be about something that is automatically supposed to be cool, like jazz. We don’t need any more poems about Miles Davis.

Macchiavelli: So, what don’t you look for in prospective pieces?

Grippi: We try to stay away from fluff pieces and pieces where the writer appears too self indulgent. This tends to be difficult at times, especially for writers working in memoir and that sort of thing. We try to stay away from things that try so hard to be cool or cutting edge that they forget to be good. For instance, if you give us a poem where the lines create the shape of a musical instrument, it better be a really good poem.

Macchiavelli: What type/genre of pieces do you tend to publish most?

Grippi: We probably publish more poetry than anything else. This is probably because we receive more poetry submissions than any other genre. That said, we have been receiving much more fiction lately, and that makes us happy.

Macchiavelli: Which of your authors do you think reflects Shaking the most?

Chano Pozo

Grippi: Pablo Medina’s “Cubop City” really blew us away. It’s one of those that we’re really happy to have published. It’s a fictionalized account of the murder of Latin jazz percussionist, Chano Pozo. It’s just filled with magic and beautiful language and images.

There’s also another great story, “Killer Heart,” by William Orem that really works. It’s the story of an aging bassist who’s carrying on a relationship with the 17-year-old rising start that fronts his band.

As for poetry, it’s the ones that don’t try too hard to be about music or musicians that I think really succeed. We get a lot of poetry that name drops jazz greats and such, but that’s not really what we’re about. The musical inspiration can be a very minimal part of it. The hope is that music sparks something that then causes a writer to create more music. That’s what poetry really is in the end: music. That said, Lisa Mednick-Powell’s “Ooh La La” is pretty great, Fred Shaw’s “Turntable Generation,” Dave Wanzynck’s “Fortunate Sons.” They’re all great.

Macchiavelli: Do you target a certain audience?

Grippi: Our audience is all over the map. Really, we’re looking to reach people who are interested in literature, people interested in music, and those interested in the combination of those two things. I suppose that could really be anyone. More specifically though, we’d like to reach people interested in interacting with the work. Part of the beauty in publishing online is that a reader can offer an immediate reaction to what they’ve just read. That reaction is read by other readers and the writer, and, hopefully, some sort of meaningful discussion can occur. There is something really cool happening there.

Macchiavelli: What do you want readers to get overall from Shaking?

Grippi: I want readers to know that there is a space where both music and literature come together in an interesting way. We hope it prompts readers to want to write (or listen to) certain pieces of music or certain musicians—or both.

Macchiavelli: What do you get from the journal?

Grippi: The gratification of knowing that we’re responsible for putting another piece of art into the world. I also love to come across names of people we’ve published in other journals. You always feel like you played a part in that person’s career in some small way.

Mostly, though, it’s a love of literature and music and being able to witness the convergence of the two, and then release that product or offspring into the wild.

Macchiavelli: Do you have any advice for authors?

Grippi: Read everything you can get your hands on, write constantly, get to know the work in the journals you want to publish in—and read the submissions guidelines. There is nothing worse than turning down a great piece because a writer has just sent it to the wrong place.

Zuckerberg image from Mashable

Dear Online Literary Community,

I’ve been thinking about what you said. After talking with friends and reading comments here and elsewhere, I want to respond to a few general things regarding my first Duckfoot proposal and then make another one.

I’m committed to the idea that creative writing belongs in public discourse. I think we can all agree on this. I think we can also agree that public discourse is online and only getting more digital. Online literature may be nascent, as Roxane Gay points out in her thoughtful response to my initial letter, but it still carries the burden of literature’s future.

For better or worse, the new digital discourse changes things for the communities it includes. We’re seeing this in our community. Things aren’t normal anymore. What it means to be a writer, reader, critic, editor, and publisher are all unstable. Now readers are less passive, writers are their own agents, editors are curators, publishers are facilitators, critics are coders, etc. Our world isn’t the same world where our heroes grew up. Soon it will be different than the world where our heroes thrive now.

When the dust settles after the transition from analog to digital, the roles will re-stabilize again and there will be a new normal. We have some agency in this, I think. If we’re clear about what we want the new roles to be when they re-stabilize in the new discourse, we’ll be better prepared to make creative writing an important part of it for all communities involved. The Duckfoot idea was an attempt to clarify these. I think the discussion has been very fruitful.

I agree with Roxane and many of those who responded to my letter: page views are not a good way to measure literary excellence, for a variety of reasons (popularity, gaming the system, etc). I think, as Richard Nash told me, this aspect of the Duckfoot is wrongheaded. The comparative analytic aspect of it, though, is something worth pursuing. I also recognize that there are many worthy literary awards and anthologies out there for the online writing. But these use similar formats for selection and distribution as the awards in analog discourse use, as a good friend at PEN American Center told me. For this reason I’m not convinced that these awards and anthologies take into full account the new roles that digital discourse has made for literature.

So, here’s another thought: What if we made an icon, like Facebook or Digg or Reddit, and put it at the bottom of all literary texts published online. If the reader believes the text worthy of consideration for an award, she clicks it. This information gets sent to an analytic. At the end of a certain amount of time there will be a series of individuals elected by nomination–critics–to read certain sections of the data set: one critic reads the lowest voted, one reads the middle, and one reads the highest, all of which will be made available on a website for anyone to read and comment on. The goal is to find the best story.

What do you think?

Sincerely,
David

One of many rotating images from PANK website

PANK’s Queer Issue, edited by Tim Jones-Yelvington, presents some of the finest writing from around the globe. In his introduction, “Why Queer?” Jones-Yelvington writes a eloquent if circumspect analysis of Queer identity and writing. He writes,

For an issue of a literary magazine to mark itself as Queer is necessarily a political act. It is a response to our absence elsewhere. Or in certain circumstances, even to our active exclusion…. But this issue is not solely a response to lack. It’s also a generative project. We are taking advantage of the opportunity Queer affords not only to obliterate (or at least destabilize) “normal,” but also to imagine new possibilities for both our lives and texts—or for our lives as texts. Or for the texts in which we find ourselves living.

Much of the writing is, indeed, generative in its openness and accessibility in terms of vernacular and structure. For instance, in Crystal Boson’s “she’s a prayin’ kind,” the speaker’s malediction is a blessing for the accursed:

i am fifth in the line of twelve men prayin for the night to end
some can wrap a prayer in gravy and straight conversate His name
some marinate in ass sweat soaked up to the spine
some can dark the hell outta a church door
the eighth will get home to find steak still cooking
the first will go home to find beer just turn warm
the one behind me thinks of a woman
they all feel Him turn over when i open up my mouth

Sofia Rhei’s Cinderella presented in Spanish in print and audio and its English translation by Lawrence Schimel, is marvelous in its inventive articulation of longing and mystery at the core of this folktale.

Cenicienta

La puerta del aseo está llena de inscripciones amorosas. Si no me
hubiera entretenido leyéndolas, no habría oído cómo alguien entraba en
el cubículo contiguo y se masturbaba lentamente, susurrando, entre
jadeos, un nombre muy poco frecuente: el mío.

Tan sólo pude ver sus extraños zapatos, ya que se fue de repente,
antes de que yo misma pudiera ahogar mis últimos gemidos mordiendo mi
brazo.

Ahora sólo tengo que encontrarla.

Cinderella

The stall door was full of erotic inscriptions. If I hadn’t gotten distracted reading them, I wouldn’t have heard how someone entered the next cubicle and masturbated slowly, whispering, between gasps, an uncommon name: mine.

I could only see her strange shoes, given that she left suddenly, before I could muffle my own last moans by biting my arm.

Now I just need to find her.

The piece I return to again and again for its stunning economy is Doug Paul Case’s “Bottom,” which captures the project of “imagin[ing] new possibilities for both our lives and texts—or for our lives as texts. Or for the texts in which we find ourselves living.”

That boy’s smile
opens to his molars.

PANK’s Queer Issue is a politically potent and exhuberant collection that shatters heteronormative boundaries and instead builds on the idea of inclusiveness, both as an aesthetic vision as well as a transformative community.