Not long ago I emailed an editor to say I was disappointed in the quality of the essays for their failure to address issues that had some relevance beyond the writers’ own world. I said I’d been subscribing to the publication for two years. Instead of the writer drawing me in on an exotic travel piece, as one example, I felt suffocated, as if I’d never ventured beyond the dull street corner of my hometown. I aimed my criticism at this publication because it promotes itself as a creative nonfiction journal—the genre I have the most interest in as a reader and writer. The note was not intended to offend or to incite. I was writing as a reader and subscriber who wanted to see this quarterly succeed beyond what appeared to be a self-imposed limit on its prospective appeal.

The editor fired an email to me at the close of business that same day. “Don’t read, don’t subscribe, and don’t bother submitting,” he wrote. “This publication is not for everybody. And if I had any further doubts about the quality of the published work,” the editor advised, “have a look at The Best Essays series, where you’ll find numerous entries over the years from our publication.”

I was already aware that this publication had been recognized more than once in the form of a best essay selection, but what baffled me most was the idea that “this publication is not for everybody.” Of course the quarterly is not for everybody. A one thousand circulation count as opposed to 1.5 million customer base in a popular magazine is enough to remind us of this fact. If the editor was implying that by its nature the quarterly is a seasonal eclectic mix of art, a literary pastiche conceived for publishing insiders, then I have no case to make. I am best advised to move along and browse among another shelf.

But if this quarterly (or any other) is not written for me, who then? I am, in fact, the serious, dedicated reader whom editors rely on to keep the quarterly in circulation. I am one of their best customers. This editor’s stance is no longer tenable in the age of information overload, in the age of a splintered, finicky readership. It’s the reader who matters most. Without readers, the quarterly’s publishing legacy runs dry.

Maybe I have it wrong. Quarterlies circulate as a showcase for writers. Consider this quote by Lee Gutkind in his introduction to The Best Creative Nonfiction:

Literary journals publish not just new and emerging writers; many well-known literary figures choose to be published in journals, because in contrast to the slicks, literary journals are read religiously by serious readers, writers, editors, and agents—publishing insiders. A primary reason to write—a challenge and joy—is to be daring with form and content. Writers want to try out new ideas and break structural barriers. You can’t do that very often in popular publications. But in literary quarterlies generally, and in creative nonfiction specifically, writers can experiment.

If I understand Gutkind correctly, general readers have no place scouting the quarterlies for a good read. Yet, I’ve never understood why it’s necessary to impose this fissure between so-called serious readers and the general reader. How does the division actually play out in the bookstores or on the internet? Do serious readers stay with Rilke, Pynchon, or The Sewanee Review while never venturing into Barbara Kingsolver or Esquire magazine? The reader in our culture today is already under enough assault. Whose interest is being served by further segregating us into serious readers or lay readers? To restrict the prospective appeal of the literary quarterly—already dealing with its own strategies for survival and identity in the digital forest of information overload—to a faction of publishing “insiders” is, from my viewpoint, the quarterly’s death knell. Surely, quarterly editors must be entertaining grander visions for the place of their publications beyond MFA circles.

If there’s any doubt regarding the reader’s sovereign place in the quarterly publishing culture, an editorial from Sven Birkerts, editor of AGNI, makes a good case on our behalf. The slush pile he rummages through day after day is a metaphor for the edgy readers’ muddle, which we’re forced to give a “yes” or “no” on every page. Birkerts writes:

When I sit down with a huge stack of envelopes, each one containing some hard-won, deliberated expression, I am not the tabula rosa—the fantasied clean slate—that I perhaps ought to be. No, I am a man of my time, a besieged reader, creating a specific occasion within what is, day in and day out, for me as for most everyone, a near-constant agitation of stimuli, an enfolding environment of aggressively competing signs and meanings. And my attitude, when I remove a clump of print-covered pages from their envelope, is not “Send me more and more new information” but “Reach me, convince me that this news is different, that this is the news I need.” . . . Because this is the editor’s—and in a way, all of our-situation—it is absolutely vital that the work, as I phrased it earlier, “anticipate and address” it, or at least write within the awareness of it. Most work does not, and I can tell right away when writing does, with whatever degree of success (Birkerts 3).

Birkert’s point appears to welcome Gutkind’s earlier mention regarding the need for the quarterly writer to express “new ideas” or at least elements of a daring style. What reader after all, overwhelmed or not, does not welcome originality? Yet here is where I lose both writers. I find myself turning away from many essays not because I am “besieged” but because of banal subject matter. I’m not sure what Gutkind is referring to when he praises the experimentation value in creative nonfiction as one of the trademarks of the literary quarterly. Over the last year or more, I recall reading only a handful of original essays that “reached” me; most I could catalog under a very definite index of subject matter: beds; cats; disease; family (lineage) ; fathers (absent) ; grandfathers; grandmothers; melancholia ; mothers (alcoholic, schizophrenic, dying) ; narcissism; nostalgia.

I have a particularly difficult time squaring away this abbreviated index, the general insular quality of the essays themselves, with the increasing glut of “best of” anthologies on the bookstore shelves. I recently convinced a teaching colleague that she should include a handful of quarterlies in her creative nonfiction class, in addition to the standard classroom anthology.(1) Later, when she requested a library reserve bibliography for an upcoming reading project, I included six or eight quarterlies as well as a number of “best of” titles: The Best American Non-Required Reading; The Best American Essays (ten volumes, 1997-2007); The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses; The Best American Essays of the Century; The Best American Magazine Writing; The Best New American Voices and, as referred to above, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 1.

There is no shortage of good writing available to readers. Yet there is a contradictory quality in the collection. Judges and editors create the essay shortlist from the same pool of material I’m criticizing for its general lack of imagination. I’m assuming a quarterly’s contents already represent the “best” each winter, spring, summer, and fall. How else to explain .5% manuscript submission acceptance rates and the authors’ subsequent rise from the quarterly to larger fishing grounds such as Viking Press? Additionally, the quarterly doesn’t dither in heading off the potential writer’s submission by declaring “We publish only the best. . . we encourage writers to read at least one issue before submitting.” This current wave of best of anthologies either signals anxiety as to what (again) needs to be presented as superior work, or these meta-anthologies are yet another byproduct of information overload, where no matter how much readers have to choose from, more never seems enough.

And the rationale for publishing this spate of new titles appears perfectly sound: More writers are producing superior essays, reportage, and fiction that demand a final, prized showcase. The series’ introductions narrate a similar selection process where an esteemed panel of editors or writers rummages through thousands of selections from more than 600 literary publications until they hand over the shortlist to another distingue who (in the introduction) describes the painful yet ultimately triumphant experience of combing through the pieces until the final line up reaches publication.

Given the limited space allotted for the literary essay among the quarterlies—fiction and poetry usually outnumber the essay selections—it’s difficult to figure how the mediocre work finds its way in the seasonal issues so frequently. By the above measure, every essay should bear the stamp of unsurpassed quality. Yet consider a New York Times Book Review article by Stephen King, guest editor of The Best Short Stories 2007, in which he describes his reading and choosing process for the 2007 series. In addition to the hundreds of selections that make their way to his home, King describes how he beats a path to the “bottom shelf” quarterlies found in a bookstore—past the best sellers, the trade paperbacks, the hundreds of commercial magazines, past the hundreds of items that scream “Buy me, buy me!”:

And here I find fresh treasure: not just Zoetrope and Tin House, but also Five Points and the Kenyon Review. What’s wrong with this picture? . . . Let us consider what the bottom shelf does to writers who still care, sometimes passionately, about the short story. What happens when he or she realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily? . . . In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines . . . Last year, I read scores of stories that felt … not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. . . When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.

As a popular fiction writer, King may not be the best example to argue the merits or demerits of the literary quarterly, but his article hints at a critical point regarding their future place among readers, serious or otherwise. Beyond the sheer overload of reading choices found in Borders or Barnes & Nobles, King attributes a quarterly’s bottom shelf value to a shrinking readership and faltering circulation, as if the editors are losing touch with their reading base while descending into some solipsistic literary funk. Here again, the best case scenario has the poets, fiction writers, and essayists writing only for each other, as if reaching a wider reading audience is no longer possible.

Yet while King or other quarterly readers make their way through to the bottom shelf, we do find outstanding work. Here is one example of an essay that I think does reach the reader.(2) Its opening contains all the elements of a “self-referring” style, one that could easily beat a path to King’s dungeon of “stale air.” And its subject matter—penmanship—would also seem to be predictably tedious, but by the middle of the first paragraph it unveils an irresistible quality. It inspires the precise opposite reaction than the travel essay referred to above: What reader would turn this piece away?:

Drunk on too much data, dizzied by a blizzard of numbers and acronyms and made-up techno-words I don’t understand and don’t even want to know, that’s what I was recently—down in the trenches, in a guerilla shopping war on the Internet, searching for a new laptop computer. Choose: 40 vs. 80 gigabyte hard drive. Choose: 2.8 vs. 3.02 megahertz processor. Choose: Pentium vs. Celeron chip; 14- vs. 15- inch screen; 5.5 vs. 6.3 pounds. I’m a writer and I need good tools. I do my homework. But this was tough going. As I scribbled comparative notes, pretending all the while that my sophistication was growing, my roller ball pen ran out of ammunition, and I plunged into the dark chaos of my desk drawer to find another instrument de
guerre. I came up instead with treasure.

Maybe the tone here is just a matter of age and maturity—the writer’s bio indicates tenured professorship—but the essay balloons into something beyond the writer’s self. Besides the sense of style and verve (“drunk on too much data”), the reader is struck with the experience of plodding through a technical manual’s jargon and the simultaneous issue of too many choices in the marketplace. We’re hit with a pair of punchy, declarative sentences, which fittingly nail the prose down to match its subject matter—penmanship. I assumed the essay was about penmanship, but the first paragraph tells us about technology taking over the tools of the writer’s trade. And while I’m certain I have no vested interest in reading about penmanship, it’s too late. I’m in with whatever it is that the writer is going to reveal in the “chaos of the desk drawer.”

This essay is a superb example of how quarterly readers plunge into reading—or not. The title alone might have the truly fussy or impatient reader bypassing the essay altogether. Of course, this is not what characterizes a quarterly essay reader. We’re open to any subject, so long as our guide checks in with us as we’re settling in. Curiosity consumes us. It’s why most of us can’t wait to see what’s in store with the next seasonal issue. And insofar as identifying with the writer, her or his subject or intent, I don’t mean to imply that the reader has to “like” the writer or the subject in order to keep turning the pages. The aim of my concern for the essay is not another rendition of the well-trammeled ground regarding literary aesthetics and reader preferences, as in “I like this, or I don’t like that.” There is something more to it than this middlebrow path, I think. There is something more to the penmanship essay than liking or disliking that kept me absorbed.

What drives King’s top shelf prose from the bottom shelf, Birkert’s “yes” or “no,” or the quarterly reader’s subscription renewal is an absence of a connecting narrative. The writer should never come across as more interesting than the story itself, but again and again the essayist insists on playing the central character, even though the reader would be better served by the narrator staying out of the picture altogether.

As another example, Thomas Kennedy’s essay, “I am Joe’s Prostate,” works in similar fashion.(3) Kennedy’s first wife advises him to see a doctor for a prostrate check. The piece takes the reader through numerous harrowing, frustrating rounds of doctors’ offices and examinations. On one level, the piece is all about the writer, or more specifically, his prostrate problems. Halfway through the piece, however, the reader sees that it’s really not about the writer at all. Instead he performs a deft Houdini act by holding a mirror to the faces and situations he encounters during his numerous examinations. They are cold and perfunctory. By the essay’s conclusion, the reader identifies with the writer’s pain, with his personal torment in the face of (what he assumes) is a life or death condition. Really, though, the piece is about self-annihilation on the “examination” bed. The writer could have easily taken the operating room’s spotlight in this piece, but it would have come at the expense of the story itself.

By my measure, the close of the first essay paragraph on penmanship extinguishes any vestige of self. And in this second piece, a prostate problem assumes a much wider lens than personal suffering. The essayist is left out of the picture, at least as far as the story line goes. Yet, the reader is still has a real sense of the writer’s style and voice working behind the stage. As a result, I’m more interested to see where this “roller ball pen” and its “ammunition” are headed in the penmanship essay. And in the prostate essay, I’m haunted more by the doctors’ cold hands than I am the prospect of disease.

The most striking features common to both these pieces, relative to their ability to engage the quarterly reader, is that they operate outside of the MFA flavor lab. There is no egocentric drumbeat of the twenty something writer introducing the reader to his special strain of personal torment. If I were to attribute this common denominator prose—the pampered essayist waxing nostalgic on an heirloom, the essayist attending her father’s funeral—to any one influence it would be the proliferation of MFA programs and writers workshops.(4)

I attended one last summer in New York. We circulated the campus grounds, from the spa, the dining hall, the lecture hall, the pool, the library, the bar, and back to our beds with manuscripts tucked in our bags. Everyone had files of words, reams of them. When we weren’t hearing words on the literati stage, we were reading our words to others. We reviewed words, rearranged words, deleted words, added words. We searched for better words and wondered why our words were somehow less striking than everyone else’s words. We obsessed on words. And if we couldn’t figure out what the words meant, to which end one of us was trying to apply our words, then we “teased out the theme” for words like the snake charmer bringing the cobra to life. Indeed, it sometimes felt as if the words would poison and strangle the lot of us. Sitting through this two-week workshop, I wondered if there is a literary term for the reader being rendered speechless or indifferent in the face of a text. And if not, couldn’t this phenomenon transform into a post, post modernist movement, with today’s print matter tonnage crying for just a few extended moments of the readers’ understanding and attention?

In Literary Theory, An Introduction, Terry Eagleton writes, “The whole point of creative writing is that it is gloriously useless, an end in itself removed from any sordid social purpose.” In other words, more than most indulgences or diversions of the age—tummy tucks, amusement parks, origami—the writers workshop relies on an exclusive dispensation from society at large. The writer / essayist hopes to keep the world’s creeping misery far from reach—but not so far that the writer can’t dip into this wretchedness for material, now and then. The mayhem of the outside world carried on during the workshop. Iraq continued to implode. The polar ice caps were melting at a far faster rate than anyone realized. Meanwhile, my classmates and I were critiquing the finer points of unrequited love, motorcycle riding in Italy, a high school mentor turned sex fiend, and an empty nester’s “grief” over a daughter’s leaving nest for college. Who knew what the hundreds of others were up to in the fiction and poetry workshops.
As much as I’d like to agree with Eagleton’s idea of creative play, the writers workshop or the essay as a kind of fifth-grade art class where the teacher (editor?) gives children free rein with playdough and watercolors, I think readers need to demand something more from the essayist.

By the end of that first week the writers conference, after reading batches of my classmates’ submissions, after listening to a score of the literati read from their work on stage, I stopped paying attention until a classmate made a point that neither the instructor nor the students ever touched on again, even though it was the most critical point any of us would make in the workshop. My classmate had submitted a piece on growing up in Ohio under evangelical parents. He preambled his submission by saying “I like this work, but I’m still wondering how I get anyone else to care, how I get others to read my finished work with real interest.” This simple comment was ignored. The rest of us were preoccupied in finding an editor for our own “stuff.” Yet his concern revealed volumes about the essay’s future—and memoir, in this case.

That Borders and Barnes & Nobles et. al. are stocked with more material than any of us can read in a lifetime is not news. What is news, however, is the way readers are managing in the age of the information bomb, or as a more immediate example, how we are responding to the flood of manuscripts passed around in a workshop, or in Birkert’s example above, behind the editor’s desk. The contemporary essay, creative writing for that matter, need not be a “gloriously useless” undertaking as Eagleton says. The workshop I attended didn’t make any real demands on writers. Nor did we make any demands on each other. Our writing instructor advised our class against “attacking below the belt.” Subsequently, it was easy for us to surfeit our classmates with comments on the “superb” elements in their writing, but when someone’s prose lumbered, if it left gaping holes in meaning and depth, if it didn’t stand a chance in meeting an editor’s eye—and most of what I read could be classified as such—we didn’t say so.

Some critics are placing more demands on the essayist. In “What’s Wrong with the American Essay” Cristina Nehring writes:

The Essay is in a bad way. . . If the genre is neglected in our day it is first and foremost because its authors have lost their nerve. It is because essayists—and their editors, their anthologies and the taste-makers on whom they depend—have lost the courage to address large subjects in a large way. . . And here lies the problem with essayists today: not that they speak of themselves, but that they will do so with no effort to make their experience relevant or useful to anyone else, with no effort to extract from it any generalized insight into the human condition. It is as though they were unthinking stenographers. . . pedantically taking down their own experience simply because it is their own. . . And here is what the essayist ought to offer: ideas. . . Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements.

I’d settle for more essays on penmanship; the essay can observe and record the domestic, and it can celebrate the “little.” Daring pronouncements or not, Nehring’s essay still raises a critical point. Readers assume that the essay is home turf for the self-absorbed. They grant the essayist this space and welcome the musings of the solitary voice against the clamor of the information flooded media. The essay favors digression, however egocentric. Its conclusion may end up overturned in a gulley, far from the homing ground from which it set out, but the reader still expects the essayist to express something about our “human condition.” And while the essayist devotes hours each day to recording ideas large and small, attempting closure with at least one polished sentence, one phrase that rings true, the reader will always want to have a part as well.

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(1) This colleague has a Ph.D. in American literature from Yale. She says she’s never bothered reading the literary quarterlies because their subject matter is “inconsequential” and “marginal.” Another colleague from the composition and rhetoric department recently had one of his books reviewed in a journal that I usually read cover to cover. When I asked him if he’d read it—the issue had been circulating for a couple of months—he said, “No, I had no idea this was out there, but please put it on hold for me.” These responses make me curious as to who it is exactly, if not the academics themselves, that defines this “publishing insider” group, which Mr. Gutkind is referring to above.

(2) I’d considered providing examples of essays here that appear caught in their own narcissistic muck, but I’m assuming the quarterly reader can already discern the difference in quality and approach between this example and the lot of other essays, which fail to summon the reader in for a closer look. As I mention below, what distinguishes one from the other is less a matter of individual taste for subject matter or reader preference—this is an essay about penmanship, after all, a lackluster subject— than it is a matter of talent.

(3) This essay later won the National Magazine Award for best essay in 2007.

(4) Can we make a connection between the rise of MFA programs with the spate of new quarterlies? I’m not arguing against the debut of more quarterlies—a handful of new titles that have appeared over the last couple of years are publishing superb material—but the super abundance of new titles are destined to contribute further to King’s idea of the bottom shelf factor.

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WORKS CITED

Birkerts, Sven. “Traction.” AGNI 64: 1-7.

Emblidge, David. “The Palmer Method: Penmanship and Our Time.” The Southwest Review 91.4 (summer 2007): 327-344.

Gutkind, Lee, ed. “Fame and Obscurity (With Appreciation to Gay Talese) and our Search for the Best Creative Nonfiction.” The Best Creative Fiction Vol.1. New York: W.W. Norton: 2007.

Kennedy, Thomas. “I am Joe’s Prostrate.” New Letters 70 3.4 2007.

King, Stephen. “What Ails the Short Story?” New York Times Book Review: September 30, 2007.

Nehring, Cristina. “What’s Wrong with the American Essay?” Truthdig. Nov. 29, 2007. [link]