These Things Will Make You Moody

Last night I checked my email late, just because. There, waiting, was rejection number 3,435 from a certain online journal. Hyperbole, of course. But it feels that way and every time they tell me no, I spend a few moments sulking. This time, since it was late, I headed to bed gripped by this ugly mood, only to find my daughter awake in her room and looking terribly sad. She’d had a bad dream or wasn’t feeling well – her articulation of the problem was poor – but I picked her up and carried her to my bed and let her sleep on my shoulder.

Then I thought of this. An essay at Big Other where Amber Sparks admits to feeling undo anxiety because she’s constantly reading on Facebook (and elsewhere) about other writer’s publications/readings/general success. She feels behind; she feels pressured to keep up and write more and be noticed more and achieve more. And I’m lying there with my daughter on my shoulder and I’m feeling sorry for myself for this latest rejection, except now I’m wondering why. The story is good. Many of the pieces I’ve sent to this particular journal have been good. And, frankly, despite their prestige, I really only enjoy half of what they publish and tend to find the other half perfect presentations of the emperor’s new clothes. Why do I keep submitting to a journal with an aesthetic that I think tends towards the incomprehensible for incomprehensibility’s sake, that holds up a certain kind of obfuscation as something grand when it is, in my opinion, mostly something meaningless.

This isn’t an attack on certain styles of writing; aesthetics vary and I know I don't have the most experimental of tastes. But, seriously, why the hell am I submitting to (and getting disappointed by) a journal that is clearly operating at an angle different from my own?

The answer is: it’d be really cool to appear there. I mean, it seems like everyone else gets published there. Shouldn’t I want to be published there? Isn’t it imperative for me to keep up with the writing joneses? See me, see me, I’m a talented and prolific writer!

This is silly. This is unhealthy. We’re not a factory; we’re not measured on output. And the quality of our work doesn’t change based on where it appears. A good story is a good story is a good story. The goal, I think, should be to write those good stories and let the rest work itself out. If it takes a long time to craft that story, then it takes a long time. If it takes fifty rejections to find a home for that story, then it takes fifty rejections.

At least these are the thoughts that came to me last night. With my daughter on my shoulder. The purpose of things and such. The point of it all.

"The Abomination" at decomP

The February issue of decomP is live and my story "The Abomination" appears within. It's a monster story. It's part of a little project I'm working on about various beasties and such and I couldn't be more pleased to have it in decomP.

Thanks to Jason Jordan for including me!

Do You Read Booth?

Should. It tends to publish stories and poems that refuse to let you stop reading.

Check out: "Run Time" by Jesse Goolsby. It's one of those stories where the plot is minimal but that doesn't matter. It holds you.

And Sometimes It's Just About Getting Ecstatic

The purpose of writing? The big story behind what we do? Yeah, I’ve been known to talk about that.

That’s why I was so entranced by M Kitchell’s HTMLGiant post that uses Dan Hoy’s THE PIN-UP STAKES to focus in on what we as writers (or at least what he, as an artist) should want to achieve/do/create. It’s one of those high-speed, wind-whipping-in-your-mouth kind of posts that concludes with the idea – to paraphrase – that we’re either blowing up the order of things or we’re falling into the trap of the already-is. And that already-is – the world as it stands – is a shitty place that we already understand all too well.

Kitchell doesn’t want to be told how the world IS. He wants to “end the world and change life.”

Diversion here (although this all matters to the end I envision for this post): Kitchell spends a chunk of his post chastising those who think the young can’t write about Important Things (he’s in his mid-twenties he says). He’s right, of course. Age and experience/wisdom/artistry do not have to correlate. But what’s cool is: he makes that argument while freely sounding his age. Which is to say: he has the enthusiasm and the fuck-you attitude of a guy in his mid-twenties.

I bring that up because, in his post, he quotes my post over at Hayden’s Ferry Review. And he quotes me as an example of what he DOESN’T want writing to do. Which is to say, he doesn’t want to read/write anything that: “ takes you into the unique life of an “other,” a life that in some way broadens your own understanding of the world, that brings illumination to places previously darkened.”

But the thing is, we’re making similar points. Or so I think we are. I mean, what I want out of fiction –as a reader – is to be shown something new. I want to have my brain reshaped. I’m not particularly interested in reading the kinds of quiet, realist fiction that makes up such a big chunk of American literature. That’s not to say I have anything against “realism” – I just have something against realism that I’ve already experienced, already seen, already spent God knows how much of my reading life rolling around inside the carcass of.

My HFR post was kind of about that – an argument in favor of making fiction new and necessary. And yet, when Kitchell read it, he found something staid in my words. What’s going on? Well, maybe I just think I agree with him but I really don’t (because I’m not getting his point). Or, maybe it is what I think it is: a difference in age and disposition.

Age how? Age as in: I don’t know too many people in their mid-thirties (as I am) who haven’t changed in their opinions and temperaments in the decade since their mid-twenties. Something happens in that decade that causes most people to disconnect from the ecstatic. We lose our excitability and find ourselves sunk into the pragmatic. So we write essays that are “admirable” (Kitchell’s words to describe my piece) rather than “wind-whipping-in-your-mouth.” This isn’t true for everyone, of course, and the degrees of change varies depending on the person. But for me, ten years ago, I’d have wanted to write a piece like Kitchell wrote. Now? Not happening. Or at least it’s not happening without me looking like the guy with the toupee in the dance club.

But I’m glad there’s someone out there writing shit like Kitchell wrote. We need the ecstatic. We need to be reminded that Big Things are possible and that, despite whatever has changed in our lives, we can still be turned on by ideas. Or at least I need that. I trend towards the square. But I still want a world in which people read something like Kitchell’s post and then everyone agrees they need to go out, get drunk, and discuss the damn thing until that place on the corner starts serving breakfast.

Because, really, it probably doesn’t matter HOW we want to approach this writing/art thing (realism, meta, nonsense, whatever). It just matters that we’re still enraptured by its possibilities.

Symbols and Death and All of This

Horrible things happened in Tucson this past weekend. You know this, of course. And you know what followed – the mourning, yes, but also the finger pointing, the political gamesmanship of fixing blame. This wasn’t just the usual human need to find something to repair whenever something so tragically breaks, but a markedly political need to “win” something or to “not lose” something, both “sides” turning tragedy into an opportunity to play politics, to “prove” the veracity of their particular world view, or prove the invalidity of their opponent’s.

I use quotations there. Because there are no sides except those we artificially impose and there is no proof for ideology. We create these concepts because, without them, there appears to be no order . We generate symbols (these right here that I’m using to write with and other symbols like flags and peace signs and entire people and movements) and we manipulate these symbols to force meaning into our world. And this is okay, of course. Necessary. What is writing but the creation of meaning out of abstraction?

But here’s the thing, here’s what I believe: nothing is as simple as our structures often lead us to believe. A human being doesn’t walk into a grocery store and shoot another human being in the head because yet another human being used gun sights in an advertisement. Sure, those gun sights and other symbols may have filtered in to the killer’s paranoid psyche and maybe in some unknowable, unverifiable way those symbols contributed to the act.

It’d be easy to believe this. Because symbols are power, right? Because symbols are the way we organize our reality? But let’s not fool ourselves about what words and symbols really are. It’s all nothing more than artifice. Than construct. What truly exists can never be captured in symbols. Yes – hell yes – we need more civility, more consideration, more compassion in our modern discourse. And, hell yes, hate breeds hate and there's never a wrong moment to condemn those who demonize, who divide, who callously ruin. But in all this conversation about the power of words – of symbols – I think it’s important to remember that all words and all symbols will always fall short of truth.

Some things defy our attempts at order. Some things exist outside categorization. Some things are, by their nature, incomprehensible. And I think it’s okay to admit that.

Guest Post Up at Hayden's Ferry

I've written a contributor's spotlight over at Hayden's Ferry; it's about race and class and gender in the world of literary publishing. It's something I've been thinking about for awhile and something the amazing Roxane Gay brought to the forefront of the conversation last month at HTMLGiant.

Hope you get a chance to check it out here.

Thanks to Beth Staples for working with me on this and giving me the opportunity to post it on Hayden Ferry's blog.

New Things

Couple new pieces out there in the world.

My poem-like thing "How to Pronounce Water" is part of Mud Luscious 14; many thanks to Andrew Borgstrom who put this awesome issue together.

And "Stars Like Glass" is up at Necessary Fiction as part of this month's first footing project. Thanks to Steve Himmer for allowing me to be a part of this -- the idea is to take the last line of a story and make it the first line of a new story. Cool stuff.

Talking About He Is Talking to the Fat Lady

When I heard xTx was releasing a chapbook, I jumped. Glad I did because I’m now the proud owner of one of the few printed versions (#36 in fact) of He Is Talking to the Fat Lady; and I love owning printed things. I don’t even have to feel guilty for hording words. The chapbook is digitally available here at Safety Third.

This isn’t a review. This is a suggestion that you get a hold of the stories contained within He Is Talking to the Fat Lady. While a lot of writers are flitting around the edges of ennui and introspection, xTx is driving straight into the gut. The result is a collection of stories that combine physical violence and various kinds numbness to create a beautifully desperate look at emotional frailty and our attempts at resilience.

I often think we live in an overwhelming time, where none of us truly has the capacity to bear or even process the stories of horror and loss and struggle that flood into our lives through all these connections. xTx is capturing that overwhelming experience in a way few writers can.

That sounds like a review. Maybe it’s a review. But I intend it as a recommendation.

"The Nameless" at PANK

If this was Novemeber, I could say Happy PANKsgiving and feel mildly clever. But it's December. So maybe: Merry PANKsmas. I'm not sure that's appropriately non-demoninational. It also sounds weird.

In any case, this is all to say that the December PANK is live right here and it contains my story-like thing "The Nameless."

So ends today's self-promotion.

How We Talk About This Thing We Do

For reasons not worth explaining, I was quote-hunting today, centering my efforts on the various arts and their various inspirations. I looked for quotes on dancing and music and painting and poetry and general writing (aka that thing we term fiction).

Here’s what prompted this post: for all the arts save general writing (aka that thing we term fiction), the quote sites overflowed with pleasant little missives about how said art was the yada yada whatever journey to/revelation of truth/beauty/life. Good quotes. Perfect for my needs today.

Now, as for those general writing quotes, I’d say 90% or more pretty much discussed what a god-awful slog this business of ours is and how it requires nothing short of pulling your soul out of your nose/anus/ear/pores.

Poetry? Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat (Frost). Poetry is an echo, asking shadow to dance (Sandburg). General writing? Yeah, that’s pain, pain, suffering, pain.

Bollocks.

Bollocks. Bollocks.

Writing – general writing, fiction writing, whatever – is the most freeing thing I do. As silly as it sounds, I get to be a lover, a killer, a mechanic, a prince (actually, I don’t think I’ve ever written about a prince, but I sure as hell could). I get to recreate the world daily. I get to squeeze this big mess of nonsense into something that contains meaning – at least to me, at least for me. And that’s not nothing. That’s not something everyone gets to do.

Sure, some days it’s a pain to write – because I’m tired or sad or busy or because I’m feeling suffocated by the omnipresent fear that my creation will fall painfully short of my vision. But despite this, I do write. And I do love it.

So, in the event I’m ever fortunate enough to be Bartlett’s worthy, I pledge to say something like this: Writing is the way we slice through the chains that hold us inside ourselves. Writing is how we, for even a moment, stop being so damn lonely.

Enough now. Back to this story of mine that’s falling painfully short of my vision for it.

"Leap" at Hayden's Ferry Review

Thanks so much to Beth Staples and the editors at Hayden's Ferry Review for including my story "Leap" in Issue #47. The story is available in the print issue; or you can read it online here.






The opening:

They found my roommate’s body stuffed into a drainage pipe two miles from campus. I saw it on the news before anyone came to my dorm-room door. “Body of Missing Student Believed Found.” He’d been dead for five days. I’d like to claim I was the one who’d reported him missing. But I hadn’t even known he was gone until his girlfriend called the police.

The knocks at my door began a few minutes after the news of his death hit. Light tapping at first. Then people banging, shouting for me to open. I imagined them swarming in the hall. If I’d opened the door, they would’ve eaten me. Skin first and then the red parts. I sat in my desk chair next to the window, the February air coming in cold as I watched my roommate’s fish swim circles in his tank. A key rattled in the lock. Then the door opened, and there was the resident assistant with two cops, clones of each other, formal posture, pug faces. A crowd gathered behind them but didn’t come in. “You the roommate of Baron Butler?” one of the cops asked. The RA told him I was. “That’s David Nikkola,” he said. My name is Davis. But I offered no correction. Or maybe I mumbled one. I don’t know. This was five years ago now.

Cut Through the Bone Now Available!

You should order this book. Because Ethel Rohan is amazing. And amazing writers should be read.

Buy it here.

Finding Meaning in How They Were Found

The first time I read a collection of David Foster Wallace’s short stories, the depth of his fiction reminded me of the depth in great essays. The man had a point to everything he wrote; his fiction doesn’t just tell a story (in the same way his nonfiction doesn’t just, say, report on a lobster festival). He was always needling at something more important, something worth examining, something worth trying to understand even if understanding is/was impossible.

While reading How They Were Found, Matt Bell’s excellent new collection of stories from Keyhole Press, I saw Bell engaging in a similar process of digging. Bell – while a very different writer than Wallace – doesn’t keep to the surface. The stories in How They Were Found dig into essential questions. How do we organize our life after tragedy? How do we comprehend that which has no explanation? How do we uncover what matters amidst so much that seems so meaningless?

Confession: a lot of modern fiction bores me. Truly. Many of the short stories I encounter are well-written and nicely controlled, but ultimately unimportant because of their smallness in consequence or because they travel such well-trodden terrain. Bell doesn’t write that kind of fiction. Bell writes fiction that roils with a desperate want to comprehend this world, a burning desire to seek out and grasp some truth, even if it's small, even if it vanishes in a breath.

From the very first story that follows a man using a system of cartography to seek out a lost love to “The Receiving Tower” where the main character is losing his memory (in a possibly post-apocalyptic world, nonetheless) to the structural experimentation of “Wolf Parts,” “The Collectors” and particularly “An Index Of How Our Family Was Killed,” Bell has assembled a collection filled with characters yearning for understanding and propelled by a belief that such understanding is actually possible. It’s that yearning – that hope – that pushes us to care and makes us want to read more, even when the stories turn disturbing (helpful tip: read “Dredge” on an empty stomach).

Writers enamored with inventive structures and rich language sometimes produce impenetrable work that is more literary artifact than meaningful story. Fortunately, despite the complexities in many of Bell’s stories in this collection, they are still stories. Which is to say: they are good reads. Nothing feels overly forced; nothing feels done just for the sake of showing off writerly abilities or messing around with language for the sake of messing around with language. The structural choices within How They Were Found are the product of specific characters and their specific need for understanding. Bell allows his characters to present information in whatever ways are most meaningful to them. Sometimes, that’s linear with traditional flashbacks, but sometimes that’s in the form of an alphabetized list. The result is a collection of stories that feels born from the characters and not from the mind of some overly playful writer.

The collection, of course, is not perfect. The best stories (“Collectors” and “An Index Of How Our Family Was Killed” being my personal favorites), so outshine some of the smaller stories in this collection that, when going back to write this review, I came across a couple of stories I’d completely forgotten. This is not an uncommon problem in story collections. But, with Bell, I get the sense that it’s a consequence of him being a writer just beginning to come into his own. The collection is certainly well-assembled and well-paced, but there are softer spots, stories that lack the openness of some of the collection’s best stories, as if Bell is still working to find a balance between his desire to cross literary boundaries and his desire to make his stories meaningful. The stories that make this collection brilliant are the ones that Bell allows the reader to move through and explore. The stories that shine less so are the ones where I felt Bell leading me by the hand (i.e.: “Hold Onto Your Vacuum” loses some of its whacked-out strangeness once the sadistic Teacher explains the purpose of his violence. I would have liked if the meaning of the story had been much less tidy.).

Nevertheless, How They Were Found is an excellent collection and is worth reading by anyone who enjoys good stories. Even more so, it’s a collection worth reading for those who want their fiction to contain deeper meanings. Fiction, at its best, is a submersion into the questions of its age. And in a world of random violence, cultural wars and proliferating “truths,” I’m not sure there are too many questions more important than: how do we find meaning in all of this? Matt Bell explores that very issue. And it’s what makes his collection a true standout.

This Thing of Ours

Sometimes I get frustrated. Out of whack. Writing will do that to you. Just trying to write will do that to you. The other night I was emailing a fellow writer and it all just kind of fell apart for me. Or came together in that weird way collapses combine what wasn’t before combined.

I crib from that email here because I feel the impetus to do so. You see, I’m in a weird place: I’ve got this novel that I would really, really love to get out into the world, but those things take time and as those things are taking time, I’m trying to make a living and trying to keep writing and trying to raise a family and trying be something that simulates normal. It’s all just a dog pile after awhile.

This thing we do ... this writing thing ... it’s a fight. It’s a fight against the cultural impetus to hang it up. And it has been a fight since the moment we realized we want to write, hasn't it? I mean, everything I've encountered in life has tried to push me into something less-than art. My job as a copywriter is the perfect example. What a ruinous compromise! Or, rather, it would be ruinous if I was to convince myself that it’s enough to call those websites and brochures and ad campaigns real writing. I have to fight to keep them in their place. To call them a paycheck. To give them no more emotional weight than money deserves. I often fail at this. I often let my day be destroyed by the petty happenings of my job.

Even now, I think: oh, shit, I shouldn’t be writing this. Someone who pays me will read it and assume I don’t care, that I’m not giving my copywriting my all. But that’s not the point. The point is really the opposite: to make a successful living – to feed a family and all of that – you better as hell give it your all. But giving your all to one thing makes it that much harder to give your all to another thing, particularly when that other thing is this pursuit – this mostly uncompensated pursuit – of something that might be art.

It’s brutal out there, out here. Doesn't matter what your choices have been. Single. Married. Kids. No kids. Rich. Poor. This is not a culture that values what we do in any grand sense. This is a culture of enterprise, of capitalism. Dreamers are rewarded only by the economic viability of their dreams. We are not rewarded merely for the capacity to express those dreams in ways no one else can. And yet we choose to keep at it -- to try to pierce through the culture, to expose some small bit of truth or beauty or horror or failure. We jab and jab and jab and only those who keep at it can hope to succeed.

So I keep at it. Because the alternative is shit. The alternative is giving into all those little nits that try to fill me with self hate, that try to tell me I’m nothing but mediocre. That say: make a damn living, man. Go to Vegas. Drink good wine. Forget this thing with words.

Can’t. Won’t.

I’m in a mood. So I write.

What Wal-Mart Doesn't Have

I needed things last night. An assortment of items affiliated only by their eventual ownership by me. A wireless router. Some light bulbs. Bananas. I went to Wal-Mart because it was close and it was late and sometimes convenience wins.

But I really dislike Wal-Mart. I’m not talking about its business practices, I’m talking about their stores. They are unwelcoming. Soulless. They grab you by the back of the neck and shove your face into the fact that you are a consumer and every damn thing is a commodity. You like to eat? Tough. Wal-Mart doesn’t sell the joy of eating. They sell packaged foodstuffs. You like to look attractive? Wal-Mart doesn’t sell fashion, they sell body coverage items.

It’s all about the sell. Where what cog fits into what hole.

Sure, there are those who will say that’s what all stores do. And there are those who will blame the soul-sucking nature of capitalism in that weird, simplistic way people like to blame complex, inexact systems for the majority of our problems. But I believe that most of life is just people interacting with people. And while the fulfillment of basic needs is obviously essential, people don’t just connect through basic needs. We have passions and fears and desires and insecurities and we pursue those or try to mitigate those through human interaction.

Wal-Mart removes all of that upper-level stuff.

I mean, sure, they try to make their stores bright and clean, but they go to no effort to relate to their customers on anything more than a transactional level. Just because I am a person who needs to buy an item doesn’t mean I have to be reduced to a personality-less consumer. I go to a place like Target (which provides essentially the same items as Wal-Mart) and I feel that there’s someone human behind the store – someone who has taken a few minutes to consider what I might want, not just what I might need.

I could go on, more examples and all of that. But I’m going to end up talking in circles. My point isn’t to throw Wal-Mart onto the pyre, it’s to note how alienating their business-model is and how that alienation is becoming such a defining feature of our society. I don’t much go in for the overheated cries that our civilization is failing, but I take notice of all these ways we’re removing ourselves not just from each other but from our own personalities, our own identities.

I mean, we talk about what the great literary/artistic themes of this period are and will be and I keep coming back to this notion of alienation. Not the lost generation stuff of nearly a century ago, but a far stranger alienation, one that can only be broken through with increasingly bold leaps of faith (in love or God or just in the very notion of truth).

I read a lot of these writers publishing on-line (Roxane Gay and Ethel Rohan and Matt Bell and Amber Sparks and all the others I've referenced on this blog) and I read others like Edward P. Jones and someone like the late David Markson (whose Wittgenstein’s Mistress was about 20 years ahead of its time) and I see all these characters hoping and dreaming for these connections that might not even exist or are only found at great costs, and I think, my God, this is what’s happening. This rebellion against alienation. Taking to the barricades. Maybe in failure but always in passion. The return of sentimentalism not as some saccharine or moralistic device but as a real attempt to forge connection, one person to the next, through this bizarre period where a trip to buy a router and bananas can make you feel as if your very identity has been bludgeoned.

I overstate. Or oversimplify. But maybe the point is in there.