Coming to the End of the Semester

So it’s almost the end of the semester, and I’m trying to get all my writing in order. Along with the piece I wrote for Digital Media Theory, I’m going to have eight full length pieces I need to submit in the fall along with three pieces of flash fiction. Jeeeeeeeeeeeeee-sus. The amount of time it takes to research journals–I submit each piece to 10 different places–is astronomical. Especially considering the odds. Did you know that landing a story in The Paris Review is far more difficult than getting a novel published? Maybe you did, but it’s certainly something I didn’t start thinking about until recently. So as I revise and prepare for this summer, I’m also going to be working on novel length projects as that’s where my skills more naturally gravitate toward anyway.

So along with reading a plethora of journals to see where my fiction will fit, I’m also going to be doing some research for the novel projects and of course, reading a ton of fiction as it’s one of the best ways to learn. With that in mind, I thought I’d share my incredibly tentative and undeveloped summer reading list. Feel free to add your own or chime in on mine.

Orson Welles Biography (Anyone know the definitive one?)
Some brief history of Pittsburgh (Same question as above)
October Light – John Gardner
Long for this World – Michael Byers
A Widow for One Year – John Irving
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
Whatever Happened to Anna K.? – Irina Reyna
Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
The Coast of Chicago – Stuart Dybek
Last Night – James Salter
Burning Down the House – Charles Baxter
Twilight of the Superheroes – Deborah Eisenberg
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline – George Sanders

Of course, what I’m missing are the old standby’s. So I’m going to have to add those as I go. But yeah, let me know what you’re planning on tackling in the months ahead.

Post Humanity and Experimentation

I’ve been revising the hell out of my LHC piece as of late and after getting a lot of feedback from other MFA students–and during my latest rewrite of the ending–I realized that the general thrust of the piece was building to the question of whether or not we as a species have moved beyond humanity.  I’m quite pleased with this development as it dovetails nicely with what we’ve been discussing in Digital Media Theory this semester, and it gives me yet another opportunity to rework the text from this new perspective. If the protagonist–a scientists living underground in the Large Hadron Collider–comes to the end of the story with a few new insights and many more questions about post humanity, then I need to seed those queries and revelations from page one on. I know many apprentice writers really hate revision, but I’m an adamant proponent of the school that believes revision is the only way to make a story complete. So to sum up: Jack Kerouac can go fuck himself.

Lately, I’ve been rereading George Saunders’ Pastoralia which was originally the inspiration for this writing project that would be slightly less realistic than what I’m used to writing. While reading Saunders, I found myself sighing a breath of relief as my work doesn’t appear–to me at least–to be especially derivative of his early work. But then that got me thinking about what it is about Saunders I enjoy, when I dislike so much of experimental writing, especially all that nonsense that came out in the 60s and 70s and overshadowed true masters of the form like Richard Yates until the golden age of 1980s working class realism swung everything back into equilibrium. And I think what it comes down to, for me anyway, is that I’ve always pegged realism and experimentation in two very separate camps: one is interesting in making you feel emotions and one is interested in making you think intellectually.

I’ve always been drawn to work that has an emotional center which is why it’s been hard to enjoy work like White Noise and The Crying of Lot 49 as much as I’m supposed to. But Saunders packs a lot of heart into his stories. And I’m not talking about sentimentality. Richard Yates–my literary god–was a staunch opponent of all things sentimental. But I think early Saunders gets a bad wrap when it’s called purely intellectual or merely exercises; Saunders is interested in characters and the choices they make, not so much in the overarching structures of society. I guess the reason why I’m so much more interested in the emotional core of stories is because of my undergrad where we read nothing but realism and everyone heavily favored T.S Eliot and the new critics, but I’d like to think even if that wasn’t the case I wouldn’t have been swayed completely into the other side of the literary aisle.

Research

Over the last few days I’ve whittled the current down to 19 pages as I’d hoped. I also am close to finishing a presentable draft of what I hope will turn into the second piece of the short story cycle. But mostly I’ve been focused on journal research, something I started when I attended AWP this year. For those not in the know, it’s the biggest writers convention of the year and always a good place to network. This was my first time and one of my teachers introduced me to one of the editors over at BOMB, a major journal in the lit world based out of NYC. Long story short, I’m now writing book reviews for their internet blog. Woo. Anyway, research:

1) Redivider (Rejected Once, Have a story there now)
Style: Quirky realism, occasional experimentation, usually in flash fiction form–
Publishes: 10 stories, lots of emerging writers/MFA students, few writers with books out
Their writers have published in:
Glimmer Train
Bat City Review
Another Chicago Magazine
The New Orleans Review
Barrelhouse 2
Bayou
The Missouri Review
Quick Fiction 2
The Greensboro Review
The Literary Review
Other Voices
ZYZZYVA
Blue Earth Review
Storyglossia
Cake Train
5_Trope

2) The Missouri Review
Style: Realism
Publishes: 5 stories, first published story of an emerging writer, emerging writers with story pubs., novelists
Their writers have published in:
LIT
Fifth Wednesday Journal
The Madison Review
Flyway
Santa Clara Review
New Ohio Review
Yale Review
Southern Review 2
Sewanee Review
Hudson Review
McSweeney’s
Vice
Virginia Quarterly Review
Zoetrope

3) Crazyhorse
Style: Iowa realism
Publishes: 6 stories, professors, established short story writers like Susan Perabo and Gary Fincke, maybe 1/3rd emerging
Their writers have published in:
Prairie Schooner
TriQuarterly
Michigan Quarterly Review
The Sun
Tin House
The Greensboro Review 2
The Mississippi Review
The Missouri Review 2 GF
Glimmer Train
One Story
The Brooklyn Review
Guilt & Pleasure
Meridian
Other Voices
The Massachusetts Review
River Styx
New England Review
The Kenyon Review GF
Pleiades GF
Ploughshares GF

4) Subtropics
Style: Realism, kind of fringe, a lot of the same writers again and again, maybe 1 or 2 emerging, occasional traditional realism
Publishes: 6 short stories, 1 flash, novelists and foreign writers
Their Writers Have Published In:
New York Tyrant
New Orleans Review
Sleepingfish

5) Western Humanities Review
Style: Experimental
Publishes: 3 stories, 2 novel excerpts, lit crit, novelists, some emerging
Their Writers Have Published In:
Bomb
Ploughshares
McSweeney’s 2
The Believer
Rain Taxi
Bookforum
The Denver Quarterly
The Iowa Review

6) The Evansville Review
Style: Quality isn’t great, hit or miss, realism, very simplistic prose
Publishes: 6 short stories, all emerging writers, former Pitt grads
Their Writers Have Published In:
Cold-Drill
Green Hills Literary Lantern 2
MacGuffin
Oyez Review
The William and Mary Review
New Delta Review
Concho River Review
Barrelhouse
HazMat Review
Artful Dodge
Vestal Review 2
Contrary
Diet Soap
Hecale
42opus
Fugue
Jabberwock Review
Slow Trains Literary Journal
Riversedge
Hunger Mountain
Connecticut Review
The Saint Ann’s Review
Dalhousie Review
Clackamas Literary Review
Cairn
King’s English

7) The Florida Review
Style: Denis Johnson-y harsh realism, not necessarily in subject matter but in tone, great quality
Publishes: 7 short stories, Almost all Emerging writers, some have books but not in fiction
Their Writers Have Published In:
The Chattahoochee Review
580-Split
Painted Bride Quarterly
The Evansville Review
Fugue
The Gettysburg Review
Story
Ontario Review
Commentary
Michigan Quarterly Review
Cottonwood
The Mississippi Review
BOMB
Glimmer Train
Black Warrior Review
The Carolina Quarterly
Crazyhorse
The Cream City Review
Passages North
Orchid
The Rio Grande Review\
The Baltimore Review
Jabberwock Review
Weber Studies
Oxford Magazine
Witness
North American Review
Threepenny Review
Willow Springs

SPRING BREAK!!!!!!!!1111

So I used part of my spring break to get a lot of writing done. I’ve been working on some flash fiction recently, which is a genre I’ve never really dabbled in, and of course, the trusty old LHC story. I’ve been revising the hell out of the piece and I’ve also run it by some other writer friends from the MFA program and have been incorporating their suggestions. My goal is to get it down to about 19 pages which is a respectable length and then send it out to some magazines at the beginning of the summer or start of the fall.  Most journals don’t read over the summer months, but a few hold pay to enter contests that cover subscription costs. Although, to be honest, usually it’s always established writers who end up winning those, and the editor of Tin House–a mag I’ll definitely be submitting the Collider piece to–told a bunch of us at Pitt that emerging writers are better off just vying for out and out publications instead of contest victories.

One interesting development I stumbled across over break was the second story in a cycle I’m beginning to work on concerning the Collider. While the first piece focuses on a female scientist, the second one is in the third person and follows a janitor who begins to see a lot of familiar faces from his surface life down in the underground research compound. I knocked out a draft in about a week and started planning out some of the other stories. It’s interesting because my manuscript’s going to be due at the end of ’09 for the MFA program, and for awhile I’ve figured I’d submit a novel I’ve been writing and revising for about…. 11 months now titled Burn All Your Cities. But now that graduation is a bit closer, I am considering using this summer to write a ton of Collider stories and submitting a story cycle ala Winesburg, Ohio, The Things They Carried, Circus in Winter, etc. etc.

One final note: in my Digital Theory class we discussed apes that were raised by robot mothers who ended up autistic, schizophrenic and impotent. I’m not sure if I located the exact article but I did manage to track down this, which was incredibly helpful during the second Collider piece, tentatively titled “This Neighborhood’s Getting Worse Every Day.” Because if you’re working on a collection of stories set in a scientific research compound, you have to work in impotent apes raised by robots if you can.

First Drafts

Since last post, I’ve completed a first draft. Interesting decisions were made. I went with a first person female voice mainly because I haven’t done one in so long and liked the idea of a strong female lead in an underground compound comprised mostly of men. Like I’d anticipated, as the story developed it became more about how technology makes people even lonelier despite having more access to humans than ever before. What I hadn’t expected was the strange kind of personality disorders that developed as the piece went on, something I attribute to the plasticy–for lack of a better term-world the characters inhabit.

I thought it would be very difficult for me to transition from writing straight realism to something a bit more off kilter, but since my work has always been deeply concerned with place and setting, the Large Hadron Collider facility served as the anchor for me mentally in this piece. My LHC is quite different from the real world LHC–in fact, as the story progressed, it slowly became more of a dubious reflection of the real life American office world more than anything else–but as I stated in the previous post, this freed me from the scientific jargon that would have overwhelmed the piece had I kept it straight realism. That’s not to say that jargon didn’t make it in. There’s virtual worlds ala Second Life, a mathematical theorem based on the first Apple computer chipset, the LHC observation theatre is called the Bergsonian, and the protagonist goes by the username “The Digital Narcissist” in AlternaLife, my stand in for the aforementioned Second Life.

So to sum up, things are going well at this point, but I am a meticulous reviser and will probably exchange this piece with other writers I trust before moving forward. Before I finish up today, I thought I’d leave a few links to some of the research that proved invaluable during the initial writing process.

Virtual Child Birth in Second Life

Stephen Hawking Claims Collider is “Crucial” to Human Survival

LHC Comes Online; World Fails to End

Introductions

As you’ve undoubtedly ascertained from reading the about page, I’m using the WordPress platform to talk about what my writing process is like and the difficulties and challenges that will arise while working on this piece.  Before I get to that, however, I think I need to do a bit of an introduction to explain where I am in relation to this work and in my writing in general.

I’ve been writing fiction seriously for a few years now. I’m a current MFA student at the University of Pittsburgh and so far I’ve published one short story in Folio, American University’s literary journal, and I’ve also been awarded runner-up in a creative nonfiction contest judged by Dan Chaon. So far, I’ve only dabbled in literary realism in the vein of writers like Tom Perrotta, Charles Baxter, Antonya Nelson, etc. etc. and I thought it would be a nice challenge to myself to try and write something slightly unrealistic, maybe stylistically reminiscent of early George Saunders before he goes off the deep end in terms of experimentation and utter nonsense.

What prompted me to take on this experiment was my growing obsession with the Large Hadron Collider. I started peppering references to it in my short stories as a means to portray apocalyptic dread in a post-9/11 world. Eventually I decided I wanted to write a story set in the underground bunker but the technology was too daunting. I’d never be able to get all the details straight and quickly realized the only way to move forward with the project was to set it in a slightly off kilter world where rules could be shifted if necessary.

So that’s where I’m at now. I’m working on a draft of the story currently and will update about my progress as I go.