Wednesday

♫ Intern interviews, meeting, interviews, office hours, workshop, thunk.

I'm a grad student, a composition instructor and now I'm co-managing editor of Third Coast magazine. What have I gotten myself into?

NaNoNotes

Yes, it's getting to be that time of year again. This go around I am determined to succeed in spite of life, in spite of stress and in spite of myself and my excuse making tendencies. In short, I am going to be a true NaNo-Warrior this go around.

From Lynn Veihl:

There will be some online grumbling about NaNo'ers, as there is every year, from people who don't like the idea of unpublished, uneducated, unworthy riff raff writing novels. It's really cute how they get such a knot in their knickers over it, too, but don't let them discourage you. You don't need anyone's permission to write but your own. I'm proof of that.[read more]

(she's also the maker of the lovely graphic)

Ad of the Week

Ack! The first was, indeed, removed by user as JES pointed out ... but we have another format up and it's fixed now :)

Quote Post

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
- Flannery O'Connor

If the writer is involved in an emotion that too will be transferred through all the steps it takes to get a story from the mind to the reader. I have made [people] weep to hear me read the last four paragraphs of that story (The Ship Who Sang). Of course I'm weeping too, and barely able to speak; I wrote it as therapy for the grief I felt for the death of my father.
- Anne McCaffrey

"A writer without a social conscience is like a frog without a vacuum cleaner."
- Loren Estleman

Don't ask so much what the world needs. Go out and do what makes you come alive, because what the world needs most are people who have come alive.
- Howard Thurman

The best way out is always through.
- Robert Frost

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
- Roald Dahl

"If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is indeed short at the longest."
- Henry David Thoreau

If my doctor told me I had six minutes to live I wouldn't brood. I would type a little faster.
- Issac Asimov

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
Dr. Seuss


We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it
- Edward R. Murrow

Season Premirers

I try to stay away from TV addiction. Try being the operative word. In reality I'm addicted to House, NCIS, Law & Order (thankfully all in reruns on the cable channels which can be viewed at almost anytime), and then Top Chef, Project Runway, Burn Notice and Grey's Anatomy. For a woman who's not addicted I sure do use a lot.

Let's forget my TV consumption problem for a minute and discuss Grey's Anatomy. Yes, I just said that; don't hate me.

Here's the deal: I don't follow spoilers and I don't like entertainment tabloids -- I have a hard enough time processing real news that I certainly don't need to spend time processing fake news via Hollywood. I heard rumor (one, only one has gotten through my internal Hollywood-gossip spam filter) about what might be happening this fall and that was that actors Katherine Heigl and T.R. Knight (Izzy and George) would not be returning to the show. Ack!

Okay, let's back track.

At the end of last season both characters "died." That is to say that they crossed over to the super-bright Hospital which equals death on the show. The too-bright, empty set serves as the "other world" and occasionally as the "in between" for characters that leave the show and make us (me) cry when doing so. Meredith spent almost three episodes in the super-bright set during season three, if you'll recall, and came back just fine.

Okay, spending that long dead and returning is an absolute stretch of the imagination but, *meh* believability = not important.

Which leads me to wonder if Izzy in her "prom" dress descending in the elevator to meet George in his soldier's uniform (which he's never gotten the chance to wear in "life" btw) all in the super-bright-hospital-of-the-dead really means they will remain dead. Surely one of them will live regardless of what the TV tabloids said to me months ago. Wouldn't that make the best fake out to leak to the press?

You could shake your head and say I'm a sap for wanting them to live, but, honestly, how do you think the show will function with both the "heart and soul" characters dead? All the other characters have crazy trust issues; there's a certain disbelief in humanity that, logically, will only deepen if Izzy and George die. Okay, Little Grey still believes in people but she's about it.

Needless to say, I will be spending two hours tonight answering all these questions.

I need your help for a Post Secret related memoir project

(please repost and repeat the information in the following letter on your blog and to your friends. I hope to conduct as many interviews as possible over the next three months)

Dear fans of Post Secret,

I am a graduate student in an MFA writing program where I am working on a memoir project involving three months of my life and my then obsession with Post Secret. The reason I am writing is because part of my current memoir project involves conducting semi-anonymous interviews with people who have interacted with Post Secret. Not just people who have sent in secrets like I have (although that would be great) but also with people who interact with the blog, online communities, go to Post Secret events or read the books.

What I mean by “semi-anonymous” interviews: I will be conducting these interviews primarily over email. I ask those volunteers who respond to give me a name (first with last initial is fine) but it need not be his or her real name. What is important to my memoir is that people be truthful in recalling their thoughts and emotions related to Post Secret, not that they divulge their identity—it is, after all, Post Secret.

Once again, I am ONLY looking for volunteers to respond to some or all of my questions; I cannot pay people. Over the next two to three months these interviews will occur entirely by email, and there may be some follow up emails sent to certain respondents to clarify or to ask for elaboration. These interviews are for a piece of creative nonfiction relating to my life and, while I am not seeking immediate publication, the piece may eventually be published with some of the volunteers’ responses in it. Any interview or part of an interview that appears in the memoir will be attributed to the fake/real name the volunteer has offered me.

Thank you for having read this far and I hope you will take the time to answer some/all of the following questions and email your responses to eileen.postsecretmemoir AT gmail DOT com.

1. How did you become familiar with Post Secret? How long ago was that?

2. Thinking about the secrets you’ve read, which one stand out in your memory? What’s memorable about that/those secret(s)?

3. Have you ever attended a Post Secret event? Why? What was it like?

4. Have you ever sent in a secret? How many? If more than one, over how long a period of time?

5. Have you ever seen one of your secrets again (on the blog/in the books, etc)? How did that make you feel?

6. Have you ever found a postcard with a secret written on it that was tucked inside of one of the books? What was that like?

7. Have you ever put one of your own secrets inside of a book? What was your reason for doing so?

8. Has there ever been a time where you’ve written a secret on a post card but kept the post card instead of sending it? Please elaborate as much as you are comfortable as to why you’ve hung on to it.

9. Why do you think you read other people’s secrets?

10. If you’ve sent in a secret, or many secrets, why did you send it in opposed to telling someone you knew or keeping it to yourself? What was your reason for sending it off to some place where strangers were going to read it?

Note: I am NOT asking anyone to explicitly state the content of their secrets unless that is something that you want to share. Any information sent to me may eventually be published.

Small Piglet Flu

I might be coming down with something. Ug. Wouldn't that be awful? I blame my students and their dorm-room, crowed dining hall, beer pong existence.

Can you think of a more germ ridden game than beer pong? And no, 6-8% alcohol does not kill germs on contact so, no, those cups and ping pong balls aren't being sanitized between when the ball falls on the floor and when your buddy rubs his nose then grabs the ball and throws it in to your cup of beer. A cup that a few other random guys were drinking out of a few minutes ago that you refilled and reracked.

Anyway. I'm staying in today and taking it easy. Sleeping a lot and getting my liquids. Hopefully this is just a sleep/caffeine/allergies issue. Hopefully. It's tough because this is the right time of the school year (about one month in) for everyone to get sick due to contact with a bunch of fun new people with fun new germs.

Am I worried about swine flu? Yes, but not in an everyone's-going-to-get-it end-of-the-world sort of way. I'm selfishly worried about me getting it because (a) the US population under 60 does not have any resistance to the strain because nothing similar has been doing around in the past fifty years or so [therefore, if I were to contract a normal flue it would be much milder than what I'd go through with our piglet friend], (b) it loves to spread in dorms and summer camps and as a teacher of first year writing most of my students are freshmen living in dorms and (c) when I've gotten the flu before I've gone down hard. Out for two weeks. Fevers with hallucinations. I thought I was floating up off the bed only to have the sheets yank me back down; it was an awful sickening feeling that I do not want to repeat. Ever.

I'm waiting on tenterhooks for the flu shot to come out so I can have a little bit of armor other than hand sanitizer.

Ad of the Week

Awww.

Seriously

September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Don't know if I'll be shouting ahoy or threatening people that if they don't bend to my will I'll have them kissin the keel at dawn! But I will be doing a lot -- a lot -- of work. Whereas I found myself with more downtime in my first year of MFA-dom, my second year is much more work. Perhaps because I'm taking on much bigger projects.

YAY! -- Fuck.

That seems to be the way my life is operating lately. It's like the universe is really trying to get me back in sync so every time I get really excited about something I have to become really upset so that my ying and yang balances with the square root of my chi or some such shit.

YAY!

I got a personalized rejection letter!

I called both my mother and my father to tell them and they were both ... why are you happy about being rejected? Not the rejection; the personalized note! It means I'm close; it's encouragement. If nothing else it's them letting me know how close I came to getting published even if I didn't make the final cut. And if you know the publishing-in-lit-journals game you know that they send form responses to almost every submission just to help them deal with the volume. So I was pretty damn ecstatic when I got the mail.

FUCK.

My car got towed in the middle of the night from right in front of my apartment because the management is more concerned with spending money on BURRITO BARS and POOLSIDE DJs than on getting information straight and clear to their RETURNING LEASERS that the OLD parking permit is no longer valid; nor did they give us a warning shot across the bow. Bastards.

I discovered this when I went out to drive to the university to teach class. Thankfully, I live close enough that walking was feasible, however I was late, late, late, didn't have all the stuff to teach, didn't have all the stuff for my grad class because I couldn't run back and forth between classes, and then had to miserably beg rides off of very kind people to very eerie parts of town after dark. Joy.

I think I went through all the stages of grief. Disbelief as I kept looking for my car, anger and barely restrained four letter words at the office, crying between classes (and let me tell you, I'm not a cute crier), resignation as I counted out the bills to the clerk at the uber-creepy impound lot ... what other stages are there? Remorse? Is that the one I feel when I see my checking account in a few days time? Bargaining? Trust me I will be writing a pissy letter to management. Will they do anything? I have no idea, but I want the letter sent.

Fiction and Poetry Contest

Announcing the 2010 Fiction and Poetry Contest

Deadline for Submissions: Dec. 1, 2009

Fiction Prize: $1,000 & Publication
Poetry Prize : $1,000 & Publication


Final Judges

Fiction: Ann Beattie
Poetry: David Wojahn

$15 contest fee includes a one year subscription

See website for complete guidelines.

Founded in 1995 by graduate students of the Western Michigan University English department, Third Coast is one of the nation’s premier literary magazines—and one of only a handful of nationally distributed literary magazines to regularly include four genres. Third Coast consistently publishes excellent, and often award-winning, fiction, poetry, non-fiction and drama.

In the past year, two published stories and one poem have been chosen to appear in the O Henry Award Series, The Pushcart Prize Series, and Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri.

The Saga of the Gimmick Ends ... or does it?

A few weeks ago I posted about the interesting ways people are going about publishing and promoting their work and making the distribution as much about art and creativity as much as the novel is. Here we have an update from Mike Heppner:

Mike Heppner announces the winner of the Man Talking contest: Dan Pope!

Dan Pope of Hartford, CT, has won the Man Talking contest by correctly identifying the secret phrase from Heppner's two novels, The Egg Code and Pike's Folly. As the winner, Dan will receive a single-copy handwritten edition of the final section of the Man Talking Project, "Talking," plus signed copies of the other three sections, "Talking Man," "Man," and "Man Talking." A short documentary of Mike meeting Dan for the first time and awarding him the prize will be shot in the weeks to come and posted at mikeheppner.com. Go to mikeheppner.com to see the secret phrase revealed.

Mike Heppner's Man Talking Project, an original series of three novellas and a coda, has been written about in the New Yorker on-line, the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, Conversational Reading, AdFreak, Maud Newton, Media Bistro, the Millions and HTMLGiant. Clare Dudman (98 Reasons for Being) calls the project "...a brilliant piece of writing... innovative, interesting, and absorbing..." and Neil Peart (Road Show) raves "...an artful examination of modern life, and modern love, with perfect dialogue, wry humor, (and) psychological insight." An essay about the history of the project appeared in the Sept/Oct '09 issue of Poets & Writers.

The four sections were written between 2007 and 2009. One cannot find all of them in a single location, however it is possible to collect and read the project in its entirety.

Part One, Talking Man, was published in September 2008 by Small Anchor Press. Small Anchor Press is a Brooklyn-based independent press specializing in finely crafted handmade books. Talking Man can be purchased exclusively at SA's website, smallanchorpress.com. A second printing came out in February 2009.

Part Two, Man, was released in December 2008. Five hundred photocopies have been left in random locations across the United States for readers to find and comment on. Some of those comments can be read here.

Part Three, Man Talking, the third in the series (but the first to be made available), can be read for free at mikeheppner.com. Over seven thousand readers have visited since Man Talking went on-line in April 2008.

Part Four, Talking, was a contest that ran from March to September 2009. One winner received a single-copy edition of Talking, entirely handwritten by Mike Heppner, plus signed copies of Talking Man, Man, and Man Talking. The winner was the first person to correctly guess the secret phrase found in one of Heppner's two full-length novels, The Egg Code and Pike's Folly. Dan Pope of Hartford, CT, won the contest in September 2009.

(sort of) Ad of the Week

So it starts with this: the H1N1 Rap



I caught a glimpse of this guy thanks to CNN. Then I found out that www.flu.gov is having a contest. The "US Department of Health & Human Services 2009 Flu Prevention PSA Contest"



There's some 230+ entries there as of today. All flu-prevention videos made by people hoping to win $2500 -- and we get to vote for the winner.





Elmo's even in on the act.

Ack.

Just when I start becoming proud of how responsible and on top of things, getting things done, talking to the right people, being proactive, punctual, involved, something Not Good happens. Something that requires me to be even more responsible and more adult-ish and less creative.

Whoa

Glad I posted that I'd be MIA for a bit because, baby, am I MIA.

I find myself in the position of having two classes where I have to propose my final project up front. One major project for each class.

Some people might enjoy this; I do not.

Mostly, I dislike making proposals for creative work I've not yet spent time thinking on. I'm not good at bullshitting on my feet (probably another good reason to quit law school when I did), and I get even more anxious and embarrassed about it when it's creative work. Why? Why? Why? I have no problem saying 'here, read this story,' but the moment I have to talk about that story in summary I can't think of a single thing to say that doesn't sound either pretentious or calculatingly cold and boring. Really good thing I didn't become a lawyer ... although everyone expects lawyers to be pretentious, calculating and boring so ... No, best not to finish that thought.

What I prefer to do when starting a project is to think, write, think, write, edit, think some more, frantically change things at the last minute, then show it to people.

I also running up against the issue that I expected to work on several smaller, non sequential pieces throughout the semester and I'm having trouble adjusting from expectations to reality.

Aside: Why is it that when expectations go awry they "disappoint you" but when assumptions go awry they "make an ass out of you"? Neither is founded on anything other than the individual's experience and perspective. Is it because expectations are thoughts, and assumptions are thoughts that are acted on?

Even more of an aside: my cat smells like perfume. She's a very clean animal and normally doesn't smell like much of anything. Why and how she's attained this new floral scent ... well, we're going to have to add those to the ever growing list of questions I can't answer at the moment.

Friday Readings

This week my interesting internet finds lean more toward the blogging side than the short story side, but don't let that stop you from checking out the first item on the list "Dear Doris."

A story in answers: Dear Doris by Adam Davies from FiveChapters.com. The form made me start reading but the story has stuck with me for the past week. I find myself thinking about it as I fall asleep where my half-conscious mind tries to fill in the gaps between the answers because it believes, really believes that this piece of fiction was an interview with a real person.

Wylie-Merrick Literary Agency has a really nice tutorial on point of view from the writer's perspective not the agent's. Point of view is one of those things that's simple but not simple at all. This blog post does a good job of starting that discussion and, even though it's a long post, it goes no where near finishing that discussion.

Forgotten Bookmarks is a blog put together by a rare book seller who finds all sorts of things stuffed inside the books he buys (and I think other people send him pictures too). It's a really interesting FOUND art type project.

Pimp My Novel delivers the 10 Commandments of Blogging (for authors) and linked to this news tidbit: CBS has greenlighted a pilot of "Open Books" a comedy that revolves around a book editor and her industry friends. There's the fear that books might make boring TV, but the project is being driven by Gail Lerner who worked on "Will & Grace" and "Ugly Betty" so it should be funny, right? Or maybe it'll show how the book industry is just another face of MODE.

Collection in Review: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Last week when I blogged about "the gimmick" I made mention of Miranda July's collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, which I promptly went out and found a copy of (the yellow one, and, for those of you who've been to her website, no, I did not wear yellow while reading it).

I really enjoyed "The Man on the Stairs" and it is a story I think I could teach to a class, or at least use as a jumping off point in a fiction workshop.

There's a great sense of play in the language. I think my favorite one word sentence reappears several times in this story:

My oldest friend, Marilyn, loves to sing and is head of enrollment t a prestigious music school. It's a good job, but not as good as just opening your mouth and singing. La.

La. It is essentially a nonsense word that somehow is both descriptor and verb given the context, yet it is a context provided outside of the sentence the word appears in. I feel the urge to start getting all scholarly-analytical so I'll stop now; just know that I find it intriguing.

I'd finished just one story when I read margosita's comment that July's stories made her feel ungrounded, and I understand the sentiment completely. Although I think the word I would choose to describe the feeling is discombobulated.

I think July makes up for much of this in the breakneck speed of her writing. Yes, we're disoriented, but the landscape's rushing by so fast that our thoughts are only half formed, and the sentences are following this pattern, and we can't tell if it's the ground that's shifting or the car that's wobbling, and with the needle quickly dipping into three digits of speed we have to wonder how much of anything is real and how the hell any of us are going to survive it, and then ... thankfully ... the story ends. I breathe normally again. I shake myself. Blink a few times. And I'm very happy that what I just read was fiction and not my life; a thrill ride with a seat belt and not really a car on the highway.

La.

September

It's a new month and it already feels like fall. The past few days have only been in the 50s and low 60s here in southern Michigan, an odd but welcome shift in weather. Just when I was beginning to think of it as fall the radio tells me that it'll be back in the 80s by the end of the week.

With September comes thoughts of school. Many places have already started back up, but I'll not return to the classroom until after Labor Day which means I am loving this extra week I have. And no, my syllabus is not written.

What September also brings is the opening of some of many print literary magazines. Some begin in September to overlap with the school year (and therefore with their slush readers) and some do it simply to limit submissions. Either way markets all over the place are going to be popping open.

The best advice I've heard is to submit as close to the beginning of the reading period as possible (assuming you have something ready to go) because this will get you the quickest response time. Essentially, it's getting your Christmas shopping done early to beat the lines and the crowds. Although there's two sides to beating the crowds; you may hear back quickly if you submit early, but it'll most likely be a rejection, and you'll have to wait for an acceptance. Of course, getting a rejection quickly means that you can pick up and keep going ... still, it comes with a certain amount of pain and makes the whole process smack of masochism.

I'll try to focus on the happy cappuccino instead.