Let Your Flag Fly

It's time to talk about social justice in America. Not politics or religion, but justice.

Earlier this week, I changed my Facebook icon to a red-and-pink equals sign. Why? Because I support marriage between consenting adults in America. And then I saw a number -- a handful -- too many! -- supposedly thoughtful individuals poo-poo on that choice of mine to act. These weren't even individuals who disagreed with my politics, if you want to call marriage a type of politics, which (for the record) I've believed for the past decade that government should get out of marriage and leave it to religion, handing out only civil unions to deal with the intricacies of health care, custodial, and survivorship rights.

These were people who decided to poo-poo on my choice to fly a flag because that flag appeared on Facebook and Facebook flags can only be "empty gestures." In some cases going so far as to say they are "liberal empty gestures." Implying that conservatives somehow don't use Facebook in a similarly empty manner.

If anyone wants to poo-poo on my flag-flying actions, then you have my pity, but not my admiration.

Is it an "empty" social media gesture? No. It's not. I vote -- and have voted regularly since I was 18. I take action to educate on the issues before I go to the polling station. I donate money to political/social causes even though I'm in such a position courtesy of grad school and teaching at a large university without a Full Faculty position as to qualify me for public health care assistance -- which I don't accept. I've stood up for my gay and lesbian friends since I was a teenager in high school when I told my social group that it was not right to "out" one of our friends no matter what they "thought" him to be; that we should respect what he vocalized, not repeat our own assumptions, because he had his reasons for choosing to say what he did no matter what we "suspected." (Something which he later, personally, thanked me for. Something which I wish I could have done for so many other young men and women in this country had I had the chance.)

Or are my flag-flying actions, as others say, a "worthless" gesture because so many people "don't know what it means"? I hope that action + ignorance, generates discussion and awareness among those who don't know. Who want to know. Who need to know. Who need to see their walls turn pink and red and ask, what the heck is that? NPR news reports statistics that claim, based on population age, in ten years the majority of eligible American voters will favor gay marriage. (And youth have registered and voted in OVERWHELMING numbers for the past five years. I don't expect that to change.) It's time to talk about the inevitable.

And for all of those who continue to think that my actions -- my delight in seeing the majority of my FB wall turn pink and red -- is "empty." I say three things: (1) You're cynical and pessimistic: how can I possibly hold you in my heart the way I hold hope for the future in my heart? (2) When George Takei asks you to do something that is within your means and abilities, you do it; you wear your nerd-badge with pride. And (3) you're wrong. You're wrong because you assume. You aren't willing to look case-by-case, you're only willing to make assumptions based on the lowest common denominator of human behavior. This individual act, my actions, are a truth. If you can't see that based on your assumptions or cynicism, or pessimism, then you are, simply, wrong about me.

If you want to send me a Facebook friend request, I'm https://www.facebook.com/eileen.wiedbrauk.

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The Truth of the Slush Pile

A recent article by David Cameron published by The Review Review poses an intriguing concept: the writer took a story printed in The New Yorker, supposedly THE magazine when it comes to literary short fiction, and submitted it to other magazines as part of an experiment to see if the story was empirically "good."

That is, would all the other magazines jump to accept the cream of the crop story on their desk?

Answer: not a one.

It should be noted that not a single one of those Top Tier or Second Tier literary magazines sent him a rejection saying this was already published in the biggest magazine in the country, who do you think you're trying to fool?

Not a one.

What does this say about literary magazine publishing? Three things:

1. People who buy into the idea that there is a TOP magazine for short fiction are buying into a myth. There is no empirical standard for a "good story." 
2. Not everyone who reads fiction reads the same magazines. But we should have already known this, otherwise there wouldn't be more magazines published each month than any person could possibly have time to read. 
3. Making it to the top of the slush pile is one part good craft, one part interesting story, one part dumb luck.

"Slush sucks," Cameron says. It's a good summation. In my editorial experience, it's all about hitting the right editor on the right day with a story they're going to want to fight for. If yours is the third ornithologist with marital issues story they've seen that day, they're not going to cut you any slack. If they've just lost a family member, your piece on death that starts crass and ends poignantly isn't going to be read all the way through. There's a lot about the slush pile and the editor that you can't control or even predict.

Although the bigger the magazine or anthology I worked on, it mattered that a story ended up with the right editor eventually, but it almost mattered more that it first was shuffled to the right slush reader who read it on the right day while in the right mood and found themselves so taken with the story that they wanted to fight their editor and the other slushers to see the story got printed. When I've slushed for larger operations, I've found stories that I've passed up to the lead editor because they were good enough for a second read, or because they were my editor's "thing" even though I didn't particularly care for it. I've also passed stories on up with the note You're going to publish this one! It wasn't a threat. It was a promise. And it came true.

How do you find the right slusher? The one who's going to write the note that says publish this, who then campaigns for your story at the editorial meeting? You don't find her. At every magazine I've worked on, stories were assigned randomly to slushers.

But this is the mechanics of the slush pile, not the truth. 

The truth is that catching the right editor on the right day when she's in the right mood doesn't even touch on the fact that what each of us considers a "good short story" differs. It's not empirical. If it was, there would be only one magazine in the country and we would all read it and slobber with love over each word it printed.

February Is the Longest Month of the Year

There it is, the conundrum wrapped in a paradox that I really wish was wrapped in bacon: February is both the shortest and the longest month of the year. A short, painful 28 days that lasts forever. February begins when winter has gotten old and oppressive, and doesn't end until spring arrives. It's still February in my world. Never mind that it's already mid-March.

Seasonal affective disorder? Perhaps. Perhaps I just miss all the people whom I've loss contact with because the general ick-feeling produced by the weather has separated us since Christmas. Perhaps I'm just sick of the people with whom I'm forced to have regular contact in spite of the weather. (Teachers of the world, is it just me or do classes that begin in second semester always have lower morale than those that begin at Labor Day?) Many of my colleagues are citing Spring Fever or perhaps that no man's land between the Known Drinking Holidays of Spring Break and St. Patrick's Day as the reason for students checking out. But how many of them every really "checked in" this semester? I see moments like this from Missed Periods and Other Grammar Scares, and -- while I constantly see similar issues, never have they been so pyrotechnic -- it makes me wonder if the answer isn't just to raise one of your own and don't let them get away with shit like that.

Perhaps the past six weeks have seen the pendulum swing too drastically, too fast. Great news followed by devastating news. Again and again. Sometimes within hours of one another. Including the loss of my grandmother and putting some tough questions to myself, the answers to which would drastically change my day-to-day life.

Perhaps I just wish you were a dragon.

Like the above cartoon from exocomics.com says, Sometimes I look at you and I'm sad because you're not a dragon. I want you to be a dragon. I want  you to be fabulous and fascinating. Bring a little bit of danger and a whole lot of wonder into my life.

Displace my desire for change onto someone else? Gladly!

Perhaps sometimes I look at myself and I'm sad because I'm not a dragon. After all, isn't that the basic life goal for all of us? Not power or money or an ass-kicking 401K. What we really want: to be awesome. Like a dragon. Dude. That's it. Be a dragon.

(Oh, and just in case you found this post too sad, I give you the top canines of sci-fi. Puppies!)

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