"What Do You Do With Your Stories?"

A report from the end of the term, including some thoughts on teaching students to send work out as well as what magazines are even for.

This last fall quarter I taught two courses on fiction writing to undergraduates—an introduction to fiction workshop and a speculative fiction workshop respectively. I finished the grading last week after the holiday weekend.

The end of the term is my favorite part, when I get to see the work my students have done for the term as a whole. I observe trends such as they emerge—this fall saw many students in my intro class for example writing speculative fiction. Amid the panic about students not reading enough I also learned my students at least are quite fond of reading whole novels, especially fantasy novels that make War and Peace look concise. A few students in both classes experimented with allegory, to my surprise. Last year fairies were broadly popular, and this year I saw robotics and the post-human, the mythic and ghosts. Many students tried to use the present tense for what I call the present tense immediate, as if the reader were along with the character for a ride on their shoulder. It’s almost never successful as a choice in my opinion but it did mean I leaned into teaching the present tense. I taught Ling Ma’s Severance, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise, and for the first time included this story from Jess Row, “The Empties,” which imagines a future that seems very close. But I also found myself seeing too plainly the limits of post-apocalyptic frameworks as an inheritance from the religious colonists who colonized this country, and questioned partly through this interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

This fall also marked for me a time of rethinking my approach to how I teach writing. I emphasized the need to enjoy what you’re writing about, to crack yourself up, even, and I think that was a successful strategy. And as I spent last weekend in Maine with my brother, for the holiday, he gave me a point on mischief, after slowing down his car to deliberately mess with someone who had sped up, cut him off at a turn and then ended up behind him again. “You get close to yourself when you’re up to mischief,” he said, and snickered a little as he touched the brakes on the car and slowed down to 35 in a 50 mph lane.

How does your main character like to mess with people, being the prompt there, to my mind. It was timely for me.

Self-Portrait by A. Van Dyck c. 1640, from the Metropolitan Museum Open Access

Now I am seated at my desk as the sprint to the end of the year begins and all around me I can see my TBR pile is so deep, it has ancestors and children. The night is that winter dark, darker than a summer night somehow. I have a facedown copy on my desk of the O. Henry Prize anthology Edward P. Jones edited, selections drawn from literary magazines around the country, and which I have to say I’ve loved so far, story by story, every one, and have some new favorite writers. I have been thinking about short stories, partly because of the anthology and also this question a student asked me on the last day of classes before Thanksgiving: “What do you do with your stories now? Save them up until you’re dead?”

I think of this student as a future satirist though technically she is already doing it, say, with this question. “No,” I said, even as I remembered a time about ten years ago when I told my agent there was a story collection in my files she’d never seen.

And while my agent and I laughed at the idea of me harboring a collection of stories, many of them published, from the time before she was my agent (I signed with her in 2002) I took yet another year to send them to her.

*

So I told my student and the class both about the importance of sending work out, and urged them all to make Submittable accounts, with a description of the process of submitting work. And since that class I have decided to create submission parties for the coming year, a monthly session with snacks and sample issues, encouraging students from all the creative writing classes to send out their stories, essays and poems on that day, together, so it’s less painful. And because I typically teach what I need to learn, I will be sending work out also.

Writing classes back when I was a student mostly didn’t teach us to send work out. A single class I took really addressed it, a class with Annie Dillard, who told us how to use Best American Essays to keep track of where essays were published, an introduction to what a magazine would publish, as well exploring the list of the nominating magazines. Best American Stories, the aforementioned O. Henry, all of these anthologies can work this way, as a guide to your own future. And it should be said that Lit Hub is a clearing house for literary magazines, among the identities it has, and that you can learn about literary magazines there as you read through. For those students who’ve asked me where I find the stories I assign, these anthologies are the first answer.

Dillard also taught us formatting for submission, and back in 1989, this meant a title page with our address and phone number, the date, and the word count. Each page had page numbers and a header with the story title but not your name, in case they were reading blind and making copies. Double-spaced 12 point font, and in the old days, the choices were Courier or Times New Roman. Palatino had advocates also. I believe Courier is now widely eschewed by writers, to my knowledge, but tell me if you hear otherwise.

The inspiration for the submission day party is the first writer I ever met with a strong practice for sending out work: the late Reginald Shepherd, who I knew at Iowa. He had a spread sheet and a day of the month for sending out work, and he recorded what poems he’d submitted where and if they were rejected, he simply moved them on to the next magazine on his list. He made a dispassionate effort out of it. I admired this but it would take me a long time to summon the energy to do even a little of what he did.

Sending work out for publication is typically nonfatal to the writer, but we steel ourselves up too much like we are going to be harmed. Writing is a social act in that we write to be read. I think it’s important to see that through.

I sometimes think about how the life I have, I have because I sent stories out to magazines. I learned early on that the writing I published brought me new friends, lovers, work opportunities, and that continues. Christa Wolf says in The Fourth Dimension, and this is a paraphrase, Writing is not an avoidance of life but an engagement with it deeper than is possible while you are living through what you are describing. I believe this. So you try to publish it. Or maybe you do as I did, in 1999, and take a story draft to an open-mic. At the end of that reading, my current agent walked up to me and pressed her card into my hand. The story I read that night was born out of a letter I sent off to a friend from my MFA program, and the short story it became eventually became a chapter in the novel I’m finishing now.

Or more recently, there’s the Moby Dick erotic fan fiction short story I read at Shipwrecked when the series came to New York City, which then became part of their anthology, and which then led to me talking about the inspiration for it this fall on the @laphamsquarterly podcast, with editor Donovan Hohn. My old friend Caleb Crain is also on that episode.

Publishing work before going to my MFA program also gave me some independence from the opinion of my teachers and peers there. It’s why I recommend students do not go on to graduate work until they’ve had some success elsewhere.

This is what I mean, when I say writing is a social act. I’m not speaking about a party exactly, though I do love a party. I mean the connections that run through a life. The ones that can hold that life together for decades. When we teach students to write in the introductory classes, if we don’t teach them to send work out, I think we are not finishing the job.

*

Sending work out and subscribing to magazines and reading them, this has another context this year. Our literary magazines and institutions, our literary culture, these are under attack, and these attacks are not happening because literary magazines and literary culture are powerless. They are happening because of this power, they are a sign of this power. Back in March when the Trump administration tried to cancel thousands of library grants (I say “tried” because the effort just failed in court and the judge ruled the case could not be brought back), they did so because they are trying to seize cultural power through political power. The way a book, a poem, a story, an essay, a history, criticism, the way these can all tell you a bit of the story of who you are, if not a lot of it, or offer a glimpse of who you were, who you could be, who you could have been, the world also, and other people, too—this is what they want to control or stop. We pretend to be powerless at our peril, as usual. And if we don’t subscribe to magazines, we lose them.

Magazines when I was first falling in love with them as a young person told me stories about places I wanted to go, people I wanted to be. I was lonely for a future I could want and a place, too—while I enjoy returning to Maine now, it was not my favorite place back in 1983. Magazines helped me dream my way out of there. And while I loved The Face and my mother’s Harper’s Bazaars, I still recall finding an old New Yorker at a friend’s summer lake house, and becoming obsessed with the stories I found there.

If you haven’t subscribed to a literary magazine this year, I would suggest it for these reasons. I regularly enjoy the aforementioned Lapham’s Quarterly, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, n+1, The Sewanee Review, VQR, One Story, The Believer, The Baffler, The Drift, The Point, Harper’s, The New Yorker, ZYZZYVA and Electric Literature, where you can find this list of newer literary magazines. I will add: as a creative writing professor, I do get funding for my subscriptions, these are all mentioned by way of suggestion. Please leave any of your favorites that aren’t mentioned here in the comments.

My students this fall also asked me where I found the stories I taught and this is that answer. These magazines all come with online archives for the price of your subscription, most of their archives going back decades, and many of them offer digital only subscriptions. Many come as extraordinary objects in the mail. They make excellent gifts, host parties and readings, and if you go, you can meet people. Not to overstate it but some of the best people I’ve ever met, I met at a magazine party. Magazines can be the answer to several kinds of loneliness.

If you save your stories up until you die, you do skip the humiliation of being rejected, it is true. But you miss the rest too.

Some recent gems from some of the above magazines:

• Salt of the Earth, a posthumous long story/novella by the late Brad Watson in The Sewanee Review.

His real name was Travis Enfinger. He’d never robbed anyone of something so meat-and-potatoes as a wooden leg before, so he laid low for a couple of days. He wanted to make tracks to the coast. The leg jammed into his valise, he crossed open pasture only when he had to, staying close to the brushy fence lines, and cut through the woods whenever he could. He camped in a little woodsy clearing, made a small fire, ate a candy bar that had melted in its wrapper in his jacket pocket, drank water from a nearby creek. He took the leg out and admired it by firelight, and shuffled through his deck of picture cards, then slept like a child with his mouth parted, a little drool running down his cheek. He woke in the morning to birds singing and fluttering through the clearing like feathered small-arms fire.

• Brontez Purnell is in Harper’s with a new short story, “You Might Live Longer Than You Think.”

I was coming from my Narcotics Anonymous meeting high as hell. I have to say, if I believed in things like God, this would have been the time I would have asked him to hold me, but I didn’t, and so I had to hold myself again.

• “The Mermaids Singing,” by Maria Marchinkoski at n+1.

A few times a year, the trans women of Boston convened to remember who they were without anyone else to tell them

• At the Paris Review Daily, “Scenes From An African Childhood,” by Patrice Nganang.

Papa Mama was a man my age today, but by my standards then, he was an old man. I remember him being small in stature but agile on his feet. He wore slippers. He usually dressed in a Hausa gandoura and chechia, the northern classical attire, and had a chewing stick. And he always spat, which I never liked. He was the one who welcomed clients into the garage and settled transactions. This was when his face would brighten with a happy smile. He would snap back to his angry figure the moment he saw a kid misbehaving around, then would mechanically return to the client.

• Eula Biss at The Believer on the South African writer Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart and the book that changed her life, 20 years ago and today:

At twenty, I recognized myself in the young Malan. I saw my own undeveloped politics, my own failings and my own frustrations, my own crisis of conscience. I saw the deficiencies in my education, which was, in many ways, an apartheid education. I had been fed mostly platitudes about race in America and I was hungry for real talk, so I was drawn to Malan’s impatience with empty gestures and his intolerance of pious pronouncements.

At forty, when I traveled across South Africa carrying My Traitor’s Heart, I read the book at more of a remove. I saw how often Malan describes black Africans as unknowable and inscrutable, with customs and conflicts that could never be comprehended, and of Africa itself as unfathomable and otherworldly. He compares white South Africa to a moon base, by which he means that it was insular and artificially maintained. But outside that base, in the townships and homelands of black South Africa, everything is alien to him. His book is the artifact of a mind still half-entrenched in apartheid.

• Rosannah Young Oh at The Yale Review with this beautiful poem, Hide-And-Seek.

• Another Jess Row story (he has a new collection coming next year) over at The Baffler, “The Assassination of Henry Kissinger.”

These were some of the materials Srinivas “Vas” Patel brought to workshop, back when I first met him at the New School in 1997: a story printed on strips of paper lovingly glued to a sledgehammer; a story written entirely with his car, blank sheets of copy paper with faint tire treads; a stack of cassettes recording twenty-four hours in the life of his friend De Lorean, a dominatrix and professional dog walker; a taxidermied giraffe’s head, which he rolled into the room on a large dolly he’d borrowed from the janitors. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the story.”

• John Paul Brammer in his newsletter reaches deep down to go off on that new Pantone color.