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Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem
(Doubleday, October 2009)
Steve Gillies

A quarter of the way into Jonathan Lethem’s novel, narrator Chase Insteadman takes a break from the action to spend a short chapter describing the view from his window of a flock of birds in a church spire.  He’s described it already, but he tells the reader he wants to take make sure to get it right.  Then he completely fails to do so.   His description of language as the very thing that makes accurate description impossible is emblematic of the book.  “I employ it the way a dog drives a car,” he says, “without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible.  That is, of course, if dogs drove cars.  They don’t.  Yet I go around forming sentences.”  Attempts to find or convey some kind of meaning about the world consistently run headlong into the futility of language or the very idea of meaning itself.

Except, to say Insteadman takes a break in the action might be putting it generously.  There isn’t actually too much action to speak of.  Surviving off residuals from a teenage TV career, Chase Insteadman drifts aimlessly through the novel, attending fancy dinner parties, eating cheeseburgers in greasy spoons, and getting high in the ratty apartment of oddball ex-rock critic Perkus Tooth.  Insteadman indulges Tooth’s obsessions, from paranoid delusions about Marlon Brando and something called the Gnuppets to a religious awe of a type of pottery that can only be seen by bidding on it on ebay.  Yet anytime they might be in danger of following one of these obsessions into something resembling a plot, Lethem quickly moves them along to some new and equally fruitless pursuit.

Meanwhile, Insteadman’s astronaut fiancé writes love letters to him via weekly tabloids while trapped aboard a space station.  A giant tiger that might not actually be a giant tiger patrols the city, wrecking buildings that are coincidentally inconvenient to urban development.  A very literal grey fog hangs over the financial district.  Blending science fiction with surrealism, Lethem artfully renders a Manhattan that’s both strange and familiar, not to mention almost entirely populated by people with silly names.  The aforementioned Insteadman and Tooth are joined by the likes of Oona Lazlo, Laird Noteless, Georgina Hawkmanaji and Strabo Blandiani.  It’s the type of book where someone named Bloody Chicklets or Kilgore Trout could come strolling by at any moment.

There are dangers in following in the footsteps of Pynchon and Vonnegut.  For one thing, it isn’t the 60s anymore.  What once seemed new and profound now can seem an awful lot like random stoner-talk in Perkus Tooth’s living room.  Yet Lethem takes care to place such concerns in contrast to the novel’s hyper-modern surroundings.

Sure, there’s a conspiracy in Lethem’s Manhattan.  There are hundreds of them.  The question Lethem’s characters ask, though, is not what is reality? but in a place like this, what isn’t reality? The world Lethem creates can be a cold and alienating place.  Still, it has room for friendship, genuine human moments, and the promise that something new and indescribable lurks in the writing around every corner.

Steve Gillies is a current MFA Candidate in Fiction Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born in Brazil, raised in Alabama, and spent a considerable amount of his adult life in Chicago. One time he made a comic book that was called “the stupidest I have ever seen” by a noted Environmental Chemist.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy.
(Riverhead/Penguin, July 2009)
Loring Ann Pfeiffer

If I recounted a handful of the stories from Maile Meloy’s most recent collection, the book would quickly begin to seem sensational.  In “Red and Green,” a teenaged girl has a sexual encounter with a much older man (a client of her attorney father); in “Lovely Rita,” a widow raffles off her romantic services to her dead husband’s colleagues; in “The Girlfriend,” the father of a murder victim, desperate to understand the mind of the man who killed his daughter, interviews the murderer’s girlfriend.  But what is most remarkable about Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It is that the experience of reading it elicits much more complicated responses than a simple summary of its plotlines might suggest.

A skilled sustainer of tension, Meloy writes stories that don’t so much resolve as arrive at a lingering uncertainty.  Like most real-life conflicts, the tensions at the center of Both Ways break only because some force shunts them aside.  In the final paragraph of “Travis, B,” after Chet Moran has had his hopes for intimacy dashed by a young lawyer named Beth, he stands in the darkness trying to determine how to proceed.  Just before the cold weather forces him inside, he takes the only action he can at that moment—he removes from his pocket the piece of paper that contains her phone number, memorizes it, rolls it into a ball, and throws it into the wind.  Such an ending contains within it both a finality—the piece of paper is gone, after all—and an uncertainty—if Chet intends to call Beth, why has he felt it necessary to rid himself of all physical traces of her?

It is Meloy’s economical use of language that enables her to sketch these stories in as emotionally complex a way as she does.  The A. R. Ammons poem from which this book’s title comes conveys in just sixteen words—“One can’t/ have it/ both ways/ and both/ ways is/ the only/ way I want it.”—the at-times excruciating nature of the decision-making process.  Similarly, in Meloy’s collection, the complications that underlie characters’ actions are lain bare in short sentences and paragraphs that feature the simplest possible diction.  In my favorite story in the collection, “Two-Step,” a medical resident, Naomi, listens as her friend Alice relays her suspicions that her husband is having an affair.  Five pages into the story, Meloy takes us inside Naomi’s head: “Naomi hesitated.  She had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously—or at least soon—be told the same thing.  It had been a difficult week” (94).  These three sentences entirely shift this story’s trajectory, but Meloy conveys this reversal in the simplest language possible—“It had been a difficult week” is one of the best examples of understatement I have recently come across.  Because she reveals Naomi’s adultery in such a matter-of-fact way, Meloy avoids the melodrama typically evoked by the other woman and, instead, extends the reader’s sympathies.

Both Ways is not perfect.  A Montana native, Meloy is at her best when writing about rural locales and the people who populate them; when the collection ventures elsewhere, Meloy’s characters lose some of their complexity.  In “Liliana,” the titular character reads like a caricature of a flamboyant European doyenne, and her miraculous return from the grave ends up indulging in the sensationalism that the rest of this collection so judiciously avoids.  Likewise, when the aging Argentinian hero of “Agustin” tries to help a former lover who has lost everything, he comes across as merely kind-hearted, not as a character with whom the reader feels aligned.

In the vast majority of Both Ways’ stories, though, Meloy’s unresolved tensions and her simple language help her to achieve near-mastery of the short story form.  These stories challenge the reader to do that most difficult of things—suspend judgment of characters and, instead, exist with them in the tensions they inhabit.

Loring Ann Pfeiffer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama.

Thanks to all of you who have submitted! Submissions for Hot Metal Bridge #6 are now closed. The issue goes live next month, but in the meantime, stay tuned to our podcast series and book reviews. And don’t forget, the winner of the 1st Annual Hot Metal Bridge Fiction Contest will be announced with the publication of HMB #6.

-Salvatore Pane

Editor-in-Chief

It’s that time of year again writers, readers and friends. We here at Hot Metal Bridge are ready and willing to pore over your finest literary submissions in preparations for the sixth iteration of Hot Metal Bridge, due to be released later this fall. Below you’ll find the updated call for submissions from the various genres. So whether it be fiction or criticism, nonfiction or poetry, send us your work by Tuesday, November 10th. We look forward to it.

Submissions Guidelines:

Fiction:

Hot Metal Bridge is interested in your well-crafted literary fiction, whether short story, flash fiction, or novel excerpt. What counts as literary? Just don’t send us a story about spaceship-flying dinosaurs. That said, we like aesthetic diversity, from realism to surrealism, maximalism to minimalism. And if you simply write stories and don’t care about literary classifications, send us your work too. We accept submissions as Word attachments sent to fiction@hotmetalbridge.org. Please keep submissions under 7,000 words and make sure to include your name and contact information.

Poetry:

We are many, and our tastes differ, but as this is an entirely online journal, there’s no reason not to read the past issue before submitting (it’s good, we promise). If you can smell what we’re stepping in, then send something our way. Down to business. We welcome poetry submissions of five (5) pages or five (5) poems, whichever comes first. Please attach your submission as one document (we prefer .doc, but .docx .rtf or .pdf will all work) with your name appearing at the top of the first page. E-mail subject heading should read “Spring Poetry Submission” and in the body, you may include a short bio or cover letter, if that strikes your fancy. Send your work our way:poetry@hotmetalbridge.org.

Nonfiction:

For this issue (and this issue only) all creative nonfiction submissions must be brief: 1,000 words or less. If you think of creative nonfiction as organic material saturated with potential energy—ready fuel for reflection, insight, and action—then brevity is a diamond. Alternately, think of creative nonfiction as a magnifying glass held over some aspect of human experience; brevity focuses that lens until your writing ignites.

As in past issues, we’re still looking for nonfiction in all its guises: essay, travel writing, literary journalism, satire, memoir, etc. We want to hear about dirty kitchens, ill-mannered exchange students, and hydrogen bonding. We will read about decaying vineyards, heroic mall guards, disenchanted cartographers, and sweet potatoes. If it’s new and true—and under 1,000 words—send it our way as a Word or RTF attachment. Nonfiction@hotmetalbridge.org

Criticism:

Hot Metal Bridge is looking for innovative critical work from graduate students and scholars across the humanities. As a forum for a variety of approaches to cultural criticism, we want your seminar and conference papers, your unpublished chapters, your articles and miscellany. Our aim is to create a space for previously unpublished pieces that may not find an easy home elsewhere. Because critical work is inherently creative, we encourage interdisciplinarity and hybridity in both form and content.

For the first time, our Fall 2009 issue will feature articles constellated around a specific theme. The increasingly digital manner in which we engage with the world—what Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker call “network being, a Dasein specific to network phenomena”—gestures toward the impending declaration of the “death of analog.” We are interested in exploring some of the implications of near-ubiquitous digitization, especially the implications this has for work in the humanities, a field that has been dominated by the analogical since the invention of the pen. So for this issue, we specifically invite submissions loosely gathered around themes of the digital (for instance, but not limited to):

–Literature read through a digital lens

–The materiality of the text and textual apparatus of the book

–Digitality and poststructuralism: fragmentation in practice

–Modes of composition: digital pedagogy, multimodal making

–(New) Forms? New Form(alism)?

–Digital effects on the production of literature

–Networks and network theory

–Digital ecologies

–The posthuman and the machine

–Code

–Digitization in the academy

Send articles and papers, 15 to 30 pages in length, to criticism@hotmetalbridge.org before November 10, 2009. A 200-300 word abstract should be included in the body of your email, in addition to a brief bio. Please note your name and title in the subject heading of your email—your name should not appear in your attached submission (Word file .doc, .docx, or .rtf). MLA style is required; submit other citation styles with the understanding that a conversion to MLA will be required for publication.

And finally, good luck to all of you and we hope you’ll stay turned for upcoming book reviews, podcasts and our glorious sixthissue.

-Sal Pane
Editor

The headline pretty much sums it up. If you’ve ever even briefly thought that your short fiction might impress the author of Little Children and Bad Haircut, now’s the time to take a chance. The final day to submit for the contest is August 12th. Details follow:

All entries will be considered for publication in future issues of Hot Metal Bridge and the winning entry will be published in the Fall 2009 issue and win a hundred dollar prize. Please submit no individual story longer than 10,000 words. But feel free to enter as many times as you like, just keep in mind that each entry costs $10 dollars.  Send your work as an attachment to HotMetalPrize@gmail.com. Then send your check–payable to the University of Pittsburgh–to

Sal Pane
Department of English
University of Pittsburgh
526 Cathedral of Learning
Pittsburgh, PA 15260

-Sal Pane and Geoff Peck

You heard it here first, kids! We’re here to announce the 1st Annual Hot Metal Bridge Fiction Contest  judged by none other than novelist Tom Perrotta.

All entries will be considered for publication in future issues of Hot Metal Bridge and the winning entry will be published in the Fall 2009 issue and win a hundred dollar prize. Please submit no individual story longer than 10,000 words. But feel free to enter as many times as you like, just keep in mind that each entry costs $10 dollars.  Send your work as an attachment to HotMetalPrize@gmail.com. Then send your check–payable to the University of Pittsburgh–to

Sal Pane
Department of English
University of Pittsburgh
526 Cathedral of Learning
Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Please keep in mind that we will not read your work until we receive your entry fee. Also, HMB Editors will winnow the field down to the top five before Tom Perrotta selects the winning entries. The contest is officially open and will run until August 12th. Good luck!

-Sal Pane and Geoff Peck

This is not an April Fools Day prank. The latest issue of Hot Metal Bridge featuring interviews with Charles Baxter and work by Shawn Wong and Jennifer Haigh will go live on Monday, April 6th 2009. Prepare to have your face rocked off by literary (sexual) explosions.

-Sal/Geoff
(awesome) Editors-in-Chief

A Better Angel by Chris Adrian
(2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Adam Reger

Chris Adrian has an interesting biography. He wrote his second novel, The Children’s Hospital (2006), while he completed his pediatric residency. Working as a pediatrician, Adrian enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, where he wrote many of the stories collected in A Better Angel. Adrian’s old teacher, Marilynne Robinson, blurbs for him this way: “Chris Adrian’s life is a dedicated exploration of the things that matter most, and his writing is his companion and interlocutor . . . as he travels a landscape not before seen by other eyes.”

Whether you consider this statement hyperbole will depend on your reading of Adrian’s stories, which share common threads of violence, grief, and the mystical. In “The Changeling,” a father exorcises a demon (actually, approximately three thousand tormented souls; more on that later) from his son by burning and cutting himself. The protagonist of “Stab” hopes to rejoin his dead brother by murdering ever-larger creatures. The title story dramatizes a drug-addicted doctor’s squandered potential by detailing his defiance of the angel who has followed him since childhood, prophesying his greatness.

The question with Adrian’s work is whether the darkness and grand scale of plots like these transcend the form and conventions of the short story. If you are inclined to believe that the father in “The Changeling” is sacrificing himself to appease the spirits that haunt his child—that this is not mere metaphor, or mental illness—you will find much of A Better Angel affecting, even revelatory. If that ending sounds like a standard-issue climax with the volume cranked up, you may find these stories a little arch, maybe even ridiculously so.

A number of the stories in A Better Angel deal explicitly with the September 11 terrorist attacks, casting the spectacular horror of that event in spiritual terms. In “The Changeling,” the narrator’s possessed son speaks with the voice of the 9/11 dead–yes, all of them. In “The Vision of Peter Damien,” images of falling people, immense silver “angels,” and burning towers afflict the children of a small Ohio town at least a century before the morning of the attacks. And in the collection’s strongest and most hair-raising story, “Why Antichrist?” a man who has died in the World Trade Center uses a Ouija board to tell the narrator that he is—you guessed it—the antichrist. Among Adrian’s great strengths is the ability to sell conceits like this one without winking at the audience or falling into self-indulgent darkness. “Why Antichrist?” is full of legitimately creepy Ouija messages like “What matters time when time is soon to end?” and “My suffering is great but yours will be greater.” But it’s also, often, disarmingly offhanded: hours after drinking holy water to show that he’s not the antichrist, the narrator reports that “the burning came again, and though I made it to the toilet this time, I had barely finished throwing up before I had to sit down and shoot black blood out of my ass.”

At times, the off-handedness of Adrian’s prose distracts. Seven of the nine stories in the collection are written in the first person, and Adrian occasionally suffers from the flabbiness and weird rhythms that can afflict first-person narratives. In the title story, the narrator says after taking a droplet of morphine that “[i]t was too good, and it made everything too beautiful, not just the angel, whose ugly skin flew off as if blown by a real hurricane wind, so her wings were clean again and her naked face and body were open and compassionate.”

Even so, the reader understands the occasional flat sentence as the price of writing (and reading) stories this ambitious in scope and theme. The stories in A Better Angel begin with images of everyday life, but use those ordinary moments as openings to something larger, something less familiar and less comforting. This is the joy of reading Chris Adrian: the sense that Marilynne Robinson is right, that the writer’s life is a grand and novel journey, and his fiction dispatches from that distant territory.

Ablutions: Notes for a Novel by Patrick deWitt
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2009)
Emily Testa

This debut novel from ex-bartender and ex-Angeleno Patrick deWitt appears as a series of “notes for a novel”.  The observer and transcriber of these events is a bright, young, whiskey-guzzling bartender who catalogues (in the second person) the miseries and misdeeds of a ragtag bunch of regulars at a faded Hollywood lounge:

Discuss the regulars.  They sit in a line like ugly, huddled birds, eyes wet with alcohol.  They whisper into their cups and seem to be gloating about something—you will never know what.

Here are tattooed teachers, charming crack addicts, mute transvestites, psychotic surfers, and a bloated former child star.  He knows they lie to him and to each other.  He knows, too, that his own future sits just across the bar from where he stands.

Newcomer deWitt revives a tired theme—addiction begets despair—with razor-sharp prose and a startling twist: the never-named narrator (a version of the author, it would seem) is neither self-pitying nor self-loathing to the point of extinction.  He acknowledges his downward spiral with an uncommon clarity, and never reports his circumstance as though it just happened upon him.  Thus, even the most debauched behavior of the regulars is related coolly, dispassionately.  The narrator is reluctant to condemn them because he recognizes himself in their unconscionable actions.  For this reason among others, Ablutions is more than a book about a bar and its resident aliens.

Part travelogue (Grand Canyon, inner psyche), part documentary (destruction and despair in Hollywood), deWitt’s novel defies easy classification.  Undoubtedly, though, the formal elements of the author’s style are pitch-perfect.  Whether delivering news on the bar’s ghost-in-residence, a tragicomic gangbang, or the dissolution of his marriage, the narrator remains distant but deeply involved:

You stagger closer to the old horse, thinking of him standing in the alley by himself with nothing in his mind but gray sound and all of a sudden you are so sorry for hitting him like that, and you cannot understand why you would do such a thing and it seems to be the worst thing you have ever done in your life.

Though he is always attuned to the real pain of his regulars, he rarely steps this close to his own.  While basic sentiments—sadness, or anger—are revealed as a matter of course, the narrator’s (and the novel’s) emotional nucleus is avoided at all costs. This is deWitt’s greatest risk and a probable source of his readers’ frustrations.  The novel hints at—but does not affirm—its narrator’s more complicated feelings and eventual fate.  The narrator, replete with acute insights and a quick wit, certainly has a brain.  But where is his heart?

Emotional evasion aside, Ablutions resonates because it does not forgive the indiscretions and toxic opportunism of its characters.  The novel’s narrator offers, for all of them, the only apology he can muster: this will have to do for now.  deWitt emphasizes, at every pulsing turn, the thread of loss and regret that holds his ‘notes’ together.  Here, the hilarious and pathetic escapades of the narrator and his barflies are less evidence of moral turpitude than of searing loneliness.  They are greedy because they have nothing, selfish because they have no one.  Only the narrator is hopeful, remotely and occasionally so, and in a way that tugs at the edges of a reader’s restraint.  Even as the narrator destroys himself, we root for him to win.  In these, its best and most unsettling moments, Ablutions aches with honesty.

During the NCAA tournament, viewers have been deluged by all the usual sporting-event suspects: commercials for cars and trucks, retirement funds, Axe Body Spray, and beer. And of course, Viagra.

That’s nothing new; the world of marketing seems to have sports fans pegged, and probably correctly. What I have found completely baffling this year, though, is the odd world demonstrated by the current Viagra commercial.

Here’s the scene: we’re in Nashville; it’s 1:22 a.m. The camera pans around a music studio where a bunch of musicians are tuning their instruments; there’s an empty coffee cup, signifying that this is an all-nighter. One of the musicians, an affable-looking older white guy in a cowboy hat, interrupts the concentrated silence of musicians making preparations: “Hey, fellas. Listen to this.”
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In honor of Leap Day, a re-post from Issue One of Hot Metal Bridge from personal hero and all-around good guy Michael Martone:

LEAP YEAR

They broke up then on leap day over email, sending ever-shorter messages back and forth by hitting the reply button until the final word “stop” was the final word.

They left the subject field blank except for the abbreviation for reason, re:, which multiplied with each reply to one another so, at last, the space read: re:re:re:re; etc.

Each of them, miles apart, paused a moment to read again what each had written on the screen, their fingers poised about to send the other this next leap.

Four years later, all the reasons for doing what they did are lost to them, the email program purged, but this extra day returns to both a surplus sadness.

* * *
As always with Martone, don’t skip the author’s note.

Happy Leap Day, everyone.

Midnight Sunday brings September to a close. With that auspicious ending comes the real, true, not-to-be-pushed-back deadline for Hot Metal Bridge’s second issue (except that you will also have all of Monday to submit your work). The theme, as ever, is “Headless.” Do you have a fine little story, a taut poem full of riveting images–but nothing relating to what Webster’s defines as the condition of having no head? A non-fiction story in which someone almost–but, ultimately, does not–lose his or her head? Send it anyway. Of course, we will like it better if you fudge a bit and say yes, come to think of it your cousin did, after that last-paragraph epiphany, ride his/her motorcycle through a razor wire, thus losing his/her head in quite literal fashion. But even so, we want your work. You will have to trust me on this, but the issue as it exists now, in an amorphous state but with many of its larger components set, is going to be awesome. You will want to be part of it. You will not regret time spent this early autumn weekend refining things, polishing things, and, mayhaps, lopping heads off things.

The MacArthur Foundation named its 2007 crop of (”genius”) Fellows. Fiction writers have done pretty well in recent years (Aleksander Hemon, Jonathan Lethem, and George Saunders have all won), and this year the sole fiction-writing “genius” was Stuart Dybek.

Looking through the whole slate of “geniuses” is generally pretty interesting, although about half the “geniuses”‘ work I tend not to understand.

“Genius” and “geniuses” are of course in quotes because the MacArthur Foundation tends to officially discourage the grant being called that, although, really, I can’t imagine they’re not delighted by the name.

Just in case you did not know: our Call for Entries is still in full effect, and the deadline is ten measly days from right now.

H E A D L E S S

Please send us your poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and cultural criticism on the theme of headless. Horsemen, flat beer, chocolate bunnies, the guy who never gets a blowjob, zombies, animal crackers, classical statues, John Wayne Bobbitt, groups without leaders, blondes, Marie Antoinette and other unfortunate royalty, Medusa post-Perseus, the philosophy of D.E. Harding — any and all of these could fall under the heading of headless. Whatever your interpretation, be sure to stun us. We’ll know it’s good when we feel, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, as if the tops of our heads were taken off.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 24, 2007

See here for information specific to different genres.

This in fact has little to do with being an MFA student, except to suggest that real life does not in fact stop once you enter an MFA program:

Congratulations to Alli and Carlos Delgado, who welcomed their son Jonah, healthy and remarkably handsome, into the world at 1:30 this afternoon. Carlos, a third-year fiction student at Pitt, blogged about the experience here.

Sangeeta Mall graduated from Pitt’s fiction program last spring, a year early and, quite amazingly, in just three semesters. From the first getting-to-know-you e-mail anyone got from Sangeeta, it was clear she was not the typical MFA student. Beyond being married, with two children, an MBA, and a successful business background, Sangeeta was earnestly dedicated to her craft in a way few of us insecure MFAs own up to. Oh, and also: Sangeeta came to Pittsburgh from Bombay, leaving behind the aforementioned children and husband for months at a time and thus putting our own respective moves (e.g., 300 miles across Pennsylvania, in my case) to shame. Despite being far from home, Sangeeta was always as hospitable to her fellow students outside of class as she was supportive in the workshop, and her perspective–whether on a story or on the essentials of what we, as writing students, were doing–was always useful as a means of reminding yourself why you were pursuing the MFA in the first place. I asked Sangeeta for some of her thoughts on the MFA experience, and from her palatial estate in Bombay, India, she generously agreed.

Hi MFAers

The three semesters that I spent at Pitt seem like a dream from which I wish I hadn’t had to awake. I’m back in Bombay now, working on my novel, which I had turned in as my final manuscript to get my degree.

It is impossible to enumerate all my experiences in this piece. I’ll probably need to write a whole book, something I intend doing sometime in the future. So here’s the A-list of things that were positive or negative for me at Pitt. Of course the former will be much longer.

The most valuable takeaway for me from my MFA was that I learnt how to write a novel, and I mean learnt. There’s an ongoing debate about the necessity of doing an MFA, since you can always write if you know how, but Pitt proved that formal inputs can contribute immensely to honing one’s talents. When I wrote the first draft of my novel, I thought it was the most perfect thing to have emerged in the twenty first century, until Fiona [Cheong, fiction instructor] and Chuck [Kinder, fiction instructor and head of Pitt's writing program] very gently pointed out the hundred things that were wrong with it. As a result I could write a very creditable second draft, and now I’ve finished a third one. The biggest advantage I had was that I was in a hurry to finish the program and return to my family, so I turned in my manuscript very early. And then pestered the professors to read it and give me their feedback.

The richest experience in my entire stint at Pitt was the personal interaction I had with each of my committee members, and I wish the writing faculty could enhance these sessions to at least twice a term instead of just once. I don’t know if there is any kind of orientation session with faculty for new students, since I joined a little late, but if there is, faculty should ask students to turn in their manuscripts early, as early as the beginning of the second year. After all, the reason why we join the program is to emerge with a manuscript of publishable quality, and for that we need time to implement the advice that the faculty offers us.
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The Mid-American Review has three contests running concurrently: the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award, the James Wright Poetry Award, and the (sadly unnamed) Creative Nonfiction Award. The prize for each is $1,000, and the (postmark) deadline is October 1, 2007. The entry fee is $10.* Details are here.

The Mississippi Review is also having contests in fiction and poetry. Like the MAR contests, the prize for each is $1,000, and also like the MAR contests, the (postmark) deadline is October 1. Entry fee is $15.* More details here.

*For both the $10 MAR and $15 Mississippi Review entry fees, one gets a copy of the issue that publishes the winning entries. This is better than the common entry-fee freebie of nothing, but not quite as good as getting a subscription (see this earlier post for some probably not very interesting pontificating on the ethics of different types of contests).

(Thanks to loyal blog reader AP for supplying the information on these contests.)

-Adam

is interviewed in the latest issue of The Believer, by Nick Hornby. It’s an excellent interview, complete with some U.S.-Britain tough-talk (mostly from Simon, who certainly knows his Baltimore history).

It was great to read, for me, primarily because it provided a few deeper levels at which to appreciate HBO’s series The Wire. Even though a large part of being in a writing program centers on identifying and articulating aspects of a creative work that are working, not working, or rest somewhere in between, when it comes to The Wire it’s tough for me to find more to say than “It’s really awesome,” or “I’m going to go watch The Wire now.” Simon talks about the series’s resemblance to a Greek tragedy (as opposed to, say, Deadwood’s employing a more modernist narrative strategy), in that monolithic forces like the Baltimore Police Department, or city machine politics, take over the role of the gods, against which individuals fight only in vain. There’s also a ton of interesting stuff about how the show is written and cast. (This includes an answer to the question of why so many British actors are in the cast.) If you care at all about The Wire, it’s worth checking out.

Also if you care about The Wire, two links: HBO’s cast biographies (seriously, look how many actors are British); and, apparently fan-favorite (read: me-favorite) Omar Little has a Wikipedia entry of his very own.

At Hot Metal Bridge’s spacious world headquarters, summer is drawing to a close. Leaves are getting fat, almost ready to decay and fall. Moving vans are seen shuttling all over Pittsburgh, followed by piles of rolled-up carpet and still-viable-looking furniture. It is moving season, and in Pittsburgh that means new students are coming; a new crop of MFA students is on its way.

It’s put us in mind of our own first days here, awkwardly navigating the channels of Pitt’s program, and made us wonder what we would have wanted to know, just prior to getting here. What would we have liked to ask older students, but were too embarrassed to ask?

In that spirit, we’ll be dedicating some space for the last week or two of August (starting tentatively on the 20th) to what we’re informally calling “New MFA Week” (or, “MFA Boot Camp” if you prefer that one). Different stuff will be highlighted–I can tell you right now, funding will be discussed. We’ll hear from various MFAers about what they did right, wrong, and what they would do differently.

But it won’t be a Pitt-only party. If you’re a new MFA anywhere and have a general question, hit us up (at either fiction at hotmetalbridge.org, or ajr at pitt.edu). Write in with any questions, or just a suggestion of something you’d like to see covered. Sounds good? Good. Look for it later this month.

I pay more attention to the “Bulk” folder in my in-box than I probably need to. Occasionally important things will get misdirected there (e.g., HMB’s fiction submission from Michael Martone), but I keep an eye on that folder because I’ve had the idea for a while that I could compose a prose poem from the weird fragments that serve as subject lines for those e-mails. For a week or so I kept the ones that had promise, thinking of putting them together for a blog post, until it became clear there would be too many dirty words and mis-spelled references to genitalia.

Today, though, I got a spam e-mail that I must blog about. The title is poorly spelled and extremely vulgar, but that’s not the significant part: what set the e-mail apart was its sender: none other than Canadian actor, singer, and onetime talk-show host Alan Thicke had sent me the e-mail. Finally, after years of letters and attempts to join his fan club (always rebuffed), Mr. Thicke had gotten back to me with a very special message indeed. Let’s just say the e-mail’s subject line promised–with maybe a little less delicacy than I am using here–attractive young women doing something quite remarkable for my entertainment.

Inside the e-mail, there was a link and this beautiful sentence, which I hope is the beginning of Mr. Thicke’s novel: “Il Salaino entered Leonardo’s household in 1490 at the age of ten.” Or maybe it could be more like a Carveresque piece of historical fiction. It doesn’t have to be a novel–whatever Alan Thicke wants to write, he’s a better judge than me: of the market, current aesthetic trends, whatever. I just believe he knows better.

Not to harp on it at all, but this link about Thicke’s horribly failed late-night talk show (”Thicke of the Night”), designed to compete with Johnny Carson, is pretty funny. It was before the days of Growing Pains and Thicke was basically a no-body trying to parlay success in Canada into U.S. TV stardom. The entry–admittedly, it is on Wikipedia so, officially, take it with a grain of salt but in cases like these I trust the nerds with long memories based on the pure strength of their nerdy passions, more than I would trust an Oxford historian with his long white beard and scholarly detachment–discusses how a pre-show hype campaign forced journalists to dub the show “Sick of the Hype” (its real title was “Thicke of the Night,” get it?); and these two sentences I will just quote:

“Even the commercials that aired between segments seemed to have an axe to grind with the show and its host. In a later interview on another talk show, Alan Thicke described a maxi pad ad with the unfortunate slogan, ‘Once you try our brand, you’ll never go back to thick again!’”

I know that is all behind Dr. Seaver–er, Mr. Thicke–now, but yeesh. That is rough. I’m glad you survived, my friend, to send me this inviting e-mail message.

I’ve just emerged from a solid 20-or-so hour immersion in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you’re at all invested, and/or are a slower reader than me, don’t worry: No spoilers in this post.

Now that I’m done, I can make note of an odd sensation that was with me from the afternoon leading up to the book’s release, to the present: excitement to finish the book that was not purely due to the pleasures of the story, but to the fear of the ending being revealed to me.

Friday afternoon, Ashleigh mentioned in an e-mail hearing a horror story about people standing in line outside Barnes and Noble, just prior to the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, suffering the disappointment of a car full of teenagers driving past and shouting, “[Main character] dies! [Other main character] kills him!” Swearing we would not leave ourselves open to similar, outrageous behavior, we bypassed the whole midnight festivities, which had looked fun when we’d stopped in earlier in the afternoon. (I did, however, apply a temporary tattoo, which did me fairly well as a visible token of my enthusiasm.)
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An anecdote: one of my students dropped by my office last semester to chat. The subject of books came up and he asked me what I was reading. I told him I was reading The Satanic Verses and rhapsodized for awhile about the book.

“Oh,” he said quietly. He looked down at his notebook for a long moment and finally said, “I didn’t think you were into that.” By “that,” I learned after a few questions, he meant “Satanism.”

This student, born sometime around 1988, had never heard of Rushdie’s novel and therefore leapt to the most logical conclusion: that I was reading a medieval spellbook of the dark arts. I assured him I was not, and he at least pretended to believe me. I tell this story occasionally to friends and colleagues in order to prove one of two points: my students missed out on a lot of cool stuff OR my students truly believe I’m the spawn of the devil.

At any rate, I’d like to take this moment to heartily endorse Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. Everyone knows about how the book infuriated Muslims around the world, about how Iran put a bounty on his head, about how Rushdie went into hiding. But what got lost in the political intrigue and religious outrage is the fact that The Satanic Verses is an outstanding novel.
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Perhaps the most useful advice I’ve received about writing is to buy a comfortable chair. While I’ve come to appreciate the understated practicality of this recommendation (along with the emphasis it places on the non-glamorous heart of the profession), another useful piece of advice is to find a writing coach.

Although there are freelance writer/instructors who bill themselves as coaches, I was advised to seek out someone who published essays on craft: someone whose ideas made sense to me. I chose to go with Raymond Carver—he’s direct and articulate, and I still stop to consider what he had to say about workmanship whenever I think I’m finished writing a story. Coach Carver has become an inexhaustible well, someone I can return to when I need another way of looking at the craft of writing, which (to me) often feels like a Byzantine complex of intuition and instinct.

Another excellent writing coach is Michael Chabon, who offered some great advice when he recently visited Pitt (you can find the interview here). I was especially impressed by his 1997 speech “My Report to the Carnegie Institute” (which used to be available on his website—I’m not sure how one can obtain a copy now) and his musing on the concept of entertainment in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2005.
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One of Hot Metal Bridge’s fantastic fiction contributors, RoseMarie London (”Don’t Make So Much Of It”), was recently named a finalist in the Emerging Writers Network’s inaugural fiction contest. The winner is here.

Never ones to rest on their proverbial laurels, the EWN is coming right back with the Second Annual Fiction Contest: details here.

Congratulations to RoseMarie and best of luck to anyone entering the new contest. The Emerging Writers Network, it bears mentioning, is well worth checking out. That is, if you’re a, you know, emerging writer.

It’s better to get rejected by the best than not to have tried: Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells young reporter, “If I give an interview to you I have to give an interview to everyone.” (via)

Here’s a way to get some love: storysouth’s Million Writers Award is now accepting nominations. Readers & writers can nominate any story published online in 2006.

Inside literary magazines: a few notes from a panel last night in San Francisco, which included editors of Zyzzyva and McSweeney’s.

Got $1,000 burning a hole in your pocket? Why no go to the Gettysburg Review Conference for Writers, June 6-11?

Front Porch 2.0: Barry Hannah! Video of Denis Johnson!

A Public Space #3 is out. But wait, I’m still enjoying #2!

New reviews up at January Magazine of T. Jefferson Parker’s Storm Runners, Don Hannah’s Ragged Islands and Catherine Jinks’ Elysium.

Are agents necessary? Identity Theory says maybe not, but then again, maybe so.

One summer, early in high school, I went on a Vonnegut tear, reading at least ten Kurt Vonnegut novels during the long, dull break.  I can still remember walking across town in the mid-day heat to the library to exchange one grubby hardback edition for another, then leaving the air-conditioned library and walking all the way back, Slapstick or Jailbird or Galapagos collecting the sweat trickling down my arms onto its musty pages.

Most of those novels run together in my memory.  One I still remember, though, is Breakfast of Champions.  It was one of those books that, although I haven’t really followed any of its examples, opened things up for me in terms of what writing could be and do.

I’m talking mainly about the drawings.  A friend and I once snuck into the film version of Breakfast of Champions (starring Bruce Willis, and I seem to remember Lukas Haas in bunny slippers, playing a pump organ) after seeing some other, respectable movie.  We were the only ones in the theater, and left after a few minutes because, dorks that we were, we were afraid some astute manager type would put two and two together and note that a movie for which 0 tickets had been sold was playing to 2 pathetic-looking college students.  But as much as that sad reason, we left because the movie was terrible.  Seriously–never see it.  It made me realize that the plot of the novel isn’t much: nothing exposes that like an adaptation to film.  The real value and novelty of the book was its sort of reckless freedom, Vonnegut’s almost-audible “I’m going to include a drawing of an asterisk now, and say that it’s an asshole–what are you going to do about it?”

This is all a long-winded way of leading up to the news that on a crowded 61A the other day, I stood a few feet from a guy who was reading a paperback copy of Breakfast of Champions, which I recognized right away when he turned to one of my favorite moments in the book.  It’s the part that discusses the treatment the writer Kilgore Trout’s publisher has given his books: they’ve written the words “Wide-open Beavers Inside!” over the covers, and shipped them to be sold in porn shops.  Vonnegut shows us exactly how these words are written on the book covers: the letters are large, bold, a little sloppy.  The narrator then, as if speaking to an audience of simpletons from another planet, explains that a beaver is a mammal with a flat tail specially adapted for dam-making; and Vonnegut supplies an illustration.  The narrator then provides a second definition of “beaver,” which I’ll omit here; and Vonnegut supplies an illustration of this second definition.

The guy reading this just stared into the pages with a look that was somewhere between annoyance and befuddlement.  He looked like he was in his late twenties, with a neat little mustache-beard combo.  I kept waiting for him to laugh; I was laughing myself, seeing those three drawings together on facing pages, remembering how funny they were when I was 15 years old.  I couldn’t figure out why this guy was reading the book, because he seemed too old to be in any class where the book would be taught.  Maybe somebody recommended it to him, or he’d asked a bookstore employee about Vonnegut and where he should start.  Maybe the book was a Valentine’s Day present, a gift from some awesome, soon-to-be ex-girlfriend who mistook his laughter at Family Guy episodes for a genuine sense of humor.  The dude never laughed.  I wished I could have swept that fact into my appreciation of the moment, and laughed at the whole situation, but it sort of bugged me.  I’m all for respecting other literary tastes, but those are two funny pages, wildly unexpected, and hardly difficult to grasp or even, let’s be honest, that offensive.  It didn’t seem to me that he was offended, only untouched by the humor of that scene.  I wanted to ask him, “What part of ‘Wide-Open Beavers Inside!’ don’t you understand?”

(Of course I’m thankful that I didn’t.)