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This is old news but has escaped my attention until now: The Atlantic Monthly is accepting entries for its annual student writing contests. (Student status being of the undergrad or grad varieties.) Entries accepted in fiction, poetry, and something called “personal or journalistic essays” that sounds a lot like creative non-fiction.
Prizes are $1,000 for first place, $500 for second and $250 for third. Postmark deadline is December 1.
The best part? No entry fee.
Full details here. Good luck.
It seems that several times over the last year, I’ve looked in the front matter of a book of short stories I’ve been enjoying, and in the place where the author thanks those publications that originally printed his or her stories, I’ve seen the journal Salt Hill listed as one of them. (Although I can only think of the example of Mary Gaitskill’s Because They Wanted To at the moment.) Google “Salt Hill,” though, and you turn up a bunch of results pertaining to pubs called Salt Hill or, yes, salt hills.
It’s not just me. Fellow fiction ed. Ashleigh heroically compiled a long list of literary magazines over the summer, and her listing for Salt Hill was something like “Not sure this still exists.” We just figured it had gone the way of the dodo, so to speak.
Au contraire! Today, via Pitt’s super-useful “dist list,” comes word that Salt Hill not only exists, but is welcoming submissions for its 21st issue. It turns out too that it’s affiliated with Syracuse University.
Here is relevant info from the aforementioned e-mail, followed by an explanation of why I’m not just putting up a link:
“The editors welcome submissions of poetry, prose, translations, reviews, essays, interviews and artwork submitted by April 1. We do not accept electronic submissions.
“. . .
“To submit address your work to the appropriate editor
(poetry, fiction or nonfiction) at:
“Salt Hill
Syracuse University
English Department
Syracuse, NY 13244″
And now here is the web address they provided: SaltHillJournal.com. Click on it. Type it in yourself and see where it goes.
This is the most utterly mysterious literary magazine I have ever heard of.
-Adam
Like some sort of conscientious, self-loathing werewolf who chains himself up as the full moon approaches, I try to keep my most fearsomely geeky urges and tastes in check. But sometimes the full moon sneaks up on you, as in this case:
The 1987 adolescents-battling-monsters classic The Monster Squad has just been released on a special 20th Anniversary DVD.
The film mostly lives on in memory for a scene where one of the monster-hunting kids kicks the Wolfman in a most sensitive region; the Wolfman doubles over in pain, and the kid, who’s shocked to see a supernatural being hurt by such a juvenile tactic, says, “Wolfman’s got nards!” My brother and I would use the phrase pretty much all the time; I don’t really think “nards” had any meaning before The Monster Squad, but it sure did afterwards.
Two Pittsburgh tie-ins to the movie and that magical phrase:
One, Pittsburgh’s Unicorn Mountain, a collective of artists, earlier this year published Wolfman’s Got Nards: A Compendium of New American Monsters in collaboration with another Pittsburgh entity, Encyclopedia Destructica.
Two, the writer of the Monster Squad screenplay, Shane Black, is a Pittsburgh native. He’s got quite the resume: Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight are all Shane Black scripts. However, film historians will no doubt remember Black largely on the strength of The Monster Squad.
Okay, perhaps not. But apparently the making-of feature on the anniversary DVD is longer than the film itself, so someone is taking The Monster Squad pretty seriously. (Either that or, as the AV Club review suggests, DVD extras are getting out of control.)
-Adam
Issue #1 of Hot Metal Bridge launched over two months ago, but it continues to impress me. The astonishment comes in waves: first the insider’s swell of pride at the quality of (fiction) submissions; next the excitement of venturing into the other genres, seeing the excellent poetry and non-fiction my colleagues have collected. Now that the issue has faded from memory a little, the next stage is rediscovering stuff that, by the time the issue launched, I was honestly a little burned out on.
The best example? Johnathan Wilber’s “(de)jamais vu,” which gave me fits as I proofed it for the site–it’s a textual minefield full of particular accents, footnotes, punctuational flourishes, and selections from esoteric vocabularies. (My annoyance was nothing, however, as compared to that of Carolyn, who had to format the story for publication.) It was kind of a tough sell at HMB’s editorial meeting, and it’s not surprising: it’s a weird story, and with its fragmentation and the aforementioned excess of style, it can be tough to dive into.
But it remains one of my favorite things in the issue, largely because the weirdness and style feel necessary and embedded in the world of the story, and the fragmentation pays off in the end. But, looking through the site again, I came upon almost a distillation of all the things I like in the story: the separate page that contains “(de)jamais vu”’s footnotes. I could type a while longer trying to recommend the story, but I couldn’t make it seem as interesting as do these twelve short footnotes.
-Adam
The leisurely hysteria that is general across the country on the afternoon before a holiday was observed in Pittsburgh today. The clotting of major byways as people escape work, the throngs trapped in supermarket lines, and the seemingly spontaneous weekend feeling–unplaceable but real–are all in evidence this evening. Because of that and because the holiday in question is Independence Day (and because I’m moderately bookish, of course, and because a new blog post was sorely needed), my thoughts turn toward the novel Independence Day, by Richard Ford. It was a Pulitzer Prize winner and I can remember when I was 16 or so seeing its lovely paperback cover in prominent bookstore displays, the title and the photograph of a screen door with rain drops lodged in its tiny cells combining to make me think the novel would distill that listless-holiday feeling.
Let me throw this out there: I have tried to read this novel, and I have never come close to finishing it. I finished and enjoyed (moderately) The Sportswriter, the prelude to Independence Day featuring the same main character, Frank Bascombe. Certain of Ford’s stories (”Communist,” of course, and the one where the guy hooks a dead deer with his fishing rod) utterly floor me. And yet the book that’s thought to be his masterwork is so utterly tedious and unfulfilling to me that I have ended up not just bored but in that weird place of getting angry at the thing that is boring you so thoroughly; throwing-the-book-across-the-room territory.
Am I a complete philistine? Does my failure to finish Independence Day betray a fatal lack of character? Of literary taste? I am interested in being persuaded to suck it up and stick with Frank Bascombe, but I’m also wondering how alone I am in this opinion.
~Adam
At a recent University of Pittsburgh panel on how to make money as a nonfiction writer, a successful freelancer advised us on how to get started. “Take anything!†he shouted, pounding his fist on the table. “ANYTHING!†A freelance photographer in the audience snarled, “Don’t use Craigslist. Jobs on there are piss.â€
This summer I needed work, and having paid my dues in food service and public education, it was time for a summer gig that would beef up my writing resume. My requirements were few: work from home (to accommodate two vacations and my internship schedule) and that my work be compensated with money (to accommodate the rest of life). I didn’t want to pay $30 to Writer’s Market, and Media Bistro had mostly full-time gigs in New York and L.A. To Craigslist!
Pittsburgh is unique among the cities I’ve visited or lived in, in that it has a surprising number of homeless literati-lookalikes. While running through Schenley Park last summer, I saw the homeless Samuel Beckett sitting on a bench, his creased and weary hatchet face staring off across the tennis courts. I wasn’t aware of the writer Richard Yates, but a recent photo reminded me vividly of a man I see often around Squirrel Hill, frequently talking to himself. There’s a woman I sometimes see muttering on the street with the same vivid white skunk-stripe that cut across Susan Sontag’s hair.
But there is a special place in my personal pantheon for the George Plimpton of bums. He has the grayish-white hair, patrician face and carriage of the late George Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review and author of such gonzo sports journalism works as Paper Lion and The Bogey Man. He is shorter, though, a little stouter, and in general doesn’t seem to be in as bright a mood as Plimpton often broadcast to the world. I see him in my neighborhood and in Oakland, where Pitt is, haunting coffee shops, Subways, or standing on street corners, waiting patiently to cross but appearing to have no destination in mind.
It happens that I’m in the middle of Paper Lion, for which Plimpton spent training camp with the Detroit Lions as their “last-string quarterback,” and which is great so far. Earlier this week, I was reading it in a coffee shop and, looking up, noticed that the George Plimpton of bums was sitting twenty or so feet away. Perhaps because of the coincidence, I was attuned to all the other ones–even if they were only coincidental within the framework of my life and experience–that popped up as I continued reading.
Plimpton spoke at length to defensive back Dick LeBeau of the Detroit Lions, now retired and a defensive coordinator for . . . the Pittsburgh Steelers. The year that Plimpton went to training camp with the Lions, their other great defensive back, Alex Karras, was suspended for the season (for gambling). Although Plimpton only spoke to him later on, Karras looms as a kind of shadow over the book, with then-current players recalling anecdotes about Karras’s meal-time theatricality, his exaggerated responses to practical jokes, and his ballerina-like agility on the field.
Reading about Karras’s theatrical abilities and hammish tendencies was a bit weird because Karras would go on to have something of an acting career, probably more of one than Plimpton had. Most notable in Karras’s resume, of course, is the TV series Webster, where Karras played former football great George Papadopolis (whose name is weirdly similar to that of a former Greek dictator), who’s stuck raising Webster, a minuscule, insufferably cute black orphan played by Emmanuel Lewis.
Rather than distracting me from Plimpton’s day-by-day account of football camp with the Lions, all this extra-textual stuff has made the reading really fun and a lot weirder than Plimpton probably intended the book when he wrote it forty or so years ago.
(Post-script: I might be wrong about Webster being Karras’s most notable role: I just learned he also had a small role in Porky’s. Let’s call that a toss-up.)
On a day to day basis, I am a very laugh-y person. I giggle at incredibly innappropriate times, like when my large, short-tempered 3rd grade science teacher used to scream at our class to be quiet. While my fellow eight-year-olds cowered, my reaction was to muffle my laughter–surely bred out of fear–in the sleeve of my shirt. Sometimes I laugh so hard that my eyes get puffy and red, and the muscles of my face feel frozen in a perpetual, doughy smile. It’s actually a little painful.
But all that said, I also cry. A lot. Not because a road rager flipped me off or because I realize my bank account is devastatingly sparse or because I just ate about two week’s worth of calories in one sitting, and can already see it accruing on my thighs. I cry when something moves me, and I find it fulfilling to realize that I am moved by a quite a lot. Two of my favorite ways to get my cartharsis-on are by listening to heartbreakingly beautiful songs, and by reading a good novel. The list below details the who and what of both songs and books that have seriously moved me. I hope they’ll do the same for you.
Tunes:
“One More Dollar” by Gillian Welch.
Oh, Gillian. How I love you. You and your cowboy hat!!
I loved the lyrics to this song so much I wrote a story based on them. And while I wrote, I listened to this song on repeat. For literally days on end. If this particular tune doesn’t suit your fancy, try “Orphan Girl” or “No One Knows My Name.” If she doesn’t have you crying, she’ll have you tapping your bare toes and pensively sipping some moonshine.
“This is the Dream of Win and Regine” by Final Fantasy.
If you are already an Arcade Fire fan, this song may be that much lovelier (Win and Regine are married and play in their band, The Arcade Fire, as one gloriously artistic and adorable pair of musical lovebirds), but it stands its ground entirely on its own. Perhaps I am shamelessly sentimental, but this song embodies the kind of love and loneliness and sweetness and angst that I wish I could pour into my own writing.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
Say what you will about best sellers, but this book is a damn good one. Beautiful. I laughed, I cried so hard I had to put the book down until I got a grip, I laughed some more, I cried a lot more.
“Remember the Mountain Bed” by Billy Bragg and Wilco, lyrics by Woody Guthrie.
Um…I can’t talk about this one right now. I’m about to start crying.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
I’ve read this book several times and can’t decide if it’s a really twisted love story, or a story about a couple of miserable existentialists gone a little cuckoo from all those windy moors. What I do know is it is delightfully grim, and I can’t help but be moved when, psychotic or not, a guy loves his lady so much he’d dig up her dead body just to see her again.
(*giggle*/*sniff*)
Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling (all six of them).
I have cried at the end of every single one of these babies. I don’t know if it has something to do with Harry’s whole Burdened Hero persona, his poor murdered parents, or the fact that by the end of each book I’ve spent a straight forty-eight hours prying my eyes open with toothpicks and abstaining from food and drink in favor of finding out what’s going down at Hogwarts. These books are well-written, funny, smart, sweet, and sad. Everything a good book should be, in my opinion.
I’m a sweet-and-salty kind of person, and I like my reading and listening materials to hold that same dual quality. It’s like Joni Mitchell (whose music often makes me cry) said: Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release.
–Ashleigh
Most of us writers like getting paid for what we do. And at the opening stages of the game, it almost doesn’t matter what that work is, be it word problems for math textbooks, sports reports from the world shuffleboard championships, or obituaries. If someone’s rewarding your wordsmithing with cash, then bully for you.
But some lucres are filthier than others. I recently answered a promising call to write humor for a startup social networking website aimed at college students. The hourly rate wasn’t bad and writing jokes sounded fun. What the hell.
A couple of writing samples later I was given my first assignment to write for the website’s dating game. It functioned like an online version of television’s old Dating Game, and my job was to write clever questions that the inquisitor could use to elicit revealing or witty responses from the field of potential dates. Okay, I thought, I’m helping web surfers break the ice, what’s wrong with that?
The head writer sent me some sample questions to get me started. Here’s where I sensed trouble: “If I were a latte, would you add milk and sugar to me? Or would you just drink me down straight and hot?â€
It occurred to me then that the cardigan of Love Connection had been stripped off television’s hard, eager body years ago. The age demographic for romance game shows had shifted downward, and in Chuck Woolery’s Old Spice-scented vacuum arose cultural travesties like Elimidate, where a group of camera-hungry college girls make out with a glazed dude in progressive single-elimination rounds of clothing removal until one so-called love interest remains.
I considered my moral position. Not all the sample questions were racy and obvious. Most were innocent and even a little clever. But I couldn’t avoid the sobering fact that this website seemed to be in the trampled, sodden field of the VH1 generation cash cow. Had I thrown my literary lot in with the MTV mindset that everyone’s okay as long as everyone is under thirty and hot, sexuality should be worn outside your pants at all times (“So we can check,†to quote Bananas), and irony is best left to steel mills? Surely not. This website just wanted to connect people with a few jokes, right? Either way, I’d been given a job, and the call of paid publication was strong. I let it lead me.
This morning, in town for a speaking engagement at the Carnegie Library, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman sat down with Pitt’s fiction students. As all Pitt writing students know, Chabon did his undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh. Chuck Kinder, the author who runs the Pitt creative writing program, said of Chabon, “I gave him special permission to sit in on graduate classes because he was clearly one of the most brilliant young writers I’ve ever been around.” That’s Michael Chabon on the left, Chuck Kinder on the right.
Sadly, I didn’t get a photo of Ayelet Waldman, who shared the stage — er, table — with her husband as they answered questions and shared stories about writing. Some of what they told us, hastily transcribed:
Chabon: What a good writing program does is give you time to do your writing. A writing program ought to be a way to change your life so you have more time for writing.
Q: Some undergrads are worried that if they’re not published by 23, they won’t really be writers…
Waldman: I think Michael’s one of the only people in the world who isn’t embarrassed by the book he published at 23.
Chabon: Oh, I’m embarrassed.
Chabon: If you write every day, you’re a writer.
Waldman: Michael’s model has been sufficient guilt to keep me at my desk.
Q: What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Chabon: Dennis Bartel, a teacher I had here: If you want to write a novel, you have to sit on your ass. At the time, I was like, Yeah, whatever, dude.
Waldman: story about the Golem as novel, a creature that you create but that you can’t necessarily control, ending with: It’s not anything good unless there’s a certain element of danger to it.
Q: What’s it like working in film, like Spiderman 2?
Chabon: It’s a totally different thing. so much goes unmade; he’s written 2 original screenplays, 2 pilots, years, 15 drafts of Kavalier and Clay. It’s not very fulfilling…. Usually the first draft is fun … but you don’t become a writer because you like sharing.
Q: What kind of research/prep did you do for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay?
Chabon: Part of the reason I wanted to do that book was because of the research; I knew there was a lot I didn’t know (so he read a lot of old comic books, 50-year-old copies of Life magazine and interviewed Stan Lee, Will Eisner, Gil Kane.) My dad grew up in Brooklyn in the ’40s and ’50s and infected me with the sense of wonder of the time.
Q: How do you create the internal logic of Kavalier & Clay, in which superhuman feats appear naturalistic?
Chabon: Try to find books that give you permission to do the kind of work you want to do: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera.
Q: Literary fiction vs. genre fiction?
Waldman: I started with murder mysteries. Who did I think I was? I was just a lawyer on maternity leave. My goal was to write something no worse than anything I’d ever read. I didn’t call myself a writer until I had 4 or 5 books published.
Chabon: When I was here, writing, the work that I did, the stories I wrote and the stuff that I wanted to do when I grew up was strongly influenced by what I read — science fiction, hardboiled detective novels. There had to be a way to write within genre and transcend genre — to write literary fiction true to its genre roots. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was an anomole, naturalistic. All of my primordial great reading experiences were genre, in one way or another, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle when I was 10.
Michael Chabon’s upcoming novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is due out May 1. Ayelet Waldman’s latest, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, is now out in paperback. Big thanks to them for spending time with us Pittsburgh fictioneers!
The New York Times has posted the first chapter of Michael Chabon’s new book Gentlemen of the Road. As a fan of Chabon’s first novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh I made sure to check the link ASAP. While I’m not going to ruin the read for you, I will say Chabon has a skill in going into new worlds each time he puts out a book. This time you can check out a fight between The African and The Frank in the Caucasus Mountains, 950 A.D.
The Drue Heinz Lecture Series in Pittsburgh kicks off its Spring 2007 season on Monday, January 22, at 7:30pm with Alice Hoffman, the author of over twenty novels including Practical Magic and The Ice Queen. Upcoming speakers include Michael Chabon and David Sedaris.