This past week I received yet another letter saying “no thanks.”  This one came from Cezanne’s Carrot, a journal whose speciality is fiction that explores the metaphysical and mystical.  I sent them my story “Puppet Storm,” a story that fits nicely within their editorial guidelines.  This story is one that I started many years ago but finished only recently, and it narrates a comic moment of cosmic import.

The story has, so far, garnered no fewer than four rejections from journals large and small.

In the words of a poet friend of mine, “I want the rejections that are rightly due me.”  Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel a low, every time thsoe damned emails/letters arrive.

“We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but after careful consideration, we have decided not to publish it.”

Very succinct.

Whilst moping about this latest rejection, I read a great post on HTML Giant.  The author, Roxanne Gay, is an editor at Pank magazine, and in that role, she has the pleasure of sending more than her share of rejection notices.  Her post explores the stages of grief that every writer goes through when dealing with rejection:

1. It’s not me it’s those damned editors.
2. It’s all my fault.  I will never be published.
3. People just don’t understand the brilliance of my writing.

I have felt all these things.

Gay cautions folk like me not to fall victim to an entitlement mentality.  To put that energy back into the work.

She concludes:

Growing up, my father (like many fathers, I’m sure) was fond of reminding my brothers and I that life isn’t fair when we were pouting about one trivial thing or another. I often want to dispense that advice to writers who feel like publication is inevitable, that publication is  their right by the grace of their talent.  I’m afraid such is not the case.

‘Tis a good word.  Not very soothing to me at the moment.  Maybe it’s simply the reference to father figures, but Gay’s post strikes me as a bit trite right now, however, true I know her advice to be.

I have much work to do with my writing.  I want to write well.  I have yet to acheive what I want with writing.  I recently read an interview with Barry Hannah, in which he discussed a certain story of his (I forget which), it was a story that he wrote several years after publishing a book of stories.  Hannah was well on  his way to achieving some noteriety for his writing.  Yet he said of this particular story that it was the first time he felt like he got it right, like his words captured the essence of what he wanted.  I’m still waiitng for that moment, and I do not wait passively.  I write.  I read.

And I try to ignore the rejections.

I was born in Flint, Michigan. My parents still live there. My grandparents have lived or still live there. Flint is the quintessential Northern factory town. It is a city that General Motors built, and when I grew up nearly everyone I knew was connected in some way to the auto industry. Yet despite being a distinctly Northern town, Flint was mostly populated with Southern transplants, folks who came North to find a better life. These Southern Yankees brought their Baptist faith and their cornbread up North and started raising families. Exiles from the Bible belt, singing the songs of the lord in a foreign land.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s remarkable book of short stories American Salvage captures this experience of the Yankee South, however unintentionally. All the stories in the book take place in Michigan, a truth made more poignant by the fact that Salvage was published by Wayne State University Press as part of their “Made in Michigan Series.” It seems rare to find a writer of Campbell’s talent stake such a strong regional claim. The notion of a “regional” literature seemed, for a time, to be the purview of Southerners alone–and the ocassional “Westerner” (Cormac McCarthy; Annie Prolux?).

American Salvage, however, is distinctly Michigan. But in being so distinct, Campbell pays homage to Michigan’s cultural dependence on the South. These characters would be just as comfortable in a Faulkner tale or a Peter Taylor short story as they are here in this colder clime.

I read American Salvage over the Christmas holiday while on my way to Michigan to visit my family. The characters evoked memories of my people, my family, and perhaps for this reason alone I felt a deep connection to Campbell and her story collection.

But these stories are more than just evocative. Campbell is a master craftswoman. She has a seemingly innate sense of how to control language and employ it in story. The beginning of the story the Inventor:

A rusted El Camino clips the leg of the thirteen-year old girl, sends her flying through the predawn fog. She lands on the side of the road and lies twisted and alive in the dirty snow.

Two terse sentences that set up a story of loss and love, a story with one small part sexual tension and one big part discovery. The El Camino driven by a man who would be good, but who has only ever been the Other. In telling the story, Campbell gives the reader just enough to move to the next sentence with growing anticipation.

The fourteen stories in the collection share a tone and often a subject, though it would be difficult to pin that subject down like a moth. It is the stuff of life, and particularly the stuff of life in rural Michigan.

Campbell’s book was the runner up for this year’s National Book Award, an honor she fully deserves. As part of the festivities for the award, Campbell gave this fine reading of one of the stories in the collection. Not the story I would have selected for her to read, but a great piece none the less.

finalistread f campbell from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Check out her website too www.bonniejocampbell.com .

On her blog she had some great snippets of the speech she intended to give had she won the National Book Award.  I’ll conclude with this, which, IMHO, makes Ms. Campbell a damn fine Southern Yankee.

This award is good news for writers who feel uncertain, for writers who choose to live in small towns in Michigan or Maine because they feel a profound connection to their own people and landscape. This is good news for writers who do not feel brilliant, but who want to work hard to get it right

It’s that “profound connection to their own people and landscape” part that I’ll ruminate on.

J.D. Salinger and I go way back.  It was he who stuck “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a poor sinner” into my little brain.  Yep, this is that damned Jesus Prayer that drives Franny Glass bonkers in Franny and Zooey.

As much as I hate the man for giving me that ear worm, i’m sad to see him gone.

My good friend The Hamster has the best remembrance of the man I’ve read.  Go check it out http://wheresmyhockeymask.blogspot.com/2010/01/indeed-today-is-perfect-day-for.html

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

-W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry and politics.

This is one of those recurring themes in my thought life. I’m an idealist who masquerades as a realist, but I cannot shake the belief that good art can shake the system to the core.

On the other hand, I fancy myself an artist, or at least a fella who likes to play with language. And, as such, I have always harbored a deep respect for Oscar Wilde’s apology for the uselessness of art.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

I believe Oscar. Of course, loving beauty got him two years hard labor. Maybe he was more ethical than he thought. Maybe it was his ethics that ran him headlong into the authority of the day. And perhaps his art helped to (eventually? still going on?) bring down the ethics that put him in prison.

But poetry makes nothing happen.

Auden’s words about Yeats.

And here is Yeats, taking swipes at and then steps toward Irish Nationalism. He turns his Nobel acceptance into an opportunity to promote Ireland:

“I consider that this honor has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.”

Ahhh, but the Yeats I love is the Yeats with “a faerie hand in hand,” the romantic Yeats. Or that dark lyrical pessimism of Adam’s Curse: “we’d grown as weary hearted as that hollow moon.” Gorgeous. The beauty that needs no moral.

Poetry makes nothing happen…

And maybe Auden’s point is that politics, the give and take, the back and forth, it goes on with our without our art. But it sure don’t hurt to try and make something happen. Maybe the attempt to make something beautiful, and in that way to make something happen, maybe this is a windmill worth chasing.

I’m a two pack a day man, smoke like a fiend
Like a burned out bearing in a bad machine
I cayn’t breath in the mornin’ till I get myself a cigarette lit
Say, Daaaa aaaad Blame, anyways a man cayn’t quit.
–Roger Miller

I did not meet her as a teenager, as so many others do. True, I saw her often, flirting with the gutter punks and metal heads, men, women, she was indiscriminate, flirty bitch, and I was not attracted to her. I was NOT.

Paul introduced us. He had not known her very long, but he invited her along one night. We had no plan. It wasn’t a formal date. Just friends, feeling the first flush of adult independence but with nothing to do except drive around that dirty Indiana river town. Five of us drove out to the river. There was Paul and her, Kelly and Jenny, and myself. They all knew her better than I did, and I was uncomfortable around her, awkward, but I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to impress her, show her how cool I was. I didn’t know then how easily impressed she was.

There, on the banks of the Ohio, our first kiss. My head was a mason jar of frenzied fireflies. Ecstasy.

The S.S. and I winded our way to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, making stops along the way in St. Louis, Hot Springs AR, Glenwood, AR, and Norman, OK. In the time it took to get from Evansville, IN to Fort Worth, TX, I fully committed to tobacco, and on that trip, I switched my allegiances from cigarettes to the pipe. This was a decision made on a whim as I rolled through a drive-thru smoke shop in Hot Springs. There I bought a corncob pipe and a pouch of Prince Albert. The pipe I named Quennie.

Queenie and I snaked our way through the Ozarks, puffing and laughing, light headed. This was when one puff still gave me the lightening bug feeling. Empty one bowl, tapping her out on the side of the S.S.. Fill another. Empty another bowl, tap tap tap. Fill another. Puff, Puff, Puff. Later that night I sat around a campfire with Luc and Irys and we passed her around, taking turns. There was something sad in the air that night, like fumes of Auschwitz, and the tepee was cold despite Queenie’s presence.

How could I know then that I would scarcely spend a night without her for the next twelve years.

I don’t smoke, and I don’t chew, and I don’t go with the girls that do.
~anonymous

I knew immediately when I arrived on the campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that i had made a mistake in coming there. A quick review of the bumper stickers in the dormitory parking lot told me all I needed to know: “My Boss is a Jewish carpenter,” “We Vote Pro-life,” “In Case of Rapture, this Vehicle Will Be Unoccupied.” But in that election year, the top-rated bumper sticker was “Dole/Kemp ‘96.” Even in the height of my religious fervor, I despised jingoistic Christianity and hated this identification of evangelical Christianity with the Republican party, and SWBTS, the largest Christian seminary in the world, was, at that time in history, the seedbed of jingoistic, politicized Christiainity.

Smoking was anathema. No one smoked on campus. In fact, all SWBTS students were required to sign a pledge saying that we would not smoke or drink alcohol. I broke that pledge within two seconds of my arrival. I violated the pledge at least five times a day during my brief stay. I was afraid, though, of getting kicked out of graduate school, so I smoked in secret.

If smoking is an ice cream sundae, smoking in secret is the whipped cream and cherry on top. The secret makes the smoke delicious. My favorite place to smoke was the Denny’s on University Avenue in Fort Worth, and it was here that I would spend my nights and early mornings for the one and one-half years that I endured SWBTS.

My habit was to go the seminary library and check out books of theology that had been blacklisted from classroom reading lists. Then I would take these books to Denny’s and devour them along with twenty cigarettes. Yes, cigarettes. Queenie demanded too much codling. She was a demanding lover. She needed constant attention, cleaning, accessories. Ciggies only needed a light, and Armando, the manager at the Denny’s was always good for a light. He was sweet on me.

Then one rainy Tuesday afternoon, I couldn’t handle SWBTS anymore. I was sitting in my Southern Baptist History class. Earlier that morning at Denny’s I had finished a book about the recent history of the Baptist Convention. I read about the so-called “purge” of liberalism; I read about the back room deals (one wonders what might be different had those rooms been smoke filled); I read about all the subterfuge and jockeying for power, and I was illuminated. “I am not a Southern Baptist anymore.” I left class, got in the Smoking Section, lit a cigarette, and drove the ninety-miles to Waco, TX where I enrolled at the Truett Seminary. They didn’t care that I smoked, or at least, they didn’t make me sign anything saying I wouldn’t. True, they were still Baptists, but they were kinder, gentler Baptists. Joining their ranks brought catharsis for a time. To celebrate, I sat on the banks of the Brazos and smoked half a pack in the rain.

My friend Anthony is–to put it mildly–a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she’ll get mad.   (That’s Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we feel about books, and why/if we are attached to the physcial manifestaion of words known as the book.  Anthony calls this the “book object,” and he’s even got a wonderful blog about his personal explorations into book objects (http://onbooksandbiblios.blogspot.com/).  Anthony and I sometimes wrangle about the future of the book.  I believe that there will come a time (behold it approaches) when we will get most of our words in some paperless fashion, and I do not lament the passing of the book.

The contents of a book excite me more than the book itself.  The physical book to me is more of an annoyance (but yes, I am a librarian) that you have to take care of, store, lug around from town to town.  Book objects are things that Thoreau would say are “easier got than gotten rid of.”

The book-object problem is accentuated, in my mind, by the dubious practices of the publishing industry.  Books today are designed to wear out, fall apart, and the crappy content that’s published in these book objects is not worth the CO2 released from the trees the book-objects are printed on.  (eg I saw a book at the Friends of the Library book sale today titled Jesus, CEO that purported to reveal the secrets of Jesus’ business management style).

Admittedly, I am a hypocrite.

I have felt that titillating surge—so much like an awkward and unexpected pubescent erection—when I walk into a massive bookstore. The smell of book objects. The racks and racks of books on every topic. The covers in colors or lacking colors, artful,sometimes playful. AND, most importantly, I have salivated over the amazing bargains. They buy one get one deal. The $1 Dover Thrift editions of the classics.

If the publishing industry has gone a-whoring, then the big box bookstores are their pimps. Sometimes, these corporate stores even get in directly on the whoring. Barnes and Noble is the worst offender. B&B cranks out their own editions, in disarmingly handsome hardback, of the classics. I admit to having bought a few of these over the years. And B&B’s sheer purchasing power allows them to discount their books at rates that make it hard to say no.

Yet, sometimes, they get it right. And this is a post about Barnes and Noble getting it right.

Every year, I can count on getting at least one B&B gift card for my birthday or for Christmas. One of the perks of being a librarian is that everyone thinks you always want books as a present (which isn’t too far off the mark, really). For the last two years, I’ve used these gift cards toward the purchase of quality hard-back fiction, mostly of authors who probably don’t sell that much hard-back fiction (btw, if you want to support authors and NOT publishers, then buy first-run hard-backed fiction. This is really where an author makes his/her money. The acid-washed paper-backed editions are a publishers wet-dream because this is where they can take someone’s intellectual property, crank it out quickly and cheaply, and rake in the profit).
Barnes and Noble has a program called Discover Great New Authors, and this is where they get it right. One of their picks for this year is Gin Phillips and her new novel The Well and the Mine. The rightness of this pick almost attones for their past sins.

The book explores the world of coal-mining Alabama in the 1930’s. Phillips narrates her tale through the shifting perspectives of members of the Moore family, a family living in the type of dignified poverty popular in seventies TV shows like the Waltons or Little House. There’s the strong, working-class father who is both rough and gentle. Mr Moore has that time of wisdom that sees it as nothing to bail out a colored friend, but who has trouble thinking on the deeper issues of racial injustice. Ma is that type of maternal figure who sacrifices all for her family and does so without quarrel, without question. She is the flattest of all the characters in the book. The children round out the Moor family: two girls and a boy. The oldest girl is the beauty. The youngest is the boy, Jack, who is the scion, the only son, and though he is the youngest, Phillips chooses to time-shift from time to time, as Jack picks up the story looking back over that time from his vantage point of middle age. Tess, is the middle child, not as pretty as her sister, but more spunky. One senses that Tess is Phillips favorite child, for she seems to get the grandest treatment in the story.

A story like this , with a cast of characters that leans so closely toward archetypal cliches, could easily get so syrupy that it sends one into a diabetic comma. Yet Phillips eschews oversimplifying the life of this family, and she does so largely by sticking to the facts. The narrative facts of the story, that is.Portions of the story where other writers might be tempted to moralize, Philips simply tells the tale, or rather lets her characters do the talking. Much like Harper Lee’s classic—one of my all-time favorites—there is a strong theme of maturation at work in the Well and the Mine. This is a family growing up in a difficult time. That is all. It is not a more difficult time than any other; it is not a more romantic age. It is simply a different time. The story a human story.

But to get back to my original point: the success of this book is made more astounding by the fact that, as wonderful as the story is, no major publisher picked it up. No Random House, no Viking, no Knopf. The Well and the Mine was published by Hawthorne Books, a independent publishing house in Portland, OR (http://www.hawthornebooks.com/). Hawthorne says of itself: “we’re serious about literature. We suspected that good writers were being ignored and cast aside as a result of consolidation in the publishing industry, and in 2001 we decided to find these writers and give them a voice.” Three cheers for Hawthorne: Hip Hip Horrah! Each of their books is printed in durable paper-back with handsome cover-art and book-marking flaps. Barnes and Noble’s pick of The Well and the Mine gives me a shred of hope for publishing and for the literary arts in general. It makes me feel that maybe book-objects are still a worthy obsession.

Your move, Anthony.

‘Turn dis soul ta bread.
It might be useful.
Ain’t fit ta e’en put butter on now.

Feed the body.
Starve the soul.

“Willie, maybe the body and soul
Are two sides of the same crust.
Maybe spirit and flesh ain’t easily rent asunder.”

“You ain’t far from da kingdom, boy.”
Take, eat.

I’ve also installed WP2.7 on my local machine with the help of XAMPP and intend to build my own theme as soon as time is available…which is rarely.

I’m tired of the damned red, white, and blue.

Like an infant that has not yet smiled.
I droop and drift, as though I belonged nowhere.
All men have enough and to spare;
I alone seem to have lost everything.
Mine is indeed the very mind of an idiot,
So dull am I.
The world is full of people that shine;
I alone am dark.
They look lively and self assured;
I alone, depressed.
I seem unsettled as the ocean;
Blown adrift, never brought to a stop.
All men can be put to some use;
I alone am intractable and boorish.
But wherein I most am different from men
Is that I prize no sustenance that comes not from the Mother’s breast.
~Tao Te Ching, Chapter 20

J.M. Coetzee is a celebrated South African novelist and scholar, winner of England’s Booker Prize and the 2003 Nobel in Literature. Upon receiving the Nobel, Coetzee was praised for his moral vision and for “in inumberable guises portraying the involvement of the outsider.” His novel Disgrace is illustrative of this emphesis on the outsider.

Disgrace begins with the self-assured, yet discontented, Professor David Laurie getting sexually involved with one of his students. This sexual escapade is indicative of Laurie’s adult life, simultaneously revering yet despising the fairer sex. The disgrace of Disgrace first manifests itself here. Laurie loses his professorship, because he cannot bring himself to acknowledge any wrongdoing. “Yes, it’s true; I slept with her.” Is as close as he can come to confession.

And so the once-professor Laurie, quits the city to live in the country with his hippie lesbian daughter Lucy. In cinema, the story would go like this: disgraced professor moves to country with lesbian daughter where he has revelation about his misogyny and cosmopolitan bias; redemption ensues; in the climax the chastened David Laurie presides over a a heartfelt commitment ceremony between Lucy and her lover.

Coetzee, however, eschews the Hollywood fantasy. Against the sometimes brutal backdrop of rural South Africa, Coetzee’s story illumines the complexities of disgrace and what it means to be disgraced, spiraling deeper and deeper into both our personal and corporate conceptions of guilt and justice.

There is no dualism for Coetzee. An act of “disgrace” is simultaneously and act of “redemption.”

There is nothing but dualism for Coetzee. There is disgrace and redemption. There is justice and injustice. Good and evil.

On one side are the black South African rapists. On the other is his hippie lesbian daughter who is patient and long suffering. Then there is the white Christian family. They are the parents of the student Laurie disgraced. They will forgive. They will offer redemption. The black “dog-handler” Petrus is both exploited and exploiter. Is he a protector or an instigator of violence? He is both.

In the middle, juggling all these dualities is Laurie. Professor Laurie is the unwitting Taoist sage. By the end he is a shadow of his former arrogant self. He job is to kill and incinerate unwanted dogs. He lives in a shack and spends his time tinkling out tunes on a busted banjo, tunes he intends to use for his forthcoming opera on the life and loves of Byron. He droops and drifts, prizing only the precious milk from the Mother’s Breast.