I’ve always enjoyed reading the Google search terms that direct people to my blog. One of my favorite Google referrals of all time was “trying to contact the version of me who lives on another planet.” I was sorry that my blog would have been of little help for that Google user, but not a little amused that someone out there was researching such an important topic. But at least once per day, I see some permutation of the question “how do I withdraw a piece from Submishmash?” or “what does it mean when my submission’s status is marked In Progress?” in this blog’s search results. If there are that many of you with questions about navigating submission managers, I think it’s time for a little public service announcement about all things Submishmash (a.k.a. Submittable).

First, a disclaimer: this is one lowly editor’s advice about how to understand and approach Submishmash/Submittable. Not all editors are the same in the ways they run their publications; while I am trying to give the most broad advice possible, I can’t speak for everyone in publishing. I also do not have complete and unending knowledge about the intricacies of Submishmash, as I do not work for them.

Okay. Are we good? Let’s talk about those little status indicators you see to the right of your submissions list. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the New Year weekend, I decided to take on Jeffrey Eugenides’s new book, The Marriage Plot. I’d been hearing buzz about it for some time, and had been told it was an Important Book. I’m not always so fond of the chosen ones of literary fiction (let’s face it: they’re pretty much always white men), but I gave this book a go. It was an interesting read, but less because of it’s incredibly predicable plot than because of Eugenides’s deeply strange characterization choices.

Let’s get the elephant in the room taken care of first: The Marriage Plot may just as well have been called Jonathan Franzen’s Plot. Eugenides essentially reconstructed Franzen’s Freedom–college-aged kid are all sleeping with one another, but they want to be sleeping with different people. None of the sleeping with turns out to be very satisfactory, and everyone is having crises about this sleeping-with situation. That’s all. Eugenides does toss in a little lightweight literary theory and cuts out the saggy middle-aged bits that Franzen includes, but we’re looking as the same, fundamental book.

But whereas there are authors–like Franzen–who put their characters through grave trouble and suffering of all kinds, then allow the characters to escape, grow, and triumph in some small way, there are also authors–like Eugenides–who put their characters through troubles, and then proceed to mock them; not only is The Marriage Plot a low-calorie version of Freedom, it’s also pretty snide. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was studying Medieval Literature at Oxford (I just rewrote that phrase about 20 different times in an attempt to make myself sound less obnoxious. This is the best version I came up with), I was surrounded by people who had a wide variety of motivations for studying the time period. I thought it would be cool to learn to read Middle English and to spend an intensive period of time learning about the English mystery plays. A small handful of my compatriots–well, fellow American expatriates in our big communal house in Shoe Lane–had other interests, including but not limited to feigning British accents to take back home with them to Kansas or Iowa (nearly everyone in the house but me, the lone Californian, seemed to be from Kansas or Iowa) or scouring the Oxfam shops to find tweed coats with elbow patches and pairs of flat-front pants to make themselves look scholarly.

I was chatting with one such guy–who I’m fairly sure ended up a local Republican politician somewhere in Kansas or Iowa–one morning before a lecture we were about to hear on medieval monasticism. He told me that he had entertained the idea of becoming a monk, but sighed and said that “the monastery just isn’t what it used to be. It’s so service-oriented these days.” I had to chuckle. Of course, my KansIowan classmate wouldn’t be any Abelard, able to keep a lovely lady on hand in the back room while he philosophized the day away. He would have to work with the poor, with the indigent, with the sick. Not what it used to be indeed.

But if I’m honest, I’d have to admit that I too had had a fascination with cloistered life. In fact, I think many of the young women with whom I grew up in a highly religious community felt, at one time or another, that if there were some sort of Protestant version of nuns, we’d sign ourselves up. While I no longer align myself with any religious group, I still understand the draw of that sense of purpose, of contemplation, of service, and of love. Of a radical commitment to an ideal rather than to the proscriptive path of marriage and family.

It was with that sense of fascination with the cloistered life that I found Mary Johnson’s new memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst. While I’m not generally a great reader of memoir, I practically gorged myself on this book. Johnson tells a fascinating story of growing from a young college student into a novice, a postulant, an avowed sister in the Missionaries of Charity–the order of nuns founded by Mother Theresa. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking lately about how much time I and other writer-types spend yakking away about our writing and about our industry. Of course, we spend a huge amount of time working on our books and trying to bring them to market, so it makes sense that we would want to talk shop now and then. The problem, though, is that it sometimes seems that writers and readers exist as different species: one creates the work with a great deal of fanfare and bloggery, and then the nameless, faceless other devours it in some dark corner of the universe. But when we writers are doing our jobs properly, we’re also readers. Big readers. I’m a firm believer that a writer who doesn’t spend at least as much time reading as scribbling isn’t serious about the work. If you want to make good books, you have to experience books. Read the rest of this entry »

This time of year, everyone’s rounding something up, whether it’s the top 10 albums of the year, the top 5 books of the year, or the top 7.2 olive oils of the year. Creating a “top” list is inherently problematic; none of us is well read, well listened, or well oiled enough to be able to speak for all cultural productivity for a year, and grouping work by base numbers of ten is clearly convenient rather than meaningful.

This year, I thought I’d make a list for myself. This list is titled “Some of the Fiction that I Read and Enjoyed this Year.” Okay, it’s not as catchy as “The Only 10 Relevant and Worthy Books of ALL TIME,” but I rather like a small gesture, don’t you?

A few statements before I get into this list:

1. I do not possess complete world knowledge, so this list is a limited endeavor. These are just books I read and enjoyed. Not all of them, not the most important of them, just good books.

2. This list is based solely on what I read this year, not on what was published this year. Some of these books are a bit older than others.

3. While it’s awesome for reader/writers to encourage one another, it makes me nauseated when I see lists in which reader/writers simply mention everything their friends published in a year. So, while I’ve met some of these writers, I do not personally know any of them, and I listed their books for no back-scratching purpose.

4. Yes, this list is all fiction, this time. I have a number of reviews of poetry forthcoming, so I’ll let those reviews speak for themselves.

Some of the Fiction that I Read and Enjoyed this Year Read the rest of this entry »

Birthdays are always a little bit of a conflicted time for me. It’s not that I’m tremendously concerned about the idea of getting older (though, seriously–what are these wrinkle thingamajiggers doing creeping up on my face?). It’s that I find it hard to avoid using the day as a natural pause to do some soul-searching, assessing the ways I’ve spent time and what I’ve managed to accomplish since the last such mile marker.

This year, I had one major goal: finish the current novel-in-progress. Obviously, I also needed to meet the goals of being a good editor at LAR, a good teacher to my students, a good partner to my husband, and a good friend to those I care about. But in terms of goals that were purely for my own sake–my totally selfish goals–I just wanted to finish this damn book. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again–changing seasons, Halloween, Thanksgiving, whatever. I’m talking about its being time for The Los Angeles Review’s fall issue!

This fall, it’s our 10th issue. That’s right: we’re in the double-digits, folks! And while I know I have a habit of declaring favorites among our editions, I really do think that Issue 10 is a standout among our publications over these past few years.

Because I co-edit poetry for LAR, I’m particularly pleased with the wide array of poetic voices we have in this issue. We have ekphrastic work from Terrance Hayes, beautiful formal pieces from Jennifer Givhan and Nick DePascal, knock-the-wind-outta-you poems from Benjamin Sutton and Colin Pope, impressive long poems from LaTasha Diggs and James Allman Jr., and quiet and tender poems from Brandon Courtney, Todd Kaneko, and David Wagoner. And that’s just the beginning. (I’m tempted to name every poet in the issue, but I’ll show some restraint.) Read the rest of this entry »

I love banned books. I love reading them, I love teaching them. My contrary streak may have begun in my conservative high school, in which we got to read some banned books, but with the bad words slyly redacted in black Sharpie. Or maybe with my mom’s throwing out my copy of Siddhartha, because it was based loosely on the life of the Buddha. Or it could be the hilarious scowls I got riding the high-speed rail in Portland while reading The Satanic Verses.  Whatever made me a rogue reader, all someone has to say to me is that a book is banned, and I am off to the bookstore to buy myself a copy.

In honor of banned books week at the end of September, I had my 9th and 10th graders take a look at a list of books we’ve read together, and that they’ve enjoyed: The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lord of the Flies, Night, Wise Blood, A Separate Peace–the list went on and on. When I told them what the books had in common, that people in various locations across the country and the world cannot access these books because a school system of a library has deemed them dangerous and immoral, they were perplexed. Read the rest of this entry »

This September has been an exciting month for me. Not only did I have the enormous pleasure of seeing my best writing buddy and fellow Los Angeles Review editor Tanya Chernov ink a fabulous book deal with a fabulous press, I also came, at long last, to the 18-month mark before publication of my own book.

As many of my readers likely know, my collection Burn This House was accepted by Red Hen Press for publication some time ago. And though I knew I’d have to wait my turn for publication, I was so pleased to have the book accepted at a wonderful press like Red Hen that I would have waited a decade longer to see it in print. (And because I’m a compulsive tinkerer, I enjoyed having a great deal of time to continue to fuss with the poems in the book.) Even though I’ve been polishing individual poems in the book for some time, as my final manuscript delivery date came closer into view, I began to get a serious case of the nerves. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, world. I’m back to the world of the written page, after a wonderful break from teaching and editing. Let’s just say there was sand and warm water. There were giant sea turtles that swam around my ankles. It was very good to take a bit of time off and to spend long days with my husband, and to take an enforced time out from the literary world. Much as I love being engaged with other writers, readers, and editors, sometimes it’s a good idea to remember that literature is a component of life–an important one–but not life itself. One has to breathe from time to time. One has to look up, and look around.

As I was heading back to life, tanned, relaxed, and not a little more portly for all the delicious things I’d eaten on vacation, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the most recent literary kerfuffle. I may have been the last person in the publishing world to hear about the flap over BlazeVox Books’ latest fundraising efforts (if you, too, were living under a rock and had not heard the fuss, here’s a glimpse at the issue, and the high emotions it called up. A short version: BlazeVox is accepting manuscripts, and, upon acceptance, asking authors to make donations to the press. A host of authors are speaking up, arguing that this practice makes BlazeVox, a bastion of small press publishing, a vanity press, up there with concerns like Publish America.)  But as you may have noticed, I can’t help but rattle my two cents around, even if I’m a little late.

I stumbled on the news about BlazeVox on the same day that I got a Los Angeles Review-related email I’d classify in the second of my three categories: “normal mail,” “snippy and strange mail,” and “hate mail” (the last of which we’ve dealt with here in past blog posts). This snippy email was from a writer who chastised me/the magazine for not offering our issues free online (we’re a print-only magazine). He informed me that, while he’d like to send work to us for publication, he he wanted to read what we’ve done before. And he thought he should be able to do that for free. Read the rest of this entry »