P is for PhD: A Year in Review

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I know I abandoned the blog this past year. Guess I got worded out. When all you do day in/day out is words you crave a task that is not words. Frying a farm fresh egg in a skillet, for instance.

But here I am Summer break. My friends are (mostly) scattered. I find myself inspired to pen a brief wrap to the highlights of my past year as a PhD candidate in creative writing at Ohio University.

So.

I navigated the usual stages if a first year: 1) exhilaration 2) resolution 3) pedagogy 4) assembling of posse 5) poetic musing 6) hedonism 7) deathbed hangover 8) atonement 9) actual writing 10) random drive to Target 11) Karaoke-ing 12) existential questioning 13) the frantic desire to move to France 14) disintegration of self 15) lunch 16) gang warfare 17) more actual writing 18) veganism 19) lapse from veganism 20) total burnout 21) acceptance.

I fought back a torrent of seminars, meetings, assemblages, surveys, memos, notices, warnings, emails, reminders, reports, colloquia, announcements and etc. Ultimately I have found the "oh, I didn't see that one" technique works best.

I still miss Montana. This heartache won't heal. I cling to my 406 area code and MT driver's license. My tags have been expired over a year but I refuse to change them.

I took a Tristram Shandy seminar, which rocked. Sitting around a large oak table discussing 18^th century literature felt exactly like what grad school should be. Advice: take the time to search out those profs who bring the material to life, and the lit classes won’t feel like cement feet.

I lunched with writers such as Rebecca Skloot, George Saunders, Robin Hemley and Lydia Davis. I was hoping for a laying of hands or incantation of secret writer spells, but they did each break the terrible news that the actual writing part is up to me kindly. And sometimes, there was good cheese.

I published in The Gettysburg Review, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and mental_floss magazine.

For coursework I read Phillip Roth, Michael Chabon, Denis Johnson, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Joan Didion, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Nellie Bly, Hannah Crafts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and about 50 critical articles, most of which could have been cut in half, although I recommend Henry Louis Gates, Janet McMaster, and Hugh Kenner who all write *gasp* enjoyable scholarship.

I taught three sections of comp at OU, and eight sections of business communication online, and wondered if I will ever get to lead a workshop.

And, somehow, through all of this, I managed to complete a draft of my first book. Despite the extra workload, I believe school helped. Yes, school can be a bubble, but for me the bubble works. As my former Montana prof Kevin Canty wrote once on writers, "Talky, drinky, gossipy, insecure and overcompensating, self-doubting, self-promoting, bright and dark, you are nevertheless My People and I love you almost all."

Slush: Not A Pleasing Fruity Drink

The Wall Street Journal released this article about how getting read (nevermind published) from the slushpile has reached astronomically difficult proportions. For example, The Paris Review, publishes one solicited story a year, making the odds .o08%. So, do we draw up the noose, pile up the back issues, and jump?

By way of response, I would like to say that even today, in this supposed dearth, new writers get noticed. Who ever said writing was easy? People seem to cling to these glory days when the short story market paid the bills. And when was that? And how long, in the grand scheme of writing and publishing, did that era last?

Technology has made multiple submissions easy for the writer. Writers don't have to painstakingly type manuscripts, and then wait for their return. Now they can fire multiple copies off and carpet bomb if they like. Editors, lest they wind up drowned in sheafs of paper, have had to create lines of multiple defense. Having read for a lit mag, I don't blame them.

No, you can't mail your newly minted book off to Random House and expect a response, but if you are writing and submitting good work, publication is not dreaming the impossible dream. In the past three years Montana MFAers (as in, my fellow classmates) have cracked some tough markets, including The Colorado Review, The North American Review, The Black Warrior Review, The Boston Review, McSweeney's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Mid-American Review, and The Gettysburg Review. Books by former grads (that seems to take a few more years) have been published.

A quick look at The Paris Review told me this pub is not for the emerging artist. This month's issue (for example) has work by Robert Haas and Aimee Bender. Furthermore, I don't believe it's the responsibility of every lit mag to focus on emerging writers. It's not as if Aimee Bender and Robert Haas are spamming American.

Still, I'm glad for the lit mags that give us newbies a chance. Allow me to say, thanks. And if you are an emerging writer, consider supporting a mag that supports us.

P is for Publication!

I have a book review in the latest edition of Brevity. For those unfamiliar, Brevity is an online lit mag dedicated to "concise nonfiction," meaning less than 750 words. "Over the past year Brevity has averaged 6,000 visitors per month, or 24,000 visitors per issue," (from the website). And it's free!

So get with it. Here's a link to my favorite from this issue.

P is for (Re) Publication: A Reprise

Earlier I posted that one success of the year was my appearance in The Pop Culture Zone, a book in which a profile on Gary Larson I wrote for Mental Floss Magazine is anthologized. I knew the pub was some kind of textbook, but not what kind, exactly.

Well, I finally received my copy, and turns out the book is designed for freshman comp. You! My old nemesis. The concept is “students relate to pop culture, so they will be more willing to think critically about it.” Having engaged in such ploys myself, I am skeptical. Only freshman could sleep through Pulp Fiction and whine at the end, "I didn't get it." (To which I reply in my mind, Fuck you motherfuckers. For next week read Tristram Shandy.) I suppose we must try. Although I fear the professors Smith, Smith and Watkins didn’t consider that the John Hughes movie era was at its peak about a decade before the current crop of Freshman were born.

No matter. I will certainly order this book when I teach Comp. Because of course I’m thrilled. I am referred by last name. I am indexed! And…I got to read the much anticipated discussion questions.

My fav: "Why does Ferguson hope that Larson will emerge from retirement 'long enough to draw a python that strangles The Family Circus'"?

Answer Key: Because the Family Circus blows. Why does academia insist on making everything so complicated?

I can’t wait to make my students buy this sixty dollar beast and assign myself as homework. Awesome.

Oh, and if all this wasn't too much already, Joy Williams and David Sedaris are in the same book. It’s like, we’re touching!

Montana MFA's in the News

In my lit mag research (read: randomly clicking on websites) I stumbled upon Elizabeth Benjamin (class of '07) in The New Orleans Review. Last I heard Elizabeth was butchering chickens in Maine. And writing. Chickens and literature are inexorably linked, I've noticed. Chickens work in the way that other domesticated animals do not.

From Mount St. Helens:

"When I was twenty-nine, my hair became so tangled with grief that my my mother and I wore bathing suits in the shower together while she greased my hair and combed it under the spray..."

Montana MFA grad news

Newsletter just in my emailbox: 2007 Montana MFAer Grace Egbert is a finalist in the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize at Crazyhorse. Congrats!

New Lit Mag

The Rat's Ass Review

On the Poets & Writers Speakeasy (time suck/savior/break from Facebook for those of us who work on computers), a running joke became The Rat's Ass Review as in...

...should I list small pubs on my bio like TRAR?
...will MFA programs consider me if my only credit is TRAR?
...maybe you should send that romance/thriller/horror limerick set in the Garden District of New Orleans to TRAR.

Online and poetry only. TRAR is new, so the chance of acceptance might be higher. Think of how awesome your contributer notes bio will read for the rest of your life. Looks almost as good as Cat Fancy.