On Thursday I leave the overcast of Mercer Island and head down to the overcast of Forest Grove, Oregon for my third residency at Pacific U. As Ryan Boudinot once told me: “An MFA residency is like summer camp for writers . . . with beer!” I’m fired-up to see friends, critique shorts, talk shop, listen to the war stories of the faculty, and immerse myself in the idea (albeit an illusion) that I’m a writer first and foremost. Jess Walter is joining the faculty this semester and I’m just finishing his 9/11 novel (he probably doesn’t like people calling it that) The Zero. It’s a badass book, written with just the right measure of swagger and chops. Finding some time to pick Walter’s brain will be a priority in Forest Grove. But first I’ve got to finish my critiques for workshop, run a few million errands, and pack. I’m off.
Last week on an episode of my son’s favorite show, “Man vs Food,” Adam Richman went to a ballpark in Illinois where their specialty is a bacon cheeseburger made with a Krispy Kreme doughnut as the bun . . . no lie. So my son said, “I wonder if that’s any good.” And–as part of my continuing (and often ill fated) effort to be the best dad ever–I said, “Why don’t we find out.” With the help of my culinarily-gifted wife we reverse-engineered the Krispy Kreme Burger (a.k.a. Luther Burger, reportedly after Luther Vandross) and went shopping: Krispy Kreme Original Glazed, 80/20 ground beef, sharp cheddar, and bacon.
The process is pretty straightforward. Cook the bacon first; then slice your Krispy Kremes and grill them (cut side down) in the bacon fat. That’s right, Krispy Kremes grilled in bacon fat! What? In a separate pan grill up your basic bacon cheeseburger. When you go to assemble your burgers–this is important–you put the glazed side facing in toward the burger, so the glaze melts into the bacon-cheesy-beefy-goodness.
Before you jump on the phone with CPS, my son eats a well rounded diet of fried twinkies, maple bars with bacon, and Count Chocula. We certainly don’t let him eat Boo-Berries (that stuff is nasty) and doughnut burgers are a one time thing. So how were they? Krsipy Kremes fried in bacon fat are cloyingly sweet. The first bite you think you may really be on to something, but by the fifth or sixth (okay maybe the thirteenth or fourteenth) bite you’re looking for the airsick bag. It was really a bit too much, at least for me; the little man ate two. Ironically, I was worried about the burger overpowering the doughnut and so I went light on the cow and pig and cheese. If I ever try it again, I’ll make a thicker patty, and go extra sharp on the cheddar and thick cut on the bacon. All in all, it made for a fun evening and earned me a few points in my futile effort to be super-dad.
I have a week to go before I head down to Forest Grove OR for my first Residency at Pacific U. For the most part I am ready. I’ve sent of a short story to be critiqued in my workshop group, and I’ve started critiquing the work of my peers. I’ve read works by almost all of the fiction faculty and decided who I am most interested in working with. I even did some back to school shopping. The sum total of my purchases: one notebook and three pens. I wanted to buy a folder, but Target just didn’t have what I was looking for. Seriously. They had folders with Batman (I’ve always been more of a Marvel guy); some Hello Kitty stuff that I thought might play sort of ironic funny (after I slipped it under my arm and walked a few feet I realized it would just be creepy); a few random unicorn folders (again… creepy); and a handful of Hannah Montana folders (Uber Creepy!). So thanks to Target’s lack of simple folder options (Pee Chee anyone?) I will be carrying handfuls of loose documents around campus. Bastards!
In less than two weeks I need to send 10-15 pages of fiction to the MFA program at Pacific for “faculty and peer review” during my first residency. Ordinarily this would not intimidate me, but this piece will be what the faculty uses to determine what students they want to work with (Pick me! Pick me!). So there is a bit of a conundrum. The official documents say to submit something “in progress” that is not yet polished. But there is certainly a part of me that wants the send the piece I think will be the most impressive.
A friend of mine who teaches in a low-residency program says that the problem with doing workshops during the residency period is that they essentially become writing competitions and I see exactly what he means. It is so hard to resist the urge to send the best, most polished thing I can to “put my best foot forward.” But I know that in the end that’s not going to help me as much as sending something that I genuinely want feedback on. I’m sure this would be easier if I weren’t an egomaniacal perfectionists.
I’ve got it! All I need to do is write an unpolished gem that hints at my true genius. No problem.
I’ve spent most of the day today, with the exception of a haircut and a mother’s day shopping excursion, agonizing over the query letter for my novel The Nine Doors. In fact I’ve been agonizing over this query letter for months.
I was lucky enough to get a few agent referrals after I finished my final draft and I held onto the pipe dream that I would somehow escape the query process. Well, it doesn’t look like either of my referrals are going to pan out, so here I am again trying to reduce a 78,000-word novel into a 250-word hook.
The first problem I had when I started working on this query forever ago was that The Nine Doors consists of four interspersed first person narratives. I tried for a while to boil the whole thing down to 250 words and, not surprisingly, failed miserably. I spent some time banging my head against the wall and getting beat up… literally. Well sort of. I practice Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and fighting (in a controlled environment) is how I work off stress. Finally, I decided to focus my query on a single character and things started going a lot better.
There are some great resources out there on query letter writing, and some agents who invest a lot of their time informing writers how to do things right. Apparently there are also a ton of writers who ignore, or don’t find this advice and continue to write queries that have no chance of success. The three online resources that I have really been leaning on are Query Shark, Nathan Bransford, and Pub Rants (Kristen Nelson). I also got a few books, but the agent blogs are really great because you get to hear their immediate reactions to what they like and don’t like and then look and your query and go hmmmmm?
Well, the good news is that today, for the first time, I have a query letter sitting on my desk that I like. More important than the nuts and bolts, I think for the first time I’ve captured the tone of my book in my query letter. I am cautiously optimistic that an agent who likes this query will like my book, which seems sort of like the point of the whole thing.
I have been slow to warm up to “flash fiction,” the terse (generally 1000 words or less) short stories that are increasingly the meat and potatoes of online literary journals. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, most flash fiction comes with the assertion (overt or subtle) that Americans, dazed by the one-two punch of television and the internet, are simply incapable of focusing on written words in excess of 1000. Don’t get me wrong, I, like the incomparable Bill Maher, am a firm believer that The United States has become a nation of idiots. I’m just not sure I’m ready to watch the “longer” short story go the way of the epic poem just yet.
The second reason that I have been slow to warm up to flash fiction is that most of what I find online feels unfinished. The stories read like a great idea streaking through your mind and then petering out. It feels like a copout to me, like having the idea but not having the fortitude to follow through and make it something whole.
My reason for mentioning all this is that I have recently had a change of heart, at least a partial one. Over the last few weeks of reading online journals I have found a few that publish really great flash fiction. Chief among these are SmokeLong Quarterly and Wigleaf. I have to admit, good flash fiction is a bit on a epiphany. Gary Percesepe’s story “Beautiful Girls” in Wigleaf this week really stuck with me. In fact it got me wondering just what I could do with 1000 words or less.
It’s been a while since I submitted a short story to a literary journal. The biggest reason for this is that I haven’t written a lot of short stories. I’ve always liked working on longer projects, having characters who stick around for a while. I like to wake up in the morning and see how they’re doing. But I’ve been working on a few short pieces lately and I know it will help my chances with “The Nine Doors” to have some publishing credits, so I’ve decided to send out a few things.
The first journal I submitted to wanted my story cut and pasted into the body of an e-mail. This is by far the most arduous process for submission (other than snail mail I suppose). Don’t get me wrong; I respect the right of the journal to enforce whatever process works best for them. In fact, I think it behooves them to make it a bit of a pain in the ass to submit, thereby weeding out those who are spamming their stories all over the place. But pasting a story from MS Word into an e-mail and making sure the formatting is right, especially if you are a Mac user, is tedious work. I sent multiple test mails to myself to make sure that it was working and finally after maybe an hour of trial and error I sent out the story.
The second journal I submitted to directed me to their submission management system, called Submishmash. It took me about five minutes to create an account, and after that it took me another five to upload the .doc file of my story and type in my cover letter. Click submit and… done. Awesome! Much, much easier then the cut and paste routine. But, I thought, if I have to create a new account and go through the whole process every time I submit to a new journal, still a bit of a pain in the ass. Well, turns out the third and final journal I was submitting to (they all expressly accept simultaneous submissions) uses Submishmash too! So for this one all I had to do was choose my story from a drop down menu in my account and add a cover letter.
It looks like Submishmash is free, and at least so far it has been a pleasure to use. So if you run a lit journal, or any other publication that accepts submissions, you might want to take a look at Submishmash. Unless of course you use your submission guidelines to keep down the number of submission, in which case “cut and paste” is an excellent choice.
Today I entered the November Criminals Giveaway over at Three Guys One Book. The question: Who is your favorite adolescent protagonists and why? My answer:
We – the protagonists of Jeffery Eugenides’ “The Virgin Suicides.” Why? Well, first of all you have to give it up for the pure narrative creativity and the large set of literary nuts it takes to write a book entirely in first person plural. But beyond that, the confused infatuation that “we” feel toward the Lisbon girls is pretty much the way I felt toward one member of the fairer sex or another throughout my entire adolescence. There is something about idealizing another person beyond all rational bounds that is just so beautifully… adolescent.
I know that “we” are actually pot-bellied, middle-aged men looking back on their adolescence and that this may disqualify me from the competition, but they are still my favorite.
I’ll admit that one of the reasons I chose Pacific U’s MFA program was because they made Atlantic Monthly’s list of the top 5 low residency programs. Also, the fact that I can drive there in four hours is a big plus. But perhaps the most significant reason I had for choosing Pacific was the sheer number of well-published, well-reviewed novelists who teach there.
So, last week I got my “Study Proposal Form.” This is a document that I am to fill out, outlining my plans for the upcoming semester. One of the things I have to do is list my preferences for faculty advisor. I have to write down the names of five potential faculty advisors in order of my preference. This is huge! I will spend the entire semester working one on one with this person, having them critique everything I write. The choice is not entirely mine. The faculty advisors read the work of the incoming students and hopefully there is a match, i.e. I want to work with someone who likes my stuff. I’m sure that after my first residency I will have a better idea of which members of the faculty I click with, but right now all I have to go on is their work. So I have set out to learn as much as I can before my Study Proposal Form is due on May 24th. Based mostly on Amazon availability I ordered eleven books, one each by eleven members of the fiction faculty at Pacific.
Eleven books in five weeks. I snagged the first one off the top of the pile and already I am in love. This is going to be a hard choice. I am about halfway through Mark Spragg’s “An Unfinished Life.” The story is engaging and has already surprised me a couple of times. But the language is what I really admire. Spragg is precise and economical; his tone is perfect and unrelenting. It feels so simple, which I mean as the best sort of compliment. The other thing I have really noticed so far is how seamlessly Spragg transitions between characters. I just read “The Unnamed” by Joshua Ferris which has a similar structure in terms of being a third person narrative that jumps around between the perspective of different members of a family. The transitions were somewhat abrupt in Ferris’ book and detracted from the flow of the story. By contrast, I never thought about the character transitions while I was reading “An Unfinished Life.” It wasn’t unit I started thinking about the book critically that I realized just how clean they were. To top all this off “An Unfinished Life” was made into a film starring Robert Redford and Jennifer Lopez. Is it tacky if the first thing I ask Mr. Spragg when I meet him is what it’s like to have J-Lo play one of your characters?
15 years ago I was mooching off my family in Seattle and making plans to pursue my MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in creative writing. Then life happened. A four hour temp assignment at a warehouse on First Avenue turned into an 11 year career at Amazon.com. I fell in love with the hot girl from Human Resources. We got married. A few years later I passed out in the delivery room and the next thing I knew I was sitting with my newborn son in my arms trying to explain to him how preposterous it was that the Yankees were losing to the Florida Marlins in the World Series. Seriously, the Yankees lost to the Florida Marlins in the 2003 World Series. Ridiculous!
Anyway, my point is that a lot has happened since I first set out to get my MFA. But the time has come. Last week I was accepted into the MFA program at Pacific University in Oregon. I’m going to spend the next two years studying the craft of writing under the tutelage of some fantastic authors. The program is “low residency,” which means I will spend ten days each semester on campus doing workshops and seminars, then work from home sending my projects to a faculty advisor for critique.
I don’t think it has really sunk in yet that I am going back to school. When I was an undergrad at UCSB I have to admit that I felt a certain amount of animosity toward those “returning students” in their forties and fifties, all focused on their studies and hardly ever drunk. My friend JM says I should rock it “Old School” like Will Ferrell and start a fraternity for over-the-hill MFA students and other misfits. It’s not a bad idea. At the very least I plan to use fine wine to try and ply agent referrals from the faculty.
It is my sincere intention to chronicle my MFA experience on this blog. So stay tuned for updates.
