The Descriptive Mood

Going for a walk invariably puts me in a descriptive mood, especially a walk in nature. I wind up thinking about how I would describe, for instance, the waters of Lake Michigan this morning. The water was almost thick, heavy with ice floes. How to describe its movement? Often, the right German word will occur to me (one of the hazards of being bilingual), and then I’m trying to find the fitting English one. In this case, the German word “Wogen” would have captured the water’s movement but there is no equivalent English word. “Waves” would be “Wellen,” and that describes a forward rolling motion: crashing, splashing, sucking back. Today the water was rocking back and forth. Rocking, that would be it. Heavy with ice. Almost oily, but not really, because oily makes me think of iridescent oil slick. And the water seemed more gentle and benevolent than that. The water had the color of what? Café au lait? No, wrong word, that brings up warmth and tastiness, and this was a cold windy morning. Sea green? It was more brown than green, and green could easily be thought of in terms of turquoise shimmering Caribbean waters. This was definitely not shimmering. It was dull, like dish water – yes, dish water might be the right word.

So what do I have then? – The water was heaving, thick with ice floes. Once in a while it managed to lap up the boulders of the shore, coating them with another dish watery layer that would freeze to make grey glass of the rocks.

Stories that Keep on Giving

Once a story has been published, you know it’s good. That’s not to say a story that hasn’t been published isn’t good, but at least you’re over the hump of believing in it all by yourself and having someone else believe in it as well. The nice news is: You can keep riding that wave.

Yesterday, I got a note that I was accepted to participate in an authors’ roundtable as part of the Literary Festival that Kaplan University (where I teach English composition) is organizing in February. I had submitted my essay “A Room of His Own” to showcase my work because I felt that might work best for this audience, and because this essay is now included in a book, which is what Kaplan University was also looking for. This is the third time “A Room of His Own” is coming around – it was first published in flashquake in 2004, then last year made it into the anthology Cup of Comfort for Couples.

Monday I heard that my piece “The SS Plate” was accepted to be published in an anthology of alumni work that Queens University of Charlotte is putting together in celebration of the MFA program’s tenth anniversary. When I answered that call for submissions, I chose to send this excerpt from my essay “Betty Crocker in Bavaria” that was published in Natural Bridge last year. Why? When I participated in a panel discussion on working with postmemory at the Washington DC JCC in October, the moderator had remembered that particular section of all the work I had sent her – so I knew it resonated. And based on her reaction, I also read that piece that evening in DC, and several audience members came up to me later to talk to me about it. You can find an e-version of “The SS Plate” as part of the original essay “Betty Crocker in Bavaria” on the Writing page of this blog. I’m hoping more readers will ask me about it when it comes around again.

The Missing Narrative

I saw Edvard Munch’s painting “The Girl at the Window” at the Art Institute of Chicago again this Monday. (This month admission is free, so the Art Institute is seeing a lot of my family and me.) I was first struck by the light in this picture; the white of the girl’s dress is so luminous it seems alive. But what I find even more striking is what this painting does not show: It does not show what the girl is looking at outside, nor does it give any hint why she is trying to hide behind the curtain while peering out. No other clues are offered. We look on with her. We wonder about the dark foreground; we wonder what she’s looking at, and who or what she’s hiding from. Such is the power of the missing narrative: It engages the viewer, or, in the case of writing, the reader. A scene is rendered with enough detail to grab our attention but something major is omitted, and our imagination is engaged. The artist has created a space for us to move into, to be filled by our imagination. We keep wondering.

Musing on his short story “Out of Season” in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote about this art of omission: “I omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

I am left wondering about this art of the missing narrative – how much does one need to clue the reader in, and how much can one safely omit to give the reader the space to make the story his own?

Calls for Short Nonfiction

As I was doing my submissions last week, three opportunities for short nonfiction came across my desk, or rather, my laptop:

The Bellingham Literary Review is notoriously hard to get into and continues to receive accolades in the literary world, such as a notable essay mention in Best American Essays 2010. Now they’re looking for short nonfiction pieces for special publication on their website (deadline is April 15):

The South Loop Review, published by Columbia College Chicago, has gained momentum as a respected nonfiction magazine (notable essay mention in Best American Essays 2010) that also features stunning photography. Now they are looking for short pieces for their online publication that are “more contemporary in voice and aesthetic.”

Brevity is arguably the all-time star in publishing short nonfiction. The recent issue features a piece by Lia Purpura, one of my favorite essayists, and by another author I always enjoy reading, Kim Dana Kupperman. You have to indeed be brief, word limit is 750.

The Belle with the Book: Jessica Handler

My friend Jessica Handler has blossomed into Southern Belle in a two-page spread in the February issue of Vanity Fair. Her memoir Invisible Sisters does indeed deal with grief and family, although that summary by Alan Deutschman cannot begin to describe the extraordinary journey her family endured losing Jessica’s two sisters. And yet that stunning photo in Vanity Fair captures the amazing grace and fervor with which Jessica continues to move forward in life. My students at StoryStudio Chicago and I were fortunate enough to host Jessica for an author Q&A session in the fall of 2009, which Jessica so cleverly suggested we run via Skype, ushering in a whole new way of talking to an author. She shared with us her experience of what it’s like to get a book published, and how hands on it can be: At one point, she spread all the chapters of her book out in her house to work out their order. All along her hallway and up the stairs sheets of paper were lined up, with Jessica hopping about, talking to her agent, trying to figure out where the best spot would be to mention the high school years, or the first shocking diagnosis, and where to place the happiness and love of that family that did exist before illness and amidst all the heartbreak.

Congratulations, Jessica, on making it, so elegantly, to the pages of Vanity Fair!

Strong Verbs and the Art Institute

“As a creative person, it’s good to visit places like the Art Institute; they always inspire you in unexpected ways,” I said to my daughter as we left the Art Institute of Chicago last Friday.

“So how did you get inspired today?” she promptly asked.

“Well,” I said, “as the curator was talking about the engine in Magritte’s Time Transfixed ‘belching smoke,’ I thought, ‘what a great strong verb,’ and immediately wrote it down in my notebook.”

So, on the way home, we sat on the bus and made a list of strong verbs relating to bodily movements/functions. It’s a great occupation on the bus, and as we all know, stronger verbs make for more vivid writing. We quickly realized that we needed to organize the verbs by body parts, so here’s our list for the head (Do you have any to add?):

belch
bite
chew
cough
gape
gnaw
groan
gurgle
hiss
moan
nod
scream
slobber
sneeze
sniff
snore
spit
squeal
stutter
wail
weep
whimper
whine
whisper
whistle
wink

Two Acceptances in One Day

How likely are you to receive two acceptances for publication in one day? Highly unlikely, I should say, until the very thing happened yesterday. I checked one email account to find an acceptance from Writing on the Edge, and later, while fixing dinner, another email came in from Literary Mama, accepting a piece with the caveat that they want me to shorten it. I had sent out both pieces in December, and I hadn't marketed them much because they are both more suitable for targeted markets. Mind you, these two acceptances came after a yearlong drought. Goes to show that you have to persevere, and that the old adage "when it rains, it pours" is true. Needless to say, I'm buoyed by all this - perhaps this blog is good writing karma?

Submit More?

My writer friend Nancy Kopp says one of her goals for this year is to submit more, write more, read more. But what does "more" mean? Is that one submission per month, one essay per week, two books a month? Or 10 per month?

"More" is a typical word to include in New Year's resolutions, or goals, but how can you measure "more"? The operative word here is "measure." Maybe it's my former life working for a firm immersed in statistics, or maybe it's my socalled Type A personality, but I like to have a specific goal to work towards so that I know when I've met it, so I can get the satisfaction of checking it off a list, or just going "Yes!" to myself at the end of the week, or month, or whatever the goal's time frame was.

My submission goal for the past few years has been one submission per week, or at least 50 per year. That doesn't mean I submit every week, although I try. But it's been possible to catch up if I've fallen off the bandwagon as I invariably do when life gets in the way. So I know I can achieve 50 submissions a year; the question now is - shall I attempt a stretch goal this year and go for 100?

Best Literary Magazines for Nonfiction

For those of you whose New Year’s resolutions include getting published or publishing more: The first rule of the submission game is: Be discriminate, meaning don’t submit your writing just anywhere. Have a list of the top journals you’d like to get published in, and send your work there. If they reject it, submit it to your second tier of magazines, and you won’t be sorry if it gets accepted there or at the next tier.

But how do you know who the top tier magazines are? The world of literary magazines is a gigantic, ever-changing maze. And the maze is different depending on the genre – magazines winning Pushcarts for Fiction might not be winning them for nonfiction. I just updated my ranking of literary magazines that publish literary nonfiction, namely essays and/or memoir, and am sharing my top tier here. Top tier, in my humble estimation, means a magazine won either a 2010 Pushcart for Nonfiction, or had an essay included in Best American Essays 2010, or achieved some of the same in either 2009 or 2008, although my review of those years is not as thorough.

My list does not include icons like The New Yorker or Vanity Fair which hardly ever publish unsolicited work. I also don’t list journals that do not accept simultaneous submissions (I have a separate list for those) because I am very reluctant to have a piece tied up for months by one journal. This is why stellar journals like the Georgia Review are not listed here. Please note that journals are listed in alphabetical order:

Agni

Alaska Quarterly Review

Fourth Genre

Gettysburg Review

Granta

Harvard Review

Iowa Review

Missouri Review

New Letters

Southern Review

The Paris Review

Virginia Quarterly Review