On Sunday mornings, everyone on the Brevity staff gets two-hours off from reading submissions, so we brew coffee and rip into the New York Times.  It has become rather commonplace (but always pleasing) to find a past Brevity contributor featured in the Times‘ outstanding Modern Love column. In the past, Modern Love has featured valued Brevitians such as Ann Bauer, Lori Jakiela, Gary Presley, & Tim Elhajj, to name just a few.

Anyway, this past Sunday we open our Times and are halfway through the Modern Love column when it hits us — “She’s in the next issue!”

So while you are waiting for Jennifer Percy’s wonderful essay “Closing Time ” to arrive in the January 2010 issue of Brevity, check out her intriguing  essay in Modern Love:

“I was so in love with you there,” he said one evening when I mentioned the place in the Midwest where we had met. He said that phrase often, and it always vaguely distressed me, as if he was suggesting that love was a label he could pass along freely from day to day, attaching it here and there in his memory.

I asked a friend about this and the friend said he thought it was better that way, about love, and how my boyfriend moved it around like an object. He told me he thought my boyfriend was honest, and that no one can ever love someone constantly, equally, at all times. It has to rise and fall and wax and wane to maintain its permanence. That is its permanence.

The full Modern Love essay is here.

If you haven’t run across the literate literary cartooning of Tom Gauld, it may be because you don’t get your London newspapers as often as you should.  Here in the Brevity corporate penthouse, we have our London papers flown in every morning by private jet.

It pays to stay on top of things.

But the good news is that Gauld’s cartoons are also available on Flicker.  See the full stream of Gauldania HERE.

Or if you want to see how he resolves the essay comic, CLICK HERE.

Boodle oodle bloop!

We’ve been fans of Gary Presley’s writing for quite some time here at Brevity, including his essay from Brevity 25 and his insightful guest blogger posts found here, so we were indeed pleased to see his contribution to the New York Times‘ Modern Love column this morning.  The essay is clear, honest, smart, and well worth your time.

An excerpt:

And so it was that the man in a wheelchair, sardonic and standoffish, and the vibrant young woman who loved science and worried over how she would support her sons, developed an odd connection, a link to a place where hands might touch, but thoughts and feelings and emotions began to flicker like lightning beyond the horizon.

I was past 40, my anger and frustration over being paralyzed mostly burned away. But it never occurred to me that the friendship, the connection, between Belinda and me might also be the bridge between caution and passion, between isolation and connection.

“I really don’t see the chair,” Belinda said a few months after we met. “I see you.”

Take a moment and read the entire essay here at the New York Times.

Novelist Zadie Smith ponders why so many fiction writers have embraced the essay in an extended Guardian article.  Smith spends much of her time discussing and digesting David Shields’ forthcoming Reality Hunger: A Manifesto — my goodness, that book has buzz  — before reclaiming the sanctity of fiction.  A fascinating read, and worth reading a second time.

Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it’s the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you’re generally looking into is the self. “Other people”, that mainstay of what Shields calls the “moribund conventional novel”, have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the “lyrical essay”.

These are all satisfactions the practice of writing novels is most unlikely to provide for you. Perfect essays abound in this world – almost every one of Joan Didion’s fits the category. Perfect novels, as we all know, are rarer than Halley’s comet. And so, for a writer, composing an essay instead of a novel is like turning from staring into a filthy, unfathomable puddle to looking through a clear glass windowpane. How perfectly it fits the frame! How little draught passes through!

In truth, we think Maud Newton (the esteemed blogger and book critic) is painting memoir with too wide a brush and setting up a bit of  strawman (straw book?) argument here, but her thoughts on why she writes her life story as a novel instead of as a memoir are provocative, and here at Brevity (way up here, in our lofty penthouse office), we like provocative things.  So have a listen:

It’s hard to dispute writer Ben Yagoda’s assertion that the memoir has become the “central form” of this cultural moment. Whether it has, as he also contends, supplanted fiction remains to be seen.

But I hope he’s wrong.

Of course some escape-from-my-wretched-childhood stories are smart and candid and complex. Shalom Auslander’s “Foreskin’s Lament” flies in the face of the therapeutic model: It closes on a troubling note, as Auslander worries that the God he’s turned his back on will punish him by killing his child.

For the most part, though, the general formula is simple, and quintessentially American — miserablism to triumphalism, with the closing benediction, through sales, of capitalism.

The critic Dubravka Ugresic has likened this parade of stories depicting a downtrodden but ultimately redeemed real-life protagonist to Soviet social realism, in that they take actual events as a starting point but twist them into sanguine rags-to-riches propaganda that serves to reinforce readers’ belief that anyone can overcome difficult times. Such stories, in this analysis, are an insidious, uniquely modern incarnation of Horatio Alger’s dime novels.

Newton’s full story can be found in the LA Times.

Fiction Prize: $1,000 & Publication
Nonfiction Prize: $1,000 & Publication

Deadline Feb 12, 2010

Final Judges

Margot Livesey: Fiction
David Shields: Nonfiction

GUIDELINES

1. All submissions must be no more than 10,087 words double-spaced, 12 pt. font, with numbered pages and NO IDENTIFYING INFORMATION ON MANUSCRIPT.
2. Entry fee: $20 per submission. Please make checks out to “The Normal School.”
3. All submissions must include 2 Cover Sheets:
   1. 1^st Cover Sheet must include: a) Title b) Genre c) Name of Author d) 50 word biographical statement e) mailing address f) email address
   2. 2^nd Cover Sheet must include: a) Title of Work b) Genre *NO OTHER IDENTIFYING INFORMATION CAN APPEAR ON THIS COVER SHEET.
4. All submissions must be previously unpublished in any form (print or electronic media).
5. Simultaneous submissions ARE allowed as long you notify editors of The Normal School should your piece be accepted elsewhere. Multiple submissions ARE allowed, but each submission must be accompanied by the entry fee.
6. Manuscripts will not be returned. Please do not send your only copy. If you want verification that we have received your manuscript, send a self-addressed, stamped postcard.
7. Please address all submissions to:

The Normal School

Normal Prize Contest – “Genre”
5245 N. Backer Ave.
M/S PB 98
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA 93740

All submissions must be postmarked between 12/1/2009 and 2/12/2010.
Please be sure to SPECIFY GENRE on envelope and cover sheet.
All entrants will receive a complimentary issue of The Normal School.

Winners will be announced before the Fall 2010 issue via email.
All entries will be considered for publication.

Oftentimes, at the end of a long day of manuscript sorting high up in the Brevity corporate towers, we will push back our chairs, throw some Miles Davis onto the big speakers, pour small offerings of Blanton’s Single Barrel Bourbon, and wonder at people who have trouble defining creative nonfiction. “Really,” we might say to one another. “It’s not a mystery.  What we do is pretty straightforward.  Can you pass the Blanton’s, Mr. Jeeves?”

So we were pleased when running across poet/memoirist/blog-provocateur Steve Fellner’s discussion of definitions on his blog Pansy Poetics. Here’s a bit, but the entire post is worth reading as well.

I tell (my students) they need to break up the word. Creative. Non-Fiction.

Non-Fiction=The Real=Autobiographical Experience and/or Texts and/or History=”The Content” of the Piece

For the “Creative” aspect of the definition, they need to ask the question, “Where would the author locate his artistry in the piece?”, “What special formal strategies does she employ?” (ie point-of-view, diction, organization, etc.”)

“That’s why,” I say, “Journalism and diary writing cannot be creative non-fiction. There’s nothing inherently special about its formal strategies. It’s simply meant to convey. To an audience. Or to oneself. It’s not meant to convey in a way that is special or artistic.”

Of course, there are an infinite number of ways to deconstruct this definition. (Even though I think it’s pretty good.)

The endless battles about this definition as a result of that can go on and on.

But it offers a starting point rather than simply raising your hands in the air, and offering nothing except to claim no one can pin it down, that it transgresses boundaries and refuses to be defined. Of course, it refuses to be defined; that’s why we’ve become writers, to fumble our way towards a useless, necessary naming.

You can imagine our excitement when Brenda Miller, author of so many beautiful Brevity essays and craft pieces (see here and here and here and here) dropped by the Brevity corporate offices last week as part of her visit to Ohio University’s BA, MA, and PhD in Creative Writing Program.  Brenda gave a wonderful reading from her newest collection, Blessing of the Animals.

Just today, we ran across a fine interview with Brenda in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Q: How much distance do you need from a topic to write elegantly and clearly about it?

A: It depends. For certain things, I still don’t have enough distance, even though the events may have happened thirty years ago. For others, I write about them as they’re happening. In either case, I don’t think it’s the literal time, but the mind’s perspective on the topic or event that creates enough breathing room for something literary to happen on the page. Also: form. If you find the right form, or voice, for a piece, it can provide just the “container” you need for whatever the topic might be. And some of my essays span quite a bit of time; so I might start off by writing about an image from my childhood, which leads me to something quite close in the present day; once I’m on that train I’m not going to jump off.

You can read the full interview here.

Kenyon Review editor David Lynn has a thoughtful post on the KROnline Blog about the debate between online and print.  What we like about David’s discussion is that he is honest about what worries many writers, especially those facing tenure or promotion in traditional English programs, but he also acknowledges that new technology and new media tend to win out in the end.

Having just finished a new short story, Lynn is considering whether he wants to send it to a more traditional paper-and-ink magazine — such as the one he edits and values so highly — or to an online journal:

Another possibility would be, as I’ve mentioned, to send the new story to any one of the dozens of electronic journals burgeoning on the Internet. But what would it mean for me to abandon print? Less status? Not least foregoing the tactile pleasure of holding the printed thing itself in my hand? How much is that worth?

I set out the questions this way to make the point that this is not merely a hypothetical: something precious to me as a writer is on the line. Because, of course, there’s the larger issue as well: what does the relationship between the print Kenyon Review and the electronic KROnline mean for the writing community? Should authors be as willing — more than merely willing, should they be as happy and enthusiastic — for their work to appear in our online journal as in print?

You can read the entirety of David Lynn’s post here.

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Well that’s a mouthful, but so is the title of Dave Egger’s annual anthology of Best American Nonrequired Reading.  We’re only attempting to say nonrequired notable three times real fast because we want to congratulate John Griswold whose Brevity essay “Three Graces” was listed among the notable nonrequired works of 2009.

Heck, we actually think it should be required, but we’re happy for John and happy to see Brevity getting the notice all the same.

Here’s the opening to “Three Graces” and a link to the rest.

Three Graces

By John Griswold

In the Sunflower Café the waitresses sat down in booths with elderly customers and watched them shuffle photos of grandkids like decks of cards, as if looking for a good hand. Some early retirees—robust, tanned, and laughing — described the waitresses to me as “booze hags.”

The women’s hands shook as they poured coffee. They moved round each other in a practiced dance, hollered obscene jokes over the din, ministered with buttered toast. Three of them said they’d drop by to see my dad on their way out to the bars. They’d be off at two but were going to someone’s house to shower and change first.

Read the Rest Of John’s Essay