Coffee House Press Giveaway!

Check out the Fall lineup of books from Coffee House Press and enter to win prizes!

Prime Number Magazine -- update 7.7 is now live

Exciting news! Prime Decimals 7.7 -- the latest and last update to Issue 7 of Prime Number Magazine-- is now live! Breaking with our tradition (is one year a tradition?) of publishing flash fiction in the updates, we are pleased to present a full-length story by David Meischen that I think you're going to love: "Center Wheel, Balance Wheel, Escape Wheel. We've also got poetry by Jay Rubin, Marc Harshman, and the singularly named Donnarkevic.

This wraps up the first year of Prime Number! It's been a blast, and I think we've presented some fantastic writing. We're now in the process of putting together the Print Annual, so stay tuned for news about that.

And we're already hard at work on the next full issue, Number 11, which is due out in late July. It's a blockbuster!

Pushcart Prize Rankings Links Now in Sidebar

No, there's no news yet about the latest Pushcart Prizes. I won't know that until the new volume comes out in November. But for fans of my annual Pushcart Prize Rankings, I wanted to point out that I've now put links the past 4 years of rankings in the sidebar at upper right here on the blog for handy reference.

When the rankings for 2012 are announced later this year, I'll create a separate page for the list. No need for separate bookmarks or tedious Google searches!

Work in Progress

I've been working on a novel for some time now. It's been done and then un-done, but it will be done again soon. I'm doing yet another round of revisions (today I begin on page 54 of 350) having already addressed in the first 50 pages the concerns expressed by a couple of readers. The task now is to see how the changes I've made will ripple through the manuscript (without, I hope, becoming a tsunami).

I think the book has, potentially, broad appeal. The main character is a man, but most of the other characters are women: his mother, his estranged wife, his cousin, his ex-girlfriend. It's set in Virginia, but also explores a more "exotic" setting. It's contemporary, but has historic ties.

I wish I could say more. The picture at left is a hint . . .

And now, I'm going to dive back in. See you later.

The New Yorker: "Homage to Hemingway" by Julian Barnes

July 4, 2011: “Homage to Hemingway” by Julian Barnes

This story needs more attention than I’m going to be able to give it here, but on my cursory look it’s a very good story—especially if the reader also happens to be a writer. 

The story is divided into three parts, in each of which a novelist is teaching a writing course. First he’s in the countryside in England with adult students. Next he’s in the Alps in mid-Summer. And last he’s in the US, in the Midwest, teaching undergraduates. Over the time covered by the story and the three parts, he separates and then is divorced from his wife; a book has come out and not done well; and his most recent manuscript has yet to find a publisher.

Things don’t go so well in his writing classes, either, but he begins to refine his schtick. He likes to talk about Hemingway, although in this case he actually likes to talk about a Hemingway lookalike, but that invariably leads to talking about the writer himself. And the story he chooses to talk about is an unusual one for Hemingway: “Homage to Switzerland.”  Here is Barnes reading that story: Homage to Switzerland. (It’s no coincidence that this Barnes story has a three-part structure.) The narrator finds that men and women in his classes react rather differently to Hemingway, and he explains to his students that his own assessment has evolved into admiration, making the point that so many readers have missed what Hemingway was doing, that it’s really all about vulnerability and failure and not just about machismo.

In the end, with plans to write an “American novel” that he assumes he won’t be able to publish because it isn’t what readers want anymore, he takes notes on the class he’s teaching, including the different reactions of the genders to Hemingway.

It’s interesting that the class would fall apart over the issue of names. The female students don’t like the fact that the females in the Hemingway story are unnamed. The narrator asks if they’d be happier if the male narrator were unnamed and the females all given names. They say yes, and so he’s done that. In each part of the story, his name is left out. The students call him Chief, or Professor, or in the final section, Maestro. But the students are named. Although I like this bit of self-referential structure, I think I would have liked it better if the narrator had helped the students discover a rationale for why the names had been left out. (I usually assume that the author is aiming for universality.)

It’s a good story, worthy of rereading, and perhaps one of the best of the year. 

Gardening 2011 -- June update

I'm a lousy gardener. Lousy and lazy. Gardens need attention and I'm just not that into it!

I'm not sure any of that's true, but it is a big job, especially when you have a big garden, as I do. (This is probably the root of the problem.) Anyway, I've got some very nice looking plats: corn, eggplant, peppers, herbs, pumpkin, squash, acorn squash, zucchini, cucumber, okra, beans, crook-neck squash, melons, sunflowers, and, maybe, broccoli (maybe because they're still so small that it's hard to tell what they are.) And I've got lots of weeds. And now I've got some stink bugs (discovered today when I was doing battle with the weeds). I've been expecting them, but I don't know what to do about them. Hope they'll go away? Yeah, that sounds like a good strategy.

Pictures:

cucumber

Japanese eggplant

green pepper

red okra

big beefy

sunflower

zucchini

corn

Sewanee Writers' Conference: Scholars and Fellows

Last year at this time, I was excitedly preparing for the Sewanee Writers' Conference, for which I was a 2010 Walter E. Dakin Fellow. It's such a wonderful conference and it was an honor to be named a fellow. I wish I could go again!

Congratulations to this year's fellows and scholars!

Happy Solstice!

Today, in the Northern Hemisphere, is the Summer Solstice. For me the significance is mostly that now, finally, the days will begin to shorten; the return to the delicious weather of Autumn has begun. Not to mention the countdown to football season.

The New Yorker: "Gravel" by Alice Munro

June 27, 2011: “Gravel” by Alice Munro

But what happened to Blitzee?

As I was reading this wonderful Alice Munro story (available for free, so read it quick before they change their minds!), I wondered why the narrator had such a poor memory of this period of her life. She was five, true, but still. And then the facts are revealed. How her holder Caro sister had acted out already—a protest, in a sense, over the destruction of the family—and so Caro’s behavior on the day in question was not a huge surprise.

The girls’ mother fancies herself a Bohemian, hangs out with actors at the local summer theater, and eventually leaves their father for Neal, who, she says, has made her pregnant. Even though it’s the mother who has caused the problem, she retains custody and takes the girls to a trailer to live with Neal. It’s out in the country and has various dangers, but the mother isn’t a very attentive caretaker. Which is not to say she doesn’t love the girls. She does, and she watches out for them. Until one day . . .

But what happened exactly. She doesn’t remember. I don’t blame her.

A very good story.

Tinker Mountain Writers' Workshop 2011

I haven't posted lately because I've been at a workshop: the Tinker Mountain Writers' Workshop at Hollins University. I wasn't planning to do a workshop this summer, but I've been working on a novel and felt that I needed an extra push to get the revisions done. And Fred Leebron was teaching at the workshop, and I've missed a few other opportunities to work with him. So, it was something of a last minute decision--but I'm very glad I went.

The setting--Hollins University just outside of Roanoke, Virginia--isn't the most beautiful spot in the world (i.e., it's not a mountain top in Tennessee or Vermont), but it's a pleasant campus, and convenient. This year's conference had just four workshops--a few others that had been planned were cancelled--so it was intimate. But our workshop on the Advanced Novel was big--12 writers--which meant it was a lot of work (which isn't a bad thing at a workshop). Fred is a great teacher, and every session of the workshop included craft discussion in addition to the manuscript critique, which I think is ideal. I learned a ton, and am excited to get back to work on the book.

The other workshops were with Dan Mueller, Jim McKean, and Nick Lantz.

Prime Number Magazine -- update 7.5 is now live

I'm pleased to announce that the latest update to Prime Number Magazine is now available. Please visit Prime Decimal 7.5 to read new work by Randall Brown, Christin Rice, Joe Mills, Jenn Blair, Jéanpaul Ferro, and William Reichard.

And, bear in mind that we are reading for future issues of the magazine, and would love to have a chance to consider your work.

Restless Ecstasy Tour: The American Shakespeare Center

I've had kind of a busy Spring, so I only last night saw the third of the three shows that are currently in repertory at the American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton. I highly recommend all three--but you better hurry. There's only one week left in the season.

The Spring Season is the time when the touring company comes off the road and entertains us at the Blackfriars while the resident company is working up the new shows for Summer and Fall Seasons. The "Restless Ecstasy" Tour (the name comes from a line in Macbeth: "Better be with the dead, whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, than on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy") is made up of several tour veterans as well as a few newcomers and is one of the strongest ASC touring companies in memory.

I'll start with the show I saw last night--Macbeth. The production is outstanding, and probably the best Macbeth I've seen at the Blackfriars. This is due in no small part to the strength of Jonathan Holtzman and Denice Burbach as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Their chemistry was powerful, and Holtzman's commanding presence on the stage was electric. And everyone remembers the Weird Sisters from a Macbeth production, and Natasha Solomon, Brandi Rhome, and Kelley McKinnon (with Daniel Jimenez as Hecate) were terrific. Chad Bradford as Macduff was also excellent.

Last week I saw Measure for Measure, which is one of my favorite of Shakespeare's comedies, possibly because the characters in disguise are kept to a minimum--we only have to deal with Vencentio, the Duke, in his disguise as a friar. But in that part, Chad Bradford was quite good. In Vincentio's "absence," the city is governed by Angelo, played by Jake Mahler, who does a fine job as the rigid moralist who is stricken with love for Isabella, played nicely by Brandi Rhome, as she pleads for the life of her brother Claudio who has been sentenced to death.

The first show I saw this season was As You Like It, which I confess is maybe my least favorite of the comedies. But the company did a wonderful job with it. Denice Burbach is Rosalind, who falls in love with Orlando, played by Chad Bradford. But Orlando gets himself banished and so does Rosalind (in disguise as a boy), and they both end up in the Forest of Arden, where Rosalind's banished father (Jonathan Holtzman) lives.

It was a great season, and I look forward to the touring company's return next year. In the meantime, the resident company kicks off their new season with the Tempest and The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde) later this month, adding Hamlet in July.

Blog re-redesign

You'll notice a change. I decided the Chinese characters in the background were too busy and, more importantly, they made scrolling difficult. I'm not completely sold on the new new look, but we'll give it a try for a while.

The New Yorker: "Above and Below" by Lauren Groff

June 13 & 20, 2011: “Above and Below” by Lauren Groff

The last of the three stories in the Summer Fiction issue is “Above and Below” by Lauren Groff. (Groff has a novel coming out but I gather from the interview that this isn’t excerpted from it.) I want to say it’s the best of the three, but they’re all so different that I guess I won’t say that, and, despite all its great strengths, I thought it went on a little long and I’m a little unclear as to what it’s about.

The story is a classic “hero goes on a journey” story, but with the twist that she doesn’t get very far. What’s also a bit unusual here is the episodic nature of the piece—she has one experience after another, each unrelated to the next. They accumulate, certainly, but it’s almost as if they are their own little stories within the framework of the whole: the squat at the end; the tent city with the woman and her kids; the cleaning job with Euclid; and so on. (There are links, actually, but they’re more psychological than plot-related.)

But the plot: a woman in graduate school who grew up quite poor (and has issues with her distracted mother), has broken up with her boyfriend and when she loses university funding her fragile finances crumble. She moves what few belongings she can in her old station wagon and hits the road—bound for where she doesn’t know. She finds various ways to survive. She showers in the gym of a beachside condo complex. She gets food from a church “soup kitchen.” She goes dumpster diving. When she finds a five dollar bill (how convenient!) she goes to a bar and lets herself get picked up by a guy and after he falls asleep she raids his refrigerator. When her car gets stripped, she’s even more homeless, but she stumbles upon a job cleaning nightclubs which lasts for a while until her boss, Euclid, has a stroke. She winds up in a tent city of homeless people watching the kids of a single mother who works in a fast food joint—until she gets fired and then arrested for prostitution. So she winds up back at the campus where she started and stumbles upon people scavenging discarded furniture from campus housing, and she hooks up with them, winding up in a Prairie House that is a “squat,” the kitchen of which she cleans, using the skills she acquired during her short-lived cleaning gig.

The whole story has been to get us to this house where she wanders into the prairie, feeling incredibly alone but also aware of the teeming life there: “There was no relief in the sky vaguely filmed with stars, a web vaster than she could imagine. There was nobody who could save her, nobody who could deliver her gently back to the solace of people.”

And then, a jump forward in time to the difficult birth of her daughter, which brings back the memory of that night on the prairie, and then this: “How delicate the things that tie us to one another. The hands in her flesh, her own crossed on her chest, her daughter’s tiny fists drawn up into the air.” This is, I suppose, the link between mother and daughter, the link that was broken with her own mother, the link that was broken with all people. [I don’t get the hands crossed on her chest, though; that makes me think she’s dead, although that wouldn’t happen until she’s placed in a coffin, so surely that’s not right.]

Reactions?

The New Yorker: "Asleep in the Lord" by Jeffrey Eugenides

June 13 & 20, 2011: “Asleep in the Lord” by Jeffrey Eugenides

This is the second of three pieces of fiction in the Summer Fiction issue.

As we learn in the interview with Eugenides, this “story” is an excerpt from a forthcoming novel. As excerpts go, however, I think this one works well as a short story. Eugenides also says that the basis of the story is autobiographical in that he, like the character Mitchell, took a year after college to travel and volunteered at the Mother Theresa Home in Calcutta.

So: Mitchell is in Calcutta as part of his post-graduate year of spiritual discovery. He’s volunteering at Mother Theresa’s Home for the Dying Destitutes (Monday through Friday, as if the Destitutes took the weekend off). There’s seems to be a steady stream of doctors and other volunteers at the home, some for extended periods, some not. Mitchell is trying to do good works and associate with people doing good works. He reads a lot of Thomas Merton and other spiritual writers. Meanwhile, he has to deal with other travelers, most of whom have less lofty goals.

Aside: I loved Mitchell’s interaction with the other travelers. Having done a shorter version of his trip—in 1978, after I finished my Peace Corps service—I found the café and the hostel experience completely real. Or plausible, at any rate.

But the story is really about Mitchell overcoming his fears in the hospital. At first he’s only willing to dispense medicine—bathing and other more personal interaction is something he can’t handle. Until he has to, and then he’s faced with a bigger fear from which he flees: “And Mitchell began to move. Already knowing that he would regret this moment for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life, and yet unable to resist the sweet impulse that ran through his every never, Mitchell headed toward the front of the Home . . . and up the steps to the bright, fallen world above.” And he keeps running, continuing his spiritual journey.

Based on this excerpt, I’m interested in reading the novel—so it has done its job.

The New Yorker: "Home" by George Saunders

June 13 & 20, 2011: “Home” by George Saunders

The summer fiction issue is pretty excellent. All three stories are terrific, and there are some other nice features, as well.

The first story—at least in the order they appear on my Kindle—is “Home” by George Saunders. It reminded me of “Soldier’s Home”  by Ernest Hemingway, although maybe that’s inevitable for any story that is about a soldier’s homecoming. Here, Mike has come home from war in the Middle East to find his foul-mouthed mother living with Harris, her new man, a lazy liar. Harris and Mike’s mother make quite a pair. Mike goes to visit his sister Renee, who has a new baby. First, Mike eavesdrops on Renee, her husband, Ryan, and Ryans parents—an opportunity for Saunders to reveal character and have some fun at the same time.’ When he finally reveals himself to Renee, she won’t let him in—because she’s ashamed of her family (justifiably, it would appear). Before he goes, though, she asks, “Did you do it?” Huh? So, now we know that Mike did something, or was accused of doing something.

When Mike gets back to his mother’s house, she and Harris are being evicted for non-payment of rent. He puts a temporary stop to the eviction, and then goes to visit his ex-wife and kids, but his wife’s new husband tells him it’s after midnight and too late for a visit (it’s actually only 9pm), so he agrees to come back the next day. (The guy is classic Saunders, explaining how challenging his affair with Mike’s wife was: “It was hard for me because I felt like a shit, and it was hard for her because she felt like a shit.” He wants Mike’s sympathy because of how bad they both felt.) The next day, after a confrontation with the sheriff at his mother’s house, they all go over to Renee’s. “Oh, this will be funny,” thinks Mike, and it is. Among other things, since Renee and Ryan won’t let him hold the baby, he breaks a pitcher of tea. When he calls to apologize, she says he’s going to buy a new pitcher. “No,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll be doing that.” Hah! And when Renee asks him where he’ll go, he says, “Home”—the title of the story.

And eventually we find out Mike’s story—that he did something during the war that got him court-martialed. And you get the sense that he might not be done.

Saunders, it seems to me, is exploring a few different themes. What does home mean? Mike's mother lives in a dump--until she's evicted--but Renee and Mike's ex-wife both live in very nice houses. Home also means family, but it isn't clear that family means too much here. And at the end of the story, Mike is headed home, which might be heading back to the feelings he had in the war. Then there's also the problem of becoming desensitized to the pain you're causing--Mike in the war, plus everyone else in the story.

For a quick interview with Saunders about the story, check out Summer Fiction: George Saunders.

I'll be dealing with the other stories shortly.

Get Published! Publishing the Short Story or Essay -- Writers.com

There's still a little room left in the Publishing the Short Story or Essay class at Writers.com. We start next Monday, so sign up before then.

It's all about getting your short story or essay ready to be published, figuring out where the best markets are for your work, and presenting it in the best light.

Take a look at the course description and see if it's for you!

Eco-confabulations and other bloopers in literature

I'm sure this has happened to you. You're reading a book and the author includes some detail that you KNOW is wrong. Maybe you even Google it to be sure, and you wonder how such misinformation slipped passed the watchful eye of the editors. (I'm more finely attuned to typos and grammar errors, but I occasionally notice other mistakes and anachronisms.)

Here's a very interesting essay from Places @ The Design Observer Group on this topic: A Home Before the End of the World. The author, Adelheid Fischer, noticed some interesting errors ("eco-confabulations") in the description of the natural world in Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World. (Armadillos and Joshua trees in Phoenix? Apparently not.) The essay asks the question: Do these mistakes matter? The author isn't concerned about these mistakes as a literary matter (that would have been my first thought). Rather, the concern is for the environment:

The least we can do — for the survival of the world and for the thriving of our own species — is to learn the real identities of the organisms that surround us.

An interesting thought. Reactions?

Reading: Man Martin and Jamie Iredell

I had the pleasure last night of attending a reading at Over the Moon Bookstore & Artisan Gallery in Crozet, VA, featuring two writers from Atlanta, Man Martin and Jamie Iredell who were in the area for a couple of stops including an appearance tonight in Charlottesville at WriterHouse.

The two writers couldn't be much different, although they are long-time friends from grad school.

Jamie read bits from two books, The Book of Freaks and Prose, Poems, A Novel. They consist of short sections, some admittedly autobiographical, that might be called prose poems or flash fiction.

Then Man "read," although he didn't read--he recited. I've watched poets do this, but I don't think I've ever seen a novelist do it. He was telling the story of his novel but then he would launch into long memorized passages from his second novel, Paradise Dogs, the publication date for which happened to be yesterday. Man considers himself a humorist, and that was evident from the story of this book. If you like funny novels, I have a feeling you'll like this one.

I knew Man a little from the Sewanee Writers Conference, and Jamie recognized my name from a story I'd had in New South a couple of years ago because he used to work on the magazine. And since a bunch of my WriterHouse friends were there, we all went out after the reading for wine and tapas (there's a nice little place in Crozet that has very good tapas and a decent wine selection, Da Luca Cafe and Wine Bar) and generally had a good time talking about writing and, ahem, other writers.

In This Light: Images -- Inspiration In an Uncharted Country

Writer Dory Adams asked me to write a short essay for her wonderful blog about images and narrative, In This Light. And here's the result: "Images: Inspiration In an Uncharted Country."

Thanks to Dory for the opportunity. It was a lot of fun to think about some of the ways images--in all the meanings of the word--impact writing. And I think I really only scratched the surface!

Take a look, and while you're there browse the site.

The New Yorker: "Clever Girl" by Tessa Hadley

June 6: “Clever Girl” by Tessa Hadley

I may be forgetting someone, but it seems to me that TNY has published more stories by Tessa Hadley than anyone else over the last couple of years. If I didn’t think this one was so good, I might be annoyed by that. (In fact, as we learn from the interview with Hadley, this story is one of a series about the same character, Stella.)

A girl whose mother remarries isn’t terribly happy about the new house they’ve moved to, even though it sounds nicer than the place they were living before. And she doesn’t get along with her stepfather, although he treats her mother well and he works hard. She’s bright, but doesn’t care much for school. In her new neighborhood, she becomes friends with a girl her age, Madeleine, but they don’t really have that much in common.

When the girl’s mother is in the hospital having a baby, she and the stepfather are thrown together. She’s struggling with a physics problem and he tries to help. He struggles with it and gives up in frustration, but in the process the answer comes to her. Not only does she understand that she’s clever, but she also sees that her stepfather is trying to be helpful: “Something had happened; I could see all the elements of the problem differently now, as if they had arranged themselves naked under a bright light.” And she’s not just talking about the physics problem.

That's about it. A nice epiphany at the end. Along the way, Stella and Madeleine develop a "tree cult" in which they convince themselves that the stumps of trees that were cleared for their housing development are alive, and those stumps look like metaphors for the girls themselves.

Book Review: The Moral Lives of Animals, by Dale Peterson

The Moral Lives of Animals

Dale Peterson

Bloomsbury Press (2011)

Having read some recent animal behavior books (such as Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human), I expected this one to be something like those. And it is, in a way, but it’s far more, because the author, Dale Peterson, clearly has in mind homo sapiens as one of the animals he’s talking about. Furthermore, while he’s exploring particular aspects of moral behavior in humans and other large mammals, he really seems to be aiming toward a moral conclusion that mostly applies only to humans.

Because whales are the subject of some of Peterson’s observations, it’s appropriate that he uses the great novel Moby Dick as something of a guide through his subject. He even presents quotations from the book as epigrams to each chapter. (My favorite of these might be the one he uses for the Authority chapter: “Whales in the sea God’s voice obey.”) Of course, Ahab and the other characters from the novel—although they are fictional—provide additional fodder for the discussion of human moral principles.

The book is organized into four parts, each answering a question about morality: Where Does Morality Come From? (In which we learn that there are two kinds of morality—rules and attachments.) What Is Morality? (The Rules.) What is Morality? (The Attachments.) Where is Morality Going?

He begins by noting the linguistic differences in how animals and humans are referred to, and relating that to different ways of viewing animals. The First Way, he suggests, is that “animal minds [are] intelligent entities constructed in humanoid form. The Second Way, which he attributes to Descartes, is that animals have no reason and are essentially “machines made by nature. But there’s a Third Way, associated with Charles Darwin, which follows from the shared evolutionary history among many species, which he believed extended to a mental continuity and even something approaching morality in animals other than humans.

He then proceeds to examine what the moral rules are—for animals as well as humans—when considering Authority, Violence, Sex, Possession, and Communication, followed by the moral attachments—Cooperation, Kindness, Duality, Flexibility, and Peace. In each case, in addition to understanding where the concepts come from for humans, Peterson gives numerous examples of studies of various “intelligent” animals such as whales, elephants, and chimps, as well as anecdotes about the behavior of his own dogs. We learn, then, about authority hierarchies among various animals, particularly violent behavior and its consequences, rules associated with sex and ownership, and the means of communication. We also learn that some species exhibit cooperation and kindness.

Near the end of the book, Peterson explores duality—the differences, or arguable differences, between males and females, between primary references to rules-based morality or attachments-based morality. Differences take many forms, too. Male and female elephants communicate differently, for example. There is a vast size difference between male and female elephants, also, and an even bigger difference between male and female whales. (And yet female spotted hyenas are larger than the males.) These differences contribute to different behaviors. On a related subject, Peterson explores flexibility, and one fascinating study is the evolutionary differences between chimpanzees and bonobos. These apes were the same species 2.5 Million years ago, but for reasons that we don’t know two groups became geographically separated and had limited interaction thereafter. Consequently, their evolutionary paths diverged. One of the differences that arose is that while the chimps remained patriarchal, bonobos developed into mostly matriarchal groups, and that seems to explain a number of behavioral differences between these two closely related species today.

The final chapter of the book takes the story in a surprising direction. It isn’t at this point about the behavior of whales and elephants, but about the war that humans have been carrying out against animals for some time, with the result that most mammals of North America larger than 90 lbs.—about 40 species—became extinct in the late Pleistocene epoch (at the time humans emerged). The same was true in South America and Australia. Elephants fared better because human populations in Africa and Southern Asia were relatively low, but that relative safety came to an end when humans acquired rifles. In the last 30 years alone, the world elephant population has been cut in half.

Peterson imagines human contact with life forms from other planets, which, given the vast numbers of such planets, is increasingly likely. But he’s not optimistic about the results. “If we reached them before they reached us, we would do so probably because we’re technologically more advanced than they. If that’s the case, what indicates that we’ll treat them any differently from the way we’ve treated every other creature with sentience already here on this planet. . . And if the extraterrestrials should reach us first because they’re technologically more advanced than we, what in our experience suggests that their high intelligence and great technology would be accompanied by great wisdom and kindness or would automatically promote high sympathy for another species?” And so, he suggests, “the best hope we have is to demonstrate with our own example that, given time, we can achieve a greater wisdom about ourselves and our relationship with the rest of the natural world down here, on this planet.”

That’s the Peace he’s talking about. It’s a somewhat surprising direction for the book to have taken, but I believe that’s basically the author’s point. And while he doesn’t posit an inter-species golden rule, that’s the basic lesson I take from the book: Do unto other species as you would have other species do unto us.   

Get Published!

My next class on Writers.com begins on Monday, June 13, and runs for 8 weeks: Get Published! -- Publishing the Short Story or Essay. Take a look at the course description and think about joining us.

When I got my MFA, we learned very little, if anything, about the business of getting published. Sure, there was a panel discussion near the end of the program about literary magazines and agents, but no real discussion of how to go about getting published. As it turns out, our program wasn't unique, as I've heard from many MFA program graduates.

So, after years of experience of sending out stories to magazines, then writing query letters to agents and small presses, and eventually getting published--both stories and a story collection--I decided to put together the course I wish I'd been able to take. And that's what this course is. We'll talk about preparing manuscripts for submission, cover letters, researching markets, and much, much more. As a magazine editor now, I can tell you that all this stuff matters.

Consider the class. I think you'll find it worthwhile.