Year of the LitMag: Mid-American Review Vol. XXI No. 2

[Note: this post is part of my Year of the LitMag series. If you would like to contribute to the series, please leave a comment below or send me an email. CG]

I’ve read other issues of the Mid-American Review out of Bowling Green State University, but with the new issue, Volume XXI No. 2, I am reminded that the editors seem to like quirky, off-beat stories. There are lots of examples here.

Matthew Eck’s “The Many Inventions of Walt Whitman, Jr.” is a love story, sort of, about a guy who goes out on a date with a wrong number, but he wears a sheet because she tells him it’s a philosophy party (and he’s thinking “toga”). The dialogue is witty and fast-paced, and reveals the delightfully twisted character of the narrator. Shannon Cain’s “I Love Bob” is about Hillary, whose mother, a drunk, has told her that Bob Barker is her father. So Hillary goes to Hollywood and meets Bob Barker. Lydia Fitzpatrick’s “Flood Lines,” which won the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award, is told in the third person plural from the point of view of Catholic school girls who were displaced by Katrina but are now back, all but one. Kate Finlinson’s “Transliteration,” a fragmented piece, is about a widow who is carrying on a conversation with her late husband—in Russian. Matt Mullins’s “The Braid” is without quirks, but it does have quite a shock built into it. Mark Mayer’s “The Evasive Magnolio” is about dealing with the corpse of an elephant. (It’s about way more than that, actually.) There are also a number of excellent flash fictions in this issue, including Ravi Mangla’s “Better Halves,” and one that I resisted (but ultimately liked) because it’s in second person, “Divination” by James Tadd Adcox.

On top of the fiction, there are three essays and a lot of poetry, including an interesting translation chapbook called “Beneath an Avalanche of Waking” by Mira Kus, translated by Karen Kovacik.

And then, at the back of the issue, I was reminded that Mid-American Review runs reviews. Lots of reviews. In a section called “What We’re Reading” there are 22 book reviews, including reviews of books from a lot of small presses: Ryan Call’s Weather Stations (Caketrain Press); Heather Fowler’s Suspended Heart (Aqueous Books); Seth Fried’s The Great Frustration (Soft Skull Press); Michael Hemmington’s Pictures of Houses with Water Damage (Black Lawrence Press); and lots more.

I wanted to mention, too, that MAR design is great. For this issue, the beautiful cover art is by Nikkita Cohoon.

Tips for Writers: Read

You are what you read. When I started my MFA program, someone offered this bit of advice: “Read good stuff.” If you want to be a great writer, read great writers. The expectation is that experiencing good work on the page will help as you try to generate your own work. You’ll see how sentences are formed, how language can be used, what craft techniques are effective, etc. And if you’re reading modern greats, you’ll also see what critics and readers are responding to these days, what publishers are buying, and what’s already been done.

A corollary to this advice is “Don’t read bad stuff,” and I think it’s equally valuable. I think the problem with bad writing, for a beginning or emerging writer, is that it gives you the wrong impression. Dan Brown isn’t successful because he writes great sentences, for example, and anyone who tries to imitate his writing is doomed. Read Brown for plot, maybe. Likewise for Grisham and some others. But try to ignore the writing while you’re doing it.

But I suppose there’s another corollary: “Read what you want to write.” Not that anyone intentionally wants to write bad stuff, but if you want to write fantasy, you should read fantasy. If you want to write thrillers, read thrillers. The reason I write mostly literary fiction is because I read mostly literary fiction. I sometimes worry that taking my reading across genres will be bad for my writing. And it might be, if I’m not careful.

More than ever, lately everything I read feels like something I can learn from. I just finished Alice Hoffman’s The Probable Future (an audiobook, listening in the car), and while her style is definitely not something I’ll imitate (a bit flowery for me), and I rarely use an omniscient voice, I did feel that she drilled pretty deep into her character’s feelings, and that’s something I could do better. I also recently read Ellen Meister’s The Other Life, and I was paying attention to point of view there, as well.

But there’s another aspect of learning, and that’s understanding the market. I’m reading the latest issue of Mid-American Review. I know the editors there and I’ve submitted a few times, but I’ve never had anything accepted. I’ve read the magazine before, I think this time I finally understand why my stuff hasn’t worked there. But it reinforces the notion for me that if you’re going to submit to a magazine, read that magazine first to get a sense of what they’re looking for. It’s key.

By the way, you can order a copy of the blank journal on Etsy, which is where I found the picture: You Are What You Read Journal. 

Short Story Month 2011: Mid-American Review -- Kevin Wilson (#ssm2011)

I'm a big fan of Kevin Wilson and his work, so I was thrilled when I picked up the latest Mid-American Review and saw that it included one of his stories. (We were delighted to publish Kevin's "Another Little Piece" in Prime Number Magazine last year.)

"Intergenerating" is classic Kevin Wilson. The story features Boyd, an unemployed (directionless, clueless) man who lives with his mother and seems to spend his days sleeping. His mother, on the other hand, is wealthy, having inherited everything from her late, philandering husband, including a sizable settlement from the airline responsible for the crash that killed him. One day Boyd is awoken by a call, and all of his neuroses are revealed: "He had to sound like a man caught at his home by chance at eleven o'clock a.m., perhaps rushing home from his fairly lucrative job to eat lunch with the wife, who no longer had to work because of his aforementioned, though still detail-lacking, lucrative job."

But there is no wife and no job. The call is an invitation to join something called Older/Wiser Bother and Sister Foundation and become a mentor to a disadvantaged youth. Despite his mother's objection--she's certain OWBSF is a fraud--Boyd joins. He goes through a brief training program, learns the ten commandments of being a mentor, and makes arrangements for his first outing with Raul, his mentee. Needless to say, it doesn't go well, but the story gets funnier and crazier as it goes on.

I highly recommend this one if you can get your hands on the current MAR issue.