Oregon Literary Arts

Thanks, Literary Arts, for the support!

It's been a trying week in terms of writing-- pleased to place my essay "What You Would Give," with New Madrid, it was nonetheless hard to have to turn down River Teeth on Monday, when I was informed they too wanted to publish the piece if it was still available. Many have pointed out to me that I ought to be pleased it was taken after three years, and that I should see the River Teeth offer as vindication of the piece's merit. It is that-- RT is among the finest venues for literary nonfiction in the United States. That's why, as much as I respect New Madrid, I was crying into my coffee yesterday... what are the chances, I whined, of two places wanting the piece in two weeks, after three years of rejections?

Evidently, the answer is, pretty damn good. To add insult, an agent I was hopeful about wrote me (another) kind rejection of "Gone." Like almost all the other agents who have looked at the full manuscript, she complimented my 'immense talent' and the 'beautiful writing' before concluding that the book is insufficiently commercial for her to take a chance on. I'm beginning to wish an agent would come and tell me I'm a second-rate hack who's written an ugly, awful book, but luckily it has great commercial appeal and so they're fully on board. In fact, I think I'll write that book next. It will be called 'Twi-twilight,' and will basically recycle the plot, characters, and pre-teen vampirical romance of the Twilight series in prose that imitates the appalling unartfulness of the original. As promotion, I will twitter Twi-Twilight's first chapter at a rate of a sentence a day for a week (ok, it might take a bit longer-- but seven sentences would be enough space to cover the actual substance of those books). Agents take note!

Now, with a few days to mull it all over, I'm at peace with the whole thing. Tomorrow, Junot Diaz comes to the University to speak to faculty and read, and since his wonderful book of stories, "Drown," has been a powerful influence on me, I'm awfully excited.

Disappointment will end. The sun will come back out. And all the racists will move to Arizona*.


*For more on racists, see my essay in tomorrow's Eugene Weekly.

Afternoon

Murmur of café, clatter and hiss of espresso being pressed, children calling from adjacent hallways, a man laughing from the belly. Sun pushes through the front windows, tiles the floor with rims of shadow, squares of light. Outside the air is wet and warm with Spring; the leaves that will fall are budding from the oaks, and it is all burgeoning, return, the kinder swing of seasons when what is to come is surely better than what has been. Maybe it is easier now to persist, even if it is all ribbon curving back on its end, all pendulum with equal and opposite energy. I know too little these days to choose a single metaphor. I have been emptied, and all I want is to be full—if not with a high, sweet afternoon like this, then with the heat of touch, the beginning of love when its price or end is unclear and it is possible to imagine for a second that this is a good and gentle world, that I have come all this way for the moment which is whole and itself enough.

And perhaps it is sufficient, this fine, bright afternoon: a fragrance of flowers and coffee grinds, smiling, well-scrubbed young baristas passing steaming cups over counters, these words released, things I have said before and will say again. I will want more; I will always want. But today, laughter, warmth, only the promise of promise. Yes-- enough to be here. Yes.

Acceptance

"What You Would Give," was just accepted by New Madrid, and will appear in their Summer 2010 issue. Three years out, and rejection by more than forty journals, and finally, my favorite essay has a home.

To AWP-Denver and back again...

Last weekend, over 7,000 poets and fiction writers descended on the Denver Convention Center, and I was among them. I hadn't attended AWP in four years, since I was a graduate student swollen with the sort of arrogance possible only when you don't know enough to know how little you know. Now, older, moderately wiser, and perhaps more than a little worse for wear, AWP was nonetheless a lovely experience. I attended a panel moderated by Luna Park editor Travis Kurowski that convinced me that the future of the literary magazine is still bright; I walked tables at the bookfair, and chatted up the editors of literary magazines (and in the case of Post Road, the literary journal out of Boston College, saw my work in print for the first time and gently chastised them-- they'd forgotten to send me a contributor's copy!); I attended the Canarium/Octopus/Ugly Duckling reading, where I was impressed with the work of Heather Christie, John Beer and Paul Killebrew; I attended a lovely reading given by an old friend, BOA poet and current Stegner Fellow Keetje Kuipers; I saw fiction writer Caroline Morris and poet Elyse Fenton (who just released her first book, a real knockout); I drank immoderate amounts of Jim Beam at the Hyatt bar, where I met a bright, fun bookseller named Stacie through fiction writer Mark Sleiter, and also made the acquaintance of writer Margot Kahn Case, who does wonderful work in Seattle with the Hugo House. And on Saturday night I read fiction for "Copper Nickel: An Audible Edition," at the Denver Press Club, an intimate and intense little reading that was recorded, and will be available soon online (I'll post a link when CN releases the recording).

The whole time, the sun shone, the sky was a depthless blue, and the downtown bustled with life. I returned to low-pressing clouds and showers, to the finally usual of my daily life, and it was a bit of a bitter pill. Of course, every weekend cannot be AWP-Denver-- but surely I could live in a place where there are writers and readers (an actual literary community!), people to meet. It may be time to seek a change.

Creative Nonfiction in Eclectica

Today, my essay "The Files of the Living," was published in Eclectica.

Finding the Story published in GOOD

My third essay for GOOD, "Finding the Story," was published today.

AWP!

So, shortly, I am off to AWP, the annual conference of the Associated Writers and Writers Programs Organization. AWP is the premiere literary writers conference, though it should be noted that it represents the MFA-literary journal-small press triumvirate that has come to dominate the American literary landscape. In the past, I have referred to the MFA as a pyramid-scheme, which it surely is: established, literary writers who have demonstrated some success make their living off the millions who aspire to be 'writers', finding some stability in the income and support of academia. The MFA is a genuine pyramid, too-- that is to say, those who pay pave the way for a few who demonstrate enough merit, luck, or savvy (likely a combination of all three) to be offered a fellowship and so paid to go to graduate school. The organization and the yearly conference are in some sense primarily social: writers glad-handing other writers, boozing at the bars and snickering at the readings of other writers, the famous attending private parties and searching for the beautiful young admirer who won't mind becoming belt-notch. But the conference is also an opportunity to confirm contacts in this tiny literary world-- to speak to editors who've encouraged and published you, to meet contemporaries whose work you've encountered and admired, to seek advice and support. Such direct contact is especially important in a landscape where most everything now takes place online: submission, acceptance, publication, response and review-- everything is e-. I would like to see faces and shake hands and hear actual voices.

I intend to make sure I attend to the liquor, of course, and I'm excited to read for Copper Nickel (one of AWP's primary sponsors this year, as they are out of Denver) on Saturday night at the Denver Press Club, but more than anything, I'm excited to be excited-- I seek the energy of the conference, the force of gathering. Perhaps that's naive, but I often feel marooned here in Eugene, too old and too published to have much to say to current MFAs, and without peers or colleagues. For years, I conceived of networking as a tawdry schmoozing practiced by people I didn't like. In the last nine months, as I've sought representation for my novel "Gone," I've had to recognize the importance of collegiality, generosity, and outreach. The serious consideration my work has received has generally come through contacts, and not necessarily by people who have any reason to help me at all: Susan Straight read my work six years ago at a Master Workshop, but was kind enough to forward my manuscript to her agent, Richard Parks, though all she recalled of my story was a girl diving from a bridge. The photographer Brian Lanker, a friend of a friend, read my work and liked it and put my manuscript in Maya Angelou's hands. My cousin, an intern at ZSH, put the manuscript in the hands of an agent. An old buddy from the Stanford Wrestling team read a piece of mine in Stanford Magazine about our old assistant coach, contacted me, and was kind enough to forward my novel to a friend who was an agent. A girl I taught with in the Mississippi Delta whose father is a well known journalist sent my novel to her friend at an agency. Another TFA alum, the education editor at GOOD magazine, contracted me to write a series of pieces about the Delta and teaching at-risk students of color today. And on Sunday, the writer Steve Yarbrough, who was born and raised in Indianola, Mississippi, and is faculty at Emerson, took the time to speak to me about the Delta and my work, told me how his first novel was rejected 43 times by publishers before it found a home, and connected with a rising young agent who now has my manuscript in hand. There is nothing tawdry about having an open orientation toward the world.

That is the outlook I intend to take as I, an introvert after all, wander about AWP. Who knows who you might meet, where you might go; who knows if I can help you, too, or if you can help me? If you're going to be there, come speak to me. I'm the guy with the smile on his face, standing with open arms but looking maybe a bit lost, maybe a bit confused-- there in the middle of the crowd, waiting for you to come tell me what you will.

In Defense of Teach For America

It doesn’t happen often, white as the people of Oregon are, except when I drive to see my buddy in North Portland, out MLK boulevard. He’s in Alberta, a neighborhood the yuppies are moving into, but he’s beyond the upscale edge, and by the time you get to his place it’s one-story brick houses with sagging stoops, liquor stores and pawn shops, hoodied homeboys on corners pounding fists and leaning to telephone poles. That’s when I’ll see them, in a crowd waiting at a crosswalk, or in a group outside an arcade or convenience store: a black girl’s head held high and proud, a boy clowning with wind-milling arms, the shadow of a child’s corn-rowed head and mischief in a flash of eyes. I’ll pump the brake, stare over my shoulder trying to be sure. Thinking maybe it’s my kids, and I can still turn the car around. Go back to them.

Ω

Recently, Teach For America has come under fire for its supposed failure to create good citizens. A study done at Stanford, a long-time bastion of resistance to TFA, with much publicized results, found that charitable donation by TFA alumni lagged in comparison to those who applied and were rejected, or who were accepted and declined. The implication, according to the researchers, is that Teach For America doesn’t make good citizens, that it burns individuals out, leaving them jaded and ungenerous. The study failed to take into account the question of population, of course: if you take the body of students willing to offer two years of service in America’s most troubled schools, you have selected the idealistic. Those who didn’t get in presumably went directly to work or to graduate school, while Teach For America alums spent two years making the salary of a first year teacher—barely enough to live. After that late start, a majority stayed on in a field, education, that is unlucrative, and they almost certainly did so out of the conviction that they wanted to make a greater difference—education is not a field you choose from a desire to make money, and there is little money there. To put it bluntly, a TFA alum who stays in education, which is a majority, is unlikely to have a great deal of money to give away, and perhaps their continued service (as well as the two years they gave) should be considered when judging good citizenship.

Still, continued service, or persistent ‘good citizenship’, does not obviate the question of Teach For America’s influence on its corps members. I cannot deny that the two years I spent teaching in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta changed me, and it was not simply for the better. People speak of how idealism ought to be tempered by reality, and think it a benign process: growing older, becoming wiser. They are wrong: there is a price for lost naivete. Some days, I would give anything to be twenty-two again, to have more heart than sense and still believe that good easily overcomes all else. I wouldn’t be teaching low-income, at-risk students of color at the University of Oregon if it weren’t for those two years in Teach For America, would long ago have traded in my degree for a job with status and decent pay. All the same, I am a sell-out. In Indianola, the children I taught walk the dusty streets headed nowhere, and I’m not there helping them.

Some nights I lie awake bargaining, trying to get back to the man I was, and imagine choices: if I could trade my comfortable life for theirs, if I could take their lot and free them from poverty, would I? So simple to say, of course, when there are guarantees.

I dream of carrying children to safety from fires, of bearing them across ravines in a storm, of leading the way through a dark wood and a line of children behind following blindly, grudgingly, until we emerge in a city with clean, bright streets, the very air shimmering with possibility, and they are with me despite all our doubts. We have arrived.

When I wake, the relief is bitterly lost: I am alone in my highrise apartment with all the comforts of a middle-class life, and those children are a world away in shacks on the wrong side of the tracks, hearing the bark of a stray dog, the far-off whistle of the train bound elsewhere, always elsewhere. I left them behind, and so cannot let go.

Ω

Whatever Stanford researchers conclude, I do not accept the idea that my work today amounts to nothing. Each quarter I face room full of black, yellow, white and brown faces, kids who have kept their heads down and made it to the University against all odds. Many of them come from little, and have had little offered to them, but they have made no excuses. Many of them have a deficient skillset, do not know how to spell or punctuate or make an argument. They still have a long way to go to realize the American dream. I stand before them, and think of the children I taught in Mississippi, a responsibility I cannot return to. Then I consider these young men and women who have come so far, and accept what can be done here and now:

“This class is rigorous and challenging, and my expectations are high: I will accept nothing less than absolute excellence. Most of you lack the skills you require to make it at the University. But if you put in your best effort, you will improve. If you work hard, you will succeed in this class. That is my promise to each of you.”

And in a greater sense, I keep the faith: all children deserve the opportunity offered by education. Perhaps there is a price in committing to so ambitious a conviction, but it is has not made me a bad citizen. It has taught me to fight for what matters.