South 85 Journal is pleased to announce recognition for one of the fiction pieces published in our Fall / Winter 2014 issue.  “Blowing Smoke” by Rachel Moore has been selected to receive the Write Well Award sponsored by the Silver Pen Writers Association.

According to the Write Well Award website, “This award seeks to recognize outstanding short stories and flash fiction from both print and online journals and to give readers a way to experience stories that they might not otherwise be exposed to.”  Thirty-six different fiction stories were chosen for the award this year.

When South 85 Journal notified Rachel Moore of the honor, she said, “I’m very excited and honored to be receiving the Write Well Award. I am proud of ‘Blowing Smoke,’ and it is incredibly rewarding to share this piece with a wider audience.”

Moore is a twenty-three year old Pittsburgh native. She lives and works on her family’s small farm outside of the city. Moore has a B.A. in History from Allegheny College and is currently a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, where she will earn a Master of Library and Information Sciences (MLIS) degree.

Check out all 36 winning stories in the 2015 Write Well Anthology, which is now available on the Kindle and in paperback format through Amazon.com.

After a nice summer break, the South 85 Journal staff is back at work!  We are sad to say goodbye to David Colodney, who has served on the South 85 Journal staff since our Spring / Summer 2014 issue.  Most recently, he was the Managing Poetry Editor of the Spring / Summer 2015 issue.  Also, we will miss Ellie Rodgers, who served on staff as a Poetry Co-Editor for our previous issue.

However, we are happy to welcome back all of the other staff members from last issue.  In addition, we would like to welcome Shianna Whitner, who will serve as a Fiction Co-Editor, and Reed McFarlin, who will serve as a Poetry Co-Editor

As of today, our reading period is open!  We will be accepting poetry, fiction, and non-fiction through April 30, 2016.  We will continue to accept blog and visual art submissions year-round.  For more information, check out our submission guidelines.  Or visit our Submittable page at https://south85.submittable.com/submit to submit now!

We look forward to seeing your work!

David Raney

Years ago my dentist found out I wrote. He said “God, I used to be really good at that. I could write answers on these insurance forms and stuff – nobody could make head or tails of it.” Writing as obfuscation. I had implements in my mouth so fortunately was not required to respond.

If you’re a writer, either you admit to it in social settings or you don’t. Cop to it, and the range of responses is discouragingly slim.

I asked a few writer friends about this. “When I say I’m a writer,” one told me, “people assume I have a book out with my name on it, and I’m possibly a famous person they’ve never heard of.” The next moments don’t go very well if that isn’t the case – if for example you’ve published something (or dozens of somethings) without spies or raised gold lettering.

“Even a lot of my old friends seem to be shaky on what I do,” another one said. “I’ve had people say ‘Oh you write for the paper?’ when I’ve been reviewing there for the past six years. And even when I explain, the bemused look stays in their eyes. The whole livelihood is fuzzy.”

I don’t often tell people I’m a writer, partly because I’m never quite sure I am. It’s not usually part of my job description, but that’s not the real reason I hesitate. Mostly it’s to avoid what follows. The polite cocktail party response – although to be perfectly accurate I’ve never attended a cocktail party – is “Oh how interesting, what have you written?” If the answer isn’t a novel, things can get hazy fast. When people learned I was a college teacher I used to get plenty of “Must be great to work three hours a day and have summers off.” But writing is, if anything, even less understood.

I think I’ll start answering “What do you do?” with just “I write” – and the inevitable follow-up with “Whatever seems true to me and might be interesting to someone else.” This will engender a few good talks with fellow sufferers and many premature trips to the bar for refills. But I’ve come to think of it as what I do, and also to feel less apologetic than I used to.

I’ve had a little luck publishing my pieces, but that’s not what has changed. (No one wants to hear your list of rejections and acceptances anyway.) I think it’s just that I’ve finally spent enough hours, weeks, years with my butt in a chair trying to get words to come. You pick the time and place, smells, drinks, noise level, favorite pen, whatever works, and you do it. Do it long enough, even (especially) when you don’t want to, and you’re a writer.

For me it’s legal pads and no capital letters (this fools my brain that things are already flowing, there’s no forbidding “Once Upon a Time” gate to open), plus a little background noise and some coffee. It isn’t so much superstition as training. You’re saying to your body “This is what happens now.”

So tell your friend/lover/barista/dentist you’re writing a novel or poem – or don’t. Say you’re a writer or else let it be your secret power, whatever makes it real. Just sit down somewhere, or stand on a ladder, and make words. They stand a good chance of begetting other words. Some you make better, some you throw out. That’s what we do.

David Raney is a writer and editor living in Atlanta with a great wife, two great kids and an enormous dog. In a previous life all that was true but he was a better writer living in, let’s say, Paris. His writing has shown up in about thirty places including Flash, Compose, Gravel, Referential, Texas Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and the Hollins Critic.

Dallas Woodburn

After I broke off my engagement, I was often haunted when I sat down to write. All you care about is what other people think. My ex-fiance knew how to cut me deeply with a few precise words. He was right: I did care, perhaps too much, what others thought.

As a writer I had a difficult time distancing myself from my audience. Even when writing a first draft, part of me wondered what readers would think. This habit grew paralyzing while pursuing my M.F.A. degree, when I workshopped stories with the same eight people for two years and could anticipate how they would respond to a piece before I even turned it in. While writing a descriptive sentence, I would hear Craig’s voice in my head: Too flowery. Tammy would chime in, arguing the opposite: Lengthen this description so it comes alive on the page. I could hear Anna’s critique of a character (stilted and flat) while Rick would comment on theme (too heavy-handed; you’re telling the readers what to think instead of letting them come to their own conclusions.) If my story tanked in workshop, my confidence was shaken for days. Attempting to heed the disparate voices in my head only watered down my work. By trying to please all, I pleased none.

Three weeks after breaking off my engagement, I sat at a conference table with a panel of professors for the culmination of the M.F.A. program: my thesis defense. I had spent the past year working on draft after draft of my manuscript under the guidance of one professor, whose response had been positive. I expected to receive a fair amount of feedback and suggestions, but to overall feel encouraged.

Within ten minutes, I was shell-shocked by criticism. The defense lasted two hours.

I trudged back to my car through the early April slush, my mind spinning, feeling drained and utterly defeated. Because real life is often stranger than fiction, I bumped into my ex in the parking garage. He asked if I’d passed my thesis defense. I nodded. “Congrats,” he said coldly, and then he climbed into his Jeep and sped away.

I missed him—the old him—terribly in that moment. There were myriad reasons we ultimately were not compatible, but until the breakup he had genuinely supported my writing. When others were critical of my work, his had been the voice I turned to: Ignore them…This is really good… I like what you did here. Suddenly that supportive voice was gone. When I thought of my ex, what I now heard was contempt. All you care about is what other people think.

Weeks passed, and I confessed to a friend that I was struggling to get past his hurtful words. Even worse: I didn’t know how to make them false.

“You already proved him wrong,” she said. “If you only cared about other people’s opinions, you wouldn’t have broken off your engagement. But you heeded your inner voice. You can do it in your writing, too.”

I realized she was right. Leaving my ex meant losing shared friends and mutual acquaintances. Some people, looking in from the outside, spoke ill of me. But I never doubted I did the right thing. I trusted my gut, and that was enough.

My ex’s words—and other people’s criticisms—stopped troubling me so much. I dove back into my thesis manuscript with renewed vigor and a wellspring of new ideas. I completed a young adult novel that had been languishing in my hard-drive for years, ever since some of my colleagues had scoffed that YA fiction was not “serious” writing. I wrote essays and plays and blog posts without worrying about being judged by readers. Ironically, once I stopped concerning myself with the opinions of others, my work began to receive more acclaim: a short story won second place in the American Fiction Prize, a play was produced Off-Broadway, and I received the John Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. However, my confidence as a writer is no longer tied to what others think of my work. I know now that the only voice I need to listen to—the only voice that truly matters—is my own.

Dallas Woodburn, a former Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing, has published fiction and nonfiction in Fourth River, The Nashville Review, The Los Angeles Times, North Dakota Quarterly, Passages North, and Monkeybicycle, among others. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her short story collection was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize. Woodburn is the founder of Write On! For Literacy, an organization that empowers young people through reading and writing endeavors: www.writeonbooks.org. She blogs frequently at http://daybydaymasterpiece.com/

Our Spring / Summer 2015 is up and ready for viewing!

Creative Work

We are pleased to present work by the following contributors:

• Artwork – Vivian Calderón Bogoslavsky
• Fiction – Connie Bull Stillinger, Graham Bowlin, Janet Schneider
• Non-Fiction – Francis DiClemente, Krista Varela, Susan Vespoli, Timothy L. Marsh
• Poetry – Christine Grimes, Christopher Muravez, Disa Turner, Donald Levering, Iain Macdonald, Jevin Lee Albuquerque, Jonathan Travelstead, Kevin Brown, Koal Gil, Marlin M. Jenkins, Tom Montag

Reviews

Looking for a good summer read?  Check out our reviews of these books:

•  City of Ladies by Sarah Kennedy (Fiction)
•  Lifted by the Great Nothing by Karim Dimenchkie (Fiction)
•  The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips (Fiction)
•  The Last Two Seconds by Mary Jo Bang (Poetry)
•  What I Came to Tell You by Tommy Hays (Young Adult)

Special Thanks

South 85 Journal is published by the Converse College Low-Residency MFA program.  Thank you to our staff of volunteers who put countless hours into making this issue happen.  We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together!

Anthony Reese

As primarily a fiction writer, one of my favorite moments in the midst of the daily grind is the point of discovery. Every writer knows what I’m talking about. It’s a Wednesday, and I’m avoiding my laptop at all costs—thinking to myself that if I have to stare at a blank Word document for one more second I’m going to scream—walking through the grocery aisles with my two kids or driving out to my favorite lookout spot in the mountains. Anything, really, to get my mind off writing. And then it happens. The tail-end of some strangers’ conversation reaches my ear, or two squirrels scuttle across my footpath, or the smell of fresh-mowed grass fills my nostrils, and suddenly I’m inspired. Suddenly, I have a story—or a scene of a story, anyways—and I couldn’t be happier. But then reality sets in.

What is the plot of my story? Who are its central characters? What do they look like? Sound like? Smell like? How do they interact with each other? What do they wear? How old are they? What scenes will drive my story along? And where will they take place? Are the settings real places, or are they fictional? What year is it? What’s my motif? My theme? My tone? My perspective?

I ask myself all of this and more when I sit down to write, and before I know it, I’m back to square one: treating my laptop as though it’s a source of some terrible disease, something I shouldn’t touch, can’t bear to look at.

From where I’m standing and based on what I’ve learned so far, two methods exist for answering these questions. One—from a logical standpoint—seems obvious: outlining. You sit down with a notepad and a pen, and you force yourself to answer all the questions that keep bugging you. What color hair does your protagonist have? Your brain tells you brown, so you write down brown. What is the climax of the story? The resolution? You put the answers down on paper and craft your story around them. The crux with this premeditated strategy of writing is that it often results in stories that feel, well, premeditated–unnatural, forced.

On the opposite end of the spectrum another, less obvious strategy seems to avoid such problems. Most (if not all) seasoned writers are familiar with discovery writing. Critically acclaimed authors of all genres swear by the types exercises that give you a one-line prompt and thirty minutes to scribble out as much on the topic as possible. The reason? Because the most well-informed writers know that we tend to get in our own way. We question our stories, our characters, our plotlines, and our themes with the preconceived notion that we have to know it all, that we have to understand every single detail of our works in progress in order for them to be great. But that’s the cool thing about language, right? It doesn’t depend on us. Sometimes, we writers have to accept that our stories, our characters are going to surprise us. They’re going to take us on their own journeys, lead us down their own paths.

But can it be so simple? Choose one strategy, stick to it, and you’re good to go? Personally, I don’t follow either method orthodoxly. For example, while I understand the benefits of discovery writing, I have to know what my characters look like before I can go any further. Or on the flip side, I try my best to avoid asking the question, “What is the resolution?” My reasons are my own, and I’m sure you have your personal preferences as well. I’m curious, though. Where do you fall on the spectrum? Are you a discovery writer or an outliner? A fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy (or gal) or someone who airs on the side of caution? Maybe you fall somewhere in the middle. Let me know in the comments below.

Among many things, Anthony Reese is a father, a husband, a travel addict, and a writer. He has a Bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies with concentrations in English and print media from North Greenville University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Converse College.

Lisa Hase-Jackson and Gary Jackson

To people who are not involved in the writing life, the idea of poets in a committed relationship can strike a romantic cord. Many acquaintances have suggested that it must be great to have someone at home who understands what it’s like to be a poet: someone who reads closely and provides just the kind of considerate critique needed to revise and edit toward the perfect poem; someone who will contradict every rejection and celebrate every great (or mediocre) publication; and someone who, above all else, provides love and support when the rest of the writing world seems to have turned its back. Since writers in love seem to hold a great deal of mystery for writers and non-writers alike, we thought we’d explore some of the more common assumptions that we’ve encountered during our 10+ year relationship.

“You guys must talk about your poetry all the time.”

Lisa: Though we discuss favorite poets and books, craft, and theory as well as keep each other informed about markets we’ve submitted our work to, we probably talk about the business of poetry more than anything. By that I mean that a lot of our “poetry conversation” is peppered with academics, especially since we are both teachers, and we tend to discuss the latest gossip about who won the latest award or who was hired at what institution for which position. Honestly, because we talk about writing at our jobs everyday then spend our evenings writing and researching markets, we tend not to talk about writing and academics in our down time and prefer to focus on some of the simpler joys of life and marriage, like what albums to buy on Record Store Day or what movie to see on date night.

With that said, I have to admit that far more of our time is probably spent deciding what we are going to have for dinner.

Gary: If we’re considering poetry a (part-time) career, then I don’t think we talk about poetry any more than two people who talk about working in the same field. But it’s more than a career too, right? I mean it’s a passion, and it’s a passion we share, but for me poetry has always been this type of paradoxical experience – it requires solitude, yet the goal is communal – to reach out. So though we share and talk about poems – our own and other authors/books we adore, we don’t usually engage in these long, passionate, critical discussions. Every once in a while, sure, but we’re more likely to say “you check out that Natalie Diaz poem on poem-a-day? It’s pretty dope. It reminds me of…” and then we move on to talking about dinner, who needs the car and when, what we need to buy at the store, what’s on TV. Similar to what Lisa already said, our lives at this point could entirely revolve around poetry if we allowed it, and who wants to be identified by a single passion? To riff on Carver, This is what we talk about when we talk about poetry.

“How convenient to have a live-in editor/workshop partner.”

Lisa: When it comes to sharing my work, I don’t necessarily want my spouse to weigh in on every piece of writing I compose. I rather believe it’s healthier for our writing, and our relationship, to keep our respective voices distinct and relatively unadulterated by the other’s opinions. I rely more on my own instincts these days, which will sometimes tell me consult an outside reader, one that I am NOT married to.

When it comes to editing, I do often ask Gary to read something before submitting. This generally works fine unless I am overly attached to what I have written and therefore less receptive to his comments. As a result, we might get snappy with each other and wind up sulking in our offices, and honestly, I can think of about a million other things I’d rather do with my husband than sulk.

Gary: Ha! Is convenient the right word? We haven’t work-shopped or edited each other’s poems in a long time. We’ll help edit each other’s documents, letters, and other pieces (like this blog post for example), but going back to the idea finding solace in the solitude of writing: we tend to only show one another poems just to get a general sense of a yay or nay if we’re feeling a little unsure (or super excited about a newborn poem). It seems to work best for us that way. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that jazz. And yes, two can be too many cooks.

“It must be great to live with someone who respects your writing space.”

Lisa: I am fortunate to have a room of my own. One with a desk, lots of books, a window that opens and a door that shuts. There is a bed, too, so the space can double as a spare bedroom for guests, or as a great spot to read and take a nap. Still, when I am stuck or bored with my work, feeling lonely, or have a random question about our plans to fly home or some other trivial matter, I am sorry to admit that I will barge in on Gary on occasion. I could, perhaps, claim to have picked this habit up from him, but I suppose I should just admit to my flawed behavior. I also have to admit that his interruptions are, sometimes, quite a welcome distraction from my work. When it comes down to it, though, we respect each other’s space when we know the other is working on a big project.

Gary: I think it’s essential for a couple to have separate workspaces, and we’ve been fortunate enough to live in places with space for separate offices, otherwise it gets more difficult to respect that writing space – when your writing space is, let’s say, the living room coffee table. Though you do what you gotta do when you don’t have the luxury of space (and we’ve been there before too). And yeah, I’ll take that blame for encouraging Lisa to barge in on me. And I do it way more to her than she does to me.

“You must have a lot in common.”

Lisa: Our relationship is built on many commonalities. We met in undergrad where we attended many of the same classes, writing circles, readings, and, eventually, parties. We discovered we shared interests in comic books, though I am far less zealous, as well as movies, art, and music. In areas where our tastes diverge, we enjoy introducing each other to new things we may not learn about otherwise. We have many separate interests, too. Gary, for example, likes playing video games where I prefer to do just about anything else. Likewise, Gary isn’t too interested in knitting, sewing, painting, or yoga. Where I like a quiet house, he prefers the hum of the television or, occasionally, music. Where I like salad, he prefers red meat, grilled if possible. I guess our biggest differences are gender and skin color, which I rather consider complimentary.

Gary: Ditto to everything Lisa said. For once, I got nothing to add!

“Do you write about each other? Do you show up in each other’s work often?”

Lisa: The first poem I ever published was about an evening Gary and I spent together when we first started seeing each other and, recently, I wrote a poem based on something he did. Of course, I take a lot of poetic license when I write about anything in my life, including my marriage, and what suites the poem will prevail even if it isn’t factual truth. It’s emotional truth that I am after.

Gary: Of course, but it’s not as titillating as you may think. And like all poetry, when you read those poems – know that everything is true and nothing is true. We don’t ask permission either, we just trust each other enough to realize it was something potentially upsetting, we’d give each other a heads-up first, and more importantly – I don’t know if there’s anything we could write about the other that could even be potentially upsetting!

Lisa Hase-Jackson holds a Master’s in English from Kansas State University and is an MFA candidate at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. Her current projects include an anthology of poems celebrating New Mexico’s 2012 centennial and a manuscript of her own poetry. Her poems have appeared in Sugar Mule, Kansas City Voices, Pilgrimage and elsewhere. She teaches English and Poetry at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, and is the Review Editor for South 85 Journal.

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collection Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Tin House, Tuesday, and elsewhere. He is the Associate Poetry Editor at Crazyhorse, and an Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC.

Discover why Publishers Weekly named the Converse College Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing “a program to watch” in 2015. Join us at our Open House information session on May 31, 2015 from 6:30-7:30 p.m. in the Barnet Room of the Montgomery Student Center on the Converse campus.

Meet current students, published alumni, and faculty, including Robert Olmstead, Denise Duhamel, Marlin Barton, Leslie Pietrzyk, Susan Tekulve, Albert Goldbarth, C. Michael Curtis, Suzanne Cleary, and program director Rick Mulkey. Learn about the program’s new concentrations in Young Adult Fiction and Environmental Writing, plus scholarship and Teaching Assistantship opportunities, along with information on recent alumni successes in fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Then stay to mingle with current students who are on campus for their summer residency, enjoying live music with Nashville-based folk rock band The Hart Strings beginning at 8 p.m.

More information on the Converse College Low-Residency MFA is available at www.converse.edu/mfa.

About the Converse College Low-Residency MFA

As South Carolina’s only low-residency MFA program in creative writing, the Converse College MFA offers students opportunities to focus in fiction, Y.A. fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and Environmental writing, plus opportunities to pursue internships in publishing and editing through our C. Michael Curtis Publishing Fellowship at Hub City Press. MFA students may also participate in editing opportunities with the program’s national online literary magazine, South 85 Journal, and pursue teaching opportunities with our Teaching Assistant program, a unique opportunity for low residency students.

“One of the strengths of a low-residency format is how it introduces students to the real writing life,” said program director Rick Mulkey. “Most writers have family and career obligations in addition to their writing. While students spend part of each academic year on the Converse campus during the residencies, they continue work on their writing and academic projects during the rest of the year without disruption from their family and career. Plus they study in a true mentor/apprentice relationship with a gifted writer. It provides both an intensive learning environment and the flexibility that most of us need.”

Converse MFA faculty members include National Book Critic Circle Award winners, best-selling novelists, award winning short fiction writers and essayists, plus some of the top editors in the country. “In addition to being outstanding writers, our faculty are energetic and dedicated teachers who have been honored for their classroom instruction,” said Mulkey. “In some graduate programs, a student enrolls to discover that the writer she planned to work with only teaches one course a year, or is on leave while the student is in the program. Here you have the opportunity to work with a large number of writers, editors and agents in a very personal mentoring relationship.”

In the last few years, Converse MFA graduates and current students have distinguished themselves with honors and awards including the AWP Intro Award, a Melbourne Independent Film Festival Award, and the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Prize, among many others. In addition, they have published work in a range of literary venues from Colorado Review, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, and Southern Review to such noted publishers as William Morrow/Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Negative Capability Press, Finishing Line Press, and others.

Mark Brazaitis

My older daughter had a few suggestions for a draft of one of my stories:

“We need to know this character’s last name.”

“We need to know what that character looks like.”

“This third character is too mean.”

I began to offer reasons why she was wrong. But they weren’t good reasons. My daughter’s criticism was thoughtful, insightful, and ultimately helpful. Thanks to her, my story improved.

At the time, my daughter was nine-years-old. Although she had been asking to read my stories since her first sweep through the Harry Potter series two years earlier, this was the first time I’d let her. In the copy I gave her, I’d edited out two expletives and a mild reference to sex. Otherwise, she read the story straight, at whatever grade-level it was on. There were subtleties in my story she missed—at least, I’ll flatter myself to think there were—but she understood the essence.

I was of course proud of my daughter, literary critic. But my pride was joined by a selfish delight: I had ensnared another family member to read my drafts!

Why bother to seek readers in workshops, on-line, or even around the block when you can find them in the next room?

My sister, whom I have bombarded with my drafts since we were both in college, is usually entirely complimentary about my work. Occasionally, however, she pinpoints exactly what I’ve done wrong. For example, on a long story I’d labored over for months, and which had continued to confound me, she offered: “I wonder if this is Maria’s story rather than Tom’s.”

“Well, no,” I began to argue, “it’s Tom’s story because…” But of course she was right. The source of my months-long agony was revealed: I had employed the wrong point of view.

It might hurt to have a family member criticize one’s work, especially if the family member isn’t a writer and is therefore un-credentialed. (My sister is a psychologist; my daughter is years from choosing a career.) But it’s a worse feeling when a family member won’t criticize one’s work and it’s at risk of stepping, un-groomed and smelly, into the world.

When I was twenty-three, I gave my mother the first novel I’d ever written to read. In retrospect, my nine-year-old daughter could have written something more coherent and mature. My mother’s assessment, written on the final page of my manuscript in bold, blue strokes: “Make way for the new Shakespeare!”

Presumably she was referring to Gilbert Shakespeare, William’s younger brother, a haberdasher.

(That particular novel has been erased everywhere but my memory.)

My mother’s critique was echoed, in a fashion, by my fiction workshop leader at Bowling Green State University, where I earned my MFA. After expounding on the faults of a story one of us presented in workshop, he would sometimes stop suddenly, gaze solemnly around the table, and say, “These may be mere quibbles,” then, in his booming voice, advise, “Send it to The New Yorker!”

We might have recognized his imperative as hyperbole if one of his students, a few years before, hadn’t had a story plucked off The New Yorker’s slush pile and published in its august pages. The story also appeared in that year’s edition of The Best American Short Stories, which made our professor’s send-it-to-The-New-Yorker advice all the more tempting to heed.

I contend that one doesn’t need to be a writer or have an MFA to offer helpful advice on a manuscript.

I drafted my wife, a marketer with an MBA, as a reader even before we were engaged. Although I couldn’t have been consciously auditioning her as a life’s partner based on the feedback she gave my fiction, it didn’t hurt our courtship for me to read: “This is fantastic. Wonderful. Maybe add a little more description in the opening scene. Also, slow down the ending. Let us linger. It’s lovely.”

My wife is still my first reader. As is befitting of where we are in our marriage—sixteen years, two children, 127 arguments, including, most recently, one over cupcakes—her critiques skip the pleasantries and hone in on the heart of the matter, often with a single word: “Redundant.” “Pretentious.” “No!”

Recently, she solidified her case as the bluntest of my critics when she said, midway through a gnarly section of what had pretensions of being a novel, “If this appeared in a book I’d bought, I would put it down now.” What she didn’t have to add was, “But because you’re my husband, I will grudgingly keep reading.”

One reason I love having those near and dear to me read my work is that even when they hate it, they feel obliged to keep going.

But my favorite of my wife’s criticisms is one of her one-word masterpieces: “Yuck!”

A writing friend of mine once told me she would never give her husband her drafts to read. “I need unconditional love,” she said.

For me, however, love is never having to say “Nice” when you mean “Yuck.”

Mark Brazaitis is the author of six books of fiction, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and Julia & Rodrigo, winner of the 2012 Gival Press Novel Award. His latest book, Truth Poker: Stories, won the 2014 Autumn House Press Fiction Competition: http://www.autumnhouse.org/product/truth-poker-mark-brazaitis/.

His book of poems, The Other Language, won the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize.

Terry Lucas

For the past fifteen years, during my morning appointment with the muse (I’ve shown up most days, even if she hasn’t), I play a game. I pretend that language is older than life on this planet, older than life on any planet, the planets themselves, stars—even this universe. I assume that language is built into the fabric of reality itself and, therefore, due to both its age and experience, has something to teach me. Thus, I come to language every morning in order to discover myself, rather than to express myself. This difference involves more than semantics; it is as important a distinction as can exist for writers, dividing them and their work into two camps with, I believe, two entirely different results.

1. Writing as expression tends to be predictable; writing as discovery tends to subvert the reader’s expectations. We’ve all heard the maxim “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Writing to express means that the writer already “knows” (on some level) what’s going to be written before it comes out. Writing to discover oneself means that there is an open-endedness to the drafting of each line or sentence that always leaves room for lightning to strike.

How often in a workshop have you heard a writer defend a particular word or phrase against a suggested change with “but that’s not the way it happened!”? I love Dorianne Laux’s response: “We love you, but we really don’t care”—meaning that what’s important is the poem, the story, the end result, not that you are faithful in providing a precise chronicle of events or expressing your particular take on them. In poetry—Laux’s and my genre—language trumps the writer’s experiences, opinions, and beliefs every time because, as Lewis Turco points out in The Book of Forms (University Press of New England, 2000), “poetry is the art of language.” But even in other genres, it is the emotional truth conveyed in a fresh way, rather than mere historical facts, that maintains the reader’s interest.

2. Writing as expression tends to deplete a writer; writing as discovery tends to enrich a writer with even greater potential for creating new work. From Larry Levis, in “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” we learn that one characteristic of a voice so absorbed in self-expression that it diminishes into silence is its increasing lack of particularity:

Like the voice that went on whispering ceaselessly its dry rage
Without listeners. He said that even if anyone heard it,
They could not have recognized the dialect

As anything human . . .

. . . he began to lose interest in stories, & to speak
Only in abstractions, to speak only of theories,

Never of things.
Then he began to come in less frequently, and when he did,
He no longer spoke at all.

Then near the close of the poem, Levis gives us these astonishing lines:

What do you do when nothing calls you anymore?
When you turn & there is only the light filling the empty window?
When the Angel fasting inside you has grown so thin it flies
Out of you a last time without your

knowing it, & the water dries up in its thimble . . .

. . . I’m going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk
I’m bent over until it’s infinite,

I’m going to make it talk, I’m going to make it
Confess everything.”

The it in these last lines is literally the wood in the poet’s desk, but metaphorically it is the page and the language of specificity that fills it when the poet writes. This process of listening to one’s own writing until it “confesses every thing” is what achieves the quality of poems Levis wrote; expressing one’s abstract thoughts about it leads to a drought of words—“the water dry[ing] up in its thimble.”

3. Writing as expression is like breathing out without breathing in—try that for a minute or so and see what happens. Writing as discovery is inhaling the words of great writers and watching that language evolve into something new that you exhale into the world. This is a corollary to number 2 above. I’ve long held to the idea that writer’s block is really only reader’s block in disguise. When writers come to me for help, one of the first questions I ask them is what they are reading. Most of the time they’re not reading anything. When I’m in a slump, I read those writers whose language speaks to me (like Levis). Or—here’s the open-ended aspect again—I read against my own grain—writers I don’t particularly like, to see what their language has to say to me.

Then I go to sleep, and wake up in time once again for my appointment with the muse of language, and see if she has anything to say.

Terry Lucas won the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His most recent chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the Copperdome Award from Southeast Missouri State University Press, and his full-length collection of poems, In This Room, is forthcoming from CW Books in February of 2016. Terry is Associate Editor of Trio House Press, and a freelance poetry consultant at www.terrylucas.com.