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Before I wrote “Requiem For A Literary Journal”, I had taken the first step towards moving away from my short-story writing by founding, and publishing, the journal night rally. “Requiem” was the first significant piece of non-fiction I had ever written, and it was borne of the demise of night rally. After many years of submitting to, and publishing in, other literary journals – the university-sponsored, the commercial, the seat-of-the-pants independent – publishing night rally had showed me the flip side of that market, and soured me to both sides of it.
Having killed the goose that laid the golden egg, I took on other projects, took a step back, and became not-just-a-short-story writer, hoping that when I emerged from hibernation, not only would I have fresh grist, but, perhaps, the market would have undergone a revolution.
The market had not. In fact, the current “New Release” tables at Borders or Barnes & Noble look more and more to me like toy or candy store displays, with wheedling cover designs and hyperbolic blurbing. “Literary ficton” had been wracked by ego-driven and ultimately picayune scandals in the form of James Frey and JT Leroy, and even grassroots literary efforts and prizes have been sullied. In 2005, writer Brad Vice had his Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction rescinded due to his blatant plagiarism. He, like others, acted as though it could have happened to anybody – that’s how unfamiliar he, and the others, are with the process of writing.
Even without these legal and ethical donnybrooks, in a world where McSweeney’s and chick lit are still so prevalent, I remain out of step.
Over the period of years between my experiment with night rally and writing this introduction, I’ve been party to a series of events that only served to strengthen my commitment to the lessons that night rally, and “Requiem”, taught me. I have tried to think of an artful way to express these, but they seem only capable of being told in a series of modular anecdotes fitting to the screenplay of My Dinner With André II; regardless, here they are.
In the last year that I was working on night rally, I was also working as a telephone operator for the ticketing office of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The office had a relaxed atmosphere, and the job itself had, particularly in summer, a lot of unmonitored down time. I recall with sentimental clarity the shift that began as I set up my desk with all my daily requirements – a bag of cherries from a street vendor, a huge, frozen iced mocha covered in whipped cream, and something to read – that fateful day, an issue of The Atlantic magazine.
I had been reading, over the past days, an article in my copy of The Atlantic entitled “A Reader’s Manifesto” by B. R. Myers, a methodical yet passionate autopsy of contemporary literary fiction in America. I knew the author was dead-on, and was enjoying his deft scalpel, while with my own right hand, I tapped my terminal keyboard and helped symphony patrons choose their seats for the coming season. Some were more talkative than others, and some occasionally asked “what else” a person who answered phones for the Orchestra did with their time. “I’m a writer, and I also publish a literary journal,” I told one curious gentlemen, who informed me that he, too, was an author. I did not recognize his name. “Well,” he said, “That’s because when I’m here in Philadelphia, I don’t go by the name that I write under.”
“And what name do you write under?” I asked, as at that point to fail to do so would have been intentionally rude.
“Cormac McCarthy,” he answered.
Cormac McCarthy was one of the authors who had been skewered in the The Atlantic article I was enjoying, and, in case he himself had missed it, I told him so. He had only a vague response; I’m sure that all the authors thusly flayed in B.R. Myers’ piece each had their own ways of minimizing the “damage” done to them by this upstart article. I shared Myers’ piece in The Atlantic with friends and family, and was delighted when, perhaps a year later, it was published as a short, stand-alone volume. I purchased numerous copies and gave them to friends as gifts. The introductory material that Myers included in this new volume only served to strengthen my admiration for the original work, and what it took to create it. There is no question whatever that it influenced my own “Requiem” hugely.
By this time, I had given up on night rally and had spent a year processing the experience in the writing of “Requiem”, which I then, with the help of my husband, posted in a printable format on our personal website. We made no attempts to advertise its existence and sent the link only to friends, and yet, we would often find in our web statistics that the essay was being linked, and discussed with some enthusiasm, on various sites on the Web.
By the end of 2005 and into 2006, my husband had begun researching overseas adoption in Korea. As a step in learning about Korea’s culture, I began to read about the country’s short story writers, and became curious in particular about a story called “The Toy Shop Woman” by a female writer named O Chong-hui. I was at that time myself writing a story about a woman who owned a toy shop, and so decided that to find an English translation of this story would be particularly fortuitous. I could find no translations or sources on the Web itself, so took my question to the editors and publishers of some of the Korean culture publications such as Koreana and Korean Quarterly.
The editor of Korean Quarterly, Stephen Wunrow, took a few months to respond to my request, but when he did, it was to give me the e-mail address of Heinz Insu Fenkl, a professor in Germany whom Wunrow believed might know someone who was translating that particular story. I e–mailed Fenkl, whose reply was swift. He did have a colleague who was, at that very time, providing “The Toy Shop Woman” with its first-ever English translation. Fenkl asked me why I had such an interest in such a raw, gloomy story, from such a raw and gloomy writer. I replied that it was just my kind of story. Fenkl, now having seen my name in the “Reply” field of his e-mail twice, also had this to say: “I knew the name rang a bell --You're the author of the famous essay, "Requiem for a Literary Journal". Great essay, which I have all my creative writing students read before going out into the real world.”
He also told me that he would let me know when O Chong-hui’s “The Toy Shop Woman” was in translation, for the promise that I would review it, and the collection, for Korean Quarterly when the book was published.
I sent an e-mail to Stephen Wunrow at Korean Quarterly for putting me in touch with Fenkl, and Wunrow, as well, suggested that perhaps I’d like to do some review work for the Quarterly. My husband and I were still literally years from being placed with a baby from Korea, and I knew almost nothing about the country’s literature, but I said yes.
Writing for KQ soon became very important to me. I wrote not only book and film reviews, but was given carte blanche to research my own points of interest in the Korean and Korean-American communities. I conducted interviews with punk rock photographer Jim Jocoy, pojagi artist Chunghie Lee, and was soon given my own column, for the benefit of documenting the process of our adoption. One day I was at home, e-mailing back and forth with my sister’s boyfriend – likely bemoaning the crappiness of literature, television and movies -- and decided to recommend to him – as I had for so many others so many times in the past -- B. R. Myers “A Reader’s Manifesto”. And in trying to find some links other than just the link to the book on Amazon.com, I came across a surprise – that B.R. Myers, in addition to being the author of a critical work that had literally helped shape my life, was also an expert in North Korean literature and culture. I made great haste in arranging an interview with him for Korean Quarterly, thus bringing to crescendo the layered, Sondheimesque number-before-the-intermission, where every individual theme is laid one on top of the other to create a rousing anthem, of my experience.
Still, there’s the problem of everything sucking. Part of the problem is that writing is so universally bad these days, but an even bigger part of the problem is that critics, and the media, parse this bad writing into “bad” and “good”, in a way that seems to me – and others I talk to and trust – arbitrary. It’s an Emperor’s-New-Clothes situation, but occasionally, I’ll find someone who says, as though they’ve just discovered that the Earth really does revolve around the sun: “These Harry Potter books are really horrible.” And they have reasons – good reasons – to think so.
Living in such spare times, I am grateful at the very least that I am capable of writing stories to amuse myself, since those who can’t have to depend on Harry Potter, and Augusten Burroughs, and McSweeney’s, and reality television for their entertainment. I truly believe that we are ripe for revolution, but the ripening may continue for thirty years.
Submitting to journals now requires a certain leap of faith and willing suspension of disbelief as well as immurement to regular rejection and simultaneous objectivity about success. After all, here’s what I found on the page of a website for a journal published out of the University of Chicago:
We meet writers the way most editors do – at readings and parties and photo shoots. We recruit them from universities. We hear about them from friends. We get excerpts from agents seeding markets for books. We have our Ezras out beating the bushes for Eliots. Behind every name in our archive is the story of a meeting.
Good fucking God.
I continue to write, and enjoy the honor of readers and writers I admire looking at my work, whether published or unpublished. If one collection of stories under my name is published – self-published – at the end of my writing life, I will see that it is an attractive and representative one. Currently, I can think of only two short stories out of the twenty-seven I have so far published that I would include in it. But I would, also, include this essay.
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