32 Flavors

Last week I
Got a card in the mail
At my office
From my mother

The card
Was obviously from
The dollar store
It had
A picture of a little girl
On the front
And the little girl
Was holding a duck
And the duck was wearing
A party hat
And the duck was saying
Happy birthday

Inside the card
Was empty
And
Inside the card
Was blank
And I mean
There was nothing printed
On the card
And she also
Filled nothing
In

Not my name
Not hers
And certainly not
Love or
Even
xo
xo

And I mean
I do not want
Anything
From her
I want nothing
So don't think
That is what
This is about
But
Why bother
I want to know
Why bother

Just send nothing
I
At least
Am used
To that

Just keeping me
On my toes
I guess
Just keeping me
On
My
Fucking
Toes.

I dreamed about her this morning
We were standing in the living room
Of the house I grew up in
Only it was completely empty
No furniture

We were standing in the big
Bay window
We were watching the sun come up
The sky was turning
Purple to pink to orange
The room was filling with light

She was standing in front of me
And I was holding her
Very close to me
By the bones
Of her hips

I was kissing her
Between her shoulder blades
Where she had a giant tattoo
She does not actually have

It was green
And blue
And black

And I cannot remember
What it was of

But when my alarm went off
I was smiling
So big
So happy
Inside
It was so nice
To see her

I called her about it
As I walked into my office
I knew she would be up
Even though
Today
Is her day off
I told her everything
That I just wrote down

And she said
Baby
That sounds so nice
And quiet
And beautiful

I miss her
I miss her
Like I never
Thought
Possible.

I went back
To the dentist yesterday

Ugh
Horrible
I hate it
I am just incapable
Of going
And handling it

I guess they really did
Flag my chart though
Because they put me in a really nice room
With a window
That looked outside
And there was classical music
Being piped in
Loudly
In some sad try to drown out
Her tools

I was crying
As she put my chair back
Oh Hillary
She said
You Poor Thing
I KNOW
I said
I AM SORRY
Because really
I know that sometimes
I am just an inconvenience
I know that sometimes
I just make everything difficult
People just want to go on about
Their lives
And I am always screwing it up
With my tears
My feelings
My crock
Of shit

She looked at my other
Wisdom Tooth
Well
She said
This One Absolutely Has To Come Out
Too
But I think I Am Going To Have To
Cut Into Your Gum
And Probably Drill Into Your Jaw
Too
I said
Oh My God
Stop Talking

For those of you
Keeping score
That's two
Dead Teeth
For me
Not just one
But two
I've got two
I have two
Dead Teeth

She said
Well
I Cannot Do It Today
I Am Going To Have To
Knock You Out
Put You Under
And You Are Going
To Need A Friend
To Get You Home

Great
I said
Great

While You Are Here
Let's Scrub
Scour
Polish
Dig
Clean

So she did
And my gums
Bled
And bled
And my jaw bone is sore
From her trying
To yank on my tooth
Again with the fucking
Rocking
Of my head
On the pillow

When she was all done
I showed her a picture
Of my Dead Tooth art
She asked me
To email her
The whole
Dead Tooth poem
And I said Okay
But You're Going To Get Upset

I'M ALREADY UPSET
She said
YOU MADE A DEAD TOOTH
BALLOON

I said
Yes
And I Am Going To Make Another One
Too

Then I went back to work
And roped Cliffy
Into leaving work early on
Monday April 7th
He has to come collect me
And get me home
We'll be living together
By then
And won't that just be
One Stop Shopping

Me
And Vicodin
And a mouth packed full
Of gauze
Spitting
Blood
Again.

So, MFA vs NYC is an interesting book. Sure to be a classic, using the traditional definition of the word classic: an inaccurate work that everyone cites, riffs on, and otherwise tangles with. We'll be talking about MFA vs NYC in the way we talk about McWorld vs Jihad, or red state vs blue state.

The book is an anthology of essays about either MFA programs, or working as a writer or in publishing in New York City, or a few other related topics. Several of the essays are already online—Alexander Chee's and Emily Gould's personal essays are easy to find (the latter was widely linked to because it is about a person who made and then lost a lot of money), and the essay about the CIA's influence on MFA programs everyone was talking about a few weeks ago is also in here. Plus, there are older reprints; you can cobble together around half the book if you're a diligent Googler. There are newer pieces as well, not all of them personal essays. The best piece is probably Frederic Jameson's dismantling of The Program Era, which was the MFA book everyone was talking about three years ago.

One doesn't review MFA vs NYC—one reviews one's own life after reading it. I'm NYC. I started publishing with the first dot com boom; I got small pieces in New York-region content plays Feed and Disinfo.com, and parlayed that into writing regularly for the Village Voice (even getting a personal essay in there my first time out) and various magazines that were popular in the city then: Silicon Alley Reporter and Artbyte and others I hardly remember. Artsier stuff appeared in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, which paid in prestige, and also reprinted in prestige, as I have an essay in Before and After: Stories from New York in the before section (this will be important later). I also edited books for Soft Skull Press when it was run out of a basement (and into the ground) by Sander Hicks. So, New York. I didn't have a full-time day job in publishing and wasn't making huge bucks; I was a term paper artist and living in Jersey City, which despite being in the wrong state is closer to Manhattan than most of Brooklyn and Queens.

Then, 9/11. Many magazines died on 9/12, claiming that their incoming checks had been destroyed along with the Post Office near the World Trade Center. The economy had collapsed the previous April, so the writing was already on the wall. The spine of Fast Company was everyone's barometer as it went from phonebook-sized to a slim pamphlet. But it was 9/11 that ended my NYC play. The sort of politics I wished to write about were destroyed, as I found out when the Voice killed a piece I was working on about the conflict between the antiwar movement and the pro-war "antiwar" movement. The latter floated as its slogan "Justice, Not Vengeance", which simply ceded the debate to pro-war forces. (PS: so many years later, everything the actual antiwar movement said came to pass, so we were right and you all were wrong.) The dot com money went up in smoke too, and as more people started learning to navigate the Internet, I lost interest in writing about it. Reportage could become service journalism too easily.

I concentrated on fiction, and for a while was all over the place: science fiction and horror, yes, but several of my early stories appeared in men's magazines like Razor, and in scene-y little zine-ys like Rag Shock. (Scene-y enough that it is nigh impossible to Google!) I started this blog, and began focusing more on genre publishing since, frankly, it's the sort of fiction one is allowed to publish without a pedigree. I'm not from a wealthy or even middle-class family, and though we're recent immigrants, Greece is without cachet in NYC publishing. Plus, we were poor in Greece too! Anyway, in 2004 I left New York and that DQed me as an NYCer. It really is impossible to keep up with the scene from the outside, even with the Internet.

I eventually got an MFA, after publishing a couple of books and a few dozen stories, but it was with a low-res program with a commercial/professional orientation, and thus doesn't count as "being MFA." It helped primarily in that Japanese firms like advanced degrees, and I got my job at VIZ, my first-ever full-time job, soon after graduating, at a good-for-publishing salary partially because of the degree.

So...the book? Yes, of course, the book! Some good stuff. There aren't two cultures to American fiction, but NYC and MFA are two of the cultures of American fiction, I am convinced. A third culture would be genre fiction. A fourth, as hinted at in the piece about judging Amazon's Breakthrough Contest, might be self-publishing. I would count prose poetry as a separate culture as well, despite its association with MFAs simply by being a species of poetry. (Prose poetry is like the plain-dressing Mennonites who look like Amish but get to use lightbulbs...of American fiction.) This title does capture the essence of the two cultures, both of which are teleological—they exist for the end of creating writer identities. Books? Ehh. Is there an emoji for waggling a hand as if to say "Maybe, maybe not"?

NYC creates writer identities the threshing floor of shit jobs, the intermittent feedback of windfall freelance paydays, and real estate prices that keep even writers with six-figure advances poor, sometimes desperately so. Partners Emily Gould and Keith Gessen gained first-novel advances of $200,000 and $160,000** within a couple of years of one another, and they ended up together, broke, anyway. Only partially thanks to their sick cat Raffles (RIP). It is not possible to be a starving writer in New York City; you just starve, or you write and make good*** by landing a real job in publishing or periodicals. Or you leave, of course.

MFAs do this via pre-selection—where you go is what's more important than anything else. If you want to teach, you need a book, but you also need to be a graduate from a higher tier school, as you will only be allowed to teach at schools with less renown than the one from which you hold a degree. Get a low-res MFA for the teaching credential, and you had either make a big splash with your novel, or you'll end up a perennial adjunct at even shittier schools or working at a community college. The psychodrama of the workshop is also important, because here is where your writerly identity (not the work itself, not skill) is forged. It's how you develop taste, how you learn to live cheaply in chockful-of-snore college towns, and how you learn to deal with bureaucracies.

The book is full of complaints, which is no surprise since American fiction is in pretty sad shape. One fellow fumes that, at his adjunct gig, he had to talk seriously about orcs with a student. Another, an agent with seventy-five clients, complains that most submissions he receives aren't very good. (Dude, you can stop reading them if you have seventy-five clients already!) MFAs tend to be happier, because they only fall victim to human gurus such as Gordon Lish. Even the most narcissistic man is much more caring than the entirely uncaring, even malefic, island of Manhattan.

A number of the essays could have in fact been blog posts. The pieces are separated by quotes from other writers discussing their own time in NYC or an MFA program. These look like nothing more than frequently reblogged tumblr memes, minus the cat pictures. The Internet has already taken over American non-fiction; the two cultures are Listicle and Long Read, and the writers here are really engaging in that struggle, not in the struggle between the MFA and the NYC.

MFA vs NYC is actually a rearguard action against the Internet, which has radically redistributed the writerly identity. Talk to a kid, and you might get the name of a fanfic writer as his or her favorite. And it's not just kids; a fanfic writer, E. L. James, is the most successful published writer of the last several years. Everyone reads and writes constantly, even if just tweets and tumblrs and YouTube comments. Did you know that you're a fag and you suck, fag? Oh no, is that last sentence snark or smarm? Nobody cares; identity-writers are concerned with that stuff. By pinning a tail on the donkeys of MFA and NYC, the book is asking its readers to chose an army, so that we can have a pretend war and thus be distracted from the fact that there are people putting poorly conceptualized and poorly written serial-killer novels on Kindle for a buck and becoming millionaires with "fans."


Both NYCs and MFAs want readers, not fans. What they get instead, given the dominance and ubiquity of the Internet, is the chance to daydream that they had been solicited for MFA vs NYC.










*"Sci-Fi" as a term is both an NYCism and MFAism these days. People inside the genre call it SF, of course. But people outside the genre, especially in San Francisco, see those two letters and think of the city. Thus the reading I attended once where Kim Stanley Robinson was introduced as one of "the most innovative writers of San Francisco novels."

**By way of contrast, my first novel advance was $3000, from an independent press run by two guys in two different apartments in San Francisco and Portland. The highest advance I ever got was $14,000, for an anthology for which I had a co-editor, and that required us to pay our contributors out of our advance. So I got to keep about 25 percent of that $14,000. Ten years after my first novel, subsequent advances have ranged from $500 to $6000, and I'm now writing a novel for one of the co-founders of my first novel's publisher—he's still paying $3000. In my NYC days, there were articles I earned $3000 from writing. Most of the ninety-five or so short stories I've published have paid somewhere between a nickel and a dime a word, or between $100 and $1000 depending on length, with a big cluster at around $250. Occasionally, I've licked $1500-$2000 for short stories, but only after multiple reprints or when cracking one of the rare markets that pays very well: a men's magazine, a Best American volume, Tor.com. For NYCs and MFAs, most short fiction is just a favor you do for someone you hope will be in a position to help you one day.

***You know you've made good when you eat at the same good restaurant, at the same table, every day. Dinner is better than lunch, but with the collapse of publishing as we know it, lunch will do.

My mother doesn't want to talk to me
She
Doesn't want to talk to anyone
I can't
Hillary Joy
(Ugh)
She tells me
I cannot
I am
Despondent
I am in an awful place
She says
You
Would not understand.

Meanwhile
Up North
My heart
Feels like
Ground Beef
My heart
Feels like
A sunburn
On the hottest day of summer
And you don't have
Long sleeves
You don't have
Anything
My heart
Feels like
The oyster
When you squirt the wedge
Of lemon
An acidic wince
My heart
Feels like
A cuticle cut
Too short
Like your finger slipped
When you pounded hammer
To nail
Like you woke up
In the middle of the night
And all you wanted
Was a glass of water
But instead
You stubbed your toe
So hard
You woke the whole house
With your crying.

I feel like Hell
Let me be clear
I feel like it
Not that I am in it
But that I am it
Itself
And this is where
My heart is trapped.

I feel fucking hopeless
It feels bottomless
And endless
I am so tired
Of talking about it
I am so tired
Of telling the same friends
Over and over
I hate my life
It's miserable
Things are not good
I am not okay.

The two most important people in my life
Are Steve
And Sandi
And the only reason I have any idea
Of what FAMILY means
Is those two
But
They have their own lives
Their own families
And I don't want to be
The screwed up
Messy
Kid sister
Forever
Like I will always be
Rachel McAdams
Amy
In The Family Stone
Showing up for Christmas
With my boxes of shit,
My laundry,
My bags,
My stuff.

I am just writing a whole bunch of thoughts
Disconnected thoughts
To keep from crying
Because
I cannot keep
From crying.

Oh boy, let's see!

The latest issue of The Big Click is out. Rebecca Ore, and much much more. It's our second anniversary issue as well, so if you were waiting to see if we had staying before before subscribing, we do have it, so subscribe.

My Writing Salon course starts up again this Saturday, so if you're local to Berkeley and want to learn how to write, or at least what the hell is wrong with you...uh, your writing, why not sign up?

Oh, and here's a tip. For me anyway, it is very frustrating to see writers of various calibers whine about opportunities and the lack thereof, and then clam up when I solicit something from them because it's too hard or not exactly in their wheelhouse or or or... Sometimes I even complain about this, on Twitter or Facebook, which is where all my short exhalations go these days. Anyway, if you see one of those little fits, here's a good way to react:



A short private message. It exudes confidence and enthusiasm, without begging, throwing around bona fides (which may work against you, especially if you're either a beginner or just terrible—a lot of terrible people writers follow me on social media) or extended rhetoric or questions. And, for the love of God, no reference to one's self as "a content creator"! Just a rhetorical Yes. And if what I'm offering is a bad fit, you can always turn your yes into a no with no hard feelings.

With me anyway, that's how you do it. And that's why Carrie Cuinn has, after a few rounds of edits, an essay in The Battle Royale Slam Book.