Details, a Time-Traveling Drain, and the Short Story

We were all seated around a rough-hewn picnic table with our various drafts strewn in front of us when the topic of details came up. My writers group had reviewed one member's fascinating, inventive story, but it was missing a bit of life somehow. Perhaps details could infuse the piece with that spark of animation that it needed?

I had recently read a short story by Tania James, the second of hers that had come into my grubby hands. Both her stories glowed with emotion made vivid by detail. As it happened, another member of the group had a journal that held a third James story and, sure enough, the first paragraph was ripe with interesting minutiae.

How does detail help? Well, I should note that it's a matter of preference and style - some writers have written powerful stories that lack detail but rely instead on muscular verbs or fast-moving narratives. That works too. But for me, nothing gets my heart racing like a closely-observed detail. Something that the story could do without, but it would lose some of its spark. Sort of like how color on a living room wall really makes the room pop.

In her short story "Ethnic Ken," published in the most recent edition of Five Points, James starts off with an intriguing detail. She writes, "My grandfather believed that the guest bathroom drain was a portal for time travel." This grabs our attention with its weirdness but also has a delicate specificity that holds our attention. She continues a few paragraphs later, "My grandfather wore house slippers with pom poms at the toes. He could slice and de-seed an apple in the palm of his hand. He believed that he was trapped somewhere in 1929, with the nine-year old version of his wife, Ammu."

James could easily write her story without the pom poms or the apples. But we might not be sitting there with her gazing into it, mouths agape, with quite such intensity.

Reading! It can be done, even with baby.

Happily, even with an eight-month-old skootching around the house, I am able to get more reading done than just Caps for Sale and Goodnight Moon. I just haven't had time to write about it! Here's a quick run-down of some recent books I've enjoyed (and one I didn't).

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman
It's been years since I've read a mystery and this was a fun one to use to reacquaint myself with the genre. Lippman is a local author, writing from and often about Baltimore, and it was exciting to see some local scenery in this book. The story isn't a typical murder-mystery whodunnit but rather a circuitous tale of secret identity. Two little girls disappeared decades ago, leaving a tragic, life-destroying wake in their absence. But when a woman appears claiming to be one of the girls, do the inconsistencies in her story line up? I didn't find the end very surprising, but it was a gripping read nonetheless.

Tinkers by Paul Harding
A man is dying and his mind spins back through his own life and then into his father's life. Time itself seems to come undone in this beautiful, essentially plot-less novel.

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth

This book really deserves its own entry but in case I don't have time for that, I'll say now that the novel is amazing. A slaveship departs England in the 18th century carrying hope and despair in equal measure. What happens to the ship and its crew as they barrel through lives along the African coast and then beyond is an epic and heartbreaking tale.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
I'm not usually a quitter when it comes to books. I tend to push through no matter what. But I HATED this book and finally gave up on page 300 of 500+. Franzen writes a heartless story about characters that are no more than caricatures. They whine and drug their way through their painful, upper middle-class lives, and are incapable of trusting or seeing love.

I'd love to hear what other people are reading! And I'd especially love to have someone argue with me about why The Corrections is worth reading.

Tutorial: Tracking your short story submissions

The most recently visited website on my browser isn't my email account or the New York Times, even though I check those multiple times a day. The site that occupies top honors on my computer is Duotrope, and I'm here to spread the gospel.

Duotrope is a free site that offers an extensive database of literary markets (primarily journals, magazines and zines) that publish fiction, poetry and (in beta) non-fiction. Duotrope lists information about each market and - here's where my obsession comes in - tracks data from users about submissions. Have you sent a poem to Tin House? You can see how many other users have sent poems in the past twelve months, what Tin House's acceptance rate is, how long responses take (for acceptances and rejections), what percentage of submissions receive form rejections as opposed to personal ones, and how recently users have reported responses. Among other neat data points. But enough telling - let me show you some of the awesome.

Let's say you want to search for a journal that publishes sci fi short stories in paper medium only, and you want to submit your story electronically. Here's what that would look like:

I didn't make this selection, but you can order your search in a few ways, including from most to least accepting, and in terms of response time (in case you're in a rush).

The real (obsessive) fun starts once you've found a journal to submit your story to. Let's say we're going to try to be the first Duotroper to publish a story with One Story. I'll go to Search, Find by Title, and pull up the listing for One Story. (They're currently temporarily closed to submissions, so let's time travel here and pretend it's September 2012). When I log in with my account, I see that Duotrope has received 507 reports from users regarding submissions to One Story over the past year. None have yet been accepted. But that's ok, we'll be the first one! On the right side of the page, we click "Report Submission/Response." The image below shows the submission page, where we note the date we submitted our story, the status ("Pending Response"), the title of the story, and how we submitted. Wait, the title? First, we have to make an entry in Duotrope for our story - that's so you can tell which story (or poem or essay) you've submitted where. So click "I need to add a piece to my list" (second arrow below) and go ahead.



Once you've reported your submission, Duotrope starts its magic. You can tell how many days your story has been out for submission, and you can track how your wait compares to the average response times. You can even check out a publication's entry to see when the last recorded response was, and the most recent date of a submission that's recorded a response. (So, for our One Story submission that we sent on September 12, 2012, in November 2012 we see that the latest response was October 31 and that they have sent responses for stories submitted as recently as September 1. So that might suggest they haven't gotten to our story yet.)

Here's my submission tracker, for example. You can see some of the stories I have submitted and how many days out they are.


There are more features than I can go over in a short post, but I'm happy to answer any questions. It's really an amazing site - very empowering for writers, and hopefully useful for publishers, who can see how their response times stack up against their peers. So, go forth and submit!

Farewell to a stupendous writer

This is a sad note to re-start my blogging with, but I think it's an important one. The tremendously talented Barry Unsworth has passed away, at the august age of 81. The Washington Post has a nice obituary for him here, though I warn you that about half way through the article reveals plot points that don't come up at least fifty percent into his Booker-prize-winning novel, Sacred Hunger.

Coincidentally (obviously, I suppose, since it's not like I knew he was going to die), I'm reading Sacred Hunger right now. It is, thus far, a moving novel that shoves your face in the gross inhumanity of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Given the role of that trade in our history, and the commonalities of spirit between that age and ours, I think it's a necessary lesson. I hope the second half of the book is as gripping as the first.

One-handed reading

Per my previous post, my life has changed pretty radically recently! I am enthralled by my adorable baby girl, Aria. But even she can't keep me from reading. I've managed to read a few books so far, including the moving Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett and Madame Bovary, which I thought I had read already but apparently hadn't. Now I'm in the midst of 1Q84 (happily loaded on my new e-reader so I don't have to balance its bulk with a 2-month-old baby in the other arm), as well as Momma Zen by Karen Maezen Miller. I'd heard some quotes from Momma Zen and her other book in my yoga class, but now that motherhood has descended full force, I wanted to read the whole thing. I'm enjoying it so far and trying to take to heart the idea of being gentle with myself. There are no mistakes, only life.

I'm curious if anyone else out there has read or is reading 1Q84. It's compelling and interesting, and I'd love to hear what other people think (without spoilers). Even better, are there any other moms, or other folks, balancing a book in one hand and the treasure of their lives in the other? (And do you ever find time to write??)

And here is a baby picture because I can't resist :)

Hiatus, for a good reason

I won't be posting much in the coming weeks ... But I think I have a good excuse. Her name is Aria.

Sixteenth Century Thought Experiments and Kittens

We're lucky today to count Death as an infrequent visitor, but in the 16th century, Europeans had a much closer familiarity with such loss. Infant mortality was extremely high, life expectancy over all was less than half what Americans can look forward to today, and illness or accident could slay anyone at the slightest glance. Thus Michel de Montaigne found himself in his mid-30s and mourning the death of his best friend, his first-born infant daughter, his younger brother, and his father, all while expecting his own life to end within a few years. Such a cacophony of loss drove him to retire to his Bordeaux estate and resolve to steel his will with stoicism, the reigning philosophy of the day.

But this late Renaissance humanist found that he uncovered not stillness but endless curiosity when left alone with his mind. He turned to experimenting with the world - having himself woken while in a deep sleep so as to try to know slumber, traveling across Europe to "polish" his mind through contact with others, and musing about the meaning of his cat's play. These trials he turned to essays, from the French verb "essayer," to try or taste. And the result was a tremendous contribution to Western thought and literature.

In When I am Playing With My Cat, How do I know That She is Not Playing With Me? by Saul Frampton, we learn about both Montaigne's life and his essays. I've never read the originals, so I can't speak to Frampton's scholarship, but the story his writes is both compelling and edifying. Montaigne, at least by Frampton's account, is a charmingly human man, eager to learn about himself and his fellows through close contact and observation. He's also intellectually daring and honest with himself, and comes to some conclusions quite different from the mainstream of his time. I really enjoyed this book - devoured it in just over a day - and now look forward to trying (tasting, as Montaigne might put it), the original essays.

By the way, Montaigne lived during a fascinating period of French history, including the religious civil wars and the death of Henry II. Does anyone know of a good novel about him and his life? I'd love to read it. If it's not out there though, maybe I'll add that to my long list of projects I'd like to write some day!

Cover image from World Literature and Philosophy Rochester Public Library blog. Once again, what a neat cover, no?