What I'm reading...

After Bradley and I met last for coffee and a little 5x5 chat, we headed to Garrison Keillor's WORLD FAMOUS (maybe?) bookstore, Common Good Books. I love this place - it's underneath a coffee shop in a beautiful old building, so there's lots of exposed stone and crazy architectural features. It's also just big enough to house a very interesting collection of cookbooks, Minnesota themed books, and children's books... along with all the regular good stuff you expect to get at a book store.

But let's go back to that children's books part. I thoroughly LOVE fiction for all ages of children. Picture books with wonderful illustrators can stop me dead in my tracks, and I will be honest when I say that I enjoyed every single Harry Potter (although I promise I have not read Twilight and have only thought about reading it a solid three times).

I was absolutely thrilled on our little stop at Common Goods, then, to see Wildwood, by Colin Meloy (yes, of the Decemberists) with illustrations by his wife/my favorite illustrator Carson Ellis. Carson has a charming style that is chock full of tiny minute details that give me the shivers. An entire book with spot illustrations from her is a dream come true!

It was an added bonus that the book is actually smart and adorable. The little foxes in their soldier's uniforms are so cute, and the main character Prue is believable and the kind of pre-teen that I'd actually enjoy the presence of.

Wanna know more? Watch this cute video and GET THE BOOK. If you are embarrassed to be seen reading a book for 12 year olds when you are a grown person, you can claim you got it for your cool niece for Christmas or something. I don't think you should be embarrassed about it, though.

Nonprofit Status!

Hello readers.  I'm very excited to inform you that 5x5 is officially a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization recognized by the IRS.  This is very exciting news, because it's a major step forward for the magazine, and because it means I know how to fill out complicated IRS forms.  That's right, we keep the overhead low by doing everything we possibly can on our own, and sometimes we cross our fingers and hope that we've done it correctly.

Alright, I did get some help with the financial side of it from an accountant friend, but I paid him only with wine and my pleasant company.  Thanks, David.

And, of course, thank you for reading, contributing and donating.  While 5x5 started out as my own personal project, it quickly turned into a collaborative project between hundreds of people.

What else is going?  Here it is.  We've pushed our deadline back one month for the winter issue because we simply haven't had as many submissions as we'd like to see.  This is somewhat of an anomaly.  As you know, our fall issue was our biggest issue yet.  We're hoping that our winter issue will be just as big or bigger, but we need more submissions to make that happen.

Please, if you've been thinking about submitting, now is the time.  If you've been thinking about telling your friends about us, do it today.  We want to see your work, because, as I mentioned above, 5x5 would be nothing without its contributors and readers.

Thanks.  Sincerely.  Thank you all for your help so far, and we look forward to doing great things for literature and the arts together.

Creating a Literary Community for Yourself

Part of the process of getting published is finding literary magazines you love!— and want to read whether or not they have accepted your work recently. I like to call this a literary magazine community—a community that showcases the type of writing you love, and the kind of writer you want to be.

But how to begin?

Get obsessive! Read up on editors, and the authors they’ve published. Have a heart-to-heart about the magazine’s mission. Don’t be daunted by the various demands for submitting work (no simsub is always a tough one). Really decide if this literary magazine is right for you and your work… and most importantly, walk away if it isn’t.

The truth is, your work is publishable—in the right place and at the right time. It may seem time consuming “getting to know” some of the hundreds of literary magazines out there—but it is worth it. Perhaps you can send out a fifty simultaneous submissions to a fifty different magazines—but if you are writing in Terza Rima and 49 of the magazines do not publish work written in form, then you are already wasting your time (and the editors, too!).
No one likes receiving a rejection letter, and though it is inevitable, it also doesn’t have to be excruciating.

Become aligned with the views and ideals of the magazines you’re submitting to, and you’ll become aligned with the greater community of writers. We all want to be published…all of the time. But in lieu of that, isn’t it better to support the cause of literature, and the literature you like best?

I love being a part of 5x5 because I believe in the short form. I like efficient, powerful imagery. I like it when a writer says just enough. I also like writing centered around women’s issues and am a huge fan of Earth’s Daughters. Even if I am not published in every and/or any of their issues, I want to see this kind of writing in the world.

So what do you want? How do you describe your work? Be honest…most of us don’t write in a style that is going to appeal to every person out there. What writers inspire you? What literary magazines have published them? Build a community a literary magazines that reflect your truth and talents as a writer.

Memory and Effigy

I recently read a draft of a poem that had the line "Why recently, I am so drawn to dilapidation."  

If you read my last post, you will know that I most whole-heartedly agree with that statement!  Again and again, I am being drawn to images, places, and people that are past their prime.  Whether you want to call it dilapidation, beautiful ruin, or even something melodramatic like the gorgeous flaw, the fact remains that what is imperfect is far more interesting than something seamless and perfect.  Perfection has its place, perhaps with Plato or in heaven.  But here on earth, what garners my attention in writing are flawed characters, broken dreams, and the imperfect world of objects.

Who wants to read about St. Blandula's struggle-free life, where she was always immersed in the divine and never tempted?  Not me.

There is an impulse within all of us to look back at the past through rose colored glasses.  We call this nostalgia or the "good old days."  History shows us again and again, that people like to recall a semi-mythical past in which their culture was at its greatest.  The ancient Greeks (specifically Hesiod) called this their Golden Age, an age where men "lived with the gods without sorrow."  There is a reason that the good stories from Greek mythology come later, at a more flawed stage of mankind.  Where would our fairy tale princesses be without the long climb up to the castle throne?

So it is with each of us.  When we begin to write, we may want to edit out the very parts of our stories that make them the most compelling.  We might want to avoid the unpleasant or embarrassing aspects.  Or even believe that our memory is absolute fact.  That hazy world of the "good old days" beckons us, whispers in our ear to return, and ultimately to enter into an idealized, struggle free piece of writing.  We become the lotus eaters that Homer warned us about.  In other words, boring.

We, as writers, need to ask ourselves what we truly wish to show in our writing.

Miriam-Webster defines an effigy first as, "an image or representation, especially of a person" but then more interestingly as "a crude figure representing a hated person."  We immediately know what we are interested in hearing more about.  Give me enemies for $1000 please.

The word effigy comes from Middle French and Latin, meaning to form or to shape.  It has a connection to the word dough.  As a former baker, I know intimately, what it means to shape loaves for the rising and baking process.  So it is with writing.

As you begin drafting or revising your pieces, I encourage you to write straight at the heart of imperfection.  Dig deeper into the flaws of your characters and narratives.  Is is through these cracks and brokenness that our strongest stories find their way into the world.

What Beginners Should Know

I remember my first fiction writing teacher telling me, "I think this story is great for a first time fiction writer."  I put it in quotes even though I don't remember what she said verbatim.  Dr. Rita Carey.  Thanks for that.  It was exactly what I needed to hear at the time.

Even at the time, I knew it needed a lot of improvement, but I didn't know how to make it better.  The foreshadowing was too obvious, and the dialogue was unrealistic.  As Ira Glass mentions, I could see that it wasn't great, but I didn't know what to do to make it better.  Dr. Carey knew what to tell me to give me hope.  Her words could be summed up as: "Good start."

There's so much room for improvement, and if you keep trying, you'll get there.  I had been reading great writing for years.  Books that had been written, revised, edited, published and then purchased by different readers for decades.  How could I possibly expect my first attempt at writing fiction to compare?

That's why Dr. Carey was the teacher.  Some of the other students in the class weren't as constructive with their criticism.  I remember one fellow classmate writing on my story, "Overall your writing is quite pedestrian."  I think he was bitter because I had given him some not-so-constructive criticism as well.  Let's face it, I wasn't qualified to be a teacher either.  But discouraging words can also be a sense of encouragement if you look at it right.  I cut his comments out of the paper and pasted them into my writing notebook as a reminder.

We all start somewhere.  And as we continue practicing, what we produce comes closer and closer to what we know is great.

Beautiful Things

I have finally purchased a digital camera.

It isn't that I'm anti-technology--I'm truly quite fond of it--but my film camera was still working pretty well(though I have about 7 undeveloped rolls lurking in a draw somewhere), and I knew that waiting would bring the price down.

Anyway, I'm one of those people. Those people who take pictures of everything. Those people who make you stop in the middle of something so I can take a picture of it/you partaking in it. Those people who ruin the ambiance of the moment by trying to capture the moment, and then the moments gone. Those people who will even try and make you re-enact the scenario if I missed it.

Forgive me.

I am not really even "into photography." What I am "into" is "beautiful things."

For me, a beautiful thing is something small that sums up a feeling. An image that can serve as a symbol for the spirit of an event. All of these events make up my life--these are symbols that represent the spirit of my life.

Beautiful things are different for every person, and sometimes they don't make sense later. In five years, will I appreciate the photo of two strangers wearing hot sauce holsters at Oysterfest? Maybe. Did I love it when I saw it? Yes! And taking a photo of this small event is for me a ritual that honors beautiful things.

Mishon

In Which Random Things Come Together and Appear to Make a Whole

Hello 5x5 Readers,

This weekend has been filled with a small accretion of idea bits and fragments, that have sort of reached a critical mass in my head.  If my mind were a junk drawer, it would be time to clean it out.

One thing that struck me this weekend was my tendency to pick up old books, even if I may never read them.  A great example of this is a book I got first published in 1939 called Cowboy Dances: A Collection of Western Square Dances by Lloyd Shaw.  This book is filled not only with photos of the dancers, but diagrams for dancing groups and a whole commentary on what music may be appropriate to listen to.  More intriguing is that the foreword is written by Sherwood Anderson, the author of the novel Winesburg, Ohio.

On Saturday, at the Farmer's Market, I saw a half dozen elderly couples square dancing.  It is one thing that I have always wanted to learn, but never gotten around to.  Do young people square dance these days?  Perhaps buying older books on subjects that intrigue me is one way to give form to my countless aspirations.

Right now, my friend is taking her elderly father through  Montana on his "last tour."  At the age of 88, she doesn't think that he will be able to make another foray into the Big Sky State where he spent the first half of his life.  She said that they were stopped in Ekalaka, Montana which is a town that nearly touches the divide between North and South Dakota.  I went to another book that I have to learn a little bit more about where they were at.  In Montana Place Names from Alzada to Zortman published by the Montana Historical Society, I learned that Ekalaka is named for the niece of the Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud.  She and her husband opened a store and saloon there in 1885.  The town is currently a whopping 410 people.

Over the weekend, I stopped at the small town of Garfield, Washington in hopes of eating at a BBQ joint and cafe run by an elderly couple.  I haven't been up that way in about five months.  When I arrived, the place was closed.  Instead, I ate at Grumpy's Bar and was told by the woman at the counter that the elderly woman was ill and her husband spent a great deal of time taking care of her so the restaurant folded.  Another place that I enjoyed visiting has faded off the map.

This morning I drank my coffee out of a cup I bought from the Steamboat Rock Restaurant in Grand Coulee, Washington this summer.  It was perhaps the ideal small cafe.  The woman who was our waitress had worked there for 36 years.  The decor was replete with wagon wheels and knotty pine paneling.  It probably hadn't been remodeled since 1960, and this was a positive thing.  Although things looked worn, they were spotless.  I bought a cup at the counter, because I know that someday soon, this place will probably also slip into history.

And that is what this post is really about, the way that life continues to slip into the past.

How elusive our points of reference can be.  Memory too continues to shift inside of us.  My recollection of the ham and egg sandwich I ate at the Steamboat Rock Restaurant will continue to haunt, even though it was perhaps the aura of the place that charmed me.  I begin to long for such things, especially when faced with the fact that I will most likely not be back to that part of Washington for years, if at all.

And this is where writing comes in, at the end.  Through writing, I am able to capture if not the actual moment, at least a texture of it.  If not the exact shape, then at least I can sketch its gesture in words.

Writing, can sustain us, even if all else recedes