The Story of Joe

Benjamin Twigg
510 Elm St.
Leadville, Missouri

Dear Editor,

Enclosed please find a short story for your consideration. I think you will find it a refreshing departure from the highly conventional “workshop” story so prevalent in so many of our literary journals these days. I am the author of Up, Down, and All Around (Firing Neurons Press), as well as other stories published in various “zines.” The story I am submitting to you is, I believe, the best thing I’ve written to date.

If you feel the story is not quite right for your journal, you may return it to me in the self-addressed envelope I’ve provided.

Sincerely,

Dear Editor,

Enclosed please find a short story for your consideration. It’s called “Meanwhile,” and I believe your readers would find it an interesting experiment in narrative restraint (although not so retrained they wouldn’t recognize its implicit “story arc,” as unobtrusive as it might otherwise be.)

I am the author of. . . .

Dear Editor,

I am submitting a short story for possible publication in Big Bend Review. While it is true that this story asks the reader to defer the pleasures of “action-filled” narrative, at least until such time as she might re-create the action after successfully connecting the narrative lines the story breaks into numerous (and numinous!) pieces of proto-story, I believe it also rewards careful readers with plenty of more immediate “readerly pleasures.”

In a “call for submissions” I read, you say you like “vivid characters” as well as the “smart stories in which they appear.” I believe you will find my characters memorably vivid, although they are also in keeping with the formally “smart” arrangement of incident and episode, portrayed at an angle, as it were, seen through a shifting kaleidoscope rather than a transparent window.

If you feel the story is not quite right. . . .

Dear Editor,

I am submitting my story, “Meanwhile,” for your consideration. Although I grant that the story might require a suspension of conventional reading habits on the part of some readers, a degree of patience will nevertheless reveal that it provides all the usual pleasures associated with “good fiction,” even if they are apportioned in an unorthodox way. I urge you to read the story in that light as you consider its merits.

I am the author of a collection of stories entitled Up, Down, and All Around, which has been praised by the literary blog Fiction Fiend as a “delicious assortment of boundary-crossing nougats,” as well as numerous other stories published in journals devoted to fictional innovation. I am no amateur at the writing of “serious” fiction, although I admit that what I write does not always conform to the prejudices many self-described “gatekeepers” in the literary world seem to think should go without questioning.

If you feel the story is not suitable. . . .

Dear Editor,

I am enclosing a story, etc.

The story is called “Meanwhile.”

It’s not an ordinary story. It doesn’t have a “plot” in the ordinary sense of the term. The “characters” are not depicted in an ordinary way. If you take these things into account before you read the story, you may save yourself the discomfort of realizing that certain conventions have been disregarded and that a different kind of “reading” is in order.

Honestly, how do you know that such a work as this will not be “quite right” for your readers if you don’t give them a chance to try it for themselves?

If you must return the story. . . .

Dear Editor,

I am submitting a story for possible publication in your esteemed journal. I am somewhat hesitant to proffer this particular story, since it is somewhat unusual and I know that most so-called “experimental” fiction is really just self-indulgence wrapped up in arrogance and pretense. However, I do believe that in this instance you will find an honest effort to deliver the expected “timeless pleasures” of fiction in a fresh, if unobtrusive, fashion.

The story concerns a man who firmly believes his life will be the fulfillment of a destiny to do something, something significant, although he isn’t precisely sure what. Nevertheless, he starts out each day prepared to see every event, every incident, every encounter as the crucial point in a narrative chain that will commence, or continue, or prove to be the climax of the “story of his life,” a story that now becomes evident, or was always already evident though not perceived, or will become evident in the due course of time and will reveal the destiny to which he has been moving all along.

Meanwhile, this flashpoint never seems to occur, and the man’s life continues to leak away (or so it seems to him) in mundane and secondary activities he forces himself to endure even though he knows his “life” is elsewhere.

The story focuses on these interstitial moments—interstitial in perception but ultimately constitutive in reality—dramatizing through what are presented as the longueurs of daily existence the way in which our desire to impose coherence on incoherence only causes us to misinterpret the true story of human life, its unfolding in flux and exigency.

Please forgive me for recounting the story so baldly and at such length in this cover letter. But I know that your time is very valuable, and I hope that the précis I have provided will help you in understanding my purpose and in making a decision about whether to make it available to the curious and discerning readers of your distinguished publication.

Dear Editor,

Since I am quite aware that the large number of submissions you receive makes it necessary for you to employ “first readers” (some of whom, as you would admit, are not quite yet the reliable judges of quality fiction they may one day become), I am providing for them in this cover letter a brief guide for comprehending my intentions in the story “Meanwhile,” which I am enclosing for your consideration.

The first section, headed “Morning,” literally chronicles the morning activities of the story’s protagonist—identified only as “Joe”—although it is admittedly not immediately apparent that this is the story’s focus, since Joe is presented obliquely as the subject of several serially aborted narratives that never really resolve themselves into an uber-narrative the reader can accept as the “real” story of Joe. At least not yet.

That these incomplete narratives are indeed part of a larger narrative—a story about how stories compose a story—becomes clear enough in the second section, “Before,” but some previous readers of “”Meanwhile” have apparently been unable to summon up the patience required to follow these lines of development through to their ultimate integration. Thus I hope that the brief synopsis I have offered here will help your pre-readers assess the strategies I am employing in this work.

If nonetheless you find the story unsuitable. . . .

Dear Assistant Editorial Pre-Screener,

Or whatever the hell your title is. Let’s cut out all the pro forma, cover letter bullshit. We both know that my story (enclosed) will never get to the actual editor of this two-bit publication unless you decide to pass it on.

Let’s be even more frank: You are a barely educated, quasi-literate, first-year graduate student who has barely learned even the half-baked ideas about writing fiction they’re peddling in “creative writing” classes these days, who has only the vaguest notions of literary history because the “professors” who are supposed to be charged with imparting this history themselves know almost nothing about it, who couldn’t distinguish artistic innovation from hidebound convention if your future sinecure in some community college depended on it (which fortunately it doesn’t), and who is likely to recommend rejecting any story that doesn’t fit your narrowly-conceived, uninformed criteria for what makes a story “successful.”

My story does not fit these criteria. Thus you can either: 1) Send the story back to me unread and without comment, which will indicate to me that you have at least read this cover letter, which in itself would bring me some satisfaction; or 2) Read the story anyway and show that I’m wrong in my assumptions about you by sending it along to the editor for his own evaluation. Better yet, advocate on its behalf as a way of showing you do recognize excellence, even though you’ve had to have it pointed out to you in such an unconventional way.

Sincerely,

Dear Ms. Payne,

Thank you for your gracious reply. I expected that your response to my cover letter would be neither to send the story back to me as instructed, nor to become its champion, but to ignore the story altogether. Or at least to convey the impression you had ignored it by doing nothing and leaving me to conclude it had been thrown on the slushpile, unread. Thus I am to say the least very pleased that you chose to write back to me with your questions about my story.

Part II of “Meanwhile” gives an account of Joe’s youth, but again it is neither linear nor unified (except in its disunity). It recounts the history of Joe’s reading as an adolescent, although the reader can’t at first be sure that this is the source of the shifting perspectives and character metamorphoses with which she is confronted. Joe assumes the personae of the characters he reads about, extending their scenarios into the circumstances of his own life, but each time these flights of fancy fizzle out in frustration and inconclusion.

Thus we are apprised of the source of Joe’s reveries, his apperception of the world as a skein of narrative threads he is determined to trace until they lead him to the happy outcome he is sure awaits him. This turn in the story, then, acts as a “flashback” to the formative period of Joe’s life without using all of the trappings of that device and without subjecting the reader to the usual melodrama and cheap psychologizing.

I hope this allows you to again consider the story, with a clearer sense of its narrative design. I await your further response.

Dear Editor,

I’m sending you my latest piece of shit story, although I’m confident that in applying your rigorous and time-tested standards you will conclude it is as worthless a collection of words as you’ve ever encountered in your life as an editor.

You might wonder why, if I hold such little regard for my own work, I nevertheless am asking you to read it. I hope that by alerting you to the dubious quality of this opus, I might both spare you the labor of passing judgment on it and perhaps encourage you to point out just where I seem to be going wrong. If you think that my talents are so meager that I ought to just give up writing altogether, I would appreciate it if you would tell me that outright so that I can begin to divest myself of the illusion I might become a professional writer.

Any comments you could make would be greatly appreciated, to say the least. You can be sure I will exploit their wisdom as part of my ongoing literary education, which you no doubt agree includes more than classroom exercises and naïve dreaming about the literary life.

All the best,

Dear Editor,

I would be gratified if you were to take a look at the enclosed, my latest work of short fiction.

I have shown this story to a few other editors prior to submitting it to you, but while they all assured me they thought the story ought to be published, they finally concluded their own readers were not quite ready to assimilate a work as “willfully oblique” as this one. (Words used by one of the editors, who also said the story is “certainly a challenge to our notions about the proper pleasures a work of fiction ought to evince.”)

If you are unable to find a place for me in an upcoming issue, I will greet the news with all due aplomb. Publishing space is precious these days! I will just send the story along to one or another of your confreres in the literary “biz.”

Benjamin Twigg

P.S. I see that in your last issue you published a story by Arnold Fenton. A jewel of a fellow, with whom I’ve had the opportunity to share a dais on the “reading” circuit.

Dear Ben,

I certainly do remember you from the literary festival in Kansas that we both attended. As I recall, you read just before me, during the panel on “Public Reading as Performance.” Your use of actual voice mail recordings as a way of dramatizing those portions of your story presented in that medium—I believe it was a story about a man pitching story ideas to film producers—was indeed. . .provocative.

I really don’t know the editor of Brushy Creek Review very well. Not at all, actually. He accepted that story a few years back, but I’ve had no dealings with him since. I can’t say I have any useful insights into “what he wants” from the manuscripts he considers, although I have the same impression as you that his publication does print “experimental” stuff now and again.

As for the story you sent me, I’m not sure I have any particularly helpful advice for you. Frankly, I can see why those readers who have told you the first two sections are rather obscure would say that. I, too, found them slow going, even after I had more or less figured out what you seem to be doing with the story. This is in some ways unfortunate, since I found section three much more accessible and thus more enjoyable to read. The directness with which you portray your character’s recognition that the “story of his life” is one in which he must forsake the comforts of story and take life as it comes is admirable, as is the humor in his subsequent efforts to pursue indeterminacy with the same determination he had brought to his previous search for narrative closure.

Could you perhaps shorten the first two sections, or even eliminate them altogether, to give this final part more prominence? I know this probably isn’t quite the sort of editorial suggestion you were looking for, but there you go. We call them as we see them. Honesty is the best policy. And etc.

Regards,

Arnold

Dear Editor,

I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your publication, The _____ Review, as one of the journals I will be reading on a regular basis. Although your publication has its moments of humor and some well-turned phrases, I finally had to conclude that it was not a good fit for my own reading habits.

I might suggest that you try publishing a different kind of fiction, something more challenging and out-of-the-ordinary than the frankly tradition-bound stories I found in this current issue of your journal. I felt as if I had already read many of these stories, so tied to the way things have always been done did they seem. If you were to start publishing more innovative work, I might reconsider my decision to keep your publication out of my reading room.

It brings me no pleasure to reject a literary journal such as yours. I know that you put in a good deal of work in assembling its contents and that you are sincere in your conviction you have chosen the best work available to you. However, I must remain faithful to my own conviction that the sort of literary journal yours represents is doing no good for the future of literature. There are too many others just like it, resulting in a stagnant, even retrograde, literary culture.

I would be happy to consider your journal again if in the future you were to change your editorial policies and print work worthy of a serious reader’s time. Good luck in your efforts to improve the quality of The _____ Review.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Twigg
Writer

Dear Mr. Twigg,

I am pleased to inform you that we have accepted your story, “Meanwhile,” for publication in our journal, One Step Forward. We found it a refreshing departure from the highly conventional “workshop” story so prevalent in so many of our literary journals these days. We believe our readers will find it an interesting experiment in narrative restraint, although it also rewards careful attention with plenty of more immediate “reading pleasures.”

We are well aware of your previous work and admire the way you refuse to give in to the prejudices many self-described “gatekeepers” in the literary world seem to think should go without questioning. This certainly applies to “Meanwhile,” which is not an “ordinary” story in any way. We recognized clearly that certain “conventions” were being disregarded and that a different kind of reading was in order. Our patience was rewarded with a story that embodied all the timeless qualities of great fiction, presented in a fresh, if unobtrusive fashion.

Congratulations on writing such a fine example of forward-looking fiction, and thanks for thinking of us.

The Editor

Comments

[marlyat2]

I twig you, Daniel. Poor Benjamin; he twigs much, as is right for a resident on Elm, but so very much is Leadville.

[Lloyd Mintern]

A narrator who is witty, yet vulnerable. Makes me wonder what the guy writes when he isn't being ironic.

[David]

Just brilliant. A sweet tonic for the rejected writer. I love the quasi-literate grad student diss, and the thanks for the "ongoing literary education," and best of all the writer's rejection of the journal! I'm bookmarking it to read again after my next rejection. Keep fighting the good fight. If it's okay to flog my own wares, I once concocted a similar fantasy of my own. Located at http://adancingbearblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/i-have-dream.html , it wistfully ponders what a fine world it would be if literary agents were like real estate agents ...

[Frances Madeson]

O Daniel. Who doesn't love a happy ending? May we all all get there together. Thank you for your leadership and for your patience.

[Eric Rosenfield]

That was very enjoyable.