Thoughts from the Editors: What is one of your favorite short stories or novels?

Brandon says...

Patrick McCabe wrote a book called The Butcher Boy. There are a lot of great things to be said about the novel, but here are a few specifics I hope to find in every story I read.

Tension is present at all moments of the story, and Francie Brady is written in such a way that the tension becomes more powerful as the story moves forward; I care about him.

There are real consequences for Francis when his mother dies. There are real consequences for Francis when he gets into fights with other characters. I repeat: there are real consequences.

The town has a history and that history plays a role in the present. This is achieved without a hundred pages of back story that read like a history book instead of a novel.

McCabe uses voice to capture Francie Brady's Ireland and does so without forgetting that he was telling a story. The voice doesn't get carried away and talk simply out of admiration for itself.

Although this is a realist novel, realism is not required in order for a writer to create characters whom a reader can connect to. And that's something I want desperately.

Characters in quirky situations that are created by writers who are so smart that they forget their first job is to tell a story bore me more than anything. In fiction I prefer a failed attempt at honesty to a successful attempt at wit every time I read.

If you want a perfect example of what I'm looking for, The Butcher Boy is it.

Thoughts From The Editors: What's your dream fiction submission?

Brandon says...


My dream submission would be Catch-22/Blood Meridian/Slaughterhouse Five sprinkled with Kate Braverman, Patrick McCabe and Flann O'Brien. This changes daily. Mainly it should be a story, and not just a bunch of words mashed together because they sound good.

Lately I'm seeing way too much unjustified first-person and quirkiness for the sake of quirk. Perhaps it's time for some third person, past tense stories that take advantage of retrospection and happen in a world I believe? There can be quirkiness, weirdness and insanity. Just make sure I believe the narrator.

Brevity is your friend. Taking endless pages to describe pointless interactions that lead to the result hinted at on page one does not help your cause. Get in there and tell me a story. Make it intense and make it matter. This doesn't mean bombs and gun shots in the first sentence. It means tell me a story that compels me to read on. Don't make me search for a reason to care.

Thoughts From The Editors: What's your dream nonfiction submission?

Eileen says...

I love braided narratives, and I'm not seeing a lot of them in the in-box lately.  If you don't know what I mean by braided essay, there's a great article/essay on it called "A Braided heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay," by Brenda Miller, in the book Writing Creative Nonfiction put out by the AWP in 2001.

Even if it's written in a more traditional narrative form than braided sections, my dream submission would weave together the writer's experience with history or statistics related to the subject.  And if you can teach me something in the process, all the better!  It's rare that I can be taught something about childhood by an essay--after all, that's something I've done, something we've all done--so the weirder topics or niche topics tend to fair better.

When I was asked to write this post, I was also asked what I had been seeing a lot of lately.  The answer is sex and dead babies.  Teenage sex, married sex, masturbation, prostitution, production of porn, rape, child molestation and abuse ... the list goes on.  If this is what you're writing about, I'm glad you've come to a point where you can talk (write) about it openly.  But unless you're doing something interesting with the narrative form, sex in literature is old hat.  There was one essay that crossed my desk about rape and the aftermath, and the only reason it stuck out was that the write had experimented with form in a way that was both engaging and fresh.

Then there's the dead babies.  Miscarriages and shaken baby syndrome.  I'm seeing a lot of them lately.  I'm okay with essays on grief; I'm am publishing an essay on grief this spring--and I cried the first two times I read it--but it's not about a dead baby.  As far as essays on grief go, these have the least sense of redemption and a tendency to be written before the author has gained enough distance.