Grant Faulkner

The Used Furniture Review

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As a genetically inclined junk collector and ragpicker—literally and literarily—I have to disclose that I was initially attracted to the new online journal Used Furniture Review simply because of its name.

Fortunately it lived up to what I expected of it—a journal that holds surprises, if only because unlike many print journals, it’s publishing a truly eclectic mix of authors who surprise me just as, well, a choice piece of junk/high art that I find in a thrift store might.

For example, read Kim Chinquee’s dreamy, distorted short I Wanted to Believe This Was My Life. She lyrically captures what might be called quotidian disorientation—sounds, movements, memories moving against and through each other without the possibility of focus or answers.

“I felt on the verge of things. My payments, student papers, that report. A journal, asking for an essay. My dad, a never-ending question. My guy’s head, thinking he felt pressured.”

But Used Furniture also publishes great interviews with the likes of Rick Moody, who discusses how he took refuge in the horrors of monster movies as refuge from the horrors of domestic drama as a child, his tastes in music, his current favorite books, and perspectives on his writing process, among other things.

Here’s a bit of Moody’s wisdom:

On his authorial stance: “The movement in and out of autobiography is something dialectical for me. I am always somewhere on a continuum between the completely imaginary and the completely accurate. Of course, there can be neither.”

On revision: “Over the life of a piece you usually alter it less radically, as you go on, and that’s how you know it’s getting better. But there’s no done. There’s no complete. There’s no exhaustion. There are only provisional versions of texts for particular purposes.”

Used Furniture also has published interviews with authors such as Tom Perotta and Luis Alberto Urrea.

One great thing about new online reviews like Used Furniture is their potential. For example, they’re taking ideas for columns. If were a young literary whippersnapper, I’d submit an idea.

So buy some used furniture for God’s sake. My experience is that most used furniture is better than the new stuff, if only because it has more character.

The death of fiction…one more time

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As much as I loath “death of fiction” articles, I’m compelled by them. I guess it’s the watching a train wreck thing. Except that it’s watching the wreck of the train I’m traveling in.

Damn.

The “death of fiction” is actually a new and thriving genre. By the time fiction actually dies, each and every reputable journal, magazine, and newspaper (and, um, blog and website and wiki and other doodads) will have predicted and analyzed its demise. Roll over Tolstoy, Augusten Burroughs is singing the blues.

Mother Jones just published a keenly insightful reckoning of lit mags, those subsidized tomes that usually make their homes at the nation’s finer universities, and have carried the torch of publishing challenging and emerging authors for a good century or so. The article is penned by Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, who’s seen by parents he meets at his children’s activities as practicing an “arcane craft they assumed was kept alive only by a lost order of nuns in a remote mountain convent or by the Amish in some print shop in Pennsylvania Dutch Country.”

Not only does Genoways provide the mathematical analysis of the doomed (the number of creative writing programs multiplied by the number of graduates each year, etc.–which tallies somewhere in the millions, or it might as well), but he provides an interesting angle into how we got into this vicious circle of storytelling demise (not that it could have been avoided) after commercial mags started dropping fiction.

One would think that the rapid eviction of literature from the pages of commercial magazines would have come as a tremendous boon to lit mags, especially at the schools that have become safe harbors for (and de facto patrons of) writers whose works don’t sell enough to generate an income. You would expect that the loyal readers of established writers would have provided a boost in circulation to these little magazines and that universities would have seen themselves in a new light—not just promoting the enjoyment of literature but promulgating a new era of socially conscious writing in the postcommercial age. But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

I’m not sure if his analysis is entirely true–maybe readers just started watching TV or playing video games or doing drugs or reading blogs by jackasses, present company included. I don’t know.

I remember reading that fiction was the number one reason people bought magazines in the ’20s (hence paychecks of $3,000 to $5,000 for a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerad), but now it’s the last reason anyone would buy a magazine–which is why even magazines with a literary heritage have quit publishing fiction.

Genoways lists several lit journals that have been around for ages (e.g., TriQuarterly, which never accepted one of my real world stories), but are losing their skin to the axe swipes of budget cuts (who’s going to notice, or care, when the journals disappear is the argument of the administration). So, he says, like newspapers, lit journals have to think fast–go out there and get an audience.Now, dammit!!

So, in short, game over.

Still, this odd game of fiction persists–whether in online form or other rogue ways. Although the 822 MFA programs in the nation are like guppies on Viagra breeding out of control, they represent and produce a hungry reading and writing public.

To tell the truth, I read a lot of books–short story collections, poetry, novels, literary criticism, etc.–but I never really read literary journals, despite buying them regularly. There was always something a bit unappealing about them.They were often just overly serious tomes, prohibiting by design. Obdurately opaque. Of the tower, not the street.

Maybe, as Genoways writes, I just never saw myself in them even though I, like every writer I know, submits to them.

Maybe this is a good chance to revisit some of the Bay Area’s lit mags. ZZZYVAA, Fourteen Hills, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, to mention the obvious ones. And, oh yeah, The Three Penny Review and Narrative. Gosh, it suddenly doesn’t feel like ficiton is dying. It feels like it’s everywhere. Just check out this list of Bay Area lit orgs, publishers, magazines, etc.

Writing without Passion

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It seems that people have tired of writing about the death of the novel. Now they’re picking on the poor, defenseless short story.

Stephen King has written the latest obituary in the September 30 New York Times Book Review. “The American short story is alive and well. Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were true,” he writes.

He first vividly makes the case that lit magazines have been relegated to the dusty corners of chain book stores, but that’s no surprise. The chain book stores really don’t want to sell lit mags, and very few consumers want to buy them, but, well, it’s a book store, and one must keep up appearances.

Then King makes the piquant point that the only readers who read these damnable lit mags are writers who want to be published in them.

“What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there.”

That’s not real reading, he says, and he’s right. And I suppose you could say that these writers who aren’t doing real reading, aren’t doing real writing, because both are being done in a calculated, passionless way, and he’s probably right again.

But this doesn’t convince me the short story is dead. It convinces me that literary magazines are dead, or many should be dead. It convinces me that consumers would rather read memoirs and other nonfiction than short stories–if they want to read at all. But then consumers haven’t really wanted to read short stories since the 1920’s, before talkies and TV.

It’s not that King doesn’t have a point. Yes, I’m sure the cliche that MFA degrees have ironed the raw truth out of fiction is in part true. Yes, I’m sure that many writers write to succeed rather than write to live–but then hasn’t that always been the case? And does this abject careerism mean that the short story is dead?

If the short story is dead now, when was it alive? That’s the annoying thing about articles like this. They start with the premise the short story was once alive and well, but they don’t tell you when this golden era was. And they insinuate that the death of the art form is because of the two things King harps on: people are stupid now (whine, whine, no one will buy true art) and/or writers (except for the author of the essay and his close friends) just don’t have the right stuff any more (whine, whine, they don’t make ’em like they used to).

Alice Munro. Denis Johnson. James Salter. Robert Stone. These are just several authors who have written great collections of stories in the last ten to twenty years, and there are many more. Why shouldn’t they rank with Chekhov or Hemingway or Carver? I’ll take Jesus’s Son and five points any day.