Saturday, October 15, 2011

Accidents & Postcards #2

[Note: I realize that there is no Accidents & Postcards #1, and you will note by the end of this post that I have only alluded to what the idea means. I have started Accidents & Postcards #1, complete with explanation, but I have not finished it yet. This one just poured out of me tonight, and I wanted to post it right away. The prequel, if you like, will be along soon.]

Another accident: Discovering that the Mississippi Review publishes work that seems to be relatively boundary-free. (As an aside, I am sure that there really are boundaries, and that there are certain things you simply cannot put down in print and expect to have published; but within reason, within the scope of what can be considered literature [and like people sometimes say about obscenity, it’s just the kind of thing you know when you see it or read it], there should not be boundaries.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how it started. A couple of weeks ago, on a Tuesday morning while Jackson watched his Thomas the Tank Engine DVDs in the background and played with his Thomas the Tank Engine toys in the living room, I sat at the dining room table over the current issue of Poets & Writers and consulted the listings for contests and deadlines in the back of the magazine. I wrote down the information for contests that: were looking for short stories; were offering a subscription to the journal or a copy of the prize issue with the reading fee; and had deadlines that were far enough in the future that I felt I could come up with something to submit in the amount of time remaining.

I already had a story in the works and knew which contest I wanted to submit it to, but I wanted to get a couple more done and submitted before National Novel Writing Month started. I finalized and submitted the first story and then wrote the second one, which I finalized last night. So tonight, I picked up my list of contests and went through it and crossed out the ones whose deadlines had passed since I made the list. Then I loaded up the website of the first one on left the list and checked to see if they had posted any prize-winning stories that I could read online to see if what I had written was something along the lines of what they had published in the past. (This is a nebulous concept, but one of the big pieces of advice you run into frequently when you start investigating contests is that you should read the work of the journals you want to submit to, to make sure that what you are writing will be a good fit. Like literature and obscenity, it’s just one of those things that you know when you see it.)

They did, and I read the 2011 contest winner; and I did not think that my writing was a good fit, so I moved on down the list, but none of the contests that were left on the list felt right. None of them had samples online, and I didn’t get the right vibe from the information that was available on the websites. So, pretty much at random, I went to the websites of contests I had submitted to a number of years ago, the first time the Entering Contests Bug bit me, thinking that maybe there was an off chance that they would have contests going on that had not been listed in the issue of Poets & Writers I had looked at.

One of these was the Mississippi Review, published by the University of Southern Mississippi. They had a contest going on. The deadline had not passed. Each entrant gets a copy of the prize issue. While looking for samples to read online, I came to their back issue page, and saw the cover of the issue I had received when I entered their contest the first time. They did not have sample stories online, and I might have given up, except that one of the people whose work appeared in the issue was called Angela Williams. I used to know a girl by that name in high school, so I went over to the bookcase that holds my literary magazines, and I picked out the issue and turned to the back to check the notes on the contributors. It was not the same person I had known in high school, but since I had the issue in my hand, I started to flip through it. I found the story that had won the fiction prize, and I read the first paragraph, which consisted of two sentences. The first sentence reveals the narrator to be a sixteen-year-old girl, and the second reveals that she is about to blow a dude with a big dick.

That got my attention, and it was totally an accident that I happened to get there from where I started when I sat down to work on my submissions tonight. Is the story obscene? Based on the first two sentences, a lot of people would probably say that it is. They would cringe, put the magazine down, and probably give me a dirty look for having brought it up in the first place. I, on the other hand, have a great deal of respect for a journal that would publish something like that. It means that they are willing to publish material that might be considered objectionable, that they are not afraid to court controversy, that they are not afraid to look taboo in the eye and say that they are its equal.

I like art that challenges taboos, that challenges people to go outside of their comfort zones—that makes people think hard about themselves and the world around them. It’s how minds open up and thoughts become freer. That’s what challenging art can do for the person who consumes it. For the person who creates it, challenging art can be a way to explore new thoughts and ideas, to confront problems, to exorcise demons, to come to terms with things that have been festering inside, among so many other modes of expression. In a free-thinking, open-minded world, that kind of art can help more than just the person who created it and who was helped or healed or refreshed by that creation; but when there are limits on art, those kinds of things get put away, and they can’t help anyone else.

I read the current issue of H.O.W. Journal earlier this year and was very impressed with the stories they published; and I knew after reading just the first story that I wanted to submit a story of my own to the contest they currently have open. I only had to read the first two sentences of the prize-winning story in an issue of the Mississippi Review to know the same thing about that journal, and that’s the contest I’m going to enter with the story I finalized last night. It’s entirely by accident that I found that outlet, even though the journal has been sitting there in my bookcase—unread—for years. If I don’t win, that’s okay; but going about this in a way that feels right to me is the only way that I’m ever going to be happy with it. It may not make me rich, but it makes me happy, and it makes me proud of what I have done, proud of this mad, lonely vocation I have chosen to pursue.

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