Intern Corner: Interning for the Wonderful World of MAR

Intern candy
Internships and candy are a match made in MAR heaven. This is just a taste of the candy found in the MAR interns’ office.

Welcome to our new column, Intern Corner! MAR has a rich tradition of including several talented, hard-working undergraduate interns among its ranks each semester. These interns work tirelessly to help keep MAR running smoothly and maintain the editors’ sanity. In this new column, our interns will have a chance to share a bit about themselves and their work at MAR. First up is Olivia Buzzacco:

Interning for the Wonderful World of MAR
by Olivia Buzzacco

In the spring of 2014, I learned that Mid-American Review was looking for interns for the upcoming school year. Some of my friends in the creative writing program encouraged me to apply, saying that it would be good experience, especially entering into my final year as an undergraduate. I went back and forth about applying for the internship, and finally decided to give it a go.

In late May, I received an email saying I had been selected for the internship at Mid-American Review, and I was elated. I felt that this was going to open up a whole new world of experiences and opportunities for me. I could not wait to get started and see how a literary journal was run, as I had no past experiences with it. I found out I would be working with three other interns, who I had already known from having classes with. This added to my excitement, as I would have other undergraduates to work with and become closer to.

However, I was also extremely nervous about starting my internship. Because I didn’t know how literary journals worked, I didn’t know what to expect at all going in. This was a nationally recognized journal that I would be working for. I didn’t know any of the staff or graduate students coming in, and I was afraid that after a week, I wouldn’t enjoy the job anymore.

But this wasn’t the case. I started interning in August of 2014 and was supposed to be done in December, but I decided to continue to intern for the whole school year. That’s how much I loved it. Working for MAR isn’t the same work and experience every day. There were so many projects and jobs I got to be a part of that each day was something new to look forward to. I got to help read fiction submissions, copyedit the manuscript, attend the graduate class every Wednesday, help prepare for Winter Wheat, and other small odd jobs and projects. There were days where I got to work with the other interns, and days where I got to work independently. I was so glad that I decided to apply for the internship, as I met so many new people and learned a lot of techniques when it comes to running a literary journal.

Interning with Mid-American Review was one of my greatest experiences in my undergraduate career at Bowling Green State University. It taught me so much about the creative writing and literary journal world and gave me experiences I hope I can continue to explore post graduation. The whole MAR staff is incredible and so welcoming to all the interns that it made me comfortable doing what I was doing. If I had a chance, I would do it all over again.

Olivia Buzzacco1
Olivia Buzzacco a creative writing major and English minor at Bowling Green State University. She currently works as a writing tutor at The Learning Commons and as a blogger for CP Rundown, Cedar Point’s blog. Olivia is from Youngstown, Ohio and has been interested in creative writing since the 7th grade. She plans to pursue graduate school next fall with a focus in fiction. Olivia likes to spend her time listening to old music and watching old movies. 

MAR Asks, George Choundas Answers

George Choundas
George Choundas

How can you possibly not read a contributor interview in which the writer describes his story as “Little Red Riding Hood kicks all manner of ass?” So please, read on and learn more about George Choundas, whose fiction and nonfiction appear in over twenty-five publications, including The Southern Review, The American Reader, and Subtropics. He is winner of the New Millennium Award for Fiction (Winter 2014-2015), a former FBI agent, and half Cuban and half Greek. His darkly imaginative short story, “The Girl Who Not Once Cried Wolf,” appears in MAR 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your story in 10 words or fewer.

Little Red Riding Hood kicks all manner of ass.

What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?

My daughter is four years old. She likes her bedtime stories. I read them to her sometimes, and sometimes I make them up. In the fall of 2013 I launched into a telling of Little Red Riding Hood. I realized by Sentence Three that Riding Hood had no need of hunters. And that Claire—born in the Year of the Tiger, on Bastille Day, with enormous eyes of mischief green—had no need of stories suggesting she was less than. I told her a different version. The story grew each time I told it. Longer, more detailed. Finally I wrote it down. I spent nine months revising and editing. And engineering progressively more disgusting ways to describe wolf innards.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

You read and write short fiction for years—decades. For decades you admire this icon called Mid-American Review and the stories in it because they’re good and, well, it’s iconic. And one day you receive an email that this same institution would love—“love”—to publish your writing. You do not fully comprehend this. You cannot reconcile it with what you know. So you do three things: First, you keep your reply email short for fear of writing something that inadvertently confirms some background suspicion on the editors’ part that this acceptance is not simply implausible but in fact a mistake. Second, you continue thereafter to play along and pretend everything’s cool, everything’s as it should be. Third, you show fate some gratitude the best way writers can: you keep writing.

My reaction? One day I’m daydreaming about space and rocketships, the next I’m in an astronaut suit bearing a NASA insignia going, This is fucked up.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

I recently learned I’d won the New Millennium Award for Fiction for a story that originally appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review. That was kind of incredible. Then I learned that the award’s founding editor, Don Williams, called it among the best stories to ever win the prize. That was kind and incredible.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

That I did not realize at a much earlier age that writing has little to do with knowing what to write about, or with having something to write about, but rather with writing and having written and determining to write some more and thereby finding out, to your surprise and (ideally) delight, what there always was to write about.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does not involve writing.

I can’t shoot pool or play a musical instrument without sticking out my tongue. It’s an unconscious tendency over which I have no control. It’s as if my tongue needs to get out and aloft to receive some kind of homing signal. This is a problem because my son five years ago agreed to play the cello if I learned along with him, and now I’m the one whom the instructor gently chides for resembling at our summer recitals an overheated dog, and at our winter recitals a deranged one.

Thanks for an entertaining interview, George!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Accepted: “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn” by Travis Vick

Ollbac / FlickrIn our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Assistant Fiction Editor Lydia Munnell discusses a story that appears in our Fall 2014 issue. (Above image: Ollbac)

Genre: Short fiction
Title: “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn”
Author: Travis Vick
MAR issue: 35.1
First line: “A popular art critic once wrote of Victor: ‘I guess all things, even art, must come to seed.’”

From its first page, “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn,” introduces four different voices: the third person narrator, the voice of an art critic, the curatorial description of a painting, and the voice of the artist—Victor himself. The rules are clear and the principal figure is revealed. Victor Vaughn is a product of fragments; it’s the structure that’s always central.

And as the story progresses, Victor’s life and history are relayed in his paintings, in the musings of his critics, in his own words offered by way of interviews. In that way, the act of reading “Inaccurate (self)Portraits …” mimics what it means to understand a life—that people are remembered through fragments and episodes. And while author Travis Vick’s structure is remarkable here, it functions as well as it does because it contains the traditional stuff of great stories too: compelling characters with complicated histories, desires, ghosts.

The specters, here, are Victor’s parents. His art and life are haunted by his mother, drowned in a nearby lake; his father, hung in the barn after the death of his wife; and Mr. Powell the neighbor whose house burned and who is linked to a single fond memory of Victor’s father. And Victor maintains his own shadow over the story. In death he is remembered by his critics, his work, his widow.

These fragments are balanced skillfully. Vick maintains distinctive voices for each piece of the narrative, and the look of the thing—its format on the page—signals changes in speaker, commands a different kind of reading. Beyond the formatting and the voices, though, the fragments work because of deftly woven images. Victor is a painter, and “Inaccurate (self)Portraits…” is visually alive. Upon the death of Victor’s father, the farm animals he forgot to shut in are left, “cantering augustly” across neighbors’ lawns. And the water death of Victor’s mother determines much of the story’s imagery. “And, when out in public,” says one of Victor’s critics, “doesn’t he always seem to be moving about a room more by the aid of his hands than of his feet, as if lost, as if swimming through dark water?’”

In the end, to read “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn” is to wade. The structure commands that readers adjust their pacing, that they move through it in slowly, steadily. But carefully curated images cement the fragments together. Here are water and fire: the elements, the stuff of great paintings.

What MAR editors said about “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn”:

“I like the repetition and the sense of cataloging his life, and I think the author uses effective snippets/portraits/scenes to show who Vaughn was.”

“The many voices all felt clear and distinct, and the episodes were well chosen. They illuminated Vaughn as well as the particular world of the story.”

“The repetition worked well, and the multi-genre feel was very intriguing. … The writing was strong and inventive.”

Lydia Munnell
Lydia Munnell is pursuing her MFA at Bowling Green State University, where she serves
as assistant fiction editor of Mid-American Review. She comes to BGSU by way of
Cleveland, where she hosted a weekly folk radio show called Revival and wrote for
Cleveland Scene magazine.