Accepted: “No Paper Cowboys” by Bryn Agnew

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Tom Markham discusses the marvelous “No Paper Cowboys.”

Genre: short fiction

Title: “No Paper Cowboys”

Author: Bryn Agnew

MAR Issue: 36.1

First Line: “Your parents stand on the porch as you park your car under the awning where the chicken snake ate the baby swallows.”

The evocative image in the opening line of Bryn Agnew’s “No Paper Cowboys” sets the stage for a tale of consumption. That the story is told in 2nd person—“Your parents stand on the porch”—brings us close to the affected character, allowing us an interiority crucial to understanding the unavoidable struggle that consumes this main character.

The setup is one we’re all familiar with—a young college student returns home for a family Thanksgiving celebration—yet the insight here feels fresh, cutting to the core a young person’s first real identity crisis: feeling like a stranger both in that new living environment as well as in the old. This sense of having one foot in one world and one in the other is brought out nicely through the italicized lines that are interspersed throughout the narrative. These lines, usually quotes from, we can assume, texts and situations the boy encountered at school, are often direct, internalized responses to the actions or requests of this main character’s family. Sometimes the interactions between internal and external are simple—“’Why don’t you go for a walk?  Get some fresh air.’  It’s plain to see, the sun won’t shine today, but I ain’t in the mood for sunshine anyway”—while other times they are a little more abstracted, pointing to the unease deep within the main character’s psyche.

The main character, the “You” in the story, is doing his best to reconcile his estranged world of the past with his new fresh but ultimately unsatisfying frame of mind, but the efforts are fruitless. The futility is shown most starkly in his family’s frustrated attempts to cheer him up with mundane, homey tasks. Sandwiched into this doomed task of fitting his new self back into his old life is the revelation that things don’t appear to be going so well socially at college, either, so at the story’s core, we are given this bit of insight—the boy is unhappy in both worlds—and we watch it eat away at him while his family attempts, always uselessly, to rescue him.

When the boy finds himself relating to a hunted deer shot by his family for the meat we know things won’t end well. The boy gets injured wrangling a cow on the family farm, a task his father conscripted him to, and in the final moments of the story, a fleeting image of the deer comes across the boy’s visage, leaving us with one lingering italicized thought: “You cannot believe such a monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing.”

“No Paper Cowboys” is a poignant look at the inexplicable pain that comes in periods of life’s tough transitions. It ends on a very somber note, but it is one that leaves us strangely hopeful, for we come back to the 2nd person voice, reading these words with our own voices echoing in our heads, realizing we’re not alone in this struggle, even though it sometimes feels that way.

What MAR editors said about “No Paper Cowboys”:

“I really enjoyed the narrator’s silence when everyone else is constantly discussing him. I feel like this was a very effective way of seeing inside this character.”

“The second person is done really well, and to a wonderful effect. Lovely prose, lovely energy, lovely sadness; it packed a punch for sure.”

Accepted: Night Watch At The House of Death by Sam Martone

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Lydia Munnell discusses a story that appears in our Fall 2015 issue.

Genre: Short fiction
Title: Night Watch at the House of Death
Author: Sam Martone
MAR issue: 36.1
While reading or discussing work with the MAR staff this past year, I’ve occasionally thrown a fit about what I call “Boring Couple Stories.” Of course this is ridiculous; Some of the best stories we’ve told since we started telling stories deal in the currency of love and heartbreak. We love an affair. We love a breakup.

But I will stand by the fact that, in general I could do without another interior rendering of here we are, in the same house, and it’s ending, and we both know it’s ending, and what’s going to happen? I could do without another thinly veiled short story about a lurid affair between an aging professor and an airy undergrad.

But I can always, always read more stories that frame old love anew, that teach me something I feel like I always should have known.

That’s what Sam Martone’s “Night Watch at the House of Death” manages to do, and, ultimately, why the story warranted such an enthusiastic acceptance in my first semester as Fiction Editor. Martone’s is a story about the sublime nature of love because it’s also about death, or maybe just loss, or maybe just being alone.

The speaker in “Night Watch…” is a worker. He is a sentinel at a death house whose responsibility it is to wait for the likely-dead to show signs of life. In inventing that job, Martone captures the all-too-familiar drudgery of work, the language of waiting and work that colors the kind of purgatorial world that’s so beautifully rendered here.

Martone does a remarkable job with all the intricacies that mandate life inside and outside the death houses. Medicine, in this world, is a kind of alchemy, and as the speaker’s relationship with Hannah emerges, it’s clear love is governed by alchemy as well. Writes Martone, “I imagined Hannah undressing, one garment at a time, and seeing all the things she stole spilling from her clothes: waffle irons, withering cabbages, hand soap dispensers, step ladders, until she was completely naked atop a mountain of all she had taken, and I was clambering up toasters and ironing boards to meet her.” The world of “Night Watch” is sketched with clear lines, but love is about trial and error, a combination of semi-precious objects that, for the speaker, seem like they might add up to something.

But the other element here is time (manifest in the form of a stolen clock), and Martone’s moves in the second act fulfill the story’s promises about what it means to wait. After some too-enjoyable-to-spoil-here twists, “Night Watch at the House of Death” grants us this: we can see work and breakups the same way. They’re both about waiting, the nebulous space between.

The worst kinds of love stories leave sullen characters brooding on a rainy New York City boulevard. But the best kind—and Sam Martone’s is the best kind—leave them cleaning gutters and listening to the wind. They end the way they start without promise of death or happiness or sure resolution. And uncertainty becomes its own kind of loss, and it aches the way a good love story should.

 

Lydia is a native of rural western Pennsylvania who has spent the last several years on the east side of Cleveland coordinating the after school program at Lake Erie Ink, a non-profit writing space for youth. While in Cleveland, she was DJ of a folk radio program, Revival and previously did freelance writing for Cleveland Scene Magazine.

Meet the MAR Staff!

Hello, let’s take some time today to meet Mid-American Review’s fiction editor, Lydia Munnell!

Lydia is a native of rural western Pennsylvania who has spent the last several years on the east side of Cleveland coordinating the after school program at Lake Erie Ink, a non-profit writing space for youth. While in Cleveland, she was DJ of a folk radio program, Revival and previously did freelance writing for Cleveland Scene Magazine.

A submission is giving you major thrills: Why? What qualities does it have?

The submissions that really command my attention right away and the ones that I enthusiastically support have a strong sense of voice right off the bat. I’m not one to demand a necessarily thrilling first sentence or to be thrown into the middle of teeth-gnashing action, but there’s got to be something about the voice that feels like it needs to be read. Maybe it’s some kind of desperation, regardless of circumstance. The speaker should need to tell this story for me to need to read it. I’m also partial to stories that try things, that do something unique with form, that confidently take risks.

What is the best piece of advice another writer has ever given you?

To take my time, to take time off between undergrad and the MFA, to remember that writers are writers because they are actually writing.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that involves writing and/or editing.

I’m always trying to set up a workspace, a desk, an organized surface. But in the end, I end up opening up my laptop in my bed and doing all of my writing there.

What is your favorite piece that MAR has published recently (in your genre or otherwise)?

This is difficult, but I’m going with “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn” by Travis Vick. When I came on staff last year, it was one of the first pieces I got to really support, and I love what Travis does with fragments and form.

 

Lydia

Meet The MAR Staff!

Hello, let’s take some time today to meet Mid-American Review’s non-fiction editor, Karen Craigo!

Karen Craigo is a poet whose first full-length collection, No More Milk, is forthcoming in 2016 from Sundress Publications. She is also an essayist and maintains the blog Better View of the Moon. She is a founder of Paper Crane Writing Services and teaches in Springfield, Missouri.

A submission is giving you major thrills: Why? What qualities does it have?

I get so mad at the contemporary essay. It’s a genre that is ripe with possibility, but its practitioners too often fall into formulae, the most obvious being a bookend structure that essays—even compelling and interesting ones—too frequently default to. What thrills me in an essay submission is originality, especially in form. Because they tend to be fresher in terms of structure, I gravitate toward lyrical essays. I’m open to anything I haven’t seen before, though. That’s what gives me a charge.

What is the best piece of advice another writer has ever given you?

Writers write. I know too many people who talk about writing but don’t produce. I have been that writer, in fact. But get a daily habit and challenge yourself—all of the best writers do that. Quit jawing about it and sit yourself down to work.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that involves writing and/or editing.

For the longest time, I carried a river stone around my neck and wrote about it every day. It was the most exciting time of my life, artistically. My first chapbook, Stone for an Eye, is made up of stone poems. I did everything with that rock. I ate with it, slept with it, bathed with it. I held it in my hand and my mouth. I balanced it on my head. Want inspiration? Pick up a rock. Step inside.

What is your favorite piece that MAR has published recently (in your genre or otherwise)?

Just flip to the finalists and winning pieces of any year’s Fineline Competition. I live for those. They’re always the most innovative and exciting work we get—hands down.

redCraigoheadThanks, Karen!

 

Meet The MAR Staff

Hello,

Let’s take some time today to get to know Mid-American Review’s managing editor, Nicole Connolly!

 

Nicole Connolly is a second-year poetry student at Bowling Green State University’s MFA program, and currently Mid-American Review’s managing editor. Prior to this, she was briefly the content coordinator for EB5 Investors Magazine, and for two-and-a-half-years the lead editor of Chapman University’s Honors Program journal, Sapere Aude. Her poetry and fiction have been published by Outrider Press, Calliope, Bank-Heavy Press, and Quite Curious Literature, and she is an honorary member of the zine-publishing arts collective Not an Exit. When at home in California, she workshops with the (In)Articulates and reads with Orange County Poetry Club and Two Idiots Peddling Poetry.

 

A submission is giving you major thrills, why?

As with most poets, I’m excited by images or metaphors I wish I’d written first: anything fresh and interesting, but still seemingly inevitable. I also have a huge appreciation for poetry that lets its strong images be strong, that avoids the temptation to sabotage the metaphor by explaining it.

When our staff discusses a piece, my personal priority falls on meaning and significance of the content. If a poem tackles subject matter not omnipresent in literary poetry, or effectively blurs the boundary between spoken-word-type poetry and literary poetry, I take notice. It also helps if the voice or sense of character is strange and strong—I like to be charmed into a new perspective on a topic.

 

What is the best piece of advice another writer has ever given you?

The first thing that comes to mind is actually, on the surface, truly terrible advice. When I was a freshman in undergrad, I took the train to school every day; one morning, I met a writer/musician who was moving to Los Angeles and sat next to me for my part of the commute. When I told him I was pursuing a BFA in creative writing, he told me to just send everything I wrote everywhere, and someone would publish it. I was totally inspired and did publish my first short story soon thereafter.

Since then, I’ve realized that more discretion is important. I’ve learned to prioritize the quality of my work enough to ask myself if I want to be associated with a press or journal before I submit. In some ways, publishing opportunities act as gatekeepers who can help you understand when you’re really “ready” to have your work potentially immortalized and forever accessible to anyone who might want to read it.

Even so, he did help me distinguish between the different aspects of a writer’s life, and begin my thinking about important questions: Who am I writing for? Why am I writing this? What is my ultimate goal for this piece? Reading, writing, workshopping, and publication don’t necessarily follow a straight path. Publication in general doesn’t seem as scary to me now as it did before my half-hour train ride with this stranger, and it doesn’t have to be the end goal for everything that I do.

 

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that involves writing and/or editing.

A lot of people who have seen my writing process at work have been some degree of confused or horrified, saying things like you’re insane and I don’t understand you at all. I write a lot of raw material by hand pretty much every day, but the vast majority of it is total garbage. I’ll often salvage one or two lines out of a page of work and start over from there, or cut four pages of material down to one-hundred words, or expand fifty words to eight more pages of raw stuff.

I type it all up, print it out, edit with a pen, rewrite by hand, re-type on the computer, read it out loud to myself over and over. Often, I don’t look at a poem/short story for six months, and then pick it up again. My process is a total mess and has only gotten more convoluted with time (and I often feel guilty for all the paper it uses), but it works for me (and it gives me credence when I tell my composition students that good writing is more elbow grease than talent).

 

What is your favorite piece that MAR has published recently?

For our latest issue, I was thrilled to get the poem “Heavens to Betsy” by Cindy Beebe. I was struck by its consistent sense of fun, even though many of the images were dark—I could tell the poet really enjoyed writing it. Every time I read it, another layer of meaning unfolded. The title made me initially suspicious of this piece, but I quickly fell in love with the work, and loved having my first expectations subverted. There is just such a delightful mix of holy and banal images, plain-spoken and elevated voice, and certainty in uncertainty. It’s got a strangeness to it that attracted me.

 

photo for MAR intro

Thanks, Nicole!

Come back next Wednesday for another MAR staff profile. And Stay tuned for information regarding MAR and Winter Wheat.