Absolute Gentleman

I’m the interviews editor for a national magazine called upstreet, a project I agreed to do with a former friend of mine after I left an organization called The Berkshire Writers Room. If you know me, rest easy; this isn’t going to be a David Scribner versus The Berkshire Eagle bitter rant. Honestly, The Berkshire Writers Room isn’t worth the time. The Writers Room is more like a circle j-

Nevermind, although I think they still have a round table somewhere in their meeting spaces.

The one thing that the organization taught me was that there are many reputable and talented writers in the Berkshires, and very few of them want anything to do with The Writers Room. The explanation can be delivered in a microcosm: a certain area amateur writer used to submit her stories every year to The Berkshire Review, an annual publication The Writers Room publishes, with the help of dollars from the local cultural councils. The writer was rejected regularly and was angered in the process. Word got back to the editorial board about this woman’s displeasure through the friend of another writer, who was also displeased. Both disappeared from The Writers Room for a while.

This is garbage I don’t understand, or I possibly do understand. I can sympathize with those who are hurt by rejection, but rejection is something beginners experience, handle poorly, learn from, then move on. I am living proof of someone who has most definitely not made it, but handles rejection decently — or at least I’m not blaming anyone else for the rejections. This woman charged us, the editors, with somehow rigging the process and choosing all our friends. It just wasn’t true. The process was conducive to choosing those you were close to, but only because those who submitted work were mostly the ones who attended monthly writing workshops. The more an individual worked on and improved a piece of writing, prose or poetry, the more likely we were to accept it because we’d heard it so much and learned to like it enough to say yes.

The editorial board of The Berkshire Review consists of the workshop leaders in each genre. I was the nonfiction editor, so I’d hold these workshops every month on the first Wednesday, and I’d have a good time talking with writers and listening to the work they were proud of. I can see that the process may have been a bit skewed because of the familiarity I had with the loyal attendees every month, but I never made a decision based on the person being my friend. The magazine hardly ever receives any outstanding work anyway.

OK, so The Writers Room is worth the time.

So anyway, back to this woman, who then submitted her work to the new magazine I edit for, upstreet. The submissions for upstreet come to me blind. This means my editor-in-chief, my managing editor, whatever she wants to be called, I can’t remember, receives all the poetry and prose submissions, reads most of them outright, catalogues them, and send them to the specific genre editors. I’m the prose editor and I do the interview. It’s too much work for one person, actually, and it won’t happen this way again. The kinds of magazines I like to read are edited by different talented writers and editors with differing tastes: Post Road, The Paris Review, Tin House, Granta…McSweeney’s…hmmm. McSweeney’s is kind of an exception to the rule. The fact that it switches gears, packaging, concept, content, etc. every issue, keeps me interested.

So anyway, yes, I control, for the most part, the fiction, nonfiction, and interview content of upstreet. It’s unhealthy for its growth, which is why I’m leaving it after its second issue. I really think I’m very good, but what is important to me is maintaining a realistic outlook on my skills and limitations, and the truth is that I’m not doing any one thing very spectacularly right now.

So I read through the submissions, filter through a couple of rounds of “maybes” and “yesses,” and I end up rejecting this woman’s writing again. It all filters through the gossip channels, of course, because writers are a bunch of babies, and this woman unleashes her accusations again. There’s nothing you can do about these things but move on. If I could talk to this woman right now, because of all the candor she chose to spit all over us — me as an editor — I’d tell her she just wasn’t good enough, that these things happen. I’d tell her that I never liked her work, now that I think about it, and it had nothing to do with her, but her skills as a writer. I’d tell her she just didn’t make it.

Then there’s the interviews part of my editing job, which I love. I’m excited about it mostly because it’s a learning experience for me. I’ve never done it before, and I consider it a deep challenge to my intellect. Being a teacher for eleven years has helped to humble me, or actually, to feel comfortable about the knowledge I have and not knowing everything. My first interview was with Jim Shepard, the famous short story writer, novelist, and professor of English at Williams College. Plus, he’s a ridiculously nice guy. We agreed to do everything by email, which was fine with me, since I would have been a bit intimidated by his experience and knowledge, but not by his demeanor. And this seems to be the thing about professors at Williams: they’re brilliant and accessible. The English Department at Williams has a really thoughtful component to their website, which includes writing tips and instruction for anyone to use.

My intention was to use my experience and skill in essay writing to turn the interview into a hybrid interview/essay. I was nervous with Jim, even when I submitted the questions by email, and when his answers were kind of short, it made me feel like I was asking him dumb and irrelevant questions. But the interview had to get done, and I was way over deadline as it was.

The first time I submitted the interview to the magazine’s editor, she didn’t like it. She was up front and honest and wanted more of my essayist strategy into the interview. I did this and submitted again, and then it went to print.

It wasn’t until months after the magazine was out that I got my first negative reaction to it, indirectly, from a nationally-known local poet through my editor. The criticism was fair and kind, because this poet is my friend, and I respect her work.

Then I got mauled in a review put out by a local busybody, Peter Bergman. He totally killed me in the review, and you can read it here: http://berkshirebrightfocus.com/.

Please read it if you get a chance, and I’ll follow up on it in a day or two.