Fiction Gets Personal

This summer, I found The Best American Short Stories 2000at the local library and started reading through it. I figured it could act as a guide to the market, and though I only ended up reading the first third of the book or so, it served that purpose well. The back of the book had an index of all the magazines it selects the stories from, which I looked up one-by-one online to see submission guidelines and to gauge the suitability of my own work (not that I actually have anything particularly publishable right now).

Needless to say, this week I was pleasantly surprised when I came across an Amherst professor's blog and saw a post entitled How To Make Use Of The Best American (insert title here) Anthology. The professor, Alexander Chee, writes about the method Annie Dillard recommended for making use of these anthologies, which bears remarkable similarity to what I was doing on my own this summer: "Annie taught out of Best American Essays in part, she told us, because it took the temperature of what was being published and who was publishing it." And I also read The Writing Lifethis summer, which Dillard was writing at the time that Chee was under her tutelage.

I only wish I'd been a student in that Wesleyan class; I absolutely love Dillard's writing. But if I don't take a class with Chee at Amherst, I may be kicking myself in a few years for missing that opportunity. The thing is that the last time I applied to Fiction I at Amherst, my pride was hurt when I didn't get in, and I haven't applied since (partly because it hasn't fit into my schedule, in my defense). At the time, I e-mailed the English department questioning the fact that there was only one section of Fiction I offered all year, which made it fairly competitive, and the e-mail ended up being forwarded to Chee and we had an intense discussion. I was deeply mortified when he took my comments the wrong way and chastised me like a child (because he felt that I'd been chastising him and the department's policies).

So what really hurt my pride was not the fact that I was rejected, but the way that exchange went. When I just went back to look at it, I realize how childish I was being, and that Chee's response was absolutely justified, but my freshman mind couldn't grasp that fully back in April of 2008. He did offer to comment on my writing sample, but I dropped the chain of communication by failing to respond to his last e-mail, and that was the end of that. So maybe I'll do the adult, responsible thing, tell him that I like reading his blog, Koreanish, and drop the baby grudge I've held against Amherst's Creative Writing department all this time. Maybe I'll also check out his novelfrom the Amherst library over interterm.

The truth is that my writing sample sucked, so I really can't complain.

Anyway, I'm satisfied that what I was doing this summer is exactly what my idol Annie Dillard recommended. And if you haven't read her essay "The Stunt Pilot" from The Writing Life (which The Best American Essays 1990 anthologizes) I highly recommend it.