A Tendency, Concern, and Forum

Some McSweeney's and RHINO

For July, I’m sharing with you two components of the McSweeney’s publishing nonprofit — its “Internet Tendency,” with tagline “Daily humor almost every day since 1998,” and the all fiction print anthology issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. Also, we’ll look at the 2024 winners of RHINO Poetry Founders’ Prize, published by The Poetry Forum, because the 2025 prize period opens August 1st. Like last month’s issue of my newsletter, July’s is also free for all to read.

Current publishing board member Dave Eggars founded the journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in 1998, in San Francisco. There was a real Timothy McSweeney who claimed to be a relative of Eggars’ mother, and wrote letters to his family when he was a child. In 2014, McSweeney’s, by then a growing media company with the humor tendency, and the literature, culture and arts magazine The Believer—founded in 2003 by Heidi Julavits, Ed Park, and Vendela Vida—became a nonprofit. They publish books and e-books, and a children’s literary journal, Illustoria. They had the food journal Lucky Peach until 2017.

It’s hard to choose which humor pieces to share with you when new funny ones are posted daily on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and so I encourage you to jump in and follow the titles that tell you enough to interest you one way or another. I do want to point out that they like funny lists that contain exasperation, from the author, the subject, or both, such as “If My Mom Wrote the Ads for her Local NPR Station” by Bobbie Armstrong, posted July 30, 2024 and “You Are Almost out of Google Storage Space” by Eddie Small, from July 24, 2024, or ones that double their satire, such as “Skills You Need as President of the United States or Skills You Need as a Stepmom” by Anna Pook, posted July 26, 2024. But the humor can be a light infusion into the work with a burst of self-critique about memes and free coffee, such as with the otherwise sensually informative travel and culture piece “The Aromatic Journey of an Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony” by Maggie Downs, July 18, 2024. It can be dark and ironic with contextual articles linked, such as “I Can’t Believe Such a Violent, Hateful Act Could Happen in the Violent, Hateful Era I’ve Created” by Joe Wellman, in the voice of Donald Trump, that has been trending since its publication on July 15, 2024, .

The forthcoming 75th issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern will be First Fictions, described by guest editor Eli Horowitz, as containing “fish guts, meteor hunters, military coups, ghost towns, and fake orphans.” That issue will be a good one to read after the one I’m going to share, a best of anthology stories chosen by guest editor Claire Boyle’s years editing issues 49 through 69. Presentation is half the fun of compiling each edition, it would seem, and one distinct way to show the chosen debut authors how much their stories are appreciated (accordion pockets, artist pairings, colorful box), or the established ones (Art Spiegelman lunch box with his booklet, “A Handful of Hallucinations: A Pareidolia Portfolio”, three packets of McSweeney’s Author Trading Cards, and three author quotation pencils.)

I’m sharing with you the first paragraphs of two stories in The McSweeney’s Anthology of Contemporary Literature, the current edition, and one full hint fiction. Almost every one of the fourteen stories has, since original publication, received some accolade: award, prize, selection. I can’t give you links, and too many photos will weigh down the code. I’m quoting from stories I hope you’ll have the chance to read through purchase, ones that I think give you a sense for essential story approaches. I’d already relished the details in T.C. Boyle’s “The Apartment,” appearing in The Best American Short Stories 2020, when I found it to be the second story in this issue. It is set in Paris, starting in 1965 with a man who wants to gamble with someone else’s life and home for his and his family’s benefit.

“Who was to know? She might have outlived most of her contemporaries, but she was so slight and small, almost a dwarf, really, her eyesight compromised and her hearing fading, and if she lived a year or two more, it would have been by the grace of God alone. Yes, she was lively enough, even at ninety, wobbling down the street on her bicycle like some atrophied schoolgirl and twice a week donning her épée mask and fencing with her shadow in the salon of her second-floor apartment overlooking rue Gambetta on the one side and rue Saint-Estève on the other, but his own mother had been lively, too, and she’d gone to bed on the night of her seventy-second birthday and never opened her eyes again. No, no: the odds were in his favor. Definitely. Definitely in his favor.”

Even if you don’t know quite what the protagonist is planning, you know that he’s wrong about the durability of his neighbor’s health, and that the odds are going to change. In fact he’s a lawyer and proposing to pay the rent and expenses of this elderly woman who has a large apartment with a view, and nobody to inherit it, so that it will become his when she dies—an eventuality he expects soon. But she has a bet of her own to make that gives her vitality. The story is character-driven with the suggestion of theme, and is detailed and somewhat poetic in prose style. The subject matter is domestic, one man’s noting all the ways his elderly neighbor seems ready to die. Boyle is good at dark comedy.

It is noted that “The Woman in the Closet” by Mimi Lok, from Issue 57, was a finalist for the 2020 National Magazine Award in Fiction.

“AUGUST

“In the space of a few hours, Granny Ng was made an official member of the village. She was given her own blue tent, just like the others had—over a hundred of them dotted the southeastern side of Hong Kong Park like giant petals from outer space. That’s how they’d once seemed to her, in the days when she still lived with her son and daughter-in-law. Back then, she would take her morning stroll around the pond with Maru, her daughter-in-law’s shih tzu. She’d occasionally look over to that strange blue sight, and whenever she saw people moving among the tents, she would turn away, embarrassed that she’d been staring. She had never given much thought to why people lived that way. Then one morning a middle-aged woman with a sleek black bob and a pink tracksuit stopped her at the turtle pond. The woman said she’d noticed her walking her dog there in the mornings, and asked if she was all right. She had her hand on Granny Ng’s arm and a concerned, hopeful look on her face. Granny Ng had to admit she was feeling hungry, having had only a few crackers for breakfast. The woman—she introduced herself as Kitty—seemed well-spoken and polite, so Granny Ng was surprised when, after answering a few questions about her home life, her new acquaintance led her toward the mass of blue tents. They stopped at an awning at the southern perimeter of the tents, where a short silver-bearded man was stirring a pot of soup on a camp stove.”

Although we do get a bit of Granny Ng’s character, it’s the scene of blue tents on the hill and what they mean, how they seem to absorb her that dominates this opening. Lok also uses just a little simile in the midst of her descriptive and straightforward sentences, and it is used to take us out of the scene to view it from a great distance. It is kind of a domestic story, and social commentary on the burden of the elderly.

Here is “Fear of Loose Tongue”, one of three stories by Lydia Davis, categorized perhaps by the term “hint fiction”, coined by Robert Swartwood. The dominant story element is language with just one voice pleading with Ron about something only they are aware of.

All three stories are about a relationship between characters—the lawyer and the 90-year old grand apartment dweller (you will be given the woman’s perspective); unwanted Granny Ng and the people who shelter her; and the fearful woman and her mean guy. In each, a problem is set forth immediately. While the authors of these particular stories are well published, the Fall issue delivers a box of ten stories by authors who haven’t published before.

Send any length story through the postal service to Rita Bullwinkel at McSweeney’s Quarterly, 849 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 with a brief cover letter, and a self-addressed, pre-stamped postcard for response. Do not worry about your resume. More details here. The pay is $400 for short stories. It takes a long while. The response is quicker for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and can be quicker if the humor is sent to the appropriate email address, even though it’s only one guy in a room receiving it—such as for timely material, list submissions, or “Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond.” Absolute maximum of 1,200 words, with preference for 1,000 or fewer. There will be payment of some sort. More guidelines here.

Based in Evanston, Illinois, RHINO is the annual print publication of the nonprofit literary organization, The Poetry Forum, Inc., founded in 1976, as the outlet for the members of the poetry collective, and since then has become a regionally and nationally recognized journal of poetry and flash fiction/nonfiction, currently edited by Virginia Bell, Jan Bottiglieri, and Angela Narciso Torres. They describe themselves as occupying “a niche somewhere between academia and the emerging poetry scene – devoted to creative work that tells stories, provokes thought, and pushes the boundaries in form and feeling – while connecting with our readers and audience.” They invite traditional and experimental work—indeed, the editors represent a range of poetics— “reflecting passion, originality, artistic conviction, and a love affair with language.” August 1-September 30 is the submission period for their Founder’s prize. We’re going to look at the winner and runners-up of the 2024 prize to get a sense of what kinds of poems the editors are drawn to, and to assess what qualities poems might need to win. General submissions are open March 1-June 30. These submission periods are contingent on the Submittable monthly caps. If it looks like the first month is closed, be ready to send at the beginning of the next one.

Runner-up Hudson Plumb gathers his vivid and quietly harrowing images, conversation snippets, and basic body retrieval actions of law enforcement to make his narrative poem, “The Son,” about a drowned 18-year-old and his father affecting, especially in couplets that seem torn in the middle. Plumb’s images can startle: “A sudden breeze picked up from the far side/blowing back the grasses/like the flames on a birthday cake.” It is physically observed and interpreted at the same time.

“Clockwork” by Joni Wallace, the other runner-up, is a slim cataloguing prose poem, closely observed in diction of the senses, the slow lengthening of time and light, sweltering skin, named stars, sizzling forest fire, and a 3-year-old looking ahead to her own independence—the inner workings of night.

The Founders Prize winner is Jessica Hincapie for “God of the gaps” which begins with a quote from Simone Weil, a curtailing of the one about enduring the discordance between imagination and fact. This is a mapping/cataloguing poem, beautifully written in a way that bridges the gap between a philosophical approach and one that is closely observed and retold; a poem of a relationship with different views, spread out and retracted and again across the page, the speaker’s desire for a kind of fact that brings God closer, an allowance for feeling to mean as much as knowledge.

The Founders’ Prize awards $500 to the winner, $100 each to the runners up. Submissions accepted August 1-September 30, $15 entry fee to accompany up to five poems. All entries are considered for publication in RHINO, and for the $500 Editors’ Prize. Cyrus Cassells will be the final judge. All the chosen poems are worthy of distinction, but the scope of the winning poem is broader. Rodney Gomez was the judge for the 2024 prize, choosing winners from the batch sent to him by the editors. Selecting poems is not formulaic, of course. So many elements contribute. But consider that the editors like all the poems they publish in each issue, but only one wins, and two come close. How are those poem different? Look at all your circulating poems. Which ones will you send to RHINO’s Founders’ Prize?

Thanks for reading. I hope you are inspired to write more by reading with me, and to send to The McSweeneys and RHINO.