The Missouri Review: Unlearning the Past Volume XVII Number 1 1994

Robb Forman Dew

Michael Byers

Maureen Seaton

The Curators of the University of Missouri

The Missouri Review (To the Edge) Volume XIX Number 1 1996

The writing in this issue is about as varied as it gets. We bring you the profoundly serious, the deliciously melancholy and the jauntily comic; seasoned writers and first-timers. You'll find work set in India, the Midwest, Hollywood, Canada and the islands of St. Kilda, in the Atlantic (had you heard of them? I hadn't)--to name a few of the places the writers go. Jobs and the workplace figure largely in many of these pieces--though family forms the bedrock of others. There's a story behind every story or essay or poem, and we sometimes hear them in the course of discussing logistical matters--edits, contracts, etc.--with the authors. G.K. Wuori wrote the enigmatic "Digby Fair" in a Canadian hotel room, entirely in longhand--the only story he's written that way. Anne Miano made films before turning to fiction, and Deena Linett published two novels before she tried her hand at poetry. So at least several of the works in this issue are departures for their authors. I think it's safe to say that others mark arrivals, for the authors, at points of greater depth or articulateness or narrative agility--the small milestones toward which serious writers strive. At the heart of the issue, though, are two essays that are of a kind: William Holtz's memoir of a father ill-equipped to be a provider, and Ron Johnson's of his resilient, hard-working mother. Holtz and Johnson have pulled off a noteworthy feat in writing interestingly and significantly about their respective parents. Callous as it sounds to say so, most of the "I remember Mama (Daddy)" essays that I see among our submissions are like snapshots of one's kids: somewhat tedious and unfocused. What Holtz and Johnson give us are, on the one hand vital portraits, drawn with sympathy and precision; (I'm tempted to say "characters," so fully do they come alive on the page). Holtz's essay is additionally memorable because it depicts, albeit with some humor, the impact of America's most severe economic tragedy. The Depression shattered careers, wrenched families, changed lives, as we can't help but recall when we read the author's account of how his family struggled through its aftermath. Johnson's essay, from his book in progress about laboring people, describes the perennial hardship of blue-collar workers. Yet it was through such work, hoeing mint, that Johnson's mother, until then a housewife, came into her own and became a real person to her husband and children. Supporting her family gave her confidence and an identity beyond that of wife and mother (even earned her the right to make off-color jokes). In the end, one of the larger points to be gleaned from Johnson's essay is that in our capitalist society, legitimacy--humanness, in effect--is granted mainly to those individuals, whether men or women, who draw paychecks. The memoir--nonfiction in general--is hot these days, and that trend is reflected in the number of writing programs and workshops and institutes that are adding "creative nonfiction" to their curricula. In part this may be the result of the market being so saturated with fiction. But also it seems to reflect the genuine (not lip-service) interest many readers have now in learning about experiences that are different from their own. Is it linked to another trend we've been noticing--the increased number of good fiction writers who are working in the first person? Now, it's a commonplace that, in fiction, especially, the first-person is the mark of a beginner. At its worst, "I" can become simply a mushy, ill-defined vehicle for the author's confessions. But we can all rattle off numerous exceptions without any trouble: Dickens, Twain, Charlotte Bront, Mary Shelley; more recently Salinger and Penn Warren; more recently still Louise Erdrich, Fay Weldon, Raymond Carver, Robert Olen Butler, Margaret Atwood. Ventriloquists all, whose vivid first-person creations prove that in skilled hands, "I" has an authority and authenticity that are hard to equal: how can we doubt the (ostensibly) literal voice of experience? In this issue we present, unapologetically, a host of first-person speakers, from Anthony Burke Lee's naively philosophical ex-con to Jamie Callan's neurotic D-girl to the "silent" letter-writers of Deena Linnet's epistolary poems.

The Missouri Review

The Found Text feature in this issue is a never-before-published, full-length play by Tennessee Williams, WILL MR. MERRIWETHER RETURN FROM MEMPHIS? It seems especially appropriate for THE MISSOURI REVIEW to be publishing a Williams play, since, while Williams was born in Mississippi, he was raised partly in Missouri and served much of his literary apprenticeship here. He even came to the University of Missouri in the early '30s--and stayed long enough to develop a solid dislike for journalism (it didn't let him write enough) and to fail ROTC not one but three times. Produced once but never published, WILL MR. MERRIWETHER RETURN FROM MEMPHIS? is more artful than forceful; yet it has the appeal of being pure Williams and the added interest, for those of us at THE MISSOURI REVIEW, of local allusions. Lights above the thrust stage spell out "Tiger Town," a seedy district where one of the minor characters hangs out. And in Act I, Scene V, there's a mention of the Hinkson Creek (Williams calls it Hinksons), which winds through Columbia, and for which a street is also named. Williams' first major success would not come until 1944, with THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Nostalgic and undisguisedly autobiographical, it is the play, along with A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, for which Williams is best known. But these two masterpieces represent only a tiny fraction of the author's work. In a career that spanned almost forty years, Williams wrote scores of plays and published numerous nondramatic works: short stories; two poetry collections; two novellas; a novel and, finally, in 1975, his memoirs. His output was prodigious. Still, it's his plays that have really counted. Of the three playwrights who did the most to advance American drama, Arthur Miller was the moralist; Eugene O'Neill the metaphysician; and Williams was the dramatist of passions, expanding the emotional range of the theatre in plays as tender as THE GLASS MENAGERIE, as steamy as STREETCAR and as violently gothic as SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH.

The Missouri Review The Search After Happiness

Morgan, Speer (Editor)

<p>We are happy to present in this issue the winners of the 7TH annual Editor's Prize, including the first winner of the Larry Levis Prize in Poetry. Larry, a co-founder of THE MISSOURI REVIEW, was beloved by many students and friends who have cooperated generously to make the Levis Prize possible. Michael Pettit's winning selection of poems, as it happens, shares with much of Larry's an atmospheric melancholy, a subtle sense of humor, and a capacity for word intoxication. </p>
<p>This year's Editor's Prize winner in fiction, Alice Fulton, is also primarily known as a poet. Fulton's winning "Happy Dust" is a brilliant, historically authentic portrait of an Irish immigrant in New York in the early twentieth century, a sickly, hard-working young woman with a rock-solid character and a scintillating view of the world. Pregnant with her fifth child, faced with dangers both obvious and unobvious, she may or may not make it through this birthing. It's an old-fashioned story in some ways, full of memorable characters, including a friend who is poisoning herself for beauty, a nun who suffers for Christ, and a kindly but misguided doctor who dispenses the latest powerful painkiller (heroin powder) to alleviate the pregnant woman's symptoms.</p>

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Books by The Curators of the University of Missouri

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the The Curators of the University of Missouri publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Missouri Review: Unlearning the Past Volume XVII Number 1 1994

The Missouri Review (To the Edge) Volume XIX Number 1 1996

The Missouri Review

The Missouri Review

The Missouri Review The Search After Happiness

The Missouri Review