Today we talk to Gary Percesepe, Associate Editor of the wonderful Mississippi Review about the spirituality of writing, Obama’s mom jeans, and the stories that give us gut reactions.
1. What is it like serving as an editor for such a venerable publication as the Mississippi Review? Is your magazine’s reputation ever intimidating as an editor? Corollary: Do you spell out Mississippi the way most people learned in grade school, by sounding out the letters slowly?
When you talk about the Mississippi Review there are two words to remember: Frederick Barthelme, the Executive Editor. He is the finest lit mag editor I have ever known, and what little I know about editing and writing I learned from him (and Nolan Miller at the Antioch Review). It’s true that the Mississippi Review has a sterling reputation, and that’s a reflection of Barthelme’s vision, his aesthetic, his artfulness and sly humor and unfailing sense of style and verve. He’s all heart. I’d like to say that all of my fellow editors and staff work in his shadow but he throws no shadow. Barthelme basically invented the online literary journal, way early on the web, and he has created a program where the online and print versions are symbiotic. From the start, MR online offered original stories and poems and essays, and didn’t just use the Web site as a teaser ad for the print magazine. This has turned out to be the right idea. Also, Rick never thought of online and print magazines as different kinds of things, just magazines in different packages. I realize that writers aspire to appear in the print issue, and that’s understandable, but the irony is that the MR online version gets read by far more people—it’s not even close. We get something on the order of a four hundred thousand visits a year, one and a half million hits; we “serve” nine hundred thousand files. That’s putting more writing into more hands than we ever could with the print version. It’s a pretty common thing for a young writer to get contacted by a New York literary agent after appearing in either version of the magazine—it just happened the other day, again.
Lo, these many years later, my fingers still occasionally err when tapping out Mississippi, even though I lived for a time on the river, in Saint Louis. Yeah, the childhood song helps, when I get stuck. Like “30 Days Hath September, April June and November””â€I love that. I love it when I get to say “hath” in public.
2. What are you looking for as you consider submissions to the Mississippi Review? What is the biggest flaw you find in submissions?
When we put out the call for stories for the Summer 2007 fiction issue, here’s what I wrote:
“What are we looking for? Characters we can care about. Some weather, maybe. Dialogue that’s spot on and never tiresome. Stories that engage our senses and make us feel things, maybe break our hearts.”
“As always when we read, we seek the problematic, the troublesome, the curious, the ill-fitting, the remarkable and the mundane, work that stays with us after we read it, work that challenges our tastes and imaginations, our spirits. We thank you for your help in sending this work our way.”Â
As for the biggest flaw, well, for me it is writers not able to get to the point in the first paragraph. I mean, set it up. The first paragraph is not too soon. I’ve got to be in love by page one, or at least feel flirted with, or it’s not going to work out. I’ve been greatly helped (both as a writer and an editor) by something Barthleme wrote a while back called “39 Steps.” I wouldn’t add a word to this classic advice. You can read it here.
3. How do you pronounce your last name? I like it. It reminds me of precipice and parapet, both good words.
Hey, Roxane, you’re the one with the great name! I always want to sing that name. (ed. Thanks. I like my name, and I used to hate the song, but now I like it too. There’s a lot to love about a song about a woman of the night.)
I do like my name. Percesepe is Italian. We are a small clan, from the Abruzzi region north of Rome in Italia, and scattered in New York, California, Florida, and me here in Ohio. What’s odd is that I am the only one called by this name, “Gary John Percesepe,” in the entire universe. When I was a kid, knowing this, it made me feel simultaneously special and lonely.
The Anglo version is pronounced purr-seh-sep-pe. If you are a paisan you may pronounce it pair-che-sep (roll the r).
I like both those words too, precipice, parapet. I have a memoir in progress; the working title is “Somewhere to Fall From,” as in precipice, parapet.
4. Other than PANK, what is your favorite magazine?
Too numerous to mention.
5. You’re an ordained minister. Do you currently lead a ministry? What is that work like?
I serve a church in the Protestant orbit known as the UCC. We keep the protest in Protestant, or what theologian Paul Tillich called “the spirit of Protestantism.” We sometimes joke that UCC stands for “Unitarians Considering Christ,” but it’s really the United Church of Christ. You can check us out at www.ucc.org We gave you Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama last year. They’re both ours, along with about 1.2 million other folk. Trinity UCC in Chicago, where all this drama played out, is one of our larger churches, a “destination church” where you’d receive a warm welcome and extravagant hospitality. That’s true of most of our churches, including the one that I serve in Springfield, Ohio. I’m very proud of the UCC. We are a denomination of “firsts” (going back in New England to the Pilgrims), as in first to ordain women (back in the 1800s), first to ordain LGBT folk, first to marry LGBT folk. Last year in the wake of the Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race, “Toward a More Perfect Union,” we initiated a “sacred conversation on race in America,” which now seems very timely, considering the latest dustup with Skip Gates in Cambridge, and the President’s perceptive comments in his press conference, which will now release more kookiness among the kooky, but will also afford an opportunity for engaging structural and systemic racism, which—along with the genocide of Native peoples– is America’s original sin.
The work is exhilarating and heartbreaking. One of my congregants died today, a woman named Helen who was 101 years old. I visited her in the hospital on Sunday and she was in terrible pain. She had fallen, and had broken her shoulder, her arm and her wrist. I held her hand and prayed with her, and she managed a smile afterwards and told me that she was losing the will to go on. She was very honest about it. I didn’t know what to say to that, so I took my hand and placed it lightly on her forehead and made the sign of the cross on her forehead. I could feel her slipping away, transitioning, moving on. She was almost 102 years old but she was traveling faster than me. A lot of this work is learning to let go. And of course, there is the grinding poverty in neighborhoods like mine, and the ongoing struggle for justice and peace, speaking truth to power and walking alongside the powerless. Preaching on Sunday mornings is a kind of performance art. It means, if I do nothing else, that I write 1,500 words a week.
6. Does your spirituality influence your writing and editorial work? How?
Yes.
Every story or poem is a kind of prayer. Every act of reading is a kind of listening to prayers offered.
7. The Mississippi Review and PANK meet at a bar, have drinks, hit it off. Do they a. go to a sleazy motel and have a one night stand or b. make out in the bar but leave it at that or c. behave chastely, exchange phone numbers, start dating, and live happily ever after? Show your math.
We don’t have enough money for the motel.
8. As someone who is committed to activism, what role does creative writing play in creating and sustaining change?
The Catholic activist Dorothy Day said that our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system, by which she meant an oppressive social structure of domination that locks in inequalities and injustices and keeps people feeling powerless to change things. I firmly believe that there are entrenched “systems of domination” in the world—economic, political, cultural, media, religious—and the task of art, or at least, one of the tasks of art, is to engage with those systems. Not necessarily directly. In fact, direct engagement, a la the Sartre program, is probably a mistake, as it too becomes oppressive. But I think what happens is that artists work on the slant side of things– always indirectly, always creatively, to poke fun, raise questions, crack jokes, sing counterpoint to, open fissures, and reveal the truth about the Empire, which is that the emperor, now as before, has no clothes. The Jesus that most interests me is the radical Jesus, a Jewish Mediterranean peasant, probably illiterate, who with sly peasant humor (“It is easier for a camel to go through a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”Â) deconstructed the Domination System of his day. I think that Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple was the first interactive performance art, and certainly the first recorded act of civil disobedience. What I’m saying here is not new–art has always empowered people to resist systems that they find oppressive, and Beauty is the truest form of protest.
9. The Mississippi Review no longer accepts unsolicited work for print issues. How do you compile print issues now?
For the last print fiction issue that I edited (the Summer 2007 issue you mentioned) we solicited work using MR online, and ran stories there as well as in the print issue, alongside stories that I had solicited from writers that I admired, like Ann Beattie, John Barth, Rick Moody, Mary Grimm, John Holman, and others. I was delighted at the wonderful work that came in unsolicited, including terrific stories from Kim Chinquee, Jeff Landon, Mary Miller, and others.
This year we’re running two contests, the MR Prize is a fiction and poetry contest and the MR Poetry Series Book Contest is a poetry book contest.
We are discussing what we will be doing next year. Perhaps the same thing, perhaps one contest and one by invitation only issue.
10. In your introduction to the Summer 2007 Fiction Issue, you talked about having a gut reaction to a story in the slush pile. What’s the last story you read that gave you that gut reaction?
A few come to mind.
Shot Girls by Kim Chinqee
Even the Interstate is Pretty by Mary Miller
Lifelike Baby Girls by Jeff Landon
All three of those stories came in cold, not “agented” but sent in response to a call for stories that we posted online. More recently, it happened with stories by Carrie Spell and Andy Plattner, featured in the current MR online issue.
11. In a couple of places, I’ve read about how you learned to read and consider submissions. How has your approach evolved over the years?
Nolan Miller taught me a lot when I worked as a fiction editor at the Antioch Review years ago. Nolan had been a brilliant novelist—he had been tagged as the “next Hemingway” as a young man– and later he was a terrific teacher at Antioch. The poet Mark Strand and “Twilight Zone” creator & writer Rod Serling were among his many students. Nolan gave me a tutorial in how to read submissions, and how to be a fiction editor. We used the slush as our raw material. I have written about it here.
As to how my approach has evolved over the years, well, I’m not sure it has. I’ve certainly adapted it, as I read much more stuff online now, and submissions are sent to us electronically. If anything, I find that I have less patience with writing that isn’t good. I suppose my impatience has grown in response to the sheer volume of submissions, which can be overwhelming. In the current MR online fiction issue my colleagues and I devised a scheme whereby we placed submissions into two categories: no and maybe. Later, we went through the maybes, adding a “probably” category for the stories that we eventually published.
12. Is mentoring within the writing and editing community a dying practice? How can we encourage more mentorship between experienced writers and editors and those who are up and coming?
At the Mississippi Review we’ve revived an old practice where established writers “introduce” younger or “emerging” writers. We did this in the Summer 2007 Fiction issue that I have mentioned. I asked Ann Beattie and T.C. Boyle, among others, to give me a name of one of their most promising students. This is how I met Hannah Pittard , one of Ann’s students, whose work I admire. We did this again in the “Lit Mag at 100″ print issue that I did with Travis Kurowski. In that issue, we did an “Editor’s Roundtable” with a fascinating group of editors from McSweeneys, Antioch Review, Missouri Review, N + 1, Hobart, New York Quarterly, and New Ohio Review, asking them to recommend a young or emerging writer whose work they particularly admired, and we published a story or poem from each. As I recall, I asked Rick Moody to contribute someone as well.
I’m quite fond of a website called Fictionaut where writers and editors can invite promising writers to submit their work. Fictionaut is the creation of another MR associate editor, Jurgen Fauth. I like the way James Robison (a Fictionaut contributor) describes the site: “A community of trusted and truthful writers who will encourage, or discourage, one’s efforts. Such a place is a luxury. A graduate’s graduate writing program which, if found, is a site to be treasured, no less.” Robison goes on to say, “Writing into a void is miserable, like telling jokes to a wall. Fictionaut provides a round-the-clock, faithfully attentive audience. Bless its founders.” Amen.
As Jurgen says, Fictionaut brings the social web to literary fiction, connecting readers and writers through a community network that doubles as self ¬selecting magazine highlighting the most exciting short stories, poetry, flash fiction, and novel excerpts.
Fictionaut is still in a private, beta testing phase, but you can request an invitation here.
(ed. Fictionaut is indeed a wonderful, wonderful place. We have one invite if you’re interested in joining. Let us know in the comments.)
13. Obama’s mom jeans. National crisis or irrelevant?
Irrelevant. The crisis is that we’ve got fifty million people without health insurance, two wars a goin’ and foreclosures all over the land. Children in Haiti are so hungry they are eating dirt. California and Ohio are broke, just to name a few states where draconian budget cuts will hurt the most vulnerable among us. We got idiot TV news people and only one Jon Stewart to go around, debunking. Though if the Prez had asked me I would have hooked him up with some vintage black Girbaud jeans with a beeper pocket, and black high top Chuck Taylors. (Aside: I just got back from seeing “Funny People” where Leslie Mann wears the ultimate mom jeans.)
14. What’s your favorite TV show?
The Yankees on YES (I am from the Bronx). My sole concession to Empire.
15. What question(s) should I have asked?
Question: How’s your novel in progress. What’s it called?
Answer: “Leaving Telluride.” Don’t ask. (ed. We look forward to reading it!)
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