A Giant Bottle, Copper Nickel, and the War on Contemporary Literature

My daughter—the older one—got a new water bottle a couple of weeks ago. She chose the largest one she could get, an enormous, metal thing that doesn’t fit into the side pockets on her backpack. But she stuffs the water bottle in the side pocket of her backpack anyway, and so of course, every morning, as she’s pacing around the house, waiting to go to the bus stop, with her coat on and her backpack on, the water bottle falls out of the pocket and hits the floor. And when it does it makes the loudest noise I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s like someone came in and dropped an artillery shell on the floor. Or it’s like at the end of The Poseidon Adventure, when the survivors of the shipwreck are banging against the hull of the Poseidon, to signal to the people outside that they’re in there. Only it’s worse than that.

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Yesterday I got my contributor copies of the new issue of Copper Nickel, and they look great.

I have an essay in the new issue. Called “Varieties of Short Fiction,” it’s about an artificial but sometimes quite helpful way I have of dividing up short stories, into stories that are about characters, and stories that are about situations.

If you want to know more, you have to get a copy and read the essay there. Which I encourage you to do.

Also: I am now a contributing editor at Copper Nickel.

I didn’t just decide that right now; it’s a true reality. And an honor.

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I heard the news that the magazine Conjunctions has lost its institutional support from Bard College.

This is absolutely terrible.

Despite how Conjunctions stubbornly refused to publish any of the great stuff I sent them over the years, I have been a faithful reader and admirer of the issues they’ve put out since I started reading them. There’s really no other magazine quite like it, but it sounds like there won’t even be that one anymore.

This has been happening a lot, magazines getting scraped off from the colleges they’ve called home for years and years. Whenever the news comes in, it’s like a death knell for a writer like me.

The problem isn’t only that our universities have had their funding cut by neoliberal state legislatures all across the country. Our universities are being run by pirates, former CEOs who see not-yet-extracted resources everywhere they look. A magazine’s masthead, to them, is just a list of people they can fire, so they can free up some more funds to hand out to their friends who own consultancy groups. They’re the sort of people who would have done wonderfully as directors of colonial mining operations.

The financiers are winning this war. Our venues for literature are some of the latest casualties.