Posted by Sam Bramlett

Is a man with no senses alive? He is in the same way that people know what’s going on in each other’s heads. Fiction isn’t limited to books or anything else in the sphere of entertainment. “I think, therefore I am,” does not mean “you think, therefore you are,” but what I think can exist between us, whatever we may be.

Humans are physical things, their emotions created by the chemicals and electricity whirring through little grey wrinkles. Within the mass of gray wrinkles in our skulls however is a seemingly infinite capacity to generate the nonexistent.

Why do you think a God would create a world? Entertainment. Drama, like opening the pages of a conscious novel and watching the people inside collide with each other. As Vonnegut said in Breakfast of Champions, “I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of nothing better to do, we became fans of collisions.”

This may seem a bit much for a simple explanation as to why Fiction is valuable to me, but the world itself is a remarkable work of fiction. My own life is the greatest story I’ve ever known, all other stories are simple distractions from the main body of work that exists inside my head. Perhaps my parents should have kept me from playing so many videogames, since now I so vividly understand that someone else could very well be playing the game as me. I have to hope my life would be a good videogame. Would there be enough backstory and characterization? enough drama and struggle to form the basis of a compelling plot? I would like to think so, but who can be sure. There’s no answer to something like that. My life could be as simple and fictitious as the book I’m going to read before I go to bed. It doesn’t matter; what does matter is that I see the story through. That’s how I rationalize it anyway.

Fiction has depth. It has emotional impact. Through the careful setup of characters and events it creates enough friction between relations that new actions or developments create a sense of wonder or despair. Revelations become biblical or humorous, somber or jubilant. It hinges on what’s already been said, allowing the connection to have an impact on whatever audience.

Fiction is a tease. Nothing is more unenticing than a book that always gives you what you want. The good stuff isn’t what’s easy, and the expected is never the answer. This is a spoiler if you’ve never read Game of Thrones, but a prime example is the beheading of Ned Stark. George R. R. Martin has since made such a habit of brutally murdering main characters that it’s become expected, but the thrill of not knowing whether your favorite character will die or not is what keeps you reading. Situations need weight. It must be possible for the hero to fail. Should the hero always win, I will eventually cease to read.

Fiction must not act as a mirror. If whatever is read does nothing but confirm the preconceived notions one has, it is worth next to nothing. Unless of course you enjoy talking to yourself, and only yourself. Fiction opens minds to new experiences and possibilities; it challenges your view of the world and forces you to see yourself in a new light. An example of this is Dr.Manhattan’s monologue from Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, “But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget… I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.”

These elements I find valuable in fiction, though not always. There are always exceptions when it comes to fiction. Rules can never contain the infinity of what does or does not exist in the mind.

[Being not quite a re-run, but a revisiting of a persistent question.]

As the population of writers, editors and literary journals increases faster the number of Kardashian spin-offs, it never seems profitless to address the question many new or just frustrated writers ask me: How can you possibly read that many stories and make wise choices? The honest answer requires me to say something they don’t want to hear, even though the existence of terms like “over the transom” and “slush pile” should prepare us all for the bad news.

Sidebar: I should say that I rarely solicit work, unless I’m working on a special issue and don’t have the patience or optimism to believe it will take shape naturally and on my publication schedule. Certainly over 90% of the poems, stories, flash fictions and essays in Shenandoah are unsolicited, and more than 50% are by writers we have not previously published, which means that a large proportion of the fiction appearing on our site arrives as a surprise and is discovered by an intern or the editor in the midst of a Ms.-reading session. In other genres, it’s the editor alone who peruses the manuscripts. But fiction is the mode of most of the words that come our way across the dark mysteries of the digital world.

Now to the raw answer to that question. Most stories we receive are not read from beginning to end. Right now I have five undergraduate interns, all new to the job this fall, no managing editor or professional assistant fiction editor to lend a pair of seasoned eyes. I’m the first reader for about 60% of the stories, and the students deal with the rest, though I will examine any story that receives high recommendation from them, as well. I try to assign two students to each of the stories designated for intern examination, but sometimes the volume of incoming prevents that. If a story does not receive a positive review from the student(s) it has been assigned to, it is declined with regrets.

I know this is pretty dry and procedural, but for the most part, people who ask this question about reading mss. are not asking for entertainment or diversion, so I’m taking my lead from the directness and urgency of their question.

How do I prepare the interns to assist me? We discuss in class stories already published in Shenandoah and some previously submitted but declined. As we do so, we compile a pair of lists – what appeals to us or excites in stories, what displeases us or irks us. No two classes arrive at the same lists, but I make certain each class deals with matters of freshness in style and plot, conciseness, characters we have strong feelings about, concepts behind the plot, pace, conflict, precision, consequentiality. This semester’s class was quick to say that when the conventions of a sub-genre like romance or horror outweigh the originality and fundamental seriousness (even in a humorous or witty narrative), we are not drawn to the piece. I always insist that I want to see a story not only written but wrought, so we do some phrase-by-phrase analysis, substituting words, asking what’s essential, what’s subordinate and what’s downright ornamental.

After we’ve had this discussion, each intern is assigned a group of stories on our Submittable page, and each has the opportunity to record comments and vote in favor or against. If I find divided opinion, I bring the story before the entire class, and we discuss it. I’ve more than once been persuaded to accept a story I had limited enthusiasm for to begin with, and I’ve also been put off a story I had previously favored.

We’re not going to publish more than 10-12 full-length stories a year, not more than a dozen flash fictions, so we have to sift scrupulously and grind fine, but I admit that there’s a serendipitous element that can’t be dismissed. It’s often a question of timing. Say we find a fine story concerning a bickering couple who find an injured owl, and trying to save it provides a healing insight. If we’ve just published a story with a prominent bird or a couple who are brought together through finding someone or something damaged, that story’s chances are not good.

Two principles hold me on a steady course throughout all our deliberations. The first is triage. Like emergency room doctors, I want us to quickly sort out the unsalvagable stories, the engaging but flawed ones and the truly exciting one. It’s that third category we need to concentrate on, and they go into a basket with a two hundred year old etching of a trout above it. The works that land there are said to be “under the fish,” and I’ll revisit that reservoir of writing. Some pieces will come to seem indispensable, others like part of a catch and release program. I spend a lot of time with the contents of that basket and do the best I can.

But doesn’t that take forever and a half? It could, but there’s a second principle in operation. About the abundance of written words begging for our attention, Flannery O’Connor said that she could give a poem a couple of lines, a story a few paragraphs and a novel a few pages, but that she would stop reading when she felt she could do so without experiencing a sense of loss. The already-too-familiar, clichés of style, character, situation, formulas and reiterations – even if lifted from famous writers and classics – are likely to make me feel that quitting will not be followed with regret. O’Connor went on to say that she didn’t have very much time. Her reason was the lupus that was killing her, my reasons are the steadily-multiplying number of submissions, deadlines and the hundred other tasks that the editor of Shenandoah gets to practice.

Do these practices and precautions allow me to sleep at night?  Sometimes.  Do I wish we had other options at our disposal?  Certainly.  But we soldier on, try to be good stewards of the work entrusted to Shenandoah and wish all our would-be contributors good luck in proportion to their careful and original writing.

by Chuck Dodge

The famous final sentences of A River Runs Through It form for me what is one of the most memorable passages in American literature. And truly, they deserve appreciation beyond the dreams of aspiring and infatuated fly fishermen.

“Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.”

(Norman Maclean)

Have better words been chosen? I think Maclean writes in such a way that we are bombarded by truth, wonder, scenery, and depth both literary and tangible in one fell swoop. And this is what makes each phrase so memorable or each thought so valuable that easily distracted people like me find it tough to forget the words as we go about our daily lives.

Over the past summer I was haunted by the words (yes, like Maclean by waters) in the sense that they continued to flow through my head. Especially, that is, when I fished in the Rocky Mountains during the closing weeks of August. At one point I felt moved to hang the words above my bed, but eventually thought better of it to avoid appearing obsessed. Needless to say, I thought about them often and am lucky now with a space to discuss my findings.

To someone who has never stood in a cold Western river, I recommend this passage as the closest possible understanding of the phenomenon that a river is. For the rest of us, or at least for me, it describes the river in a way that makes the inexplicable all but tangible. It is one of those rare occasions when you ask someone how he would describe something like the color orange to a blind man and impossibly they manage to illustrate the concept to a pixel.

Maclean makes the river sacred in the passage, and that is exactly how it feels. The rocks beneath the surface are ancient. Old as time and shaped by the flow of endless water, they are historians through and through. Beneath them, Maclean says there are words, which I interpret to mean the stories of all time. Everything that has occurred in the presence of such stones is in some way transcribed to their memory. “And some of the words are theirs,” Maclean writes, likely as a reference to his brother and father, both passed away. Some of the history, in other words, belongs to the people in our lives. Walking through a river and sensing the various rock shapes press into the soles of your feet feels in some way profound, and having read the novella I finally understand why. Walking on the rocks is to walk through one of the world’s oldest museums, and maybe its greatest. Each step that you take, to extend the idea, is a step that will make its mark on history, imprinting itself on the given rocks forever.

There is the river, then, and there is everything else. Maclean writes, “all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.” He jams these items together with “and’s” which somehow unify them despite their obvious dissimilarity. In hindsight I always felt this way about the river, but subconsciously and not in a way that I claim I could describe. It takes on such a meaning given Maclean’s observations that in its presence, your thoughts, feelings and everything around you are subjugated into one object. It is you and the river. That isn’t to say that your life holds less weight. Not at all. Instead it illustrates the reverence that we have for the river, turning itself into a point of undivided attention. In some moments, our only conscious capacity is to marvel.

Norman Maclean was both a writer and a fisherman. As an interesting side note, I went to thinking about Maclean, and whether I could draw a reasonable correlation between writing and fly fishing: two hobbies that I enjoy as well.

First, I think, a thoughtful understanding of rivers such as Maclean’s makes fly fishing an awe-inspiring activity. The best way to understand anything, of course, is to be able to verbalize it in a way that perfectly strikes the way you truly feel about it. Good writers, then (or those who think they are), are good at understanding. And because understanding generates appreciation, it makes sense that writers can experience a unique connection to fishing.

But there are other connections as well, rhythm among them. The four-count rhythm of a fly cast is a motif that occurs throughout the novella. It even displays variations, as Maclean’s brother is said to create his own tempo. Good rod tempo is essential to successful fly fishing, especially as you tie more flies onto the line. A poor stroke can twist the tippet, the strand attached to the dry fly, into a hopeless mass of knots. Rhythm also lies at the core of writing, manifesting itself in everything from paragraph length and arrangement down to sentence structure and word flow. Every writer can develop their own tempo, so long as their message remains untangled. And the more ambitious a piece of writing is, the more critical it is that the writer executes an easily accessible form, just as the rod tempo becomes paramount when you have more than one fly on the line.

Good writing also hooks the reader by the gill. In fly-fishing, better-disguised or more obnoxious-colored flies tempt the most bites. I’m going to leave the truth of that analogy as a subject for consideration.