Making Sense

(in a Weird World)

I write fiction and my stories make sense. I challenge myself with POV, tense, and story structure. But I am not breaking the boundaries of storytelling. No one would call my pieces “Meta.” My aim is to tell interesting stories about relatable characters. Yet, the published stories that make it into the literary magazines leave me, at best, puzzled, and at worst, so confused that I feel cheated.  It’s the equivalent of flying to Catalonia after waiting a year for a dinner reservation at an acclaimed restaurant. There you sup on foams and vapors that hint at a nourishing and satisfying meal. Aromas and sounds and sensations that harken back to foods you like and that you could have eaten right down the block any day during the past year.

Personally, I like an ordinary meal prepared perfectly. A well-seasoned grilled salmon, with buttery mashed potatoes and a bright side of broccoli-rabe is a delightful meal that I want to spend time with and enjoy. These are the kind of stories I try to write, and, I believe, that readers want to read. When I tune into reader groups on the socials, I don’t hear readers requesting outlandish, boundary-pushing stories.

Yet publishers seem to want only the experimental foams. Is it because, no matter how tender or well-seasoned, grilled salmon is just grilled salmon? That reviewers at literary journals are bored? That editors at publishing houses are obsessively seeking the next new thing?

I find it so unsatisfying to read the chosen pieces. I recently tried (and failed) to slog through a short story where the author had removed all the verbs! With enough verbless description, I could sense the mood, almost taste the food, but I still was left with a hollow, empty feeling. Another short story, in a highly-regarded literary journal, was a present-tense story set 25-years in the past, about a strange and unrelatable trio in Florida. The story's main theme was not re-addressed at the end. A secondary theme was not introduced at the beginning. Nothing in the portrayed lives was functional or hopeful. The ending fizzled leaving only the dried scum of foam on the plate.

If these kinds of stories appeared interspersed among smart historical fiction, romantic epistolary stories, or powerful bildungsroman, I would be more curious about the output of experimental writers. I’ve read and enjoyed both Leonora Carrington and Denis Johnson. I’m not anti-weird. But I find little-to-no commitment to excellent writing, without an emphasis on the strange—no interest in a simple, straight-forward, believable story.

Reviewing submission guidelines, literary magazines are asking for things like:  “risks for the sake of artistic expression,” “surreal/quirky and evocative writing,” “hybrid forms,” “the unexpected,” “WTF is genre,” “the sublimely strange,” “get weird, vulnerable,” “those not-yet-clearly-formulated ideas,” “art that challenges and confronts,” “anything strange, surreal or experimental,” “art from the edge,” “speculative universes that are futuristic and fantastic,” “all kinds of punk,” “the grotesqueries of the body,” “thought-provoking and absurd,” and “your most surprising!”

These editors, arbiters of what is good, with their appetite for the bizarre are effectively putting forth this boundary-pushing literature as “the best.”

The literary journal seeking well-paced stories about believable and relatable characters set in vivid and well-researched settings are growing scarcer. I miss stories that speak to the times in which we live, stories of characters making choices, coping with challenges. What about stories that simply follow an action-packed plot or make us feel something? Too mundane? I’m trying to push my own boundaries, to write more weirdly, experiment with form and to break craft rules. Maybe I’ll land on something great; maybe not.

What is your story preference? Stories that could be about someone or something that might actually exist? Or stories that feel surreal, impossible, bizarre and boundary-pushing?