Remember that person you knew in high school? The good-looking, smart and likable one? Years later you're amazed to find out he or she never partnered up with anyone.  The Facebook profile lists "relationships" as an interest among all the time-consuming hobbies and the endless lonely travel pictures and comments from married friends.  But that person seemed to have it all going for him?  What happened?

Now imagine that instead of a person, it's something you've written.  I have this short story that is the story (in my mind at least) all my other stories want to be.  I've sent it out for years, and each time it comes back: rejected to be sure, but always with a nicer note than the other rejected stories get.  My favorite was "Smart, warm, funny...not for us."

And as I dust this story off to send out yet again, I'm wondering if, as with some people, there's just something a little off-putting about it.  Maybe it's too eager to please, maybe it tries too hard.  Maybe its smile is a little forced.

"Thanks for a great read," went another rejection.  "Very funny piece."  This story is better than the ones that have found publication, in my mind.  What's the matter with you people?  They seem to wonder too.  The nice notes have a distinct whiff of the old "It's not you, it's me."  I'm starting to feel like one of those aging parents telling an adult child, "If they can't see what's beautiful about you, they don't deserve you!"

So soldier on, brave little story.  Someday love will find you!

There's a well known problem with making movies about a writers.  All sorts of interesting things may have happened in a writer's life, but the essential part of what makes him or her interesting--the writing--is an excruciating bore to watch.  You just can't make it visually engaging, no matter where you put the camera, no matter what meaningful utterances the writer lets slip.  You end up with something along the lines of the above video.  Worse still is the Inspiration Cheat: Artillery shells give soldier Cole Porter (as played by Cary Grant) the idea for the driving rhythm of "NIght and Day;" W.S. Gilbert staring profoundly at a samurai sword as he conceives of The Mikado in the otherwise wonderful Topsy Turvy.  I don't think the viewer has to be a writer to cringe at these moments with the certain knowledge that it just doesn't work that way.

But I'm increasingly realizing this problem isn't limited to writers in movies.  These days, it's traces are all over the pages of writers on Facebook, their Twitter streams, and, yes, especially their blogs.  Writers have more ways to keep their names in people's minds.  To "build the brand," if you will.(Please don't.)  It's easy to mistake what the immediacy of these tools offers for something that will further illuminate work we admire.  Instead, what you get is a hint of the author's taste in online articles, maybe her politics or his taste in music.  if you're lucky, you might discover that that writer you hold in such high esteem likes that silly cat video that's been going around your office as much as you do.  At worst, you suffer through excessive self-promotion and/or self-mythologizing.  The greatest compliment I can pay to nearly all the writers whose online presence I follow is that I enjoy their books a lot more than the digital breadcrumb trail left by their tweets, entries, and status updates.


Oh yeah, but don't let that stop you from reading this blog--it's friggin' fantastic.

So maybe the short story is dead, or maybe it's the hottest thing this season.  But here's a writer who gets the most out of the form and probably doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about the market and his platform.

Jones spent 10 years creating nearly all of his Pulitzer-winning, antebellum-era novel, "The Known World," in his head, until he finally set it all down on paper in a three-month rush in 2001 after being laid off from his job at a tax publication. "The Waiting Room" is still locked up tight in his mind, though he dictates the opening and closing three times in a row, down to the dashes and commas, without so much as blinking.

Here in Washington, dumping on the beleaguered Washington Post seems to be a favorite pastime.  But this profile of Edward Jones is a rare convergence of a subject worthy of profiling, a journalist up to the task of doing it right, and a paper willing to give a good story enough room.

Let's just agree that Wordle is a lot of fun.  This is the word cloud from my story collection.  When I pasted in the full manuscript, character names were among the biggest words.  That's probably not unusual, but I think my narrators and characters do use proper names a lot.  I then excluded character names. What else can I learn from this?  "Like," "looked," and "back" are in there a lot.  Do I use enough similes to have "like" loom so large? "Little," "just," "room"--can't draw any connections there.  Clearly "time" is much on my mind.  Maybe the biggest takeaway is that, to judge by my word cloud, I write with the vocabulary of a second-grader.

Recently I went to the Washington Arts Club to hear a reading given in honor of Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, a brand new collection from LSU Press of the poems of Eleanor Ross Taylor.  After a day of writing and child wrangling, it can be hard to downshift into poetry-reading mode.  (And let's face it, sometimes you wish you hadn't.)  But this one was well worth the effort. 

I first met Eleanor Taylor in the early '90s when I worked for her husband Peter Taylor.  I was such a fan of his work, that I gave little attention at the time to hers.  And certainly she never asked for it.  An esteemed poet in her younger years (Randall Jarrell, in accepting The National Book Award for poetry, suggested it ought to have gone to Eleanor Taylor's book instead) she put aside writing to raise her children so as not to have the one compete with the other.  Let's leave the question of that decision's wisdom to future dissertation authors.  But it was not the decision of a great artistic ego, to be sure.  She eventually resumed her slow and steady output in her quiet way.

At the Washington Arts Club, poets Jean Valentine and Dave Smith read from the new collection.  I picked up a copy and have been dipping into in the couple of weeks since the event.  I've thought more than once about how Dave Smith (who acquired Eleanor Taylor's books for LSU Press) described her work.  He said that when he played tennis, his standing rule--no matter the opponent--was "No quarter given, none asked for."  Eleanor Taylor, he said, wrote poetry by the same rule.  Introductions at readings can be pretty over-the-top, but there was truth to this one.  Here's one of the new poems in Captive Voices.

Disappearing Act

No, soul doesn't leave the body.

My body is leaving my soul.
Tired of turning fried chicken and
coffee to muscle and excrement,
tired of secreting tears, wiping them,
tired of opening eyes on another day,
tired especially of that fleshy heart,
pumping, pumping.  More,
that brain spinning nightmares.
Body prepares:
disconnect, unplug, erase.

But here, I think, a smallish altercation
arises.
Soul seems to shake its fist.
Wants brain?  Claims dreams and nightmares?
Maintains a codicil bequeaths it shares?

There'll be a fight.  A deadly struggle.
We know, of course, who'll win...

But who's this, watching?