The following is an excerpt from the Encyclopaedia of Crypto-Anthropology, 2^nd Canadian Edition, published in 2005 by The Society of Canadian Crypto-Anthropologists, Ottawa Chapter, compiled and edited by S.F. Jameson and E. Forrester-Pratt. Reprinted with permission.

Jarvis, Mark Samuel. born March 12^th, 1963 — missing December 2^nd, 2003

Mark Jarvis was a Canadian businessman, venture capitalist, and prophet. He was born in the small Northwestern Ontario village of Sioux Lookout to parents Samuel David Jarvis, electrician, and Ethel Marie Jarvis (née Hermann), nurse. Jarvis was born with a teratoma, a kind of tumor, usually benign, characterized by the growth of tissue associated with parts of the body other than where it is found. In males teratomata most often present at birth and tend to manifest as fleshy lumps on or about the coccyx or the neck. The tissues most commonly found in such tumors are from the lungs, brain, and kidneys, though more complex tissues may develop. Teratomata in females tend to present later in life and more regularly in the reproductive system. They are also more likely to develop more complex tissues and organs, and there have been anecdotal reports of the tumors developing as eyes or limbs. As a result, teratomata in women can often be mistaken for malformed fetuses. Jarvis' teratoma was unusual in several respects; first, in that it was located around the anus, second, that it included extremely complex tissues such as teeth and hair, and third, that it could predict the future. His tumor took the form of a row of five teeth circling the outside edge of the anal sphincter, a small flap of skin covering the sphincter itself, and a row of thick hairs near the teeth that resembled eyelashes. His teratoma was diagnosed as benign, but declared inoperable due not only to its proximity to the anal sphincter, but also due to extensive intertwining of the tumor's tissue and the inferior rectal nerves.

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, changed the way I look at fiction. I read the book first as an undergraduate, and then later as a graduate student. Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is astonishing, and I don't think I'd have connected to the work so strongly if I'd read a lesser version. There's any number of ways that you can divide up Gogol's stories, but the obvious way is to place them in the same two categories Pevear and Volokhonsky do; rural Ukranian tales, and urban St. Petersburg tales. Seeing them side by side in that way, the careful reader will notice that the rural/urban division mirrors another division in the tales. The rural tales are very clearly oral in nature. They are loose, fluid, comfortable, adaptable. The urban tales, on the other hand are tight, structured, detailed. They are the very embodiment of written stories. I suppose you could read them aloud, but they wouldn't work in quite the same way. When I realized that, I realized what kind of writer I was.

None of my stories really work when you read them out loud, but they do work on the page. This was brought home to me with particular vigor when I read from my story "Tobacco Hand" at the Draft Reading Series on October 4^th. "Tobacco Hand" is part of a rather large group of stories and other scraps, orts, and fragments I've written that take place in the fictional Northwestern Ontario town of New Prospect, which is modeled very loosely on my home town of Dryden. The plot of the story is fairly simple; a man named Earl is such a dedicated tobacco user that he has deep stains on the fingers of his right hand. His wife Janine has left him, and she has convinced him that it's because of his stains. Earl gets drunk in his kitchen, has an emotional break, and ultimately mutilates himself with a belt sander in an effort to get rid of them. Earl's story is told in a limited third-person subjective mode, and I think it's fairly clear that the voice is Earl's, more or less. It hasn't yet been published, but those editors that have seen it have all sent it back, to my delight, with considerable praise (the one consistent criticism, which seems to be the thing preventing it from getting picked up, is that it lacks context; this is true, but it's also deliberate, and that decision—and why I haven't changed my mind about it—is a subject for a whole other post), and on the whole they "get" what I'm doing with the language of the piece.

Now with all that in mind, "Tobacco Hand" fell rather flat at the reading. I've done work on the stage, and can be a charismatic reader of other people's work, but when it comes to my own, put me in front of an audience and I become a stuttering, nervous, flat-voiced fool. As I read from "Tobacco Hand" and looked out at the audience, I could feel the disconnect between what I was trying to get across and what they were receiving, and I'm not willing to blame it all on my abysmal performance as a reader. There were a fair number of men in the audience, but I did a couple of head counts and found they were clearly outnumbered by the women. Not an unusual thing at literary events, and of no particularly significance in and of itself. But as ridiculous as a sentence like "Earl's been working all his life and he's a big man with a big temper to match, but he's never hit a woman no matter how angry he got and that's probably one thing he knows he can be proud of" sounds when read all on its own, imagine reading it to a roomful of women writers whose work your respect. It doesn't fall flat, it trumpets out like a nasty wet fart during someone's wedding vows. It declares itself boorish, clichéd, a tad misogynistic, and perhaps even naive. Which of course it's meant to, because that's exactly who Earl is, and exactly how he thinks. Even as I was saying it I knew that wasn't the effect it was having. I felt embarrassed by that sentence. The bigger problem is that while, yes, it is one of the weaker sentences in the piece, it still works on the page, and more importantly, it still feels necessary.

Why? There's violence behind that sentence. The first time I read Alice Munro's "Royal Beatings"—indeed the first time I heard of it—there was this discourse surrounding it, a mostly urban, undeniably middle-class Southern Ontario discourse, about how horrible it must have been to go through a primary school experience like that, how different, how violent was the past, and isn't it great that we have all these zero tolerance policies and have been able to put all the behind us. That's all well and good, of course, except that we've done no such thing, and I'm not entirely sure we should. I'm not going to go into depth about my views on minor violence (and as a recipient of some genuinely severe physical bullying in my youth—among other things, I've been punched, kicked, bitten, stabbed, slashed, whipped with a toy bullwhip, beaten with blunt objects, and once four boys held me on the ground spread-eagle while a fifth jumped on my ribs from a height of four or five feet—I can assure you that most schoolyard fights and bullying are minor), but I will say that rural Ontario is still very much the world depicted in "Royal Beatings," and there are some pretty important lessons in that world for someone like Earl. If that kind of childhood violence doesn't break you—and it won't break most, though it marks them forever—it could leave you with a deep understanding of the consequences of violence. The ethics of violence are surprisingly nuanced for someone like Earl, though he's not equipped to articulate that nuance. He knows in his own flesh what happens when you strike someone, and though he knows there are situations where a man can, and indeed should commit an act of minor violence, there are also times when no justification is sufficient. He simply doesn't have the language to articulate that either, so he falls back on simple clichés like "a man never hits a woman," and takes justifiable pride in living up to the hidden complexities of his ethical system.

Of course none of this is explicit in the text, but I think that once Earl's voice gets inside you, enough of it becomes implicit. But it wouldn't without that damned embarrassing sentence, and a handful of others like it. I can't recall who said or wrote it, but I do recall one author lamenting on how terrible it is when a godawful cliché really is the best way to say something, and that's exactly how I feel about that sentence. This is not to say "woe is me, editors don't 'get' my story, and nobody will publish it." I'm actually quite pleased with the rejections I've gotten so far. They tell me that the piece is being taken seriously by editors I respect, and the feedback I've gotten make the rejection letters some of the best and most useful I've ever gotten. They are encouraging rather than disheartening. The point of this rather red-faced confession and sort-of-case-study, is that not all pieces will work in all ways. I enjoy going to readings, despite my bumbling and my nerves, and I think it's a great opportunity for me to put myself out there, to network, and to meet writers whom I greatly admire, like the wonderful Rebecca Rosenblum, but aside from one unusually successful bawdy house reading I gave in 2003, it's not a very good venue for the kind of work I produce. Too much of what I do depends on the page. After years of hearing advice like "read it out loud to see if it works," I think I'm finally okay with that. After all, if it's good enough for Gogol's St. Petersburg tales, it ought to be good enough for my New Prospect stories, right?

The Biblioasis folks, who have published many fine books, including Rebecca Rosenblum's fine short story collection, Once, are running a Revenge Lit contest to celebrate the launch of Terry Grigg's new novel, Thought You Were Dead (looks quite interesting, actually). Many of the entries are being posted on the contest blog. "Speak Softly", my own entry, went up today. Check it out! And remember, there's still time to enter.

They had never been lovers, were barely friends, and he could count on one hand the number of times they had touched. He still felt deep in his bones, and lightly across his skin and hair, every one of those moments. If he closed his eyes, he could relive them all. The first time, when he had said or done something, he couldn't exactly remember what, her eyes had lit up the way he imagined newborn stars would, the change from dark indifference to the powerful, blazing expression of life and attentiveness so abrupt and affecting that it was, paradoxically, almost imperceptible. She had reached out to him, impulsively, and given him one of the light embraces with which young girls so often express unexpected pleasure, careless of their potential force and investing in them, or so they think, only transient meaning. That first time was for him still the most powerful. The hairs on the back of his neck had stood at attention, and the whole of his consciousness briefly settled, and then became painfully focused, on those few square inches of his bare skin as it was kissed by her naked forearm. He was not too young to understand the weight of that experience; when she released him his lower lip hung slack, and for a brief moment he was outside of himself. He saw with a kind of double vision, as though his consciousness had taken a quarter-step to the right, was somehow almost, but not quite, in the same space as his body. Very quickly the world, his backpack, the linoleum floor, his locker, all snapped back into focus. He went back to what he was doing, back to his life, which was the same, but which would never be the same again, and the sense of being both inside and outside his body would stay with him for the rest of his life, climbing occasionally from some older, reptilian part of his brain to confront him whenever, by chance, they would meet on the street, in a café, at the grocery store. Was this what love felt like? He decided, then and there, that it had to be.

With several stories out there in the hands of editors waiting for acceptance or rejection (including one I spent six years writing) I find that my biggest problem isn't anxiety, it's figuring out how to write "and then I woke up" (or similar) a third of the way through the story I'm working on now without my readers thinking everything so far was just a dream. I'm horrified that the exact right phrase I need is a goddamn cliché. It's things like this that drive writers to drink. That, and spending six years trying to get a ten page story just right.

For three years I published and co-edited (as fiction editor) an online journal of literature. Lately I've been feeling uninvolved in the literary community, and I'm searching for ways to connect. I'm considering relaunching the journal. In the past we published fiction and poetry. If I did decide to relaunch it, I would publish only fiction.

My question is this: would you be interested in reading such a journal? Would you submit to such a journal (on the understanding that I couldn't pay you)? Would you be willing to post about such a journal on your blog? If yes to any of these, would you be willing to donate money (I'm thinking about micro-donations, a dollar here or there), with the understanding that any donations would go exclusively to the hosting bill? Why (or why not—this last question being an addendum to any and all of the above)? Please leave a comment below (and if you wish your answers to be more private, feel free to email me).

Thanks in advance for your time.

Cliff Burns made a name for himself by publicly venting his spleen after years of rejection letters. A former editor recently mused at The Guardian about both the writing and receiving of rejection letters, because apparently there will soon be an entire book of them. There's even a quite clever blog devoted to literary rejection. It seems that writers and publishers like nothing better than to discuss their rejection experiences in the harsh halogen glare that is the public eye. Allow me, then, to add my voice to theirs; I got another rejection letter today (well, rejection email, I guess, since I asked to be informed that way, to save on stamps).

I had sent my story to a newish publication, not entirely certain it was right for them, but hoping that they would accept it anyway—after all, they might still be struggling to define their vision. They did not accept it, and told me so in a simple, polite letter. So what did I do? This afternoon I wrote another cover letter to a different publication, printed another copy of my story, stuffed the whole thing into an envelope, and walked to my nearest post box. The rejection elicited exactly zero emotional reaction from me. Just like every other rejection letter I've ever gotten. Where is my spleen? Where is my bile, my anger, my self-righteousness? I'm really proud of my story. I think it's wonderful. I think other people should consider it wonderful. To top it off, I'm a notorious suck about other kinds of rejection. Bad job interviews (or applications that result in no interviews) send me to a pint of Tofutti—it was Ben & Jerry's until I stopped being able to eat dairy. Romantic failure breaks me. I am a sentimental fool at the best of times. I feel like my spleen is missing out on some much needed exercise here. Okay, every writer knows that at some point he or she is going to get one of these. It's not my first, and no doubt it's not my last. It comes with the job, but somehow, given all the hullabaloo I brought up in the first paragraph, I can't help but feel like it's almost unwriterly of me not to be upset.

I suppose I should mention, since I promised updates on my novel-in-progress, that I put my novel aside back in June for personal reasons, and did no writing at all until August, when I attended the Salon des Refusés launch party. I was so inspired that I went back to some short fiction I had lying around. I now have one story out there looking for a home, and at least three more packing their things, combing their hair and asking me for bus fair. Fingers crossed.

Also, I apologize for the lack of updates here recently. We're on the cusp of the holidays season, and things are hectic around Casa del August. Normal posting will most likely resume next weekend.

Often many of the most important choices a writer can make about a work of fiction are unconscious ones; the decision to use first or third person narration can seem more like intuition than anything else. There are times when I agonize over it, particularly when I'm heavily invested in the raw material (if I'm writing in the semi-autobiographical mode, for example). It's not enough that it "feel right"; the choices I make also have to work with whatever point I'm trying to make, with whatever themes I've (consciously) chosen to include. For A Temporary Life, my novel-in-progress, one of the themes—or maybe it's more accurate to say "problems"—I'm working with is that of memory.

Using the first person form of narration came most naturally, but I'm not satisfied with how most writers present dialogue in first person narratives. Let me give you an example from a book I actually quite like, Michael Helm's The Projectionist:

She stands and collects our plates, though I haven't finished yet, takes them to the kitchen counter and returns.

"What's the biggest secret you've kept?" she asks.

"This won't be easy, will it?"

"You've never asked me why I didn't come back home all those years."

"Some people don't. It's not that unusual."

Do you see anything wrong with that passage? Probably not, but I do. Not in terms of Helm's novel, of course, but in terms of my own. How can I create a narrator with an untrustworthy memory and allow him to quote dialogue with such precision? The answer, of course, is that I can't. How many people do you know who can remember conversations with that kind of accuracy? I can do it for moments of extreme emotional intensity, but otherwise I can't recount a conversation that I had an hour ago, never mind years or months or weeks ago. I make exceptions for this "problem" in works of what I think of as "Dear Reader" or "Gentle Reader" fiction, so named for the somewhat antiquated convention of the narrator (not necessarily the author) directly addressing the reader and thereby explicitly indicating an awareness of the novel as a specifically written construction, rather than a representation of memory or an oral retelling of events.

It would be easy to say that I'm frustrated with or dislike or am in some way in conflict with the conventions of realist fiction. Nothing could be further from the truth; all form of fiction have their conventions and great art can be made working both within and against those conventions. I quite enjoyed the Michael Helm novel that I quoted from above, and though it sticks rather rigorously to the conventions of the realist novel, it's also elegant, inventive, and challenging. It's a very strong work of fiction.

In the instance of A Temporary Life I've come to the conclusion that using the standard realist presentation of dialogue isn't the right choice; instead one of the things I've done is stripped nearly all the dialogue from the piece, and I'm even contemplating removing all the quotation marks and using long dashes like William Gaddis or James Joyce or any number of authors you could name. When (note the optimism) my novel finds a publisher I have no doubt that it will be called experimental (should it even receive any attention), though that's not at all my intention. As an artist I don't feel like I'm obliged to reinvent the wheel (or the novel, as it were), nor even to work outside of the conventions of whatever genre I'm working in (I would love to write some urban fantasy or science fiction some day). What I feel it's most important for me to do is make the choices that are most appropriate for what I'm trying to say with (or in) any particular work of fiction. If it means abandoning traditional forms of dialogue in one piece, or being relentlessly true to convention in another, then so be it; the only yard-stick I use is whether or not it's appropriate to the spirit of the work.

Most of the writers I know who are either barely published (like myself) or as yet entirely unpublished live in mortal terror of two possibilities. First, that no-one out there will like their work and their masterpiece will never find the home it deserves, and second, that their work isn't any good at all and their work will never find a home at all. I alternate between one fear and the other with occasional confident bursts that border on arrogance. As I see things at the moment, there are two options open. We can persevere, if only slowly like myself, and continue to send our typescripts* to journals and agents and publishers. The other option is to self-publish. I respect this option, but rarely will I support it with my dollars. It's not that I believe there is no such thing as a good self-published book, or that there are no decent writers self-publishing. I'm sure there are many. What I do know is I will only be able to read so many books in my life, and I choose those with care according to a set of standards that, while perhaps not unique, are still my own. One is that the book must have first passed through the gauntlet of a professional editor's red pen. Publishing is a business, and editors are human beings, so obviously their opinions are fallible and their motives for selecting a book not always purely artistic or aesthetic. Commerce enters in. But still, somebody else out there, someone with experience and judgement, someone other than the the author him or herself, has declared that not only is the book worth their time, but they feel it is worth mine as well, and are willing lay down the cost of printing to back up that opinion. It is imperfect at best, but still it is something.

Despite how badly and (it seems recently) how often the system can fail, it pains me to see some self-published authors consumed by their anger. It's hard work to self-publish. Writers must not only be writers, they must be businessmen and designers and promoters and salesmen.** It's also hard, and I know this from experience, to have your work rejected. The rejections are not personal, but writers often have difficulty separating themselves from their work. Having a story or a poem or a novel rejected, especially if it happens repeatedly, can feel very much like the editors are rejecting you personally. It can be disheartening. Trust me, I understand.

To cope, I think writers must consider two things. First, that agents and editors are human beings doing a job. Unless you've done something incredibly rude or stupid to piss them off, they aren't out to get you, and most likely have no opinion of you personally at all. In fact, even if you did do something rude or stupid, they probably still aren't out to get you. You just won't be able to have any useful dealings with them. After all, while there are certainly assholes out there, most people won't act liked jerks until you give them a reason to. Not everyone's tastes are the same, and not everyone will enjoy your work. Get over it, and look for an agent or an editor who does, and be sure to do it politely. Second, and this is the moment we all live in fear of, a writer must consider that maybe his work just isn't good enough. I know that it's fashionable to behave as though we are all in this together, as though taste is all that varies and all writers are created equal. It simply isn't so. There is some horrible writing out there, and you might be one of the folks shopping it around. I might be one of them too. I can't tell you how many times, with panic in my heart, I've looked at my own work—including work that's already been published—and asked myself, "what was I thinking? Who would read this crap?" We can't all be William Faulkner or Vladimir Nabokov or Virginia Woolf or Carol Shields or whomever it is we admire. When confronting this possibility, I do not suggest giving up. Let me say that again: do not give up. Instead, get better. Read more, write more, do another draft. Be merciless in your rewriting and your editing. Also remember that getting better doesn't happen overnight. It could take a year, or two years, or ten years. It could take even longer. I won't pretend that it isn't demoralizing, but it's not useful to either your work or your emotional well-being to take it as a personal affront.

Which brings me to Cliff Burns. I first heard of him three days ago, when Dave posted about him. Mr. Burns has a talent for rage and vitriol that is truly astonishing, and he directs it all at editors and publishers, seems to take every rejection personally. You can read some of his complaints here. When folks suggest that his responses are extreme, he has replied the following (you can find it in the comments at that last link): "My posts are not the aggrieved rantings of a petulant author, they are based on experiences I've outlined, in depth, in an essay called "Solace of Fortitude" (Google it, you'll find it)." I did search for the essay, and found it here. The story he tells is not so extraordinary, not so different from hundreds I've heard and read about, some of those stories being about the early years of now successful authors. Mr. Burns would have us think the rejections are unwarranted, however, particularly because of experiences like the one outlined here. That is indeed a ridiculous thing to have happen, but as I said before, editors are human and sometimes the currents of commerce prevail. He challenges us to download his novel, read the first ten pages or so, and see for ourselves if he should have a home with a major publisher. I did just that (you can find the novel, So Dark the Night—a good title by the way—here). I read the first twelve pages, in fact. Were I an editor, I would have rejected this novel as well. I may not have even finished the first ten pages. The prose is juvenile, with a cliché—either a phrase or an image—not only on every page, but in nearly every paragraph. His characters have names that would seem ridiculous in a parody of a genre novel, never mind in the real thing. I would not only refuse to recommend So Dark the Night to others, I will not even finish reading it. Mr. Burns' novel is simply not very good.

But Mr. Burns ought not give up. His blog is exactly as Dave described it, "entertaining and smart". He is not without talent; it simply does not show in So Dark the Night. Mr. Burns does not need to quit, he needs to get better. Unfortunately it may be too late. He has taken his rejection notices as assaults on his worth as a human being, and has responded by insulting editors and publishers directly, liberally employing words like "fuck" and "cunt". I mentioned above that doing something rude or stupid is a good way to ruin your already slim chances at publication for reasons that have nothing to do with the merit of your work. Mr. Burns has done something that is both rude and stupid at the same time. I'm sure that Mr. Burns is a fine human being; I have no doubt that were we to sit down over a cup of coffee that we would get along. The fact that I don't think very highly of his novel does not mean that I don't think very highly of him. I don't know him, and so I have no real opinion about him as a human being to speak of. I understand that twenty-five years is a long time to struggle. I understand the sense of helplessness, and the sense of hopelessness. I have had more than my share of those two feelings (though I have not written about them here), and I am not without sympathy for Mr. Burns. If he thinks he can find an audience in self-publishing, then I wish him all the best, but it doesn't stop me from thinking that his anger is misplaced. We all live with the same fears about how our work my be accepted, we all have the same trouble separating ourselves from the work we have put so much of our sweat and emotional energy into. The publishing industry is no doubt flawed, but name-calling and such is unproductive, unprofessional, and downright childish.

*I hate to be the one to break the news, but manuscripts are so-called because they are written by hand. When you send a publisher or whomever a type-written document, it is a typescript. You may not share or be interested in my linguistic pet-peeves, but I reserve the right to kvetch on my own blog, and will happily allow you to do the same on yours.

**I know that I use masculine forms most of the time, but I find consistency preferable to alternating between genders, and I despise the vague and grotesque grammatical constructions necessary to make all things gender-neutral.

I'm a writer. People know this about me, though I haven't published very much, and nothing outside of this blog for a while now. It's not entirely for lack of trying, although that is certainly part of it. The reason I'm not trying to get published right now is because I have, for the time being, given up on short fiction and am trying my hand at a novel. After two years of work, I'm on chapter three. From that statement you can learn that I've successfully passed the major "first chapter" hurdle, and that my biggest problem is maintaining momentum. Thank God I've only planned on a total of ten chapters. Even when my momentum is at its best I work quite slowly.

I don't bring this up because I want congratulations or criticism. I bring this up because I want to start posting about the process, about the act of writing, the preparation and the decision making. I bring my novel up because writing about the process may appear suspect when one has published very little, and I thought it would be a good idea to let you folks know where I'm coming from in my observations and ruminations. Who knows? It may help me with my own work, with the momentum, to make my thinking so public. It certainly couldn't hurt. I won't be keeping a running word count or anything like that, as I write all my first drafts in long-hand, nor will I discuss the specifics of plot or character. I'm not interested in opening a discussion about my novel-in-progress. I want to talk about writing. Think of it like this: just as I'd rather ask an author a question like "why did you choose the stream of consciousness form instead of a standard 'realist' form?" than "where do you get your ideas from?", I'd also rather talk about why I chose to use an elaborate syntax than where I got the idea to make my protagonist's second cousin a circus clown (that's not actually in my book, it's just an example). I will post when I have passed major(ish) milestones, like completing a chapter or a complete draft or something, but otherwise I will write about more abstract concerns. And hopefully with more clarity and organization than displayed in this post. Oh, I will tell you that the working title for my novel is A Temporary Life, although that is subject to change once the project is finished.