Recently, we’ve started visiting MFA programs around the country to talk with students and try ??? to the extent that it’s within our godlike power ??? to put a human face to all that hissing that comes from behind the curtain when you submit to a literary magazine. Of course, the question every student wants to ask us is, “What do you look for when you read submissions?” We do our best to tell them, and we’ve also tried to answer that question here from time to time. For example, David Lynn has described two qualities that he looks for in any piece of writing: surprise and mastery. What he means is that the story or poem is skillfully crafted (mastery) but also defies our expectations. We often see skillful craftsmanship that never surprises, and we’re just as often surprised by submissions that show no mastery of craft. It’s unusual to find those two qualities in the same piece, but when we do, we feel exhilarated and privileged to be able to offer it to readers.
All that is easy to say in the abstract, but it struck me this morning that with our recent launch of KR Online, we have a chance to show you what we mean.
One of the most exciting things we do is to publish new voices: if you haven’t read it yet, take a look at Kelly Ga-Lei Gilbert’s story “Beatitude.” Kelly’s an MFA student at SF State, and this is her first publication. Her story came to us through our regular electronic submission process, so we knew nothing about her. (I don’t read cover letters. I read the work. If it demands my attention, I might get curious about the author. But the result is that I don’t know where you’ve published or what prizes you’ve won. Other editors do it differently, so it’s still wise to put some effort into your cover letter and treat that process with respect. Just keep in mind that a great cover letter never got anyone published.)
Here’s what I wrote in my initial editor’s comments after reading the story:
I really like this: the surprising way that the speaker winds together the sacred and the profane, the way the story’s form seems to replicate religious consciousness, and the sense of despair that underlies all the language of faith. A young writer, but really promising, I think.
I’ve read the story several times since then, so let me say more about why I admire it. If we go back to those two qualities David looks for in a story ??? surprise and mastery — you can see them in the story’s opening paragraphs. The first paragraph catches our attention with a confession as strange and elusive as anything in Donne’s religious paradoxes: the speaker admits to an unnamed sin and tells us of her own death, but in a voice of innocence and an intelligence that’s very much alive. She asks us to comprehend a spiritual mystery: how can one die and yet live on, or be innocent of your own sinfulness until the moment when the law is spoken and so creates the sin? The story is structured as a ritual of confession, but spoken in a voice filled with irony and doubt. It makes sense if you read these opening paragraphs as a progress of the soul: the sin our narrator confesses in that first paragraph is original sin, and the death she suffers is the knowledge of sinfulness that her uncompromising faith imposes. By this doctrine, we die long before we’re born, and the task of our life is to be reborn by faith. But how does a young girl, struggling with her identity, her sexuality, and her complicated racial identity, make sense of these mysteries?
In the second paragraph, the speaker recites the faith she’s been taught: “Once, before I was even formed in my mother’s womb, God knew and loved me; before I was born he set me apart to be consecrated for his purposes.” This is the promise of spiritual election that her faith offers to balance the awareness of sin, but the sense of a soul divided between sin and faith will frame her life and give the story its two distinct voices. And in the third paragraph, her humanity emerges like a bitter punchline: when she was a child, she reveals, the faith to which she longs to submit was really a source of terror, and she created her own rituals to avert the miracle for which she’d been taught to pray.
The speaker is torn between these two impulses and speaks in these two voices throughout the story: she wants to believe, to submit to the language of faith, but she can’t escape from her own humanity. In this sense, it’s a story about the innocence of desire, both erotic and spiritual. The story’s repetition ??? that recurring “Once” ??? gives this conflict a scriptural tone but also reminds us that we’re looking back with an adult sense of irony at the loss of that innocence:
Once, I made an unconscious habit of praying for things I knew I would receive. I prayed that I wouldn’t go hungry, that my mother wouldn’t remarry, that I would wake up in the morning. The Lord answered each one.
One of the story’s most surprising moves comes in the final paragraphs, where the first-person narrator vanishes altogether, and we’re left only with expressions of her faith. I read that as the narrator’s act of self-sacrifice offered up for her boyfriend’s salvation, as if by surrendering herself to faith, the narrator can will that promise of salvation to be real. The resolution isn’t narrated, but enacted. Yet the last paragraph reminds us that faith can’t be willed: the narrator remains suspended between frustration and the promise of “the glorious freedom of the Children of God.” It’s impossible not to see that phrase as deeply ironic, given the narrator’s struggle to make her mind conform to her faith, but I still find it moving.
Editors are a little Satanic. We’re writers forced to read as critics, always aware of our own fallen nature. And like devils, we usually find it easier to recognize what’s bad than to tell you how to be good. Terms like mastery and surprise get us close, but they remain purposefully vague. Telling you how to surprise us is a bit like telling your friends what you want for your birthday: you might get it, but you’ll probably be a little disappointed when you do. I can’t help wondering if Kelly Ga-Lei Gilbert’s story was workshopped out at SF State. (If so, nice work.) Workshops do a good job of teaching mastery, but rarely surprise. The best stories, I’ve found, keep both these qualities in a kind of tension, not unlike the tension between faith and humanity that structures this story.