Someone is editing Kurt Vonnegut letters for publication. This was online
today... I'm struck with "editor" meaning "voter" and "stories" as "candidates"
"...I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story
(W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them
for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes
before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as
little children ...”
Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of
the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade
from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of
your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that
you like some stories better than others.
Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a
good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take three stories that
please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pretend that
they have been offered for publication. Write a report on each to be submitted
to a wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior.
Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a
barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a
few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as
you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to
annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The
Universe needs more good editors, God knows..."
There are a few more delightful bits if you're interested. Oh, and an inside
joke, KV was an atheist for most of his life, and when he wrote this.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/11/kurt_vonnegut_term_paper_assignment_from_the_iowa_writers_workshop.html?google_editors_picks=true
Jon Denn
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