Prose off: Emily Nemens story in Lynne Nugent's The Iowa Review v. Fleming story, with cameos from Jessica Faust of The Southern Review and Michael Griffith of Cincinnati Review

Saturday 6/14/25

We've talked some about Emily Nemens in the past. She was editor at The Paris Review before current classist Emily Stokes. Nemens was unqualified for the job, which, as we also know, is really about selling tote bags, but let's leave that aside.

After Lorin Stein had done all of his Lorin Stein-ing, a decision was made at The Paris Review to hire a woman before any candidates were even thought of. This person wasn't going to have a penis after what Stein had done with his. Nemens had come from The Southern Review out of LSU. She had no writing career to speak of herself. Practically unpublished.

At The Southern Review, she once told me that what gets published there--by her--had a lot to do with other things instead of the writing. Don't you love these people? They're just so gross and corrupt.

Nemens was the co-editor of The Southern Review with Jessica Faust, who is still there. Jessica Faust went to school with our buddy Michael Griffith at Cincinnati Review. They've known each other for I believe it was three decades he told me. That's why she publishes his stupid word puzzles in The Southern Review. That's right, very important journal of the literary arts...giving space to a a Wordle-type of thing. Isn't that funny? Griffith has never published anything that wasn't a friend hooking him up. (Also: maybe write something good rather than designing Wordles?)

When Nemens left for The Paris Review, I asked Griffith for Faust's email address to send her, you know, amazing work, because, hey, when one bigot moves on, you hope that maybe there's someone left or who comes in who is less disgusting.

I can't tell you how many times such a person has left or been fired and, big shock, then I get in there. The work got better? Became a better fit? Of course not. Sometimes I'm in there thirty times after that...almost like it was the best possible fit all along. Huh. Imagine that.

And this joker Michael Griffith seriously said to me that Faust was too busy grieving--that was the actual word he used--his co-editor moving on. Grieving! Like some parent who'd lost their child. Grieving.

She's grieving, Colin.

These delicate little flowers. Completely ill-equipped for reality. They can't deal with it. So, they hunker down in their incestuously evil system, and if you so much as say, "Hmm, I'm not sure you've given me a fair shake over these last seven years and I can't help but noticing that the people you're publishing are people you know really well," it's as if you've burned their home down and slaughtered their family in front of them. No wonder they write the safe, boring, nothingness that they do.

Nemens went to NYC and sucked up to the wealthy and connected--which is the entirety of the business side, as such, of The Paris Review--and lasted very little time in that job. She didn't leave of her own volition, I promise you that. The official reason was that she was moving on to work on her writing.

That was a lie. She was a like a DEI hire, in effect. That was the only reason she got the job. Once in a lifetime thing. I mean, I guess she's enough of one of these people that she could resurface, but she couldn't handle that gig. And that's not a hard gig. The journal comes out four times a year, and all you're doing anyway is slopping in the usual shit by the usual connected people of the system. What could be easier? Or emptier. But these people don't look at life or writing in terms of substance and value and meaning.

Simply because she was the editor of The Paris Review, she got a book deal with FSG, where our other friend Jackson Howard is, and published a few other shorter works. Entirely because of that association.

The FSG book was a baseball novel called The Cactus League that is the blandest thing (with blandest possible cover to match) you've ever seen. There's nothing in it. You wonder why she wanted to write a baseball novel. She doesn't know baseball. Nothing suggests she cares about it in the slightest. It's probably because her father liked it or something.

These people aren't ever even really themselves. Everything is simulacrum.

Again, that was taken sight-unseen, because of Nemens' Paris Review association.

And we all know that no one would ever read the above and think, "That's amazing, what prose artistry."

I had published a story with The Iowa Review. Want to guess what Nugent told me to do when I reached out to her? Pay them money--former contributor with the thousands of publications in his background, things always coming out, and work that beats the bag out of the stock shit they run--for the pleasure of submitting--and, of course, having that work automatically rejected by a wannabe writer in the Iowa MFA program because the work was not twaddle and by someone so unlike that person.

You see the hypocrisy. You see the double-standard. You see the discrimination. The bigotry. And now you will see the prose.

This is from Emily Nemens' story, "Prospects," in The Iowa Review:

Tamara Rowland knows only the rookies hang out by the exit. Done-up divorcées, new-to-Scottsdale cocktail waitresses, ladies in from single-A affiliate sorts of towns—places so small they don’t know any better. Tami could find half a dozen of them squeezed into the line of four-footers, grubby-fingered little boys with dirt under their nails and summer freckles just starting to blush. Nearby, but probably not attentive enough, the kids’ bored-looking fathers hang back in the shade, thumbing at smartphones and tugging on their belts. Tami knows not to be distracted by these men: doesn’t matter if they’re handsome in that midlist-Hollywood kind of way, or if they’ve got a whiff of Silicon Valley about them. Even if their kids were oblivious to her advances (and they usually were), these guys were still half in California, booking dot-com deals or toothpaste commercials, thinking about something, someone, far away. After all, this weekend, the boys-only trip to Arizona, is as much a gift to the women back home (a quiet house for three straight days, a weekend for brunch with girlfriends, a free afternoon to call their mothers) as it is a self-administered dose of father-son bonding. These men are loyal to their wives or mistresses, whoever is waiting back home.

Also queued up by the door where the players leave the stadium: the too-pushy teen and preteen boys, mostly pudgy middle schoolers and undersized underclassmen. Zitty, awkward guys who’ll never make it, definitely not with girls, and unlikely even into the ranks of the JV squad. Equipment manager, maybe? Without better options, they throw their hormone-heavy hearts into this, baseball fandom, and the signatures they might catch as athletes exit after springtime practice games. Tami feels for these boys, remembers how touch-and-go it was with her youngest, Connor, before he’d shot up and thinned out and learned that no woman likes a guy who makes fart noises for fun. 

The only group that can overcome the bad vibes of loitering at the players’ entrance are the sorority girls from ASU. A couple of times a season she’ll spot a little pack of them, watch them giggle and wiggle their way up to the front of the crowd. If the air could go out of a sky the way it goes out of a room when a beautiful bombshell walks in the door, that’d be happening in this Arizona parking lot, the aforementioned teen boys going twitchy and gasping at their lucky (luckless?) proximity to young, nubile sex. These girls, tan in their tiny denim shorts and bleach-white spaghetti-strap tanks, pay the fanboys no mind. They know what they’re dealing: quicker than a ninety-eight-mile-per-hour fastball coming toward the heart of the plate, a blonde coed will get any ballplayer’s attention. There’s no hope for anyone else the days they come to the stadium. These girls could be standing behind the outfield Port-o-Lets, covered in sod and chew juice, and the players would still stop and notice. Not that she likes it, but Tami understands it’s the natural order of things.

Now Tami won’t deny that she’s waited for a player to emerge from the locker room; of course she has. She learned this game the same way anyone does: by misjudging balls, by swinging and missing. But the woman who just waits there, right along the rope, thinking that her doe eyes will make him notice: that’s a rookie mistake. Everyone else has learned better. 

It's just...nothing. So much nothing. Why should anyone want to read this? What are the stakes? Where's the depth? The humor? The bite? The energy? The life?

You have to be made to want to read something by what that thing is. Otherwise you're going through motions. Why would you go through the motions with reading? Wouldn't you just read something else? Do something else?

This isn't someone helping you move and they committed to the day and they're grinding it out lugging furniture and boxes and taking their turn as the person in the hot moving van who makes sure no space is wasted and we can do this in one haul.

What is memorable in the language itself? What turn of phrase? What anything?

And it's embarrassing. Like it was written by someone who has no actual real world experience. Someone who hasn't grown up much yet. Undeveloped. It's beginner stuff. College stuff. An undergrad's attempt at creative writing but also kind of fan fiction that has no real...interest...behind it. At least fan fiction usually is earnest. Sure, it's bad, but you get the sense that the subject is one the person cares about.

This is the writing of someone who was the editor of The Paris Review? The writing of someone who gets a book deal at FSG? Which is supposed to be the "arty" big press, but again, we know that's about other things. Nemens with her sub-genre--or genre-lite--trash, was arty at the time to someone at FSG because she came with The Paris Review label all but slapped on her forehead.

That's all this shit ever is. It's never the writing. It's not the "commercial potential."

It's what are you to me, what do you represent (you come from money, you know this group of people, your skin color is "in" right now with my crowd that'd never be seen dead in the real world around someone with your skin color), and, above all, Are you one of us, but no smarter or legit than I am?

Meanwhile, I've been working on this today...

Everyone, just about, bolted into emergency action.

Two women who didn’t normally work together but were closing that night and who got along better than either expected to based on what they’d heard about the other ran out from behind the counter to try and help the man on his back.

A younger man who was also present many of the nights but who kept his head down over his law books leapt from his seat and bolted to the victim. A mother and her daughter who cleaned offices together in the same building and were waiting for their bus raced over to kneel by the man’s side, with the older woman unbuttoning the man’s shirt while the other cradled his head in her hands.

One of the employees of the cafe was on her phone saying as clearly as she could but obviously sounding very scared that they needed an ambulance immediately, please hurry, a man in the store where she worked had suffered a heart attack and he wasn’t responsive.

The manager—or whom the man figured over the course of his visits was the manager, and who was also crouched next to the stricken man—now realized—her face radiating contempt—that this person wearing scrubs was standing close to where he normally made his order and had barely moved.

“Do something!” she said, but as if she really meant, “What is wrong with you? Are you evil? Help! You of all people!”

He was going to run out of the cafe and never come back. Just like that, he’d lost his between-days rallying place forever. Involuntarily, he bit down and heard a resounding crack, unsure if it was mint, tooth, or both. There were no other options than to flee. He wasn’t versed in any of the techniques of resuscitation, and the thought that occurred to him about at least pantomiming the motions of pressing against the man’s chest with stacked palms and counting one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, passed as quickly as it had arrived.

But he had to say something, couldn’t do the most inopportune form of an Irish goodbye, so he blurted out, “They’re just pants! That’s all they are!” to looks of recoiling bafflement and the inculpatory glare of the law student, and left as fast as possible without actually running, as if raising his knees above a certain height could both get him arrested and serve as possible evidence—thanks to the door cam footage—of his having played a premeditated role in what happened.

He heard the siren from the ambulance before he was all the way through the entrance area and back into the cold night air, which now felt hot against his cheeks. They’d be able to see him soon enough if he went home via the direction he usually did. Might ask for the help of another pair of qualified hands or the lowdown about the fallen man’s condition having assumed he could do no more than he’d already done without any equipment and had come outside to show them the way as they picked up snatches of invaluable information on the fly because sometimes, he’d read, a single saved second results in the victim themselves being saved. If most sports were games of inches, then certainly life had to have its own omnipotent unit of measurement.

Kind of different, right? And that story is different from the last story I did and each of stories I'm presently doing which are themselves all different from each other so no one can even play the game of, "Well, that's not the kind of writing we blah blah blah or I blah blah blah" because it's never the same writing twice.

But when you're dealing with someone corrupt, who is committed to discriminating against you, committed to looking at people by skin color, gender, who they know, if they're no less smart than they are, etc. etc., etc., there's nothing you can give that person that they'll okay unless they feel like they have no choice. It's a done deal before anything is offered. Just like the slop goes in automatically when it comes from someone deemed the right person, which is for all of the wrong reasons.