Prose off in real-time: Story in One Story put forward by bad writer, obvious liar, and morally repugnant system fraud Patrick Ryan v. Fleming story

Friday 3/28/25

Let's talk about life in prose. I'm just going to throw out the latest shit here from One Story. The most recent excerpt from their site. Okay?

Recently her father had started referring to her childhood home as his and her mother’s Lover’s Nest. Marie-Claude didn’t know if this was ironic or not. If it was simply a way to keep her from moving back home. MC had moved out and then in and then out again five separate times since she was eighteen. All out of necessity. She was born in a bad year, 1987. The timing for success was all wrong. None of the economic conditions were in her favor. This wasn’t just her opinion. The Atlantic had said the same thing.

That's just anything. Right? Might as well have left the spot blank. It's nothing. It's just whatever. Does it even matter who it's by? (If you want to be technical, that would be Nini Berndt, who, big shock, has that MFA and a book coming out from Tin House, and was hooked up in this case by Patrick Ryan, whom we've discussed before and will again when we get to John Freeman.)

It's always the same shit: nothingness. Any one of these things by one of these people could be any one of the others by the rest of them. I didn't plan The Atlantic thing, by the way. But chances are always high that you'll find these people name-dropping crap for their incestuous system cronies who are exactly like them.

Consider how simple and stupid (and pretentious) you have to be for you to think, "This story mentions a place like The Atlantic, that means it's good." The Atlantic, Yale, graduate school, Padgett Powell, whatever the case.

Now look at this. It's from a story I've been working on called "Still Good."

“That was so nice,” she said like how a person does when they reach to hug someone before they’ve finished what they’re saying and the rest of their words melt into the crook of a neck or the top of a shoulder, which made her seem embarrassed again. She held herself motionless for a few seconds, a spent look on her face that made me think of the packed-down, now-soundless snow spread across the ground outside her car as if it had always been something horizontal and the sky hadn’t figured in the operation at all.

The video quality wasn’t the best but I think she was crying as she added, “There are still good people out there.” But I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right trying to play judge as to the existence of someone else’s tears.

You couldn’t hear the sound of running water despite her window still being down, so maybe the brook itself was frozen, but you figure brooks pretty much have to swear a solemn oath never to freeze or else they aren’t really a brook and what were they then, and I could have made a mistake going back to what I first thought I’d heard or the wind had drowned it out.

You see the difference? The extreme, obvious to anyone--hell, obvious to a stone--difference. The undeniable, blatant, unmissable difference? That second excerpt goes right the fuck through you like some eternal mistral wind, but it doesn't leave you--it keeps blowing around inside your heart and your soul and warms you with its massive quotient of life despite how real and unflinching it is.

It is life.

How do you even measure that gap? You can't.

The difference is so obvious. So immediately, undeniably obvious.

Let's remember something: This thing--this dreck-ass MFA fiction--that all of these people do badly is also all that they do and can do. They're not also doing some great piece on jazz, or on sports, or some dynamic op-ed, or the feature on film with matchless expertise.

Sometimes, editors who are just like them and almost always writers as well will hook such a person up with an assignment to review a book, which is then a case of talking about this one thing that they do, same as when they do one of their ridiculous "craft" pieces about writing. They're capable of nothing else, and they're awful at their one thing.

You see what I did here? I'm not digging. I went to the One Story site and I took the first available excerpt as I was working on those three paragraphs. This is in real-time. I could do this with any story by them and any story by me, any page of any story by them and any page of any story by me, any paragraph, any sentence, every time, any time.

And someone like a Patrick Ryan--who is one of these people, who sucks at writing himself, and is a terrible person--wasn't going to put that other person forward if he had a choice not to.

Same as Will Allison at One Story. He answers to Patrick Ryan. Patrick Ryan is his ruler. These people are incapable of acting or thinking on their own. They're cowards. They're pathetic. They're jokes. They look to each other with an attitude of "How do you want me to act like I think?" so that that those other people will pretend to like them, cover for them, hook them up, lie about their work, and they can all be a part of the club.