Prose off, self-smooths edition: Story in Conjunctions by Karla Kelsey put forward by Bradford "He Makes Me Want to Sneeze" Morrow v. Fleming story

Thursday 11/12/26

We've talked about the talentless, envious, bigoted Bradford Morrow before, editor in chief of Conjunctions. This man is all about the hook up. He sent me an email that was supposedly meant for someone else that insulted me because I was tardy in replying to something as fast as he wanted me to.

That's the thing about these people. They expect you to tongue their ass constantly, lick the shit from their shoes and make the soles sparkle, to venerate them, to consider them royalty above you, these simple, arrogant fools, and they can't wait to scream at you for following up a month later or however long, but if they want something and you aren't there immediately to serve them, they go off, How dare you style.

His insult was something like, "He's so immature he makes me want to sneeze," because that's something else about these people--they are painfully un-clever. You likely haven't had enough (or any dealings) with them to know, but trust me, that's what somone like Bradford Morrow thinks is high-level wit.

It's embarrassing, right? And he would have expected the recipient of that email to compliment him and treat and lionize him as this incredibly witty and articulate person, be star struck by this type of verbal flourish. Such people demand to be lied to.

The only reason he was talking to me was because I'd had fiction in Harper's, and so he was willing--just barely--to run something of mine online with Conjunctions, but nothing else, of course, because the print version is reserved for his cronies. I went to Brown once to meet with Brian Evenson, who was something like Morrow's right-hand man, and he said as much.

What? I'm supposed to keep the secrets of bigots? While they discriminate against me?

This morning I looked at some recent pieces in Conjunctions for a prose off, and it's almost impossible to decide which to use. You find yourself saying, "How stupid and pointless can anything be?" over and over and over again. Without let up. This writing is embarrassing. There's no reason for any of it to exist.

These people are all so bad at what they do; the super limited things that they do, because none of them have any range. They are working with nothing and just trying to hide that with obfuscation and nonsense like it's deep or whatever.

There is no one, for example, who wants to read, who voluntarily reads, the likes of what I've decided to go with, that being Karla Kelsey's "Who Crouches in Stone Foliage." I'll do the beginning of this story and then the beginning of one I was working on today. Ready? Sorry in advance.

Sky blurs through the oculus while drawing up incense smoke until sun infuses posture with violets that once began in the mouth. I call this vitality “via” and sew it into my vest’s inner pocket along with baby teeth and rare earth metals. A stirring thrum in the left ear, in cheekbones, while alternative events shimmer in the background and the apps refresh. This jagged music will continue unless intentionally stoppered. I make my way south in a yellow nylon nightgown chosen from the free bin. This was before we lost the Palisades, before the sea heavied with your ash.

Just now, the prism you sent years ago is backgrounded not by the usual view of The Commodore Apartments, but with ice. Daughters quickly learn to flatten themselves before their mothers, your mother never introducing you to her friend, the Chilean ambassador, for instance, because never in her presence did you allow yourself to assume your natural posture, which is that of a god. Such withholding, often unconscious, renders the domestic polite and tragic. Such are gingham and kitten heels. Now, as ice melts, the window’s dazzle intensifies. Silence your phone for this jagged thought to repeat until it self-smooths.

Your husband has permanently departed—perhaps no longer living, perhaps no longer your husband; what else has happened in the background as the apps refresh? The oyster cracks open and is no longer the self-who-accumulates-before-the-mirror, although this diverges from last night’s dream character. Nevertheless, you make up your face like this entity and pin up your hair like she would have pinned up her hair and then act surprised to see her regarding you. I was looking back from inside your skull. I was taking your burlap dress and burning it in the hills with the apron and toy kitchen.

A stirring of sex, but sans-bee and sans-needle in contrast with a blade pressed into the plum. I awaken poppies in my hair and long to manifest not as a person but as a material, first raw and then spun into wire thread suturing the too-tender jaw. To intentionally inhabit the fractured I is to entertain the possibility that when I refer to myself as “you” I channel another’s sense, import this into who I am—also a you—proposing, even if just for a moment, that you reveal something true. Something of which I am ignorant regardless of ritual.

Unless we crush orchids. Unless we unglue the symbol from its fixture. Unless we bring ourselves to omission, purpose unthreaded, we’ll be burden and burden’s daughter: a hostess gift wrapped in silk spotted with gold stars. I was unable to accommodate their vision, I was unable to hoist myself to the proper level of speech which heavied my body not in the manner of a living woman falling with full intent to rise but in the manner of cement. I hope you don’t mind this intervention as dream mansions burn and no other elements accumulate according to sign and signature.

Good Christ. Seriously? Masterful, innovative prose, huh? These people are ridiculous. You have to be a clown to pretend this is amazing.

Sky blurs through the oculus while drawing up incense smoke until sun infuses posture with violets that once began in the mouth.

Oh yeah, genius first sentence. That's the stuff right there. Thanks so much.

She's a creative writing professor, by the way, at Susquehanna University. Imagine paying money to sit in such a person's classroom to be instructed about how to write?

The "heavied my body" is funny. These people love that shit. So awkward trying to force this word into something it isn't. That's their version of creativity. Wells Tower was all about it. A pen isn't waved, it's "wanded." That one example sums up the entirety of his writing which is really his act and shtick.

What does this read like to you? Something by a pretentious arty high school kid doing some drunk-writing for the first time? The kind of thing that person is later embarrassed by, "Oh my God, did I seriously used to write like that?" if they grow up to become a better writer?

And the errors. That's not what the word "stoppered" means. Events don't shimmer. This is barely literate writing. She doesn't even know what the basic words mean. She's just slopping it all around. Whee! I'm crazily creative!

When in reality this is just a very simple person trying to fake something.

What's there to care about here? The beauty of the prose? The prose is trash. It takes no ability to write like this. Does it resonate with your life? Teach you about the world? Yourself? Is it entertaining? That's a laugh worthy of Bradford Morrow's sneeze jape.

I'll make this simpler: What is the point of this?

I know the real answer. Writing like this, which is all these people can do, allows them to be one of them without offending the rest of them by actually having talent, intelligence, brilliance, genius, anything worth reading. That way, all the pretentious frauds get to keep their egos turned up nice and high where they like them.

I can't think of a more pointless thing to do on this planet than write the likes of the above, unless it's publish it or pretend it's good or award it. Hype it.

Speaking of which: are you surprised in the least when I tell you that BOMB, where the unstable Raluca Albu does her BS when she's not working on behalf of AI, published an interview about Kelsey in which the interviewer gushed all over the place about how brilliant Kelsey is and Kelsey expanded on what makes her so very brilliant and special indeed?

To be expected, right?

Hold on--I just scrolled down to the bottom of that BOMB interview which I hadn't before and lo and behold, there is Kelsey wearing her indoor scarf. These people are affections incarnate.

This shit is unreal, isn't it? The predictability of it all. The inevitability of it all.

For me personally, if I wrote the likes of

Silence your phone for this jagged thought to repeat until it self-smooths.

I would go out and buy a sword so I could fall on it. I wouldn't be able to live with myself.

Until it self-smooths? What are you doing? Are you trying to make a fool out of yourself?

That's awesome writing, is it Bradford?

No, I definitely couldn't come up to that level. But it is like a stunning level of loser you have to reach to be Bradford Morrow.

This is actually fortuitous because my story has a window as well. Ready? This is the start of a little something called "If Storm It Was."

Coming up on three in the morning and I feel like I’m on watch aboard the last ship of the night. There's some nasty weather out there. Usually you can't reliably compare the weather of the moment with weather from before because you don’t remember. Snow can be an exception because of the nature of its visuals (the height of snow piles contrasting with street signs you still see) and a statistical component aiding in recollection if the numbers are big enough. We got three feet of snow for Valentine’s Day that year.

The “for” makes it sound like the snow was a gift given after a failure to pick up on clues dropped as to what was most wanted. Whereas rain is something that happens in passing which makes memory’s records less reliable, unless there’s a notable accompanying occurrence. The basement flooded. You said you were going on a business trip and instead, after kissing the children, went to a hotel room to end your life but didn’t and it happened to be raining during those hours of deliberation and you remember.

Storms are like ghosts that are too large for you to see the specter in full. They’re there and then gone as if they never were. This weather frightens a person over a certain age differently than a child coming by its fear because the power went out. For instance, I listen to the rain here in this room with the shades down, and it seems concentrated on a single window, as if that’s where some pre-storm agent, an advanced scout dispatched from the clouds, had descended earlier with the fading dusk and determined this would make for the best spot to try and gain entry. Rain typically falls in a uniform pattern. Looks the same when you see it. Feels the same. It’s not light upon your left hand and heavy on your right. It rains hard at once, softly at once, or somewhere in between at once.

Not the rain bonded in purpose with this wind. This rain arrives and announces that it’s here, and here again, and again, in these increments, at intervals, harder now, louder a minute later, like a wordless voice that has a body and is throwing itself against the window.

Meanwhile, the door rattles at what appears to be moments of its own choosing in the frame. The window outside in the hallway is closed, but I know I wouldn’t be able to feel a current if I stepped out there, and the door is moving all the same. In theory I can account for this movement by saying some wind must have penetrated the building, but I can’t verify this through anything I physically feel. I only hear what I hear.

The door sounds like a drum being tapped along its sides, but never in the middle of the drumhead. It occurs to me that language is omnipresent. Wind speaks to tree, leaf speaks to the sky. Maybe there are leaves whose rustling is a plea to stay on indefinitely, or for another season, while knowing the truth held within the pattern of their veins that the time is coming when they'll be made to separate from where they’ve been and descend like all the leaves before them.

You have to laugh, right? I laugh twice. I laugh when I read something like that because even I, its nominal writer, throw up my hands in disbelief that someone could do that. All I can do is laugh. That's when I've really done something. You know how I talk about working on something for as long as it takes to make it what only I could make it? Going past the point when anyone else, if they had done such a thing, would have stopped and celebrated what they'd created? I am laughing by then. We're pretty much done by the time I'm laughing. If you walked past my door at three in the morning and heard a man laughing, you'd know that something unlike anything that had been before or would be again was now in the world, even if it will never have a chance out in the world.

And I laugh because how can you not in the comparison between those two works? These people are so filthy. So prejudiced. Obviously it's not close in quality between these excerpts and these two writers. It's not "opinion," it's not "subjective." It's the most obvious thing there can be. It's the unmissable truth, no matter who you are or what you want it to be or whatever you're up to. Anyone would know.

Self-smoothing in its self-evidence!