Prose off: Story by Guggenheim winner Maile Meloy in Zoetrope put forward by editor Michael "Colin, you've never written anything close to good enough for Zoetrope" Ray v. Fleming story

Thursday 10/22/26

We've talked about Michael Ray, editor in chief of Zoetrope: All Story a number of times before. Went to their website today and clicked on the first link I saw to the contents of a story. It only ever takes one click to find the suck. Michael Ray once wrote me and said nothing I'd ever written was close to being good enough to warrant inclusion in Zoetrope, which is one of the more amusing things any of these people have been stupid enough to say, obvious bold-faced lie that it was, which I can use time and again on here.

Honestly, how stupid do you have to be to say something so absurdly untrue, which we both know to be absurdly untrue, and so revealing of your bigotry? Just can't help themselves sometimes. Bigots are like that.

Anyway, that bit of backstory reestablished, we'll do this faster than we did yesterday. Here's the beginning of Maile Meloy's "The Furies" from the summer 2026 issue of Zoetrope by Maile Meloy, Guggenheim winner, PEN/Malamud Award winner, who was cited by Granta (of course) as one of the best young novelists in the world, New York Times contributor, New Yorker contributor, and so on. The usual stuff. Ready?

The defense attorney was unfailingly kind. Virginia reflected on that as she sat in his office, waiting. He was careful to explain the law, and never acted like she wouldn’t understand. He didn’t seem to judge her for her son’s situation. She could tell that her husband and her older sons made the lawyer impatient when they shouted in frustration, but he stayed calm, and waited them out. He was tall and thin, with sparse, gray hair. He must have been approaching retirement, and she wondered if he was tired of defending troubled people who’d done terrible things. It would weigh on the soul.

He’d said at the very beginning that her son’s handsomeness could help, and recommended a pretrial haircut. Troy had a habit of tossing his hair back and glaring from beneath it, an insolent move he’d developed at eleven or twelve, when he wouldn’t let Virginia cut it. She guessed that the lawyer wanted to limit the gesture’s frequency. He’d asked her to bring ironed button-down shirts with very long sleeves to cover Troy’s tattoos, and instructed Troy to look humble and submissive in court, and to keep his hands folded in his lap.

Troy was her youngest. When he was born, Virginia had been distracted by her older boys, five and seven then, rowdy and reckless, more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else. Her husband, who’d been so proud of the arrival of their first son, was weary by the third. Three boys meant being outnumbered. It meant noise and chaos, and spilled orange juice on the floor, sticky beneath your feet. When her husband was angry, Virginia sometimes found herself having to stand in his way, blocking his path to Troy, which humiliated the child, even at three or four. Troy would scowl and not speak to Virginia afterward, like a sullen little man—resenting her for defending him, or resenting his need to be defended. When he was twelve, he poured sugar in the gas tank of his father’s truck, and Virginia had not known how to defend him then. His father broke his arm in two places.

Her older sons had finished high school and got jobs in construction, and she’d never worried about them. Troy was smart enough for college, but he wouldn’t apply, and wouldn’t work with his brothers. He found other jobs and lost them. He hung around his old high school, going to track meets and parties. Virginia remembered boys like that from her own school—reluctant men who wouldn’t move on—and was ashamed that Troy had become one of them.

This is just someone telling you things. Prosaicly. Flatly. This is barren writing. Arid writing. Lifeless writing. It's more like a dry listicle than a real story. There's nothing memorable about the language. It's as if the story doesn't even want to bother telling itself to you. Would rather be somewhere else. Scrolling, perhaps.

And like all these examples we see, the piece reads as though it were someone's first-ever effort at writing fiction. If you were told this was an example of a story that was written by someone taking a class in creative writing at the community center in your town--you know, at the same building where you could take a class with your fellow residents on salsa dancing or pottery--you'd accept that without hesitation, right? Because that's exactly what it sounds like. You wouldn't push back and say, "No, it's far too good for something like that, it's brilliant, this is genius."

There's no allure, mystery, potency, magic. It asks nothing of you the reader. Nothing of your imagination. It doesn't need you to participate in the reading of it, do you know what I mean? Reading is participatory. It's a partnership. The words and the reader are in something together. This reads like one of those foreign language courses where a recorded voice says something in French, and then you're meant to say it back, only without your side of it.

There's no voice either. It's the monotone of dictation. And you, the reader, are what? A secretary from the 1950s?

Obviously this isn't any good, and obviously Michael Ray doesn't think it's this masterful work of art. He's a bad person, a dumb person, a system person (need I add, "a busted person"?), looking to hook up someone like Maile Meloy because she's one of the chosen ones of the system. It's all about her and that name at the top. The person, and what that person represents to these people of the system. The person and not the page. (Useful phrase.) Because this is nothing writing. No one is going to try and say otherwise now that I've said this. No one could. There are no counter arguments to be made. Go for it. We both know it's a suicide mission, without you even taking out anyone else.

By the way: a list of stated happenings isn't a story. That's not how storytelling works. Isn't that an amazing thing to apparently have to say when we're talking the best fiction in the world at the best fiction places in the world?

It's all such garbage. But as we know, the quality or appeal of the words on the page have nothing to do with the publications, the touting, the awarding.

Now for a little something that's not garbage.

The girl who was the best player among the three kids instantly became the best player in the larger group with its newly drawn sides. She made dad’s ankles buckle and mom look like the high school star she once had been thanks to a plethora of backdoor set-ups for easy tap-ins befitting an awareness that as far as most people are concerned the largest share of the glory goes to the scorer of the goal and mom deserved her moment, regardless that anything most people think is unlikely to be true.

She made passes between legs but without seeming to toy with her opponents. Placed the ball in spaces her teammates arrived at without realizing they’d been traveling there until they looked down and discovered what had rolled up to them. Ran along lines of sutures far afield of anyone else’s perception or understanding of the larger, detail-obscuring whole, putting herself in position to receive a misstruck kick or double deflection like it was a brilliantly planned and executed pass from inception to reception and now that she’d gotten what she’d came for she could be on the move again.

And sometimes, in rarer instances that she must have felt warranted it, qualifying each as a special occasion within the context of this game, and perhaps beyond it as well, she let the ball get a few feet further in front of her before making a stutter-step advance of intensely rhythmic precision, a dance of syncopated, on-the-beat, off-the-beat elegance and exactitude, both compact and wide, closed and inviting, inspired and practical, publicly hosted and personally joyous, well-timed and outside of time, drawing back her kicking foot and then bringing it to bear with what may or may not have been her full force on this lone sphere atop all this flat ground, the acreage of existence, the mid-mornings of sport, and booming it between bodies and over heads through the various stages of its trajectory as though she were keeping everyone honest, and something about the world, too.

I had ceased looking for myself against that high fence close to where these people played on this field I had not set foot on since that day as if I might have caught my own eye and signaled with a wave for us to meet in the middle where I’d pass on some words to my former self, or is it my same self, or she to me, about…what, exactly? What is there to say? What isn’t there to say? What’s the difference?

Instead I watched the girl without shoes and socks as she ran, flowed, sped up, stopped on the spot, thinking to whichever of us I am, “Boom that ball!”, after it’d been a while between her rockets, and being especially pleased when she did just that in the seconds shortly thereafter.

The word Michael Ray used was "close." It's right in the email. As if I was going to forget. Not close to good enough. Nothing. Ever.

You know what isn't close? Those two stories in quality. Because that second one is infinitely better. And that's as not close as it gets, bigot.

Earlier today I shared that bit about asking myself, "Are you happy now?" as I'm working on something. My answer at present would be, "I'm getting there." This story is making a real case for inclusion in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls for which it had not initially been planned, but what am I to do when it has apparently targeted the book as though making good on its birthright? These aren't my stories. I just write them.