Prose off: Story by Pulitzer Prize/Guggenheim winner Robert Olen Butler put forward in Narrative by husband-wife clowns/con artists Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian v. Fleming story w/Brad Morrow cameo

Sunday 6/8/25

Over time, I've become increasingly interested in the challenge of creating fiction that could be understood by a child and also thought about, until the end of time, by the smartest person in the world, and everyone in between.

That is, to take words that everyone from seven to 100 knows, which all of us in theory could use, and make something that no one else would come up with, could come up with, that functions on many different levels at once. A work that in each instance you read is something different, because the reader takes something different from it and it never hits them the same exact way twice.

I cannot overstate how difficult this is. It's a challenge that thrills me. It's a challenge that is enough for me. I need to be challenged to the max. My ability needs to be challenged as much as I can challenge it. I can't do what I've done before. I must invent and do what I never have.

This idea of something looking like it's simple and being the most complicated thing ever is a formidable challenge. It's why a story like "The Bird," which is all of 432 words, took me something like a quarter of a year to do. To read it is to see that it flows like no waterway does. The seven-year-old and the fifty-seven-year-old are going to have very different, but equally valid experiences reading that story. Certainly not all of them are like this. I'm doing however many stories I'm doing simultaneously right now--let's call it ten. What I'm saying here can't be said about "Finder of Views." But every one of them is different. They have to be different. I want someone to think, "I wonder what the hell he's come up with this time," and have no chance of being able to guess. Then they see it and it's like, "Fuck me...damn."

Always new. Always unique.

But with these other people, it's always the same. And very little thought, if any, is ever given to the reader. It's about them. Often, the story is actually about them and their boring, limited, lifeless lives. They just call it fiction.

My fiction is never about me. I am none of these characters. And yet, I guess you could say, in another way, I am all of them, but it's not really like that. They exist. They are real. The stories are theirs. They're not mine. I am simply a part of the process of the telling of their stories.

We're going to do another prose off now with a Robert Olen Butler story from the clip joint that is Narrative. One can read about the antics and immoral doings of their husband-wife editorial team of Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian elsewhere in this record. Let's just jump into the excerpt:

Darla parks in front of the nineteenth-century brick opera house just off Monticello’s traffic circle. In the center sits the Jefferson County courthouse, in the Classic Revival style of the town’s namesake. She crosses the street and turns to her left to circle the building, her eyes on the monument for the Confederate dead at the north side. From this approach, only its eight-foot base is visible beyond the waxy, evergreen crown of a century-old magnolia.

She has come here to fight against her mind. The semiotician part—studying signs, signifiers—is prone to jargon-driven incomprehensibility; the art scholar part—studying created objects—can easily be stricken aesthetically blind. Both parts constantly threaten to cut her off from fundamental human life as it is lived, first and foremost: in the moment, through the senses. Not that she doesn’t love her mind. It is always quick, for instance, to see a good irony, such as this very distrust of her mind having itself begun as an idea. And it was her analytical self that challenged her to look more deeply at these monuments, issuing the challenge in this very town after she and Robert came here with friends for roadhouse food and antiques and found this relic of Old South, lost-cause passion and laughed at its excesses and, yes, at its unintended semiotics.

The above is from a novel, but it was published in Narrative as a story called "The Glory of Their Fame." That's the beginning of it. Some thoughts...

Robert, huh? Is that you, chief, or you honoring yourself? "I should name that character Robert in a sly nod to myself."

It doesn't matter. These stories by these people never matter at all. If it was a world in which everyone read and loved to read and read well--by which I mean, they had no problem understanding what they were reading--there would be no one to care about reading this.

Semiotics? Really?

Do you know what semiotics is? I'm thinking you don't, and that's not me insulting anyone. I'm in Boston. Lots of colleges here. Lot of people with degrees. Maybe more so than anywhere else in the country, percentage-wise. Could be. Has to be close to it.

I could spend today on the streets of this city asking people what semiotics were, and would you be more inclined to bet your life if you had to that a single person would have the correct answer or zero people would?

Exactly.

But that's not necessarily a problem. My work is full of things that people have never heard of. But not knowing what that thing is isn't a problem, because the context makes it clear. As I say: No reader left behind. That's my policy. If someone can't read the word "the," well, I can't help that. But I'm talking within reason.

Do you think that's an outstanding first sentence?

Let's imagine you were talking to Robert Olen Butler. What might be a reasonable question after seeing that first sentence? How about, "Is that the best you can do?"

What could his answer be? Let's think about this.

"Yes, it is."

And you'd respond, "Saying that someone parked a car?"

How would you justify that? Great artist that you are. And Robert Olen Butler must be a great artist, right, because he won the Pulitzer Prize for a short story collection. And, of course, he's got a Guggenheim. (And let me tell you: If you don't deserve a Guggenheim, you got a great chance of getting one, so keep your head up if you're one of those people.)

Wait...what do you mean these things means absolutely nothing because every single last thing that happens in this system is a result of the whole thing being rigged?

No? You don't say?

This isn't genius writing? What about when she turns left? That part was pretty good. I mean, she could have gone right. Exciting.

Speaking of rigged: You think Robert Olen Butler paid thirty bucks or whatever it is to send this slop of his to the chiseling husband-wife team Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian or do you think he or his agent just emailed it to them and because he's the right kind of person in it automatically went?

Doesn't the "came here for roadhouse food" just smack of the typical classism from these people, too? Like, wouldn't it be fun and ironic to pretend we're like poor people? The tourism of the fake intellectual. You see a similar kind of thing with the sort of person in publishing who lies about thinking Junot Diaz isn't terrible at writing.

It's some entitled, dumb white person, who has never had a real life experience, always been sheltered and lied to and coddled, who comes from money, making like they're transgressive and going to the wrong side of the tracks by reading something that has Spanish swear words in it. That's how simple these people are. And weak.

It's also why when they abuse you and discriminate you for years, and you say, "Um, maybe this isn't, I don't know, really fair, I was just sort of thinking," they pull a Sven Birkerts of AGNI and liken you to the mob, or a Scott Stossel of The Atlantic and call you a thug, or a Michael Griffith of Cincinnati Review--allowing that he made it home from the playground and/or took Brock Clarke out of his mouth--and also liken you to a member of the mafia.

Because these people are insane. Everything is out of proportion. You can see why they hate sports. They looked at being beaten as people not just being mean to them, but terrorizing them. If it's fair, they can't compete. They have to turn the horizontal plain into a vertical one so that things are made to go their way. A level playing field is the ultimate work of the devil to them. Or should I say, a level playing field with me standing across from them?

You see what Butler is doing there with the tense, right? It's present tense, because he knows this is boring, lifeless, not entertaining, but if he puts it in the present tense, maybe it will seem like it has a little more immediacy.

And consider the title. "The Glory of Their Fame." It makes no sense. The Glory of Their Times is an excellent baseball book from 1966. Its title makes sense. You wouldn't say that someone's fame is glorious. That's not how glory works. The glory of his achievement, his efforts. Something like that. But not fame.

It's like, "Do you know what words mean?" That's what a title of this sort makes me ask. Are you even trying? Can you not read the thing back? Are you so full of yourself that you never question or check yourself? You just say whatever and because it's you it must be outstanding? Or good enough?

And sure, of course it's going to be good enough for snake oil sales people like Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks because they're not even reading the thing. They don't care what it says. If it's any good. None of these people do. They care who wrote it. And what that person is to them and represents to them and how they don't make them feel inferior.

Do I even need to tell you that someone like Bradford "The King of Cronyism" Morrow is automatically going to slap Robert Olen Butler's shit into the pages of Conjunctions whenever Butler has something because Morrow is the kind of guy who is no dumber than Butler--and it's very important for a Bradford Morrow not to think someone is smarter than he is--and they are both Guggenheim buddies and though Morrow doesn't have a Pulitzer he can kind of get some contact high by publishing Butler without, again, having to feel like he's stupider or worse at writing, and so Morrow gets his meaty paws on his tiny nub and works himself over for ten glorious seconds and touts the inclusion of a Butler story in the latest issue of Conjunctions on the Conjunctions website.

That's all it is, brothers and sisters. What do you think we're going to see if I go to Conjunctions right now and grab the first two paragraphs of a Robert Olen Butler story that Bradford Morrow published? Want to do an experiment and try it? Because it's not like I spend any time in my life reading this garbage. Which really is no different than the people like Morrow, Jenks, Edgarian, any of them, who publish this garbage.

Let's try it...here I go...be right back...

These are the first two paragraphs of Robert Olen Butler's "Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis" from Conjunctions:

I carry him on my chest and it’s a real tattoo and he was there like that when I come out of Mama. That was the week after he died, Elvis, and Mama made the mistake of letting folks know about it and there was that one big newspaper story, but she regretted it right away and she was happy that the city papers didn’t pick up on it. It was just as well for her that most people didn’t believe. She covered me up quick.

And I stayed covered. Not even one of her boyfriends ever saw me, and there was plenty come through in these sixteen years, all the noisy men in the next room. But last week she brought this guy home from the bar where she worked and he looked like I’d imagine Colonel Parker to look. I never saw a photo of Parker, the man who took half of every dollar Elvis ever earned, but this guy with Mama had a jowly square face and hair the gray of the river on a day when a hurricane is fumbling toward us and he made no sounds in the night at all and this should have been a little better for me, really.

What are you doing? What is this? Why is anyone supposed to care? That last one is such a simple question, but there is no answer that anyone can give me. What is worth caring about there? What reason is there to read that? To read further? The story? It's so gripping? The stakes? They're so high? It's relatable? Illuminating? The language is so beautiful?

What?

(And you came out with a tattoo, huh? I'm sure this is meant to be "deep" and whatever, but you look ridiculous as a writer. "Quick" instead of "quickly" is how these people fake voice. This is just cardboard. It's not an authentic voice. I know all of their little tricks. A hurricane "fumbling towards us." That's another. It's like when Wells Tower says that a character "wanded" a pen. So creative! Anyone with a fraction of a brain knows what you're doing. And why you're doing it--because you're working with next to nothing, and you're trying to cover that up. Which is very easy to do with people just like you who aren't really looking at what you wrote, let alone evaluating it's quality for inclusion in their magazines or in putting your books out with their press. Can you have a jowly square face? Doesn't seem like it. And reading those two paragraphs, do you have any clue what the story is about or why you're being told this nonsense? Of course you don't.)

There's no reason. There is never any reason with what these people write.

Back to "The Glory of Their Fame" in Narrative...if I wrote that story, how far do you think I'd get with it and get in general as not being able to write better than that? Do you think the scam artists and thieves that are Tom Jenks and Carolyn Edgarian would have published that? I mean, same story, right?

Wait, no?

You don't say.

Of course it wouldn't be in there. We all know that. Could anyone even begin to say otherwise? Can you imagine the likes of a conman like Tom Jenks saying, "Well, Colin, if you wrote a story that good..."

It's so laughable that you can't even make imaginary Tom Jenks say those words in your mind as even imaginary Tom Jenks was reaching around your back to try and get at your wallet.

I mean, look at that shit. What makes it special? What makes it good? Step up. Come on, if you're one of these people. Tell me. Walk me through it. I'm more than happy to let you speak your piece in these pages. I'm sure you'll look good, right? Very smart. And totally honest.

These are sentences is the best that we can say about what we see with that story. You can read them. They are not sentences most people could write because most people can't even write a sentence. Again, it's like that earlier idea where just because you have people unable to slowly drive the car 200 yards down the perfectly plain, ordinary road without crashing it six times, doesn't mean the person who does should be suiting up for the Indianapolis 500. The work is actually supposed to be good. Great. You have all of these honors thrown at you, it's supposed to be amazing.

And all you can say here is, yeah, you can read this if you really wanted to. Do you? Do want 5000 more words like that? 400? A book's worth? Why? What are you getting from it? What's it doing for you? What is it making you feel that you want to keep feeling? Where's it taking you? What's it saying to you, unique person that you believe yourself to be? How is it connecting with you?

Now, you might say, "I used to live in a place like that," or "I studied semiotics," but these aren't things, you know? That's like liking a movie that's not any good just because it was shot in part in your neighborhood. That's just, "Oh, I get pizza at that place" viewing. That's not a reason to love something or care about it. And it doesn't make someone love or care about it.

Shouldn't we care about great writing if it's actually great writing? Because it's speaking to us, it's making us think and feel and exciting us and moving us. It's beautiful and it causes us to cry or want to share what we've read or felt or thought with someone else. We want to read it again, have the feeling again, and as soon as we do read it again, we're struck in both the same way--but maybe deeper--and in other ways. There's no wearing off, no lessening. We read it again, we savor. We feel like a light has been put on in our previously darkened corner of the universe. Our room.

And that feels amazing. Because it fucking is. How is Robert Olen Butler ever going to do that?

I don't believe anyone could care about this writing. I don't believe they could feel passion for it. I think the most you can say is you could read it if you had to. But why would you? Why this of all things? Why this more than millions of other things about which the same could be said?

And don't give me, "People don't read anyway." Sure, fine. But what are they being offered? You could also say that there are plenty of good things out there if they wanted to read it, and the reason they don't is because they don't want to.

But look, people are helpless. They're not going to figure it out on their own. They're not going to find stuff on their own. I'll go on the Grateful Dead subreddit the other day and you know what I see every day? Someone asking, "I'm new to the Dead, where do I start?" because they can't even figure that out on their own. Stuff has to go to people. They don't go to stuff. It has to be put in their faces. You can't just lead the horse to the water. You have to push its head down into it.

That's how people are now. You have millions and millions and millions of works of writing out there, and new shit coming all the time, and all of these other millions of people who can't do anything well in life who decided to call themselves a writer because then they can pretend that they're good at something, which they can't do, say, with basketball, because you don't have to be any good here. It's all just bullshit and enabling.

You can be the worst writer in the world and go on "Bookstagram" and do your thing and people will say "Awesome!" but if you go the court and someone's walking past and you're not coming within twenty feet of the basket with any shot you take, it's not like anyone will think you're not a terrible basketball player.

But writing? Hell, you could do the writing version of taking 50,000 shots and never so much as drawing iron and there so many millions of other people like you just wanting to be lied to about this thing that none of these people actually care about--you think they're up at two in the morning on a Saturday working on that prose?--and you're just going to blend in with everyone else. Then, this is all there is, and no one can tell what's good. Because it's just this. This, this, this, this, this.

Don't do the subjectivity thing, either. That is such a cop out. No one can watch that basketball player shooting the ball over the fence 100 times in a row and dribbling the ball of their knee more so than the pavement and say, "I think they're a great player, why, it's all subjective, you know," and writing is no more so. Good is good. And you can take anything good and look at what went into making it good. The "subjective" line is the recourse of the insecure person who has no clue. They're dumb, out of their depth, whatever it may be. Preference isn't the same. But something is what it is and someone's ignorance doesn't change that. That "is" is the fixed point.

Even with the internet, and a single group, people can't just figure out to maybe take a listen to Live/Dead and Workingman's Dead and American Beauty and try a Google search of "best Grateful Dead shows." You cannot overstate how helpless humans now are. They're unable to do the most basic things for themselves. And the world has devolved to make it so that those people are provided for, because you can't leave the whole race behind. If people are two stupid to understand that 3 + 3 is 6, you have to scale it back and ask them to try and understand that 2 + 2 is 4 and go no higher. So if you wanted to read--and no one ever thinks about starting to do anything and then actually does it--where would you begin? It wouldn't enter someone's mind anyway, unless it had to. And then they wouldn't do it unless others were doing it. And they wouldn't read something unless others were.

See how it works?

The thing itself is never the fucking thing. And it can be the best thing ever in human history, and something that would make so many people happy, and give them things they need that nothing else does, make them see themselves and life in the most helpful ways, and it wouldn't matter if the thing was just the thing.

It would be no different than if that thing didn't exist.

The other day we talked about a first sentence from a story I was doing. Remember we said above about Robert Olen Butler's first sentence? That was a hypothetical conversation, but you know it was also an accurate one because there's nothing he could have said because there's nothing really there. It's just "blah." Here is that first sentence again, and a few more from the start of that story to complete our latest prose off.

The sound from the girl’s own feet stamping made her think of a soldier marching off to war.

One foot, then the other, and again, except she remained in place and felt silly in a way she never had before.

“But I did do my best,” she repeated, both shoes now flat against the ground. Her cheeks felt hot. Her chin dipped. Her nostrils flared. A crease set into her forehead. “I mean it.”

The girl couldn’t help remembering how she used the exact same words in the past. It was possible she hadn’t lied the other times, but that may have been because she wasn’t thinking very hard about how true those words were.

Usually, they probably weren’t.

No, they definitely weren’t.

Only today she didn’t know how else to state her case. She really had tried her hardest and wasn’t just saying that without thinking it or not thinking it.

Maybe it was impossible for anyone else but you to ever know you’d done your honest best, including someone who believed everything you said to them.

That wasn’t going to make anything easier.

Or was it?

Such a big question.

And a big question seems like it’d require a big answer.

Even if that answer leads to an even bigger question.

The feet had started going again, but instead of beating against the floor they were taking the girl a few sharp steps backwards from a hole that had appeared in the air and looked like it could swallow her. She’d never seen such a hole before.

She almost added, “I promise,” to show how serious she was about what she had said, but the thought of doing so made the hole bigger.

It wasn’t that she was scared of the hole, exactly, because what were the chances that it could actually swallow an entire person, even one who was still growing?

Still, a big hole in the air is a big hole in the air.

That's someone doing a totally different thing than what these people are doing. Every one of us knows every one of those words. But there isn't anything like that. If you had a seven-year-old, she could take that story and go off into her room and read, and you, her parent, could simultaneously go off into yours and do the same, and you'd have these very different, fully resonant experiences.