Prose off with a medical twist: Typical cardboard fiction in The Threepenny Review put forward by Wendy Lesser--whose rapper name is revealed within--v. Fleming story

Thursday 6/26/25

I heard a rumor that Threepenny Review editor Wendy Lesser's rapper name is the bag of hag, which is a reference to her demeanor and not her physical appearance, but I can't confirm. Would be appropriate, though, I'd say.

Lesser is unstable and laced with hostility and entitlement. When I used to send her things (fiction and nonfiction), she'd get the email and reject whatever it was within ten seconds of opening that email.

I said something after years of this, and she went off as the crazy person that she is. I bet there are a bunch of people out there right now who've dealt with her thinking, "That tracks." All she publishes is exactly what you'd expect: The dead-on-arrival MFA machined prose and the worst kind of droning arts criticism, and moan-y essays from blue-blooded navel gazers who super-size the concept of "first world problems" to an astoundingly out of touch with reality degree. All from the right kind of person that doesn't threaten someone as insecure as Wendy Lesser is.

As for her own writing...well, the English have an expression: To be bored off your tits. Insofar as Wendy Lesser's pretentious, dry as mummy dust writing exists for any reason at all, it is to bore people off their tits. Prose that's written as if to say, "Huzzah! Who's somnolent now, bitches!"

What a strange three-headed thing to devote your entire life to: the bag of hag persona, publishing dreadful writing by the right kind of system-approved, talentless robot people, and writing whatever you write for the apparent goal of boring anyone who happens to see it out of their minds.

And why? So you can think you're better than people?

There isn't anyone out there that Wendy Lesser is better than. I'm not sure there's anyone she's even smarter than. And that's really saying something, considering how stupid most people are.

This is the beginning of Kate Busatto's "The Flies," as selected for publication by editor Wendy Lesser in the summer 2025 issue of The Threepenny Review.

Two weeks before the Dordevic funeral, we get flies. There are flies in the foyer, in the Big Parlor and the Small Parlor, in the men’s restroom, and in the maintenance closet. There are flies in the prep room and in the casket showroom. There are not flies in the industrial fridge. Sometimes, when the fridge is not too crowded, I’ll stand in there for a moment to catch a break. 

The flies do not appear all at once. Instead, they come slowly, like timid travelers at shoulder season. We first manage them with an electrified swatter. This method is time-consuming but entertaining. The cemetery manager and I compete to see who can kill the most flies. She has forty years on me and wins by a landslide.

Hana Dordevic died of drowning. This determination comes from the county coroner. She was face-up in the Bay for nearly a week. She followed the currents, adrift, until she was spotted in the marshes by the Dumbarton Bridge. I tell the coroner that the story from the family is much more complicated: that she left her native Serbia in the Eighties and came to Burlingame, where she worked long hours at a senior care home cleaning up drool and crusted mucus, serving potatoes and watching the soaps out of the corner of her eye, till she met some inpatient’s grandson or grand-nephew, Lawrence, and married him quick, and all was well, with three kids and the financial freedom to leave the job and learn to work with clay and make glazed planter pots, until the shape of the pots became clumsier and she went to the doctor and it was months of testing and prodding before they found the multiple sclerosis, and the medicine vacillated between depressing her and causing hallucinations, and the trajectory of the disease was despair and she was found in the Bay with no real sign of suicide, but no real suggestion of a struggle, and some moments in the dark are intangible, intractable, unimaginable but for the body who lives it and dies it. That all her being could be summed up in a word, or even domesticated into my retelling, that the cause of death is so divorced from the cause of life (a childhood, an immigration, a family, a passion, a secret, a breath), I tell the coroner, is criminal. 

“Are you new?” the coroner asks, on the other end of the line. 

The cemetery manager, the other funeral counselor, and I search for the source of the flies. We discover several gum wrappers in the dusty corners of the casket showroom. Otherwise, spic-and-span. The other counselor wipes down the interior of our microwave just in case. I take out the trash again. The cemetery manager swats three small and two large flies. A war in small battles, we call it. 

You're just telling us stuff. It's the prose version of a teletype machine. Tell, tell, tell, tell, tell. Boringly. The language is lifeless. There's nothing here to remember. Nothing to savor. Nothing to re-read. What are the stakes? Why should we care?

The voice is flat, monotone. There are no rises and falls. This is mundanity. We get the exposition dump in what the coroner is allegedly told, which isn't believable at all. Crusted mucus? Come on. You're just padding. There should be no information dumps in a story. But what we have here is an information dump that this writer is also trying to flower up. Believe me, when she wrote the crusted mucus thing, that was an "I'm really writing now moment."

No you weren't. And you never will. Because you can't. You don't get it at all. This isn't it.

Let me emphasize again: That is the beginning of the story. The beginning of a story is so important. Every part is so important. Every word if you're doing it right. Every letter. Every syllable. Every paragraph break.

But a story has to get you right away.

Boom, I'm in. I'm a part of this. Here we are, we're going.

It needs to make you feel that way or it has failed.

The story doesn't know what it wants to be, because this writer doesn't have a story to tell. Her bio beneath the story tells us she's a hospice chaplain. This is just going to be some quasi-thing from her life. Because these people can never invent. It's always them. And they're not interesting. It can't be you. There must be invention.

And you already know from the start of this story that you'll be subjected to some "deep" but really half-baked metaphor that will be labored to death about these flies. Who wants to sign up for that? I don't want to see you laboring your simple metaphor to death. Not on the dime of my time and energy. No one does.

Even if everyone in the world read, they still wouldn't want that. And very few people in the world do read. So who are we doing this for? Are we doing it to give people who don't read a reason to read such that they might read? That's where the focus has to be right now. This person isn't doing that and can't produce something that would convert anyone, even just for one story, one book, or one author.

No. This story--and all of the the stories by all of these system people--are just for other system people. And not for their readerly consumption of it, either. But so that they don't feel threatened and that their status quo gets to remain intact. I don't just mean the status quo of what gets published. I mean their emotional status quo. The status quo of their illusions and delusions. The status quo that means their fragile little egos are left unbruised and undisturbed. That they're not challenged to do better, be better, or make way or clear a way for that which is better.

As for that belabored metaphor and the predictability of how it was going to be used, this is how the story ends:

A fly lands on my neck. I let her infest.

How many thousands of miles away were we supposed to see this coming from? And you gendered the fly? You did a girl power thing with the fly's gender? You let her infest? Really?

How many times in a row can the dreck that these people write and the dreck that people like Wendy Lesser publish--and in case you forgot, the bag of hag is a Guggenheim winner, because that's totally about ability and merit--and award, and hype, and tout, and nominate, and anthologize, and put on their "Best books of the summer" lists, and on and on and on, make you say, Oh, for fuck's sake...

I let her infest.

Unbelievable. What does that even look like? I mean, someone could walk over and ask, "Hey, what are you doing?" and you could answer, "I'm staying still like this because I'm letting this fly--who is female--infest on my neck." Oh. Reasonable. Not insane at all. Works as well in a story as it does in life, which is to say, not the fuck at all.

Do these people have any awareness?

And you know something, too? This is a very short story. Which has nothing to do with the narrator. So why have the narrator narrate it? It's not even a sketch of a story. There aren't enough bones here to call it bare bones.

Meanwhile, what do you think would have happened if I sent Wendy Lesser a story that begins thusly, with me being what I am, with my knowledge, with my expertise, with my track record, with my productivity, with my limitless ability to invent, and all I represent to a person like her?

A man who was in a relationship with a doctor asked her during the early stage of their time together if she could get him a pair of scrubs—just the bottoms.

“They seem really comfortable,” he said. “I think it’d be nice to kick back in them after I’m home for the night or bumming around.”

She brought him a pair from the hospital where she worked and playfully advised that he needed to make an important decision: He could wear the scrubs, which were reversible, with the tie for the orange waistband on the outside or the inside. One way was considered traditional, the other cooler by those in the know. She didn’t tell him which was which and he really didn’t care, save that he imagined—and felt some envy for—a hotshot surgeon who had everything going on to the maximum degree, right down to how he naturally knew to wear his scrubs.

What was his life like? Had it been a rousing success at every age and stage? What kind of place did he live in? Was he automatically liked by everyone?

Respectively: Awesome. No doubt. Large and clean. Probably.

But for the most part, regarding the playful game about the important decision, his goal was to keep the pants from falling down in order not to elicit some embarrassing rebuke—“Hey, asshole, there are kids here!”—or withering comment—“God, that’s so nasty!”—because his ass was hanging out—you never want to be one of those guys—while barely noticing he was in them. No belly-pinching when he bent over to tie his shoes or reached for a handful of popcorn. All of the comfort of being pants-free without becoming a pantless man on the couch.

And if anyone wanted to assume he helped people in a certain health-benefitting manner, there was no harm in that because it wasn’t like it’d be at odds with his character, so he wouldn’t call it a mistake, necessarily. He wished he was a bigger help than he was and would not have turned down an offer to become someone who could do twice as much than he did at present or as many times more as possible. But you can’t play a hand you weren’t dealt. Maybe Johnny Appleseed would’ve preferred to build houses instead of arbors, all things being equal.

His relationship with the doctor ended, but many years later he still owned and wore—practically daily—the scrubs. Sometimes he wondered whether his ex would be surprised if she knew this particular factoid about him, were it somehow to be conveyed to her, and how long most people continued to wear an item of clothing.

It was probably a year or two, at tops, and he was pushing a couple of decades. But the pants looked the same and for all intents and purposes were the same. They hadn’t coarsened or worn thin. The blue had gotten no lighter. The waistband remained undimmed. You could rightfully term it vermillion. Tongue of fire. And comfort is comfort, especially when there’s much else that isn’t.

Different level. Always a completely different level. And obviously a completely different level. It's not subtle, it's not subjective. It's plain. Axiomatic. Undeniable.

And in a creature like Wendy Lesser, this creates envy, resentment, and rage. Then add in that this man is the expert on all of these different things. How many? How do you even venture a guess? And he has the publication record--and a publication record unlike any--that you can't begin to approach, even as a card-carrying system member. Oh, look, there he is again. That asshole. And there he is in that place, too. I can't get in that place. You add in the productivity. And even things like gender, skin color, appearance, and you just get hate on top of hate on top of hate. Ever-compounded hate and envy.

And in me, you also had someone who kept trying for years and years, before saying anything, knowing that this was full-on discrimination. Knowing why that discrimination was happening. But being so disinclined to confrontation, and just wanting to work and not be denied any chance whatsoever automatically. Because that is the truth: A bigot like Wendy Lesser could not let me my work appear in the pages of her journal, where it would also be revealed as being infinitely better than any of the other work in there, because of what I represent to her. And that's everything she is not and could never be. Whereas, this other writer, well, she doesn't, does she?

And that's what it always comes down to with these people. It's not writing, it's not literature, it's certainly readers. No one has more contempt for readers than a Wendy Lesser or your typical publishing system person. There's no reader on earth that wants this kind of fiction or what Wendy Lesser herself writers. And of course that's going to create animus on the hag bag's part. Animus for these people often takes the form of asserting class roles. What they think are class roles. Their class superiority.

They're just horrible, talentless people. Bonded together in their classism, prejudices, pettiness, and resentments, which all stem, obviously, from despicable even they find themselves to be, despite the arrogance. People like this don't have healthy relationships with themselves. Or anyone or anything. Certainly not writing.