Cover Letters (Tribute: Joey Comeau)

Notes from the Road: Currently in Oklahoma to witness my dear friends S's wedding (the Forbidden Union). Though the hotel is a lot nicer than we all expected for the price, this isn't ideal conditions for blog post composition. Yet, I'm with old friends and, after ten hours on the road, I'm still glad to see them every moment.

And then there's other things. Truth be told, I haven't been able to give SDR as much attention as I would have liked these past few months. I've been reusing material that I wrote months or years ago for exactly situations such as these. I'm very glad to share these pieces with you, but it's not necessarily by choice.

Since June, I've traveled from Louisiana to Minneapolis, four times back and forth between Iowa City and Minneapolis, and now from Minneapolis back and forth to Oklahoma. I've applied for more jobs than I care to share. Before I left New Orleans, I told AC that the job search was already weighing heavy on me and, in an uncharacteristic demonstration of disgust, he said, "Yeah, I know. Job searching is just so physically, mentally, emotionally exhausting..." It's that last point that resonates with me, and it took a few weeks for me to decide why.

Job searching, writing cover letters in particular, is a process of sharing with strangers your personal and professional triumphs and aspirations and then being told, more often than not, that "It's not a good fit," or, that they've found "a better qualified candidate." It's a horrifying, humiliating, scarring process if you stop to think about it.

IB told me that after writing so many cover letters she got to the point where she wasn't really writing cover letters anymore. They had devolved into weird, personal missives. One, which told the brief story of her odyssey to become a community organizer, landed her a job. After meeting her coworkers, I understand why this was attractive to them -- they are an emotionally involved lot, but nonprofit folk tend to be.

This all reminded me of a project and book by Joey Comeau, poet and author of A Softer World, called Overqualified. It's a series of fake cover letters he wrote channeling some of the more absurd points of job searching. You can read some of the letters here -- or buy the book and support indie authors.

Anyway, a tribute. This in response to my favorite job posting for a position I Really didn't want:

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am very glad to apply for the Private Investigator position with Walker and Ritter Investigators. With my qualifications, vastly superior to all the other candidates, I would make a terrific contribution to the company. What are those excellent credentials, you may ask? Well, being professional investigators, I leave that for you to discover (good luck). If you haven't been able to find substantial evidence supporting my claim in one month's time, then I guess we'll just have to both consider my craft and acumen proven. In the meantime, I have most of a page left, and I'd like to tell you a story.

There is a small bar/cafe in the Lichtenberg borough of Berlin that I visited with my classmates and friends. It was a cold day in January and we had just finished a long day of touring museums, including the infamous Hohenschoenhausen prison, the Stasi headquarters. It was a beautiful cafe. We sat crowded around a small, rectangular table drinking scotch and beer and talking idly about the city. I was taking notes, St. looked at me strangely and said, "Sam, stop writing." I asked him why, and he replied, "Because we just went to the Stasi museum. I'm German. Writing makes me nervous."

Indeed, the prison made us all nervous, especially the final stretch of the tour. All twenty of us Americans and two Germans stood huddled in a small, concrete, frigid enclosure with two impregnable metal doors on either side of us, wire mesh above, while the tour guide spoke.

I'll paraphrase: "There's a joke: Bush, Gorgachev, and Honecker are being chased by cannibals. Bush turns around and shouts, 'Spare me and I'll take you to a capitalist paradise.' And the cannibals eat him. Gorbachev turns around and shouts, 'Spare me and I'll take you to a worker's paradise!' And the cannibals eat him. Honecker keeps running and shouts over his shoulder, 'Keep following me and you'll be in East Germany in ten meters.' He looks back and the cannibals are gone."

We all laughed, and then the guide said, "It's funny, isn't it? But that joke was told by a twenty year-old man to his friends at a gathering after church. He was arrested and taken here." The guide gestured around him. "This is where prisoners in the later years were allowed to stand outside for fresh air. It was the only time any prisoner was allowed to be outside. You couldn't see the city or hear it -- you didn't even know you were in the city. But, at night you could see the stars in this tiny, concrete enclosure. And if you could see the sky, there was hope."

Chilling and uplifting, didn't you think? We come from very different backgrounds, Valerie Ritter, but I'm sure that you and I had a moment of empathy when you went on the same tour two weeks ago on vacation. The "rest chambers" are really unnerving, I found. But, I'm sure that you also felt some twinge of professional respect, just as I did.

You're probably wondering  how I knew that you were at the Stasi prison two weeks ago. Furiously wondering. Probably wondering how I know you didn't have anything but an Americano from Cafe Envie for breakfast because you hit the snooze too many times, very uncharacteristic. You order Caesar Salad with Ranch dressing on the side. You're left handed, but try to pretend to be ambidextrous. Last month you memorized the Salic Law speech from Henry V just to see if you could. You're obsessed with puzzles and logic games. Every evening you play Go, Chess, or Scrabble against opponents all over the world and typically win. Sometimes it's just Sudoku.

For the reasons stated above, and those credentials I'm sure you will never find, I believe I would make an exceptional member of your team. I very much look forward to hearing back from you and wish you all the best in discovering my contact information.

Best,

SF

Genre Wars, Part I

A few days ago I read "Why Isn't Literary Fiction Getting More Attention," a guest-post on Jane Friedman's blog by writer and teacher April Line. The gist of it is self explanatory. Normally I'm irked by people trashing my aesthetic, but this one just confused me.

Line draws a pretty obvious initial line in the sand between the people who prefer "... Amy Hempel or John McNally or Joan Didion than Stephanie Meyer or Nora Roberts or John Grisham." The former three, I suppose, are "literary authors" and the latter are "genre."

Okay, fine, I'll walk with you. I take exception to her straw-manning the concept of genre by not naming authors who carry the same critical baggage as her "literary" short list (like Madeleine L'Engle; or ... I've got nothing for romance, but that's because I'm not well read there; or Jonathan Lethem), but whatever.

However, next she sites a little-known book, Ron Currie Jr.'s God is Dead, as a good example of fine literary writing. This is where she lost me. I have never read God Is Dead, but the reviews say that it is a collection of short stories begins with "the death of God, who, disguised as a Sudanese woman, dies in Darfur." Bookslut and Line herself use the phrase "post-apocalyptic" to describe it.

But, in fact, that is a genre. My friends and I all it "post-apocalyptic fiction."

I'm honestly not sure if April Line would place God Is Dead in the same genus as The Day of the Triffids or The Road or The Stand, but I would. I have no idea if I would place God Is Dead in the same category as Amy Hempel, since I have not read the former. But I tend to think of Joan Didion as an apocalyptic writer. That's just my opinion.

That's where we all get stuck: personal opinion. Personally, I think the only place the word "genre" belongs is in academia - where, if we didn't have such fine words to argue about we'd have nothing to do - and secret, underground, publishers' marketing rooms where the purpose is to figure out how to get the most people to actually buy their books (or, in a less cynical view, get the books to the people who like them).

Basically, I don't think that Line is angry that "genre books" are selling better than "literature." She's upset that not enough people are reading her favorite books.

There's no reason to fault anyone for that, though. We don't choose what we love. I just don't take kindly to the attitude, It's not that what I like is bad, it's that you aren't sophisticated enough appreciate it. The real difference between genre and literature is the speaker's ego. And, yes, I realize the irony in my making a fuss about it.

Oh, Let Me Tell You a Story

Today Betsy Lerner made me feel inadequate. In her post, "You shouldn't let other people get their kicks for you," she candidly answered the question what she was doing when she was college age and shortly after. What's worse than her own adventures, and almost as funny, is the one-upmanship that ensued in the 49 (and counting) responses. It does hurt a little that many now-editors led far more interesting lives than I am currently. But I guess that when you're job is to correct other people's mistakes and be a personal fact checker for all the asshole writers who want to be edgy with drugs, sex, and alcohol, you've got to have a substantial cache of spectacular fuck-ups that you can later brag about to make other people wonder what the hell they're doing with their time.

Just submitted a story to Clarkesworld. The first time I sent them a story, the editor sent me a rejection the same evening. The last time I sent them a piece, it took over a week for them to throw me a form letter. Every hour that passes before the inevitable is a triumph. Yes, Clarkesworld is teaching me to live in the moment. I'm going to go get a fifth of whiskey and spend some time sledding with the penguins at the zoo.