The Literary Issue

By Paige Pearcy
Deputy Magazine Editor  On  March 25th, 2013

In all of my previous columns regarding books — all two of them — I’ve said in some way or another that I have no authority to really judge the literary pieces I write about, and, yet, here I am, at the helm of this issue, selecting the pieces that go inside. So, I want to thank Haley Goldberg for letting me choose these pieces after I’ve made it publicly known that I don’t think I can. Haley: thank you.

I read a lot (you’re thinking, no shit, sherlock, you write about reading for goodness sake) but reading without a pen in my hand to annotate and look for critical and stylistic elements in the text is rare. I always look at writing with the eye of an English major. So when I picked pieces for this, I tried to, well, not read the submissions like that. I tried to revert back to the fifth-grader-who-reads-under-blankets-past-bedtime-because-books-are-your-best-friend type of reader; instead of looking for all the academic hogwash, I just read them for what they are. That being said, the submissions I received (and there were a lot) were impressive, to say the least. Y’all can write! So there I sat, crouched over and frazzled in a coffee shop with the submissions sitting in front of me, and I had to make the hard decisions.

I hope what I chose, and what graces these pages, takes you to some new places and makes you think a little bit differently.

5.
By Hannah Weiner

The F Train Downtown
By Olivia Lloyd

Desire Under the Mosquito Netting
By Giancarlo Buonomo

IT
By Peter Wagner

Something
By Alana Weiss Nydorf

Preparation for Painting Shutters: A Checklist
By Luc LaFreniere

Ballet Class, 2001
By Carlina Duan

Likewise
By Logan Corey

Fucking Locally
By Allison Epstein

Printed from www.michigandaily.com on Mon, 27 May 2013 15:14:29 -0400