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Dear Mr. Blue
The man of my dreams
Emboldened by his declaration of love, I asked him about "the future." I wasn't banking on his honest answer.
By Garrison Keillor
[02/22/00]

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"Circumcision" by David L. Gollaher
A physician argues the case against lopping it off.
By Greg Villepique
[02/22/00]

Spy vs. spy
Sadism and palace intrigue flavor the deliciously paranoid vision of Iain Banks.
By Polly Shulman
[02/18/00]

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"City of God" by E.L. Doctorow
Let there be enlightenment: harrowing stories of war and vengeance interleaved with a strange tale that starts with a stolen crucifix.
By Julia Gracen
[02/18/00]

Turning out the lights on the old New Yorker
Was it Utopia? Camelot? Paradise? Or does the possibility exist that, as fine as it once was, it was still just a magazine?
By Gavin McNett
[02/17/00]

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Numerical scores and written comments were often at odds. The written reaction always seemed more positive -- but, as you gazed breathlessly at the numbers, the verbal bouquets would wilt in an instant: 6.3? 6.3!? Damn those Canadian judges!

In a forum with over 10,000 members and up to 600 stories posted at any given time, degenerative bickering and accusations of ratings fraud were the least of the Zoetrope workshop's inescapable teething troubles. More disconcerting, from a creative point of view, was that the percentage of decent writing and intelligent criticism was so tiny and so deeply buried beneath random dreck -- a drawback of the facility of electronic submission (cost-free, less effort required) and the absence of admission prerequisites and editorial filters. Think (if you can stomach it) of Epinions.com with a literary bent.

Participating in this free-for-all sometimes made me wonder whether there can be such a thing as "too democratic" when it comes to conducting a useful literary forum. One man, who had written a story set in Britain, was informed by a reviewer that she had lived in the U.K. for a few months and on this authority she could tell that he'd got the British vernacular all wrong. The author was, in fact, British himself and writing from Hertfordshire, England.

David Toussaint, a writer from New York City, was instructed that his story "Queer Window," a darkly humorous tale of a gay man struggling with sex addiction, lacked the essential insight that "all gay people are sex addicts." Similarly, Adrian Slatcher, a talented and published writer from Manchester, England, removed his graphically poetic piece on male fisting because certain readers pegged it as nothing more than a dirty and inappropriate confessional.

"They personalized it, assuming that the first-person narrator was me, and directed their comments accordingly," says Slatcher. "One person's shock had been that a 'girl' could write such a thing. I'm male! The other interesting thing was that the detail in the story, it was assumed, could only have come from firsthand knowledge, when in fact I had gleaned it from the Internet." Slatcher quickly yanked the story. "I didn't really want to be remembered as the boy who wrote the fisting story!" he says. "But hey, it got me remembered."

Indeed. At least these folks managed to pull in some readers. Most stories stay posted for a month or so and receive about five to 15 reviews, often contingent on the popularity and name recognition of established members, regardless of merit. This is one of the few attributes that the workshop shares with the real world of publishing. Another is the very real imperative to make "sales" that had many writers literally begging for reads on the site's message boards. Others would do the less blatantly self-promotional discussion board junket, slyly referring to their work in threads about technique. One can hardly blame them. The only other guarantee of a substantial response is to post a short-short with a snappy title. (New members have to make those first five critiques to join, after all.) My second story -- title: "Topless"; length: 2,300 words -- received 21 reviews in two weeks. All but two readers were men.

Aside from pleas for feedback, the discussion boards were, in their infancy, often taken over by sexual repartee and vicious flame wars that came about a comma's breadth away from sparking a lawsuit. Example: The thread titled "Pot, Whiskey, Beer or Fucking?" was an inquiry into how you unwind -- "as a writer," of course. Discussions are now censored, much to the dismay of some of the more ebullient and inflammatory participants.

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