June 8th, 2026 - A Talent for Seeming

Dear TNY,

“A Talent for Seeming” is the first of the three extra fiction dumps that I hit.

And I don’t fucking like it.  I’ve seen this movie before.  It’s called Where the Heart is and it’s not very good.  I’ve seen these people, too.  I grew up with them.  They, like me, are uninteresting.

What’s so wrong with writing something new?  I’ll give you that the craft in this is really, really good.  The narrative moves.  There’s a force.  But, like, what does it fucking matter?  It just doesn’t.  It’s just the same story retold over again.  Craft be damned.  And yeah, maybe it’s hard to write new shit when so much shit has already been written.  It might be hard to write shit when so many lives have been lived.  But the truth always has been that it doesn’t matter how many lives have been lived, Art’s job is to try to contain something from them. Something meaningful and valuable, and to reexpress it.  So maybe the problem here is that it isn’t written fresh enough, new enough, original enough, that is to say it doesn’t fucking matter enough, voice-wise, so I’m not into it. 

Yeah, maybe what I’m waiting on is a voice to carry me somewhere fucking compelling.  This isn’t it.  In fact, I think most of the voices you publish aren’t that.  But maybe that’s Art.  It’s thousands and thousands of voices saying, “Listen to me,” but it’s really only one that cuts through all that noise.  This voice isn’t that.  This is retread.  Tired.  And feels like it’s maximizing Americana and its lore for some “genuine” character.  Which doesn’t feel like character.  It just feels like old shit.  Like, what a white male author would say about the poor in this country, that he neither lived among or understood.  Yes, that’s it.  That’s what this smacks of.  American Fiction.  Nice.

Nick