​MENTOR
​COMMENTARY

Mentorship Recipient:
Meat Sweats

​Recipient Reflection:
Steven Carey-Walton

On "Meat Sweats" by Steven Carey-Walton

by ​Laura Maylene Walter

Full disclosure #1: I’m a longtime vegetarian. Full disclosure #2: My literary aesthetic is much more likely to align with a feminist voice than of a hyper-masculine one. Full disclosure #3: If you’d told me a few months ago that I’d want to accept a story called “Meat Sweats” about two men who gorge themselves on beef, take bumps of cocaine in a bar bathroom, and lift weights at a place called “The Cage,” I probably wouldn’t have believed you. And yet here we are!
 
This is what I love about editing a literary journal: good writing always comes with its own surprises. After reading “Meat Sweats,” Prose Editor Matt Weinkam and I were immediately taken with the story’s energy, humor, and characters who turn out to be more complex than they appear on the surface. It was one of those stories that stuck in both of our minds for weeks as we started making editorial decisions for Issue 2.
 
As much as Matt and I enjoyed “Meat Sweats,” we had some reservations about the ending. Endings are always difficult, aren’t they? As we saw it, the story’s original ending was too explanatory and seemed to wrap up Dre’s character too neatly. When I contacted Steve to discuss revision, however, I didn’t originally intend to select “Meat Sweats” for my editorial mentorship. I had it in my mind that our mentorships should be more all-encompassing instead of focusing on just the last few paragraphs. But I soon realized that we had the opportunity to consider more broadly why endings are so tricky in the first place and why it matters to get them right when submitting to journals.

I encouraged Steve to think about the transformation the narrator, Walter, goes through by the end of the story, and how those emotions might be reflected without overstating them. For his part, Steve was responsive, willing to try new things, and ready to get to work—basically, an editor’s dream. (Also, did you notice in his commentary that he apparently wrote this story in a day and submitted it within three days? That is impressive/jealousy-inducing.)  In the end, I’m thrilled with how “Meat Sweats” turned out, and I’m also glad to know that Gordon Square Review’s editorial mentorship program helped bring this delightfully strange and surprising story to publication. So please, read Steve’s story and enjoy a case of the meat sweats on us. 

Laura Maylene Walter
​
Laura Maylene Walter is a writer and editor in Cleveland. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, the Sun, Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She was a Yaddo Fellow, a Tin House Writers’ Workshop Scholar, the recipient of the Ohioana Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant, and a past Fiction Editor of Mid-American Review. Her debut story collection, Living Arrangements (BkMk Press), won the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize, a national gold IPPY, and a Foreword Book of the Year Award. Laura holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University, is a contributing editor for Cherry Tree, teaches workshops for Literary Cleveland, blogs for the Kenyon Review, and works for Cleveland Public Library. She is no stranger to rejection.