MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

Mentorship Recipient
"Dividing by Percentages"

Recipient Reflection: 
Brandon Noel

On "Dividing by Percentages" by Brandon Noel

by Matt Weinkam

“Dividing by Percentages” is the first piece of prose that Brandon Noel has ever published. Not sure about you, but I find this pretty remarkable. His background is in poetry, which you can sense in the rhythm of those opening sentences, in the instinct for figurative language (“a sentinel of our remembrance”), and in the reverence for detail (“the fat around their wrists stay puffy and creased”). But the narrative demonstrates such command of the elements of storytelling that it’s hard to believe Brandon hasn’t been honing his skills writing creative nonfiction for so many years. Ray Davis, for example, is such a clearly drawn character that he threatens to take the story away with him. And the movement from the factory towards the into the fever dream of the beach and back home functions with a kind of dream-plot logic that succeeds even as it defies explanation. 
 
As part of the editorial mentorship, Brandon and I worked towards unifying the prose and poetic elements in revision. For instance, the figure of Janus opens the story with a rich bit of metaphor, but in the initial draft he sort of fell away as the story progressed. Together we found opportunities to thread this idea of looking ahead and looking back throughout the narrative. By the end, this motif pays in the image of the rooms empty and full, and in the idea that “the way it was before and the way it is now, the past and future, both keep changing me.” 
 
Throughout the process, Brandon had a knack for taking my blunt suggestions and turning them into subtle, artful changes. When I asked for a physical description of the factory at the beginning and he wrote a sentence as sprawling and beautiful as the building itself. When I recommended adding the line “shit for math” earlier in the story to set up the ending Brandon worked it into a description of the giant Sutherland steel press and adjusted the language to make the math connection less overt and therefore more effective. In each case he edited the draft in such a way that addressed my concerns while staying true to his vision of the story. 
 
And how about that vision. The first time I read this submission in the queue I was struck by its tenderness, how the narrator looks at every person, every object and detail in the story with such affection and sensitivity it is like they are on the doorstep of death taking one last look back. It’s no surprise then that Brandon brought this same care and attention to the editing and rewriting process. After all, revision is tender, sacred space too. 
 
I’m grateful to Brandon for his hard work on beautiful piece. It may be the first work of creative nonfiction he’s published but it certainly won’t be the last. 

Matt Weinkam
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Matt Weinkam is a writer, editor, and college instructor with published work in Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, New South, Quarter After Eight, Split Lip, DIAGRAM, and Electric Literature. He is founding editor of Threadcount Magazine and a former Managing Editor of Passages North literary journal. He holds an MA in creative writing from Miami University, an MFA in fiction from Northern Michigan University, and he has taught creative writing as far away as Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, China. Originally from Cincinnati, Matt moved to Cleveland the same month LeBron broke the curse.  ​​