Writers Blog

Back from Outer Space

So I'm back from directing a summer study abroad program and I've been guilted into posting on my blog again.  I've been reading the latest issues of the Paris Review, Missouri Review, and the Southern Review.  Apparently Brett Lott is no longer with the Southern Review and he has decided to go back to Crazyhorse.  I'm not sure what this means for the journal or the next direction it will go (a lot of people feel that Lott pretty much resurrected it) but there certainly is some great work in the summer issue.  I especially liked a story by Bruce Ducker called "Micah's Story."  It was reminiscent of Ethan Canin's "The Palace Theif" (the short story that was made into a really bad movie called The Emperor's Club with Kevin Kline) since it was set in a prep school and it had the same sort of reunion, let's-see-what's-happened-to-all-us-good-'ol-boys feeling, but the tone was much darker and more poignant.  The narrator manages to make himself seem pretty pathetic and pedantic without losing our sympathy.  And the main character Micah, a persecuted intellectual who doesn't, for some reason, feel it appropriate to give his schoolmates their comeuppance, is complex and intriguing.  These kinds of stories always fascinate me; I'm not sure if I can generalize that all writer's do this or care about this sort of thing, but I think that there's something to be said for wanting to know what happened.  What happened to Jeff, my druggie, ex-best friend from junior high?  Or Stephanie, the violinist who gave me my first wet willie?  Or Darcy, the running back, or Sean, the band geek?  I find myself sometimes Googling these folks to try and find out.  Stories, I think, are one way to make sense of all that growing up we're always doing, to make sense of the irony or dichotomy between who we were and who we are now.  It's strange to say, but making things up helps me figure out what happened.  It's like putting a salve on the scars of adulthood--a way to reclaim the past or to make it count.  So, here we go.  Pen to paper, fingers to keys, let's get on with the business of getting it out.

Welcome to the Apocalypse

The Road

So, I'm in the middle of Cormac McCarthy's recent Pulitzer-prize-winning The Road and I have to say, I'm. On. That. Road.  What a whopper of a novel.  A father and his son walk across post-apocalyptic American and jeez, I'm there, the whole way.  Lesser novelists, I think, would get stuck with how to make a novel about a journey through a barren wasteland dramatic enough to hold a reader.  How does he do it?  Language.  It all comes down to language.  Take these couple sentences for instance:

    Dark of the invisible moon.  The nights now only slightly less black.  By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. (32)

What a great image.  Tight, minimalist.  McCarthy tells the whole story in a series of these short fragments of their journey and the cumulative effect is one of urgency.  You just can't wait to get to the end of THE ROAD.

Enough praise.  What I'd also like to talk about is the proliferation of novels about post-apocalyptic America that have come out recently.  The Road, although probably the most high-profile, is only one of them.  There's also Jim Crace's The Pest House and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. There are others, I'm sure.  But it makes one wonder: what's the deal about the end of the world?  I also recently read Omnidawn's recent Paraspheres anthology and several of the stories were apocalyptic.  Maybe I've just hit an apocalyptic vein, but it seems more than just a coincidence.  Do these novelists know something?  Are they preying on post 9/11 fear?  Why is apocalypse selling books?  Do you see creative work about the end of the world coming from other sources as well?  Thoughts...

Submission Woes

I've been thinking a lot lately about the inefficiency of submitting work to literary periodicals or independent presses.  As an editor, I'm constantly struggling with how to sift through the plethora of manuscripts we receive ever week in a timely manner.  On the other hand, I'm also frustrated with how difficult it is to find good work.  What I'd like is to find some way to expeditiously sift through all the crap and get to the work that we'd like to publish as quickly as possible.  But even with my interns reading all the material, we still take about four months to get back to folks, sometimes longer if a piece manages to get through a couple readers without being rejected.

As an author, I'm frustrated with having to wait months to hear back from journals.  Literary presses have even longer waits.  For example, right now, I'm waiting to hear back from a press that requested my short story collection ms in September 2006.  In their guidelines, they mention that the very soonest that an author will hear back from them is four months.  If they like a manuscript, it then goes to the whole editorial board who then has to agree unanimously to publish it, often taking much longer.  Oh, and here's the kick: they don't accept simultaneous submissions, which means that if they decide it's a no-go, then I'm stuck with another year-long wait from another understaffed and underpaid literary press who may also decide to pass on the ms.  Simultaneous submitting to manuscripts helps alleviate some of the wait, but many literary presses (such as the one I'm waiting on) don't accept simultaneous subs.

So what to do?  Honestly, I'm torn.  Some mags/presses are able to handle the ever-growing slush pile with ease, but they generally have a pretty hefty budget and editorial staff galore.  What do you do when you're one of the poor struggling authors trying to publish with one of the poor struggling presses?  At least I'm learning that under-appreciated virtue of patience.

My Own Monster Eyes

Painted Eric small

Here's some more Monster Eyes.  What a monster!  This was just before the final World Cup match last year between France and Italy. 

Freaky.

And I OWN this one.  But feel free to use it.  If you need a picture of a France-crazed World Cup fan of someone who still thinks that Zidane is a pretty decent guy, then go ahead.  Take it away. 

Monster Eyes

Monster Eyes

I don't know about you, but this photo creeps me out.  Yikes. 

"Monster Eyes" is the name of one of the songs in Lethem's new book You Don't Love Me Yet.  It's a song that the characters name collaboratively, during a jam session.  The main character, Lucinda, yells out the words as a chorus, remembering a conversation she had with a man who is known for half the book only as "the complainer" who calls her frequently on a complaint line.  "Monster Eyes" becomes a sounding board for the commodification of intellectual property.  Who do the words belong to?  The complainer?  Lucinda?  The band's usual lyricist and songwriter, Bedoin?  What I find amazing about this book is how Lethem takes something as innocuous as a couple of words and makes them take on immense psychological weight.  As soon as the words become valuable to the characters, it raises the stakes of the novel.  Who owns the words becomes central to the underlying tensions in the characters' relationships.  The naming of a proprietor can either make or break the band.  In one of the principal scenes (don't worry, I wont' give it away) Lethem infuses these words with such meaning that you almost don't want the characters to say them.  It's uncomfortable, humiliating, exactly the kind of feeling you get when you're watching a thriller and you're thinking "Don't open that door!"  But you don't have any control over what the characters do, the direction the words go, and Boom, they open the door and the everything changes.

As a writer, I find this kind of terrifying.  It's sort of like that movie with Johnny Depp, based off of Stephen King's novel The Secret Window.  What would you do if one day someone said, "that's my story.  Those are my words."  Happens all the time, especially when the intellectual property becomes valuable (i.e. all the people who claim to have written Harry Potter, or that guy who was so ticked off about Dan Brown using some of his research that he took him to court).  I went to a panel at the Associated Writing Programs conference this past March where mostly creative nonfiction writers (Robin Hemley was one of them) talked about literary gossip and how much is ethical to use in your own creative work.  Their general consensus was that as long as it's OK with the people you're stealing from, then go for it.  That seems to be Lethem's conclusion as well in You Don't Love Me Yet.  But I steal from all sorts of people, from all sorts of stories.  Do I essentially need to get permission for everything I hear?  Everything I read that strikes me a certain way?  For example, I have a line in a new story I wrote that was from a conversation I had with my grandmother seven years ago.  She had just broken her wrist after a nasty fall (watch out for the icy patch!) and she wore this cumbersome sling that was very difficult to remove.  She said, "Every time I change, it's a huge production."  For some reason, those words stuck and they ended up verbatim in my story.  Good thing short stories aren't worth much, or Grandma might be suing the pants off of me.

So.  Words, images, audio, video, etc. etc. etc.  Who do they belong to?  Is it entirely subjective?  A recent poster, Maya directed me to a "creative commons" area where Vox members can get free stuff and use it to construct their blogs.  The internet almost encourages this kind of collaborative work.  It's all there, free, just because someone says it is.  But if it's not, watch out.

I guess this is the place where I should attribute where I got my own "Monster Eyes" from.  You can find the same image at: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/dancing-monster1.htm

A Blogging I Will Go

My wife/spouse/life partner is a prodigious blogger.  Go to http://rixarixa.blogspot.com and see for yourself.  Hundreds of people check out her blog daily, and she's received quite a bit of media attention for her work with unassisted homebirth and midwifery.  This morning, a UK-based magazine interviewed her for a couple hours about her dissertation and her experiences.  She's been interviewed other times by newspapers, other magazines, and even received a tentative invite to be on the Today Show.  What I find so unique about her experiences is how her readership developed so organically.  Her blog started off as a site to basically explain some of her research to friends and family who had difficulty understanding some of her decisions.  That initial readership expanded to include several online birth communities and now the mainstream media.  And it all started from a simple blog.

My own experience with blogging (as you can see from my measly, 3-post nascent blog) is limited.  But I think that I'm beginning to see the value and importance of blogging more and more.  Although blogs have been around for years now, they are gaining more and more attention and a larger and larger readership.  It's kind of like the Wild West of blogging.  There are sports blogs, personal blogs, political blogs, birth blogs, blogs about blogs, etc. At the same time that there is a huge proliferation of blogs, there has been a pointed decline in literary readership.  Books, I'm afraid, are less popular than ever.  Commercial publishing houses have consolidated and are constantly looking at ways to cut costs and become more efficient.  Some publishers are forgoing the usual system of earning back an advance and moving to a strictly per-copy-sold contract.  Others, like On Demand Books, a New-York-based company that uses an "Expresso Book Machine" to print books from a digital catalog, are trying to change the way that we currently disseminate the printed work (article about this in the May/June 2007 issue of Poets and Writers).  But all of these are temporary solutions to a changing readership that prefers the short, digital media found on the internet.

So what to do?  I've had two people who've responded to my blog since last week and many more who have read it.  I imagine that with the amount of time and effort that I put into the blog compared to, say, the hours and hours that it takes me to write a polished short story, I will garner a much larger readership than I get from the literary journals I usually publish in.  And publication is immediate.  All I have to do is click "save" and my words are posted online for the whole world wide web to read.  The whole process is somewhat liberating--there is not peer-review, no real censorship, and the readership is so much more diverse than the exclusive world of literary periodicals.  And while there are advantages to the more exclusive literary readership, it's refreshing to have a broader readership.  I'm still reeling about the ability to say whatever the hell I want.

Thoughts?

Why Jonathan Lethem Rocks

You Don't Love Me Yet

Jonathan Lethem rocks in more ways than one.

First, his new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet.  I recently attended Columbia College's Story Week in Chicago and met Lethem for the first time.  The first thing I said to him was "I think I've read everything you've ever written."  After that, the man gave me a CD to compliment my newly-purchased-and-signed-by-the-author copy of his novel.  And the novel, like the man, rocks.  It's about an indie rock band in Los Angeles.  It's not as good as some of his other work (hard to top Fortress of Solitude or Motherless Brooklyn, in my opinion) but it doesn't disappoint.

Second, he's trying to stick it to the copyright man, partly through an agenda behind the new book.  Lethem feels that copyright stifles creativity because of the restrictions it places on releasing work into the public domain.  Ironic coming from a guy who makes a living through copyrighting.  But that's partly the point--he's trying to demonstrate that artists need to relinquish some of that control and he's using his new novel to demonstrate how.  He has offered free movie rights to the first filmmaker to come up with an interesting proposal adapting the novel to the screen.  As part of the deal, the filmmaker must agree to release any ancillary rights to the film/novel after five years, so that someone else can have a go at the material.  Pretty gutsy.  Deadline for proposals was May 15th and Lethem says that he'll announce a winner at the end of the week.

Third, his Promiscuous Materials Project.  This time, Lethem is releasing the rights for several of his stories at a buck apiece.  After that, you can bend, shape, or even "mutate" the material any way you wish.  What a guy.

You can read more extensively about Lethem's proposals from his website at www.jonathanlethem.com.  You may also be interested in the fairly lengthy article about copyright and some of Lethem's influences in the February 2007 issue of Harper's. 

Or, read an article about an interview with Lethem about the whole shebang at Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/03/25/lethem_interview/

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Chabon yiddish

I first read Michael Chabon several years ago when his Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay came out.  The book is easily one of my favorites.  I was immediately drawn to the characters, the language, the setting.  After Kavalier and Clay, I backtracked and read Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, both equally impressive.  When he edited those two wacky McSweeney's anthologies, I read those and quoted and cited his insightful intro about genre-bending literary fiction.  Same thing with his intro to Houghton Mifflin's 2005 Best American Short Stories.  Then I read a few flops: his young adult novel Summerland and his most recent detective novel The Final Solution.  I thought, OK, he's trying something fun--writing in the detective and young adult genres.  But neither novel satisfactorily bended the conventions of those genres and neither was aesthetically satisfying the way his earlier work was.  So I was thrilled when I found out that he was finally going back to something like his successful Kavalier and Clay: his new novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

I'm about halfway through the novel right now, and I don't exactly know where to start.  The novel begins well--with a murder--but then flounders.  I just finished teaching a college course on form and theory of the novel where my students and I collaboratively wrote a gumshoe detective novel.  I see Chabon borrowing many of this genre's conventions.  The novel is set in Alaska, in an alternate reality where the US government has established a homeland for displaced Jews after WWII.  The colony of Sitka is a year before reversion, at which point all Jew's residency is uncertain.  The novel has all the ingredients for a delectable novel but the pieces, at least right now, don't seem to be coming together.  Chabon's protagonist, Meyer Landsman, has potential, but instead of the novel moving forward, we spend the first hundred pages wandering through his past, taking diversions that eddy around his discontent.  Granted, Chabon's prose is still phenomenal, but the novel so far has failed to suspend my disbelief.  But I'll keep plowing ahead.  Hopefully by the end of the read I will have something glowing to say, but right now I'd rather be playing Scrabble.