Roy Miller's Blog, page 230
March 31, 2017
Why I Refuse to Charge Writers Submission Fees
If submission fees are controversial in the world of writers who submit to literary magazines, it’s because there’s a need to nurture writers rather than add to the haze of exploitation that has come to surround magazines. The growing reaction against submission fees speaks to deeper problems in the literary world that cause writers to resent the very members of the community that should be respecting them and building the community.
The submission fee started not so long ago. First it was a few magazines, an outgrowth of online submissions technology. But soon enough they became ubiquitous. Three bucks usually, though there are some extremes—venues that charge $18 or $20.
For some writers, it’s no longer such a big deal. They’ve gotten used to paying “a little more than the price of the stamps,” to use the justifying tag line magazines bandied at the inception of the fees. Even more, writers have gotten used to clicking a button after typing in a credit card.
Submission fees are now the cost writers pay to do business—the business being the unprofitable venture of paying to get rejected 25 or more times for every acceptance. When acceptance pays only a few hundred dollars, or zilch, ends don’t meet. And even if the loss doesn’t burn the largest hole in the writer’s pocket, the financial arrangement touches the writer’s soul.
Though writers may be more sympathetic to independent literary magazines on small budgets that are simply trying to keep the press rolling with small fees, it’s harder for them to justify paying highly rated journals at big universities that have endowments and M.F.A. programs that bring in money, where it’s a matter of allocation that boils down to an insult. One asks: Why do they need $3 from every writer who submits, especially those who cannot afford even to think about an M.F.A.? The practice certainly diminishes the range of writers who can submit.
Gatekeeping, of course, is part of the point of submission fees. Even if the $3 per doesn’t do a lot for a large, august university-based journal, it helps to keep the total number of submissions down in the era of easy electronic submission. Require a submission fee, and you keep the hordes away—but who among them?
There’s something ugly about the fees when the acceptance rates are so low. Duotrope, a writer’s resource, lists the top 25 most challenging literary magazines as accepting between 0.09% and 0.65% of the submissions they receive—just a few out of every thousand. Pretty tall odds. Then consider the fact that it often takes six months or more for the short, impersonal form rejection to come, and it might come at 2 a.m. on a holiday. Sometimes the rejection never comes at all. Then the writer asks: I paid my $3, and they can’t even give me the dignity of a low-tier rejection?
It’s a different thing for a writer to enter a prestigious contest, with the chance of winning a good sum and the attendant honor. You have to be in it to win it. Most importantly, you don’t have to be in it if you don’t want to pay.
But writers don’t really have the choice to beg out of regular submissions to the top 100 journals. Even if $3 isn’t too much for a person to afford, it can, for many reasons, still seem exploitative. And for those who can’t afford it, it seems like worse than exploitation.
When starting LitMag, we thought we could put both the pursuit of literary excellence and respect for writers at the center of our mission—respect, community, and openness to all literary comers. We charge no submission fees, and we pay pro rates. And we respond to the vast majority of our submissions within two months.
“Dazzle us,” we said. In came the submissions. We’re certain that a large number of writers submitted to us who would not have if we were yet another venue with a fee. No doubt we’ve accepted some. And we’ve received a lot of comments from grateful writers.
Marc Berley is editor of the new print literary magazine LitMag.
A version of this article appeared in the 04/03/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Fee-Free Submissions
The post Why I Refuse to Charge Writers Submission Fees appeared first on Art of Conversation.
With No Easter Sales, Juvenile Book Sales Tumble: The Weekly Scorecard
Last year’s early Easter, which took place on March 27, caused havoc with book sales comparisons with the week ended Mar. 26, 2017. Unit sales of print books fell 12% in the week at outlets that report to NPD BookScan, compared to Easter week of 2016. With Easter not taking place until April 16 this year, unit sales through the mass merchandiser channel plunged 47%, and unit sales in the juvenile fiction and nonfiction segments tumbled 30% each. Unit sales of board books dropped 38% from last year. In the week ended Mar. 27, 2016, five Easter-related books were among the top-10 bestselling juvenile fiction titles, led by Happy Easter Mouse! by Laura Joffe Numeroff, which was #1 on the segment list and sold more than 28,000 copies. This year, the top seller in juvenile fiction was Too Many Carrots by Katy Hudson, which sold more than 19,000 copies. In juvenile nonfiction last year, five Easter-related books were also in the top-10 bestsellers for the week. In the #1 spot was The Story of Easter by Patricia Pingry, which sold more than 20,000 copies. This year, First 100 Words by Roger Priddy topped the category bestseller chart, selling more than 8,000 copies. Easter doesn’t have quite the same impact on adult sales as it does on juvenile sales, and the adult fiction and nonfiction segments had small declines in the week ended March 26. The top adult fiction title in the most recent week was Mississippi Blood by Greg Iles, which sold more than 26,000 copies in its first week. In adult nonfiction, Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur stayed at #1, selling almost 20,000 copies.
Unit Sales of Print Books by Channel
(in thousands)
Mar. 27, 2016
Mar. 26, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Total
13,625
11,954
-12%
-1%
Retail & Club
10,441
10,265
-2%
2%
Mass Merch./Others
3,183
1,688
-47%
-16%
Unit Sales of Print Books by Category
(in thousands)
Mar. 27, 2016
Mar. 26, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Adult Nonfiction
4,817
4,862
-1%
1%
Adult Fiction
2,429
2,499
-3%
2%
Juvenile Nonfiction
1,509
1,061
-30%
-5%
Juvenile Fiction
4,467
3,123
-30%
-5%
Unit Sales of Print Books by Format
(in thousands)
Mar. 27, 2016
Mar. 26, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Hardcover
3,434
3,217
-6%
2%
Trade Paperback
7,600
6,678
-12%
-1%
Mass Market Paperback
1,063
1,016
-4%
-6%
Board Books
1,230
875
-38%
-7%
Audio
64
60
6%
-3%
A version of this article appeared in the 04/03/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: With Late Easter, Juvenile Sales Tumble
The post With No Easter Sales, Juvenile Book Sales Tumble: The Weekly Scorecard appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Alex Tizon, Filipino-American Reporter and Memoirist, Dies at 57
Alex Tizon at a workshop in 1991. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for articles on a housing program for Native Americans.
Credit
The Seattle Times
Alex Tizon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose well-received 2014 memoir documented his insecurities and alienation as a Filipino-American, was found dead on March 23 in his home in Eugene, Ore. He was 57.
His wife, Melissa, said that he had died in his sleep and that the cause had not yet been determined.
At The Seattle Times, where he shared a Pulitzer in investigative reporting in 1997, and later at The Los Angeles Times, where he was Seattle bureau chief, Mr. Tizon (pronounced TEA-zahn) was admired as a prose stylist and known for long, deeply reported articles.
He wrote of his own life in “Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self.” In the book he addressed many of the stereotypes he internalized as an Asian-American, having experienced them “as a set of suspicions that seemed corroborated by everyday life.”
“When did this shame inside me begin?” he wrote. “Looking back now, I could say it began with love. Love of the gifted people and their imagined life; love of America, the sprawling idea of it, with its gilded tentacles reaching across the Pacific Ocean to wrap around the hearts of small brown people living small brown lives. It was a love bordering on worship, fueled by longing, felt most fervently by those like my parents who grew up with America in their dreams. The love almost killed us.”
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Tizon’s memoir detailed his struggle to find masculine Asian role models in Western popular culture, and his childhood attempts to make himself look whiter. He recalled dangling from trees to stretch his vertebrae and pinching his nose with a clothespin to narrow it.
“‘Big Little Man’ is an unflinchingly honest, at times beautifully written, often discomforting examination of Tizon’s remarkable, yet thoroughly relatable, life,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
Mr. Tizon said in an online interview with The Boston Globe in 2016 that he thought life had grown better for Asian-Americans.
Continue reading the main story
“I have nephews who are just worldbeaters,” he said. “They read my book, and, yeah, they can relate to some of it. But a sense of inferiority? No. That’s just not there.”
Michele Matassa Flores, the managing editor of The Seattle Times, said in a phone interview that as a reporter Mr. Tizon “focused on the gray” rather than seeing the world in black and white. “The world was not a simple place for Alex,” she added, “and he wanted to convey that to his readers.”
On one assignment Mr. Tizon rode through the streets of Seattle with a gang during a period of growing violence in the city in the late 1980s. He also wrote a series of profiles, “Crossing America: Dispatches From a New Nation,” for which he traveled across the country with the photographer Alan Berner after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Tizon, along with Eric Nalder and Deborah Nelson, won the Pulitzer Prize for articles about problems afflicting a Department of Housing and Urban Development program to help Native Americans build homes.
The articles chronicled dysfunction and incompetence within the department, corruption and nepotism at the tribal level, and misallocation of funds at Indian reservations around the country. In many cases, the articles showed, the result was overcrowded hovels for most and taxpayer-funded mansions for a connected few.
Continue reading the main story
“It is not much more than a large plywood box, this house Thelma Moses calls home,” one article began. “To stand outside it is to wonder how such dimensions — 10 feet by 12 feet — can enclose a life.”
Continue reading the main story
The series resulted in a congressional investigation and changes in the federal program.
Tomas Alexander Tizon was born in Manila on Oct. 30, 1959. His parents, Francisco Tizon and the former Leticia Asuncion, used borrowed money to bring their family to Los Angeles in 1964.
Continue reading the main story
The Tizon family lived in Seattle and the South Bronx before settling in Oregon. Alex graduated from high school in Salem, Ore., in 1977 and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Oregon. He received a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University in 1986, the year he joined The Seattle Times.
Mr. Tizon left The Los Angeles Times in 2008, and in 2011 he began teaching at the University of Oregon in Eugene and writing freelance articles for national publications, including The Atlantic.
In addition to his wife, the former Melissa Quiason, with whom he lived in Eugene and Seattle, he is survived by their daughter, Maya Tizon; a daughter from an earlier marriage, Dylan Tizon; two brothers, Art and Albert; and six sisters, Leticia Tizon, Maria Tizon-Silbernagel, Maria Tizon-Huskey, Nikki Walker, Toni Tizon and Giselle Tizon-Kousonsavath.
Continue reading the main story
The post Alex Tizon, Filipino-American Reporter and Memoirist, Dies at 57 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
The Week in Literary Film and TV News
This week in literary film and television news, Hollywood was all over the brand new canon of literary classics (Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, George Saunders in general), but couldn’t help itself from beating a few old favorites further into submission (Jumanji, Doctor DoLittle). Speaking of George Saunders, looks like the producers of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One are taking a cue from him and turning to virtual reality. No one was talking about the PBS Brontë sisters film, preferring, perhaps, to watch and rewatch the trailer for Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s almost here, America. (NB: that was a double entendre.) The HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend inched closer, as did the seventh season of Game of Thrones. Forest Whitaker continued to show his greatness by signing onto the Angela Davis biopic, and Stephen King—surprise!—continued to scare us all half to death. Death by clown, that is.
The week in literary film & TV news, in brief:
Production is set to begin this summer on the HBO-Rai adaptation of Elena Ferrante‘s My Brilliant Friend. All eight episodes will be in Italian, directed by Saverio Constanzo—who, to his credit, is not the least bit interested in who Ferrante “really is,” but has been corresponding with the author via email—and produced by Lorenzo Mieli and Mario Gianani for Wildside and Domenico Procacci for Fandango. This co-production system is similar to the one Wildside and HBO used for The Young Pope—let’s hope we don’t all get sick of punning about this one before it even starts.
You’ve probably heard (and celebrated) that Amazon is developing Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad as a one-hour original limited drama series, to be helmed by Moonlight‘s Barry Jenkins. A little bird told me that Whitehead has only one small edit for Lit Hub’s dream cast of the show.
The new teaser trailer for Season 7 of George R.R. Martin‘s Game of Thrones is mostly Very Serious Walking (With Some Pretty Regal Sitting).
Article continues after advertisement
Throttle, the novella co-written by Stephen King and Joe Hill, originally published in 2009 as part of a Richard Matheson tribute, has been optioned by Emile Gladstone at A Bigger Boat Productions.
In other Stephen King news: on Wednesday, Warner Bros. released the first trailer for their upcoming adaptation of It, which will begin ravaging theaters September 8th. It looks duly horrifying.
The new reboot of Chris Van Allsburg‘s Jumanji appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with Jumanji. (Not that the first movie had all that much to do with it either.)
Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor DoLittle, which long ago, even before it was a twinkle in Iron Man’s eye, was known as a series of children’s books by Hugh Lofting, has been assigned a release date: May 2019.
Movie rights to George Saunders‘s Lincoln in the Bardo were picked up by Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman—that’s the old Saunders news. The new Saunders news is that Amazon Studios is finalizing a deal to produce an adaptation of his story “Sea Oak,” written by Saunders himself.
Warner Bros. and HTC will “exclusively distribute virtual reality experiences” to go with Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming adaptation of Ernest Cline‘s Ready Player One. Whatever that means!
To Walk Invisible, Sally Wainwright’s two-hour drama about the Brontë sisters, premiered on PBS on Sunday.
Forest Whitaker has signed on as an executive producer for the forthcoming untitled Angela Davis biopic.
Well, you’ve almost certainly already seen it, but just in case you haven’t yet set aside the two minutes, consider this your golden opportunity to watch the official trailer for Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale, coming April 26:
The post The Week in Literary Film and TV News appeared first on Art of Conversation.
PW Opens Nominations for Star Watch
Publishers Weekly and Frankfurter Buchmesse have opened nominations for their third annual PW Star Watch program, which celebrates up-and-coming members of the U.S. publishing community and recognizes them on a global stage.
“Publishers Weekly is pleased to be working with Frankfurt Buchmesse in order to bring international recognition to emerging leaders and innovators in publishing,” said Jim Milliot, editorial director of PW. “We look forward to welcoming new ‘stars’ of the industry for the third annual PW Star Watch.”
The program identifies 40 "stars" of American publishing from all areas of the industry. Five top honorees will be selected from the longlist of 40, with a single "Superstar" slated to be announced in September at the PW Star Watch event in New York. The winner will be awarded an all-expenses-paid trip to the Frankfurter Buchmesse this fall.
“Innovation and creativity is so crucial to the future of publishing,” said Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurter Buchmesse. “We are pleased to continue our partnership with Publishers Weekly to highlight and mentor the leaders of tomorrow.”
The 40 stars will be featured in PW in a September and celebrated at events in New York this fall and during the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. To nominate yourself or a colleague, click here.
The post PW Opens Nominations for Star Watch appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Don’t Call Slaves “Immigrants” | Literary Hub
You know honey, us colored folks is branches without roots
and that makes things come round in queer ways.
–Zora Neale Hurston
Ben Carson’s comments earlier this month equating immigrants and slaves didn’t surprise me, and not just because the retired neurosurgeon turned HUD Secretary is gaffe-prone. The conflation of immigrants and slaves isn’t new to me. In fifth grade, my teacher Mrs. Sauer (like the taste) assigned our class the task of drawing the flags of the countries our families came from. Old Glory wasn’t allowed; we’d all come from somewhere else, she said. When we brought in our homemade flags, in our otherness, for once, we’d all be the same.
Article continues after advertisement
We lived in a rural town on the tip of the Pine Barrens in Southern New Jersey, outside of both an Army and Air Force base. While there were plenty other kids in my neighborhood and classrooms with brown skin like mine, they were often from multiracial families. Their parents were black and German, black and Asian, black and Filipino, but rarely both black. My classmates were already heading to the encyclopedias in the back of our class to look up the flags of Korea, Germany, and the Philippines—the places their military dads were stationed when they fell in love with their moms.
My parents grew up in Oklahoma and Louisiana. Their parents were from Arkansas and Mississippi. I’d been to the farm where my maternal grandpa used to grow soy and cotton and to the immaculate little house surrounded by red clay dirt where my maternal great-grandmother made fresh buttermilk biscuits in a kitchen so clean you could eat off the floor. (Cozied up under her square Formica table, I sometimes did). But I was no Alex Haley. How was I supposed to figure out how my grandparents got to these far-flung parts of the USA? When I asked my dad later that night what country in Africa he thought we came from or if there was some representative flag for the entire continent, he breathed a heavy, frustrated sigh.
“Between the Indian blood and the slave blood, we’ve been here longer than anybody. Who’s more American than us?” He put his feet up on the coffee table, crossed them with a one, two thud at the ankles. That was that.
I knew about the “Indian” blood. That was from my Cherokee great-grandmother on my mom’s side. Maybe it was responsible for her pretty bronze color and my sister’s long, thick hair. But what about this slave blood? We were black, so I wasn’t surprised that some of our ancestors had been slaves, but which ones, and where, exactly, had they come from?
“Between the Indian blood and the slave blood, we’ve been here longer than anybody. Who’s more American than us?”
As I sat on the living room floor deciding which flag to draw, I could see the leopard skin above dad’s head stretched across the paneled wall. My parents had brought it back from Ethiopia, where they’d lived for three years during the reign of Haile Selassie before I was born. Dad was sent there on a mission by the Air Force to help Ethiopians map out their terrain and begin their own airline. It was 1967, and he took the assignment as a way of steering clear of Vietnam. It didn’t quite work. Eventually, he ended up being deployed to the war’s edges, serving first in Thailand, then in Laos. He was gone for two years. I was four when he returned, and I remember my disappointment when he didn’t have war stories, a new accent, or even any souvenirs. The Bronze Star he received for being shot at along with his other commendation medals disappeared into the recesses of some junk drawer. We kids never saw them, and Dad seemed to want it that way.
Ethiopia was different. Years after my family returned from Addis Ababa, the magic of their time there seemed to veil our house like a benign hoodoo. Besides the leopard skin, an enormous monkey skin, black and white pelts sewn together in a circle, alternatively lay on the floor and hung on the wall. A pair of painted black wooden warriors sat on the buffet in the dining room during the day but, I was sure, snuck into my room at night to terrorize or protect me, depending on their mood. The woman’s pointy bare breasts stuck out from above her thin, carved waist like daggers. The male warrior’s spear was so sharp it looked like it could draw blood. I mustered the courage to ask dad if he thought we could be from Ethiopia, but he said he doubted it. Ethiopia was in the east, and slaves were brought from the western coast.
I envied my family for having lived in Africa, the place we came from centuries before, the same way I envied the kids in Mrs. Sauer’s class who seemed certain of where at least one side of their family hailed. I’m nine years younger than my next closest sibling, which, my brother says, makes me seem more like a cousin than a sister. This gap, coupled with my family’s time in Africa without me, seemed to solidify them as a separate entity apart from me. I was the branch without roots.
I watched Dad slice off squares of Cracker Barrel cheese and pop them into his mouth while I made up our history. I figured that since Dad was from Louisiana and Louisiana had once belonged to France, his fair, freckled skin and wavy black curls must be the French blood in him. I painted three vertical, red, white and blue stripes on my paper, a sideways, compressed version of Old Glory, and closed my encyclopedia with a thud of my own. Sorry, Ms. Sauer—it was either the French flag or the Ethiopian one. Either way, I was borrowing history.
*
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, journalists dubbed flood victims refugees, immigrants poured into New Orleans to help rebuild the city, and the House of Representatives passed a bill with harsh penalties for undocumented people and sanctions on anyone who tried to help them. It didn’t take long for immigration rights rallies to pop up all over the country. Normally, I left the room, turned off the radio or the TV when the subject came up, unless I was alone. But in the spring of 2007 on the eve of more rallies, my neighbor cornered me.
“Are you going to the protests in the city?”
We stood on the uneven sidewalk, buckling from the tree roots trying to break free, waiting for the school bus to deposit our daughters. I said that I was too busy to go to a rally.
“But we’re all immigrants,” she said. “All of us in this country.” I looked away from her and up into the oak trees shading us when I told her, “I’m from here.”
“But where were your parents from?”
I spoke to the grass then, as though its green blades would neutralize my rising red anger. “Oklahoma, Mississippi, New Orleans and briefly from Bakersfield.”
“But where did their parents come from—they weren’t from the islands?”
“No.” I said, looking her right in the face this time. “They were from a continent.”
We both looked down the street with squinted eyes, but the bus still wasn’t coming. I crossed my arms over my chest so my neighbor wouldn’t push further or come any closer, but she didn’t pay attention to my new stance. Instead, she said what always made me yell at the pundits on the airwaves: “Slaves were immigrants too.”
“Immigrant: a person that comes to a country to take up permanent residence. Slave: a person held in servitude as the chattel of another.”
The bus’s blinking amber lights shone down the street and turned red, its zebra-striped crossing arm emerged, and the Plexiglas doors pulsed open to deposit our daughters, bringing the traffic and our conversation to a stop. The woman’s parents grew up here, but her grandparents were immigrants from Korea, I remembered her telling me once. I had been happy for her that she’d been able to visit her ancestral home and asked if she could speak the language. She’d said no.
A thick and heavy bitterness welled up in my throat while my daughter and I raced each other home, and a collection of disappointments nipped at my memory: That time when the arms of America opened to embrace Cuba’s little Elian Gonzalez in one moment, then withdrew them when the boat was from a bit further south, its occupants not light brown, but black. America crossed her arms across her chest and sent the Haitians back. That time when I was nine and Angie Rameriz’s* mom kicked me out of her house for jumping on her bed but let the whiter looking girls stay, even though they’d been jumping on the bed too. That time when Nelson*, whose family was from Ecuador, who dated me before dating my blue-eyed roommate, started calling me black bitch, instructing me to take my affirmative action ass back to New Jersey, insisting that blacks were lazy and didn’t belong in college after drinking too many beers from our dorm’s mini fridge. Over and over again, I gravitated toward the faces with some color in them, thinking they would embrace me. For a little while, we’d get along, but eventually, they would want their distance from me.
Six days after the slaves-are-immigrants-too conversation, I celebrated my 38th birthday. Crocuses were pushing through the ground at the base of the enormous maple in our front yard, but instead of enjoying the spring day outside with my husband and daughters, I was holed up in my office staring at the computer. An essay I had written earlier in the year was finally published—with my maiden name as the byline. I hadn’t seen my “real” name in print in over a decade, when I last worked as a newspaper reporter. Ford: a shallow place in a river or stream allowing one to walk or drive across. Immigrant: a person that comes to a country to take up permanent residence. Slave: a person held in servitude as the chattel of another. Seeing Dionne Ford in print triggered both a thrill and a longing in me first ignited by that borrowed flag.
*
About a year after Ms. Sauer’s assignment, I finally learned something concrete about both my slave and immigrant ancestors. My grandfather was visiting from New Orleans, and I noticed for the first time how different his skin was from mine. When I asked him if he was white, he laughed that he wasn’t and told me about his grandfather, Colonel Stuart, “an Irish man,” and his grandmother, who “worked” on Stuart’s plantation. I knew enough about American history to understand that black people on plantations in the South at that time weren’t paid workers. I asked my grandfather if his grandmother was a slave, but he didn’t answer my question. Instead, he told me stories about passing for white to make more money delivering groceries in New Orleans. I would later push aside my 12-year-old logic that was guided by history and replace it with my grandfather’s, which was no doubt rooted in shame. Who wants to think of their ancestors as a victim and a perpetrator? Not me, especially since I was grappling with my own victimization at the hands of a family member. But once I started my own family and my oldest daughter referred to herself as white like her father but not at all black like me, I got serious about the colonel and Tempy’s full story.
As I came to learn, Col. W.R. Stuart’s family immigrated to the eastern shores of what would become the United States before the American Revolution. In 1858, he married Elizabeth McCauley, and her family gave the couple a slave named Tempy Burton as a wedding gift. Elizabeth couldn’t have children. But Tempy could, and did have seven of them with her new master, the colonel. My great-grandmother Josephine was their youngest child.
Before Josephine married and became a Ford, she took her mother’s last name. My grandmother Lillie Mae had once told me it was because she didn’t want anything to do with her white father. Usually, it was the other way around, the white part of the family not wanting anything to do with the black ones they’d sired. Josephine, an interracial child of a slave and her master, seemed bold and sure, the way I wanted to be.
Inspired by the sight of my old name, I typed into Google everything I knew about Josephine: her parents’ last names, Burton and Stuart, and where they once lived in Mississippi. Before I could count to even one Mississippi, Google took the factors of my identity equation and presented me with a solid product—the “Col. W. R. Stuart family” picture. Tempy was in the center of the photo. The colonel and Elizabeth were seated behind her. On each side of Tempy were two biracial-looking girls. The one on the left reminded me of my daughters. Tempy’s dark face was illuminated on a diagonal, with tight curls around her head like a halo, a straight mouth, and eyes that gave nothing away. It looked like she was wearing a kerchief reminiscent of the tignons Creole women were forced to wear as a sign of their lower status in Colonial New Orleans. She, Elizabeth, and the two girls looked serious. The colonel was slightly smiling.
“The truth—mine, my family’s, and our country’s—requires specificity that is sometimes violent and ugly.”
The photo was taken in the 1890s, 25 years after slavery ended, and I wondered why Tempy would pose for what amounted to a family portrait with the couple who stole her freedom. Were her eyes sad or stoic? Was there something akin to love between Tempy and the colonel, or were their children just another case of a master raping his slave? What did the colonel’s wife, Elizabeth, the woman Tempy had undoubtedly served for most of her life, feel about it? Could there have existed something other than love or hate between these people, my ancestors and their families, akin to what I feel toward my own country?
Not long after I found the photo, I took my first trip to Ellis Island to chaperone my daughter’s elementary class. I helped her look up her father’s ancestors in the kiosk—one of his grandmothers had arrived there from Ireland in the early 1900s—but I knew there was no point in attempting to look up my own. That’s why I’d avoided visiting, even though I’d lived within an hour drive of the island most of my life. “Huddled masses yearning to breathe free” was not my story. Liberty’s breath was stolen from my great-great-grandmother and her family. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when our National Park Service guide brought my daughter’s group to an exhibit about the forced peopling of America, and my family’s place in our country was finally visible.
I let go of my resentment for Ellis Island and Lady Liberty after that, and eventually, I forgave my neighbor’s clumsy attempt to identify with me as another person of color. Our conversation was probably the push I needed to look once again for my ancestors, leading me to their photo. And I try to forgive myself everyday for so often veering toward comfortable and vague when the truth—mine, my family’s, and our country’s—requires specificity that is sometimes violent and ugly.
For instance: My third great-grandmother Eliza Burton was separated from her daughter Tempy because of slavery. My third great-grandfather William R. Stuart was among the first graduates of Washington College, ascended to President of the Maryland State Senate, and gave his son, my great, great-grandfather, his name. Their descendant–Josephine’s brother—was lynched in Mississippi for something he may have been thinking of doing to a white woman. My family. My country. I love them both and, for this reason, like Baldwin said, I insist on the right to criticize them perpetually. Mostly, what I want from them is the truth. Even or especially if it doesn’t fit the conventional story. Immigrants and slaves are not the same, but they are what made this country and me.
* Names changed to protect.
The post Don’t Call Slaves “Immigrants” | Literary Hub appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Paperback Row: Paperback Row
Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
Source link
The post Paperback Row: Paperback Row appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Vernon Sullivan: The Bestselling Writer Who Didn’t Exist
In 1946, a novel called I Spit On Your Graves (J’irai cracher sur vos tombes) appeared in France. The book was a hardboiled thriller written by a newcomer, a black American writer named Vernon Sullivan. The translator was a French author well-connected in Parisian literary circles but little-known to the reading public, Boris Vian. In his preface to the novel, Vian explained how publisher Jean d’Halluin had met Sullivan, and Sullivan “showed him his manuscript.” Vian then went on to talk about Sullivan’s literary motivations, saying that Sullivan “considered himself ‘more as a Negro than a white man,’ in spite of having passed the ‘line’… He had the idea that one can imagine and also meet Negroes just as ‘tough’ as white men. This is what he had personally tried to demonstrate in this short novel… all the more so as his American publishers had just shown him the timidity of any attempt at publication in his country.”
I Spit On Your Graves is indeed harsh. It’s narrated by Lee Anderson, an African-American light-skinned enough to pass for white. He starts the novel by settling into the fictional southern middle-class town of Buckton where he takes a job as the Buckton Bookstore manager. Amiable and handsome, he simmers with hidden anger, and he discloses to the reader that back in their hometown his younger brother was lynched for being seen with a white woman. Lee has come to Buckton driven by one goal: to seduce and kill two white women to avenge his brother’s death.
Through the book, he does a lot of drinking and partying with the town’s young carefree women, and he proves to be quite a sexual athlete. Nobody seems to suspect that he’s black, but he always worries that his deep bass voice, an undisguisable “black” voice, will give him away. One or two people do finally express doubts about his alleged whiteness, but he carries on with his deception, honing his obsessive sights on a pair of wealthy sisters. These are the two women he murders, in brutal fashion. At the end, his racial status clear to all, the police trap him in a barn and shoot him. He dies. But as Sullivan’s authorial voice says, in a brief postscript, “The townspeople hanged him anyway, because he was a nigger.”
The book is written in a terse style, indicating Sullivan had read his Cain, Chandler, and Horace McCoy. His main character’s narration carries a clear sense of outrage. Sensitive to the racial hypocrisy around him, he critiques whites and blacks in equal measure. His brother was too kind, honest, and forgiving, he says, and “that’s what ruined him.” Anderson has no time for the humility and deference, as he sees it, that blacks present to whites, and he’s certain that “if we only had [white people’s] skin we’d be ahead of him, for he talks too much and betrays his weakness when he’s in the company of what he thinks are other white men.” Of blacks who “go over to the side of the whites for all purposes, not even having the decency to refrain from knocking the colored race when the occasion demands it,” he could “kill men like that with a lot of pleasure.”
Article continues after advertisement
I Spit On Your Graves marked the emergence of a beautifully corrosive African-American author, given full expression, as Chester Himes later would be, in France, except that, as it turned out, there was no Vernon Sullivan. He didn’t exist. For all its bitterness about race and racism, the novel was the work of a white man, its supposed translator, Boris Vian. And Vian had never even been to the United States. In contrast to his fictional creation, a black man who passes as white, Vian adopted a black persona, and his literary hoax, at least at first, succeeded. French readers thought Vernon Sullivan was real. They didn’t suspect Vian had done more than “translate” and supply the book’s informative preface. But who was Boris Vian exactly, and why had he perpetrated the hoax? What lay behind what now would be rightly called an egregious act of cultural appropriation?
Born in 1920 in an affluent suburb of Paris, Boris Vian had a comfortable upbringing with bohemian-minded parents. He was sickly as a young child, and when he was twelve, he contracted rheumatic fever and typhoid. The illnesses left him with a weak heart and he lived much of his life in precarious health. He predicted he’d die at the age of 40. In actuality, he made it to 39. Perhaps it was this certitude that his life would be short that spurred his artistic production, because the volume of his creative output is remarkable.
Under his own name, he wrote novels, poetry, stories, plays, screenplays, articles, and satirical pamphlets. He did genuine translations into French of books by Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright. But alongside his literary endeavors, Vian had another love, music, in particular jazz, and he pursued it with zeal from his teenage years. He became such a jazz expert that at 16 years old, he gained acceptance to the preeminent French jazz club, Le Hot Club de France. The next year, he took up the trumpet. Vian would go on to become a prime fixture in the French jazz world, and through the 1940s, even during the war, he wrote regular columns about jazz and played his trumpet in a Paris-based band.
Perhaps it’s through jazz that his preoccupation with American culture, and especially black American culture, began. Vian often served as host to visiting American musicians, and in 1939, he helped mount a big Duke Ellington concert that affected him greatly. Ellington would become the godfather to his daughter, and after the war, Vian opened the Club Saint Germain on the Left Bank, a jazz cave where he would organize shows for the best jazz artists around, including Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. For Vian, jazz was a way of life, something to which he gave unstinting commitment. In a way that sounds quintessentially French (and male) but uniquely Boris Vian, he’s quoted as saying, “There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.”
Beauty and ugliness define the two poles of Vian’s outlook. As a literary writer, the man who moved in the same social orbit as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (who had an affair with Vian’s wife, helping to wreck the marriage), Vian wrote absurdist fantasias filled with eccentrics and romantic dreamers. His novels can get dark, but they are full of puns, slapstick, and comedy. A man falls in love with a woman who develops a fatal water lily in her lung in Foam of the Daze. To keep her alive, he must surround her with flowers. Love and weird beauty figure also in Autumn in Peking, where a number of people, obsessive types, build a train station and railway tracks in a desert no one visits. Though now considered an important postwar French author—Foam on the Daze has sold millions of copies in France—Vian writing as Vian did not receive recognition outside his coterie of literary friends. It was only when he turned to the dank and sordid, writing as a black American, that his fiction made him money.
The truth was I Spit On Your Graves had begun when Jean d’Halluin of Editions du Scorpion asked Vian to choose and translate a hardboiled American crime novel for d’Halluin’s new imprint. Vian decided he’d write the book himself, indulging his love for things American. One can imagine him, with his prankster instincts and the bond he felt with his black musician friends, telling himself he could pull the race charade off. Here was a chance to write a bestseller and to express what must have been sincere feelings about the United States’ racial situation.
Unnoticed at first, the book gained attention in early 1947 when a Daniel Parker, head of a French right wing watchdog group called the Cartel d’action sociale et morale, condemned it for its violence and explicit sexual content. Parker sued author Sullivan, translator Vian, and publisher d’Halluin, and tried to have the book banned. The case wound up in court, where Vian, never admitting he was Sullivan, escaped being fined. A few months afterward, more notoriety ensued. A man in Paris strangled his lover in a hotel room, and the police found a copy of I Spit On Your Graves by the bed. The murderer had circled passages in it, among them the section where Lee Anderson strangles one of the two sisters. Between the lawsuit and the book’s connection to the killing, sales for I Spit On Your Graves took off, and it became the top seller in France in 1947. Finally Vian had a success, but he’d had to impersonate a black American to achieve it. What’s striking is that Vian himself was fully aware of how white culture uses and co-opts black culture, and he has a passage in the novel that pointedly discusses this. It occurs when Anderson, a jazz lover like his creator, is discussing music and the contributions of black people with somebody else, and the passing-for-white Anderson definitively takes the side of blacks:
“Well, that’s really a compliment,” I said. “They’re just about the best musicians you can find.”
“I don’t think so. All the big dance orchestras are white.”
“Of course—the whites are in a better position to exploit the Negro’s inventions.”
“I just don’t think you’re right.”
“All the great popular composers are colored. Like Duke Ellington, for example.”
“What about Gershwin, Kern and all of those?”
“They’re all immigrants from Europe,” I said. “They’re the best ones able to envelop it. But I don’t think you’d find a single original passage anywhere in Gershwin’s work—one that hasn’t been copied or plagiarized…
The levels of posing this novel contains, both in the text and outside it, are dizzying. And after all, we’re talking about a work written as a pulp novel, in two weeks. It would seem easy to dismiss I Spit On Your Graves as a hoax perpetuated by a “white Negro” trying to make a quick buck, but Vian’s sincerity does come through. And more than sincerity: understanding. As James Baldwin says in his book length essay “The Devil Finds Work,” “What informs Vian’s book… is not sexual fantasy, but rage and pain: that rage and pain which Vian (almost alone) was able to hear in the black American musicians, in the bars, dives, and cellars, of the Paris of those years.”
The ruse not exposed, a second Vian-as-Sullivan novel appeared in 1947—The Dead All Have the Same Skin. Here, appropriation and racial confusion themselves become motifs; the book reads like the nightmare of a person having an extreme identity crisis. The narrator, Daniel Parker, is an apparently white man who works as a bouncer in a low-grade New York City nightclub. He has a white wife and a white child. One day out of the blue, a dark-skinned black man appears, claiming to be his brother. They have the same mother and father, he says, and he threatens to reveal Parker’s racial secret to his boss and family. Parker gives in to the blackmail, helpless against the surfacing memories of his past as a black child, and the comprehension of his true racial make-up sends him into a psychological tailspin. Are his memories real or imagined? The reader can’t tell. His sexual insecurity worsens his unease; he finds himself impotent with white women, his wife included, and flings himself into joyless trysts with a variety of black women. His internal tensions boil over into violence, and he devolves into a multiple murderer whose sexual hang-ups, chattiness, and general disorientation remind the reader of a Jim Thompson character. And like Thompson’s people, Parker, despite his delusions, broaches certain uncomfortable truths. As he says, “It’s not all that rare, really—whites who want to change the shade of their skin.”
Unlike Lee Anderson, who had a plan and executed it, consequences be damned, Daniel Parker is at the mercy of his fears and compulsions. A true roman noir protagonist, he inflicts his damage on himself. He realizes this by the end, acknowledging that he killed “them all for absolutely no reason.” Even the police discover that the man claiming to be his brother was a “master blackmailer” and that the killer they are hunting isn’t black. The people Parker killed remain dead, but that Parker is white changes how the police look at the case. It’s not a situation of a black man running murderously wild—society’s worse case scenario—but something more twisted yet mundane.
“And just what did you tell me a little earlier?” he blurted. “That this guy isn’t any more black than you or me?”
Cooper shook his head. He felt uncomfortable.
“It’s just a fact and we can’t do anything about it. We made a mistake.”
“Well, I don’t give a damn. Why did we screw up… What’ll it look like? The papers have been all over this for four days, over every last detail… And this is the news you bring me? That this guy is white! I mean really, for Christ’s sake, just what makes this guy white, after all?”
“It’s not my fault,” said Cooper.
What Vian doesn’t answer is why the blackmailer selected Parker in the first place. If Parker is white, how did the blackmailer suss him out as a mark, somebody gripped by racial dysphoria? Nothing in the book indicates that the blackmailer could have, logically speaking, and it’s part of what gives The Dead All Have the Same Skin a dreamlike quality. It’s a classic doppleganger story with a racial inflection, where the protagonist seems to mentally summon his alter ego.
Boris Vian went on to write two more Vernon Sullivan novels. To Hell with the Ugly came out in 1948 and They Do Not Realize in 1950. By then, the public knew Sullivan was Vian, and Vian jettisoned the racial explorations, preferring to go for genre parody. To Hell with the Ugly, for instance, is a noir, sci-fi, and Hardy Boys mashup set in a fantasy Los Angeles with a muscle bound lead named Rock Bailey. It’s a laugh out loud hoot, but Vian is doing something quite different than what he does in his first two Sullivan books.
Vian died in 1959, in circumstances absurd enough to match his novels. He was at a movie theater showing a French film version of I Spit On Your Graves. Unhappy with the adaptation, he had attacked the new film in the press and asked the producers to take his name off the credits. The film had just begun when he slumped over in his seat. Vian had suffered a heart attack, and the story goes that his final words, as he took in the film’s opening scenes, were filled with outrage: “These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!”
Perfect last words for a white Frenchman who pretended to be a black American writing about a country he’d never visited, upset that the actors portraying his characters didn’t seem real enough.
The post Vernon Sullivan: The Bestselling Writer Who Didn’t Exist appeared first on Art of Conversation.
March 30, 2017
A Strong Start for an Epic’s Finale
Greg Iles
Secret Realities: The suspense novel “Mississippi Blood,” new at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction list, concludes Greg Iles’s mammoth Natchez Burning trilogy, about race, murder and a fraught father-son relationship spanning half a century in the Deep South. Before the trilogy started with “Natchez Burning” in 2014, Iles had written a number of previous best sellers featuring its protagonist, the lawyer Penn Cage, and early drafts of “Natchez Burning” treated that book as another straightforward thriller along the same lines. But after a serious car accident in 2011 — Iles lost a leg and spent months recuperating — he returned to the book with a new sense of purpose and an ambition reflected in the trilogy’s ultimate size: more than 2,300 pages published over the course of three years. (At that rate, Robert Caro could have wrapped up his Lyndon Johnson biography decades ago and moved on to a multivolume study of Gerald Ford.)
So how does it feel to complete such a strenuous undertaking, and what comes next? “I don’t think I’ve recovered yet,” Iles told me by email. “When I began the trilogy, I had two legs, I felt young, and my kids were beginning high school. Now I have one leg, I feel old, and my kids are in college or graduating. More seriously, when I started writing the trilogy, people were talking about America becoming a ‘postracial’ society, and I worried that my epic exploration of the secret realities of race had begun too late. Today, no one on earth would argue that America is postracial. Race is the wound in America’s side, and we still have far to go to heal it. I need to take a breath, maybe do one less ambitious novel, and then it’s back into Mississippi, where the answer lies.”
Matchmaker: Alyssa Mastromonaco was in her mid-30s when President Obama asked her to serve as his White House deputy chief of staff for operations, a job she writes about in “Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?” (It enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 10.) Mastromonaco told the website Popsugar recently that Obama had weighed in on her relationship with the man who eventually became her husband. “He said, ‘He needs to put a ring on it because you’re worth it,’ ” she recalled. “And the thing is, I’m not even kidding you, it was about a week or two later that we got engaged. I’ve never told that story to my husband, either. It would be news to him. Also, what, are you going to go back to your boyfriend and say ‘The president told you to put a ring on it’? The lamest thing ever.”
Burning Bright: Has it really been 20 years since Tiger Woods won the Masters to claim the first of his 14 major titles? Woods looks back on that victory in “The 1997 Masters: My Story,” new at No. 15 in hardcover nonfiction. “There are a few tournaments throughout my career where I felt, ‘Just don’t screw it up,’ ” Woods told USA Today recently. “That was one of them.”
Continue reading the main story
The post A Strong Start for an Epic’s Finale appeared first on Art of Conversation.
50 Fascinating Works of Angela Carter Fan Art
Angela Carter is one of those rare writers who has not only readers but fans. That is, those who not only love her work but who also use it to self-identify, who make it a part of their lives, and in this case, who make art about it. There is a lot of Angela Carter fan art out there. Perhaps you would like to see some of it. NB: I’m using the term “fan art” here to refer to work by amateur artists and illustrators as well as established ones, so long as the the artwork in question was never actually used as official art for any of Carter’s books. They read the book; they made the art. There may, it’s true, be a particularly good selection of Carter fan art online because of the 2012 competition, hosted by the Folio Society, to illustrate a new edition of The Bloody Chamber—the winner, Igor Karash, had his art used as the cover and interior illustrations for the book. As it has been published, Karash’s work is not included below—but many of his fellow contestants and finalists are, and I’ve noted these where the artist has identified them as such. Enjoy scrolling through the great artwork below, and if it inspires you to go back and re-read The Bloody Chamber, well, so much the better.
“The Company of Wolves,” by Emily W. Martin
[image error] “The Bloody Chamber” by Iro Tsavala, shortlisted in the Folio Society competition to illustrate The Bloody Chamber
[image error] “The Company of Wolves, by Iro Tsavala, shortlisted in the Folio Society competition to illustrate The Bloody Chamber
[image error] “Puss in Boots” by Michaela Meadow
[image error] Grandma Chance from Wild Children, by Ellen Leber
[image error] “The Bloody Chamber” by Sam Kerwin, Runner Up Prize Winner for the House of Illustration / Folio Society Competition 2012
[image error] “Puss in Boots” by Sam Kerwin, Runner Up Prize Winner for the House of Illustration / Folio Society Competition 2012
[image error] “Nights at the Circus,” by Emma Block
[image error] Illustration by Emma Dobson
[image error] “Puss in Boots” by Sally Jane Thompson, created for the Folio Society competition to illustrate The Bloody Chamber
[image error] “Puss in Boots” by Louis Vinet
[image error] “The Man Who Loved a Double Bass,” by Emma Martin
[image error] “The Bloody Chamber” by Peter Strain, created for the Folio Society competition to illustrate The Bloody Chamber
[image error] “The Company of Wolves” by Peter Strain, created for the Folio Society competition to illustrate The Bloody Chamber
[image error] Illustration by Shauna Summers
[image error] “The trees stir with noises of women who have lost themselves,” by Feline Zegers
[image error] “The Bloody Chamber” by Katie Hartnett
[image error] “The Bloody Chambers,” by Deepthi Radhakrishnan
[image error] “The Company of Wolves,” Ben Jones, shortlisted in the Folio Society competition to illustrate The Bloody Chamber
[image error] Illustration by Emily Stalley
[image error] Art by Frances Bell
[image error] “The Bloody Chamber,” by Jenny Cox
[image error] “The Company of Wolves,” by Chris Hagan
[image error] “The Bloody Chamber,” by Yeji Yun
[image error] “The Tiger’s Bride,” by Asher Dumonchelle
[image error] “In the Company of Wolves,” by Kelsey King
[image error] “Company of Wolves,” by Paula Calsen
[image error] “The Erl-King,” by Laura Bifano
[image error] “Marquis,” by Nicola Rowsell
[image error] “The Erl-King’s Chorus,” by Abi Heyneke
[image error] “The Company of Wolves,” by Daniel Mackie, created for the Folio Society competition to illustrate The Bloody Chamber
[image error] “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” by Natalie Lauren Brown
[image error] “The Bloody Chamber,” by Bruno Depetris, created for the Folio Society competition to illustrate The Bloody Chamber
[image error] Illustration by Wen Dee, created for the Folio Society competition to illustrate The Bloody Chamber
[image error]
The post 50 Fascinating Works of Angela Carter Fan Art appeared first on Art of Conversation.
