Roy Miller's Blog, page 238
March 23, 2017
‘March’ Led Sales Rise at IDW Publishing
Publishing revenue at IDW Media rose 19% in its first quarter ended January 31, 2017, over the comparable period a year ago. Publishing revenue in the most recent period was $7.5 million, up from $6.3 million in last year’s first quarter.
IDW attributed the increase to the continued success of the March graphic novels titles plus sales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles board game. The company also noted that beginning April 1, IDW is moving its distribution to Penguin Random House.
For all of IDW Media, revenue in the quarter rose 13%, to $14.7 million, and the company posted net income of $127,000, up from $12,000 in last year’s first quarter.
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Writers Respond to Defunding the NEA and NEH
Last week, Donald Trump announced his budget proposal, which includes the defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanties (recipients of approximately .006% of government spending in 2016).
Writers and artists across the country have mobilized to voice their opposition to the cuts, and in solidarity with these movements, we to share the postcards they will be sending to their representatives to demand that the NEA and NEH remain funded. Below is a sample of what we have received; we encourage everyone to participate by contacting their representatives (who can be easily determined here) and sharing what they sent with the hashtag #NEAProtestcards.
Adrienne Celt, author of The Daughters
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Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife
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Tracy O’Neill, author of The Hopeful
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Nathan Schneider, author of Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse
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Blair Braverman, author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube
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Marcy Dermansky, author of The Red Car
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Mark Sarvas, author of Harry, Revised
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Jimin Han, author of A Small Revolution
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Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Only Wanting This
Michael David Lukas, author of The Oracle of Stamboul
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Naomi Benaron, author of Running the Rift
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Tracy Winn, author of Mrs. Somebody Somebody
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Clea Simon, author of Into The Grey
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Alan Alda to Host Audio Tea at BookExpo
ReedPOP has announced the lineup for the Audio Publishers Association (APA) Author Tea, which will take place Friday, June 2 at 3:00 p.m. EST at BookExpo 2017 in New York.
Alan Alda will hosting the event and will be promoting his new If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on my Face audiobook (Penguin Random House Audio). Other panelists are James Patterson (Crazy House), Marissa Meyer (Renegades), and Daniel José Older (Shadowhouse Fall).
“The APA Author Tea offers the publishing industry a unique platform to celebrate the success of the audiobook market with an impressive lineup of authors in a relaxed setting over afternoon tea,” Brien McDonald, event director for BookExpo & BookCon, said in a statement.
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March 22, 2017
‘Cork Dork’ Sniffs, Swills and Spits Through the World of Wine Experts
“Most days,” she explains, “I was drunk by noon, hung over by 2 p.m., and, around 4 in the afternoon, deeply regretting the burger I’d devoured for lunch.”
Photo
Bianca Bosker
Credit
Matthew Nguyen
Bosker was the technology editor of The Huffington Post when she heard about the World’s Best Sommelier Competition. She binge-watched videos. She marveled. She decided to change her life. For 18 months, she shadowed renowned wine fanatics, hoping to understand their obsession and to become a certified sommelier herself.
The goal was more foolhardy than she knew.
Sommeliers, at least in her hometown (New York), are a diehard lot. They’re best described as punctilious sybarites — “the most masochistic hedonists I’d ever met,” as Bosker writes. They spend evenings on their feet. During the day, they practice the arcane rituals of wine service, ingest a magnum of wine esoterica and, if they’re aspiring to become master sommeliers, sample more than 20,000 kinds of wine so that they can make such blind declarations as: “This is a Merlot-dominant blend from the right bank of Bordeaux from the village of Saint-Émilion in the 2010 vintage of Grand Cru Classé quality.”
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That’s a direct quote, by the way. It comes from Bosker’s friend — and Sherpa — Morgan Harris, a precocious, brassily opinionated sommelier at New York’s Aureole. He and other expert tasters are expected to become the Alan Turings of wine, deciphering flavors as if the Battle of the Atlantic depended on it.
Bosker had exactly no experience in this field. But because she’s possessed of a jolly hubris, she manages to wheedle and bluff her way into a series of jobs for which she isn’t remotely qualified, and then to muscle her way into the most elite blind-tasting group in Manhattan — which would be like me deciding I wanted to brush up on my baseball skills by joining the Yankees for spring training.
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She gets a quick, boozy education, and so do we. About how to decant properly, which is as difficult as sinking a hole in one. About how to serve, which involves more rules than cricket. (Whatever you do, do not show customers the back of your hand.) She gives great gossip. While trailing a “somm” at Marea, an upscale Manhattan restaurant, Bosker learns that management keeps SparkNotes on its 1 percenter clientele. They’re a confetti of acronyms, the most devastating of which is HWC, or “Handle With Care.” (At other restaurants, it’s SOE, or “Sense of Entitlement.” Ow.)
Readers also get a feel for restaurant economics from “Cork Dork,” and this much is clear: Sommeliers are secret weapons, capable of adding extra zeros to the bottom line. They’ve mastered the fine art of the upsell, sometimes based on the semiotics of customer clothing and accessories alone. Is Dad wearing a $50,000 Patek Philippe watch? Do not give him a bottle of Pinot Grigio if the most expensive one on your list is only $80. “YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED,” Harris booms. (Steer him toward a $270 bottle of Chablis grand cru instead.)
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I’d say that Harris deserves his own reality show, but in a sense, he already has one, as do some of the other somms that Bosker follows. They’re on the Esquire Network’s “Uncorked.” It felt a bit dishonest of the author not to reveal it. And while I appreciated her bravado, I grew similarly queasy, as time wore on, with how she would congratulate herself for sweet-talking her way into an event she had no business attending. Did she promise the organizers publicity in her book? A magazine article? Too often, she doesn’t say.
On occasion, Bosker radiates youthful self-importance, maybe a touch of naïveté. But she is, in the main, great company as a narrator — witty, generous, democratic. She devotes many pages to singing the praises of taste and smell, which philosophers throughout the ages have considered the baser senses, and shows how just about any of us can sharpen them. She’s suspicious, as any good journalist should be, of cant — she’s a decanter! — and interrogates at length whether the florid language of the sommelier (“notes of vanilla, cassis and saddle leather”) is useful or even authentic. She shows up at one of her fancy tasting groups with a plastic cup of chervil and asks everyone to give it a sniff. They can’t identify it — even though they regularly claim to detect hints of the herb in what they drink.
Eventually, she interrogates the entire notion of wine expertise, which in turn raises the biggest question of all: What does make a wine great? Especially if, as one damning study found, most judges in a California wine competition gave contradictory ratings to the same bottle of wine every time they tasted it? And if a wine economist explains that there’s little correlation between quality and cost once a bottle exceeds $50 or $60? (“After that,” Bosker writes, “brand, reputation and scarcity start to nudge up a bottle’s cost.”)
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Bosker ultimately arrives at her own kind of homespun answer to what makes a wine special. It accommodates tastes high and low, and she’s still certainly capable of enjoying three different vintages of the fabled Château d’Yquem. “It tasted like the sun,” she writes. “It tasted like an experience that would never repeat itself.”
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Introducing the 2017 Whiting Award Winners
This evening, at a ceremony at the New York Historical Society, the Whiting Foundation announced the ten newest recipients of its highly prestigious Whiting Awards. The winners, all “exceptional new writers who have yet to make their mark in the literary culture,” will each receive $50,000, in the hopes that the influx of cash will allow them the time and flexibility to further develop their talents. And you should probably write down the names of these new winners, because the Whiting Foundation has a pretty solid track record; among the previous winners are Colson Whitehead, Terrance Hayes, Denis Johnson, Mary Karr, Yiyun Li, Michael Cunningham, Deborah Eisenberg, Elif Batuman, Jeffrey Eugenides, Tracy K. Smith, John Jeremiah Sullivan, David Foster Wallace—and the list goes on. Below, the newest class of Whiting Award winners, along with links to where you can read more about them and check out some of their work.
Tony Tulathimutte (Fiction)
Tony Tulathimutte is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of the novel Private Citizens and has written for The New York Times, VICE, The New Yorker, Buzzfeed, and others. His work has received an O. Henry Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn.
Read Gideon Lewis-Kraus interviewing Tony Tulathimutte about Private Citizens for Lit Hub.
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Kaitlyn Greenidge (Fiction)
Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of the novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin). Born in Boston, she received her MFA from Hunter College. Her work has appeared in The Believer, American Short Fiction, Guernica, Kweli Journal, The Feminist Wire, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from Lower Manhattan Community Council’s Work-Space Program, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and other prizes. She lives in Brooklyn.
Read an excerpt from We Love You, Charlie Freeman and Greenidge’s essay about Prince as password for Lit Hub.
Lisa Halliday (Fiction)
Lisa Halliday’s work has appeared in The Paris Review. She previously worked at The Wylie Agency, and is a freelance editor and translator in Milan. Her novel Asymmetry will be published by Simon & Schuster in February 2018.
Read Halliday’s short story “Stump Louie” in The Paris Review.
Jen Beagin (Fiction)
Jen Beagin is the author of the novel Pretend I’m Dead (Triquarterly). She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from UC Irvine and has published stories in Juked and Faultline, among other journals and literary magazines. She lives in New York.
Read an excerpt from Pretend I’m Dead in Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading.
Francisco Cantú (Nonfiction)
Francisco Cantú is based in Tucson. He served as a Border Patrol Agent for the United States Border Patrol from 2008-2012. A former Fulbright fellow, he recently received an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. He is a frequent contributor to Guernica and a contributing editor at PublicBooks.org, where he curates the “El Mirador” series, which collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art focused on the American West, the borderlands, and Indian Country. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in South Loop Review, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Edible Baja Arizona, Ploughshares, and Orion. His book The Line Becomes a River will be published by Riverhead Books in February 2018.
Read Cantú’s death-map essay “Clearly Marked Ghosts” in Territory.
Simone White (Poetry)
Simone White was born in Philadelphia. She earned her BA from Wesleyan University, JD from Harvard Law School, and MFA from the New School. White is the author of the full-length collections Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem Books) and House Envy of All the World (Heretical Texts, 2010), and the chapbooks Dolly (Q Avenue Press, 2008) and Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013). She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and was selected as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America in 2013. She lives in Brooklyn.
Read White’s poems “It Must Be Shameless” and “Don’t nuzzle me fucker-maker” in Poetry
Phillip B. Williams (Poetry)
Phillip B. Williams was born in Chicago. He is the author of the full-length collection Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016) and the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). He is a Cave Canem graduate and received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anti-, Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing as a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.
Read seven poems by Williams at Boston Review.
Clarence Coo (Drama)
Clarence Coo received the 2012 Yale Drama Series Prize for Beautiful Province (Belle Province). His work has been produced or developed at the Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, New York Theatre Workshop, Ma-Yi Theatre, and others. Clarence’s honors include an Arena Stage Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship, an NEA Access to Artistic Excellence Grant, a Kennedy Center commission, a Larry Neal Writers’ Award, and a 2016 NYFA Fellowship. He received his MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and a 2012-2013 Dramatists Guild fellow. He lives in New York, where he is the program administrator of Columbia’s MFA Writing Program and is a 2016-2017 Writing Fellow at the Playwrights Realm.
Read Coo’s play Beautiful Province (Belle Province).
Clare Barron (Drama)
Clare Barron is a playwright and actor from Wenatchee, Washington. Her plays have been produced and developed at the Atlantic Theatre Company, New York Stage & Film, and others. She was the recipient of a 2014 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and was a 2014 P73 Playwriting Fellow. For her play Dance Nation, Barron was the co-winner of the inaugural 2015 Relentless Award established in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the recipient of the 2017 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
Read an interview with Barron about her play You Got Older in The New York Times.
James Ijames (Drama)
James Ijames is a Philadelphia-based actor and playwright and Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. He is a founding member of Orbiter 3 Playwright Producing Collective, a member of the InterAct Core Writers Group, and a mentor for The Foundry. He received the F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Artist, the Terrence McNally New Play Award for WHITE, and the 2015 Kesselring Honorable Mention Prize for The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trail of Miz Martha Washington, and is an Independence Foundation Fellow and a 2015 Pew Fellow. He received a BA in Drama from Morehouse College and a MFA in Acting from Temple University.
Read an interview with James Ijames in Philadelphia Magazine.
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How celebrity deals are shutting children’s authors out of their own trade | Books
Another day, another celebrity announces they are to “pen” a children’s book. Already this week, Jamie Lee Curtis has announced a “selfie-themed” tome, Chelsea Clinton a picture book about inspirational women and the Black Eyed Peas a graphic novel featuring zombies.
They join a slew of celebs cashing in on a burgeoning market. In the past month, model-turned-actor Cara Delevingne, TV presenter Dermot O’Leary and even politician and professional motormouth George Galloway have joined Frank Lampard, Danny Baker, Julian Clary and Fearne Cotton in vying to be the next JK Rowling.
Though publishers are notoriously cagey about money, industry sources say the advances paid to celebrities are considerably higher than the amounts usually doled out to children’s writers, whose contracts are won on talent rather than fame. Which explains the resentment many authors feel towards these incomers.
One prize-winning writer, who didn’t want to be named, left her last publisher after a new media star received a huge advance for a ghostwritten novel that consequently bombed. “The massive advances mean publishers put all their marketing into making these books work in order to earn back the investment,” she says. “So when they fail, not only have they taken money for publicity that could have helped the rest of us, but there is no money left.”
Celebrity-penned children’s books are nothing new. From Madonna’s English Roses and Sarah Ferguson’s Budgie the Helicopter, stars more familiar with Hello! than Harry Potter have landed deals that seem tied to status rather than storytelling ability.
Some have done very well. Though there was a degree of sniffiness in the publishing world when comedian David Walliams signed a book deal, few would now deny that HarperCollins made a smart investment. His stratospheric sales have made him one of the three highest-earning authors in the UK, clocking up print sales of £11m.
But such successes have only led to more dominance, says children’s writer Fiona Dunbar. “Some years ago I blogged on this subject, saying, ‘It’s fine, everybody chill out, it’s good for the industry generally,’” the Divine Freaks author recalls. “But now it’s different, because the scale has increased so much.”
Lucy Coats, who has written both picture and story books for children, agrees: “The number and frequency of recent deals is making many of us consider our involvement in the business. It’s depressing to say the least.”
Authors understand the attraction of star names: celebrities have built-in reach through TV and social media platforms. If even a fraction of their followers buy their book, they have a hit on their hands.
And some authors are doing good business as ghostwriters, which can promote their own work, too. Though Walliams writes his own novels, others, such as Olympic cycling champion Chris Hoy, openly use ghosts. Hoy’s Flying Fergus series has ridden to the top of the charts powered by Joanna Nadin, a former Labour party speechwriter and the author of a series of her own.
Employing an established children’s author as ghostwriter can have a double effect: the writer benefits from exposure to a bigger audience, while the star benefits from the writer’s credibility. No wonder Delevingne’s people were emphasising the involvement of Rowan Coleman – bestselling author of We Are All Made of Stars – with the model’s forthcoming YA novel Mirror, Mirror?
But the balance of such deals remains tipped steeply towards the celebrity. Some are undoubtedly well crafted but others are little more than another addition to the personal brand, to go alongside the perfume, fitness DVD and fashion label.
Surely children’s books – which help form our outlook on life, which we carry into adulthood and old age – deserve better?
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Airea D. Matthews: Texting with Anne Sexton
For the second installment in a monthly series of interviews with contemporary poets (read part one here), Peter Mishler corresponded with poet Airea D. Matthews. Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Yale University Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Poets 2015, American Poets, The Rumpus, Four Way Review, The Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She received the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Ms. Matthews is working on her second poetry collection, under/class, which explores poverty. She currently lives in Detroit.
Peter Mishler: Your collection Simulacra contains poems in which Anne Sexton texts with another figure, and the poems are lineated like a message screen, sender to the right, receiver to the left; date, day, and time. Can you share a little bit about how you started making your Anne Sexton “text” poems? Could you walk me through the discovery of this form?
Airea D. Matthews: In the days before the universality of smart phones, text messages were often delivered out of sequence but numbered. In 2012 I began reading through my own text archive and picking out happy accidents—messages that due to sequencing errors and forced line breaks read as lyrical excerpts. I started ruminating and trying to concoct a form. This experiment also coincided with a depression in which I truly wanted to correspond, for reasons of mental health and fellowship, with Sexton. At some point, I remembered reading Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames. In one of her final correspondences to her daughter, Sexton wrote “Talk to my poems and to your heart—I’m in both: if you need me.”
And so I found this opportunity to construct conversations through the text form. For about a year, I set up a secondary text account and sent messages to an imagined Sexton, which I began to transcribe and edit into the Sexton Texts poems. And since the poems were written at different times, they each have a different speaker in conversation with Sexton.
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PM: What has the poetry of Anne Sexton meant to you as a writer?
ADM: Sexton’s work speaks to my full existence. She, too, was an entire cast of characters—woman, wife, mother, writer, patient. She started writing then stopped and picked it up again, as did I. She wrote through mental illness, familial demands, and a life that appeared hyper-privileged from the margins, as do I. She found a way to bring her complex self to the page with humility and freshness, resisting aesthetics that did not suit her, as I hope to do. She also reconciled her own tumultuous relationship with the truth through her writing. And although she is canonized as a confessional poet, her poems direct massive amounts of energy to illuminating certain effects of the universal human condition.
She was one of the first poets I read who made me hunger to write. In my opinion, she was the type of poet that made poetry a visceral event; her work moves beyond the depths of emotion and experience into aural and full sensory engagement. She lived, made art and died according to her own rules, and, by doing so, forged an example of how to include aspects of the shadow self inside the work. She was a pathcutter, much like Rimbaud and Stein. I admire that more than almost any single characteristic among writers.
PM: I’m curious, now that these conversations have emerged between you and Sexton, what observations you have about what occurred between you.
ADM: Those texts were a magic mix of communion and examination. I went back and re-read To Live or Die and realized how much of her book influenced the texts’ thematic core. I truly felt like she was with me during the course of a breakdown and she guided me through it with her work—word by word. She believed that we find ourselves in our work, and the truth is in the seeking. I’ll be damned if she wasn’t right.
PM: In what ways is a sense of play or experimentation necessary to your work?
ADM: Play is vital. It’s actually one of the ways by which I make sense of the world. I often ask questions to some historical figure and then construct a response. Or I imagine contemporized versions of mythological figures, or I imagine becoming a myth. As someone who didn’t have much of a childhood, I am making up for it by playing on the page. Language is malleable and forms are ever evolving based on cultural inputs. I see both as a kind of fantasmic playground.
PM: The notes at the back of this collection reference specific texts—primarily philosophical ones—and denote how they are integrated into your work. What is the relationship between your reading and your poem-making? What specifically does philosophy do for you as a poet?
ADM: Although I am primarily an introvert, I desire to be in conversation with great minds. I want to sit at the feet of the wise and ask questions about how their minds work and what their theories imply. And after all of that, I want to reconfigure everything I think I heard or read.
Philosophy implores its readers to be objective and dispassionate for logic’s sake—a sort of natural distance between the thought life and actual life. And because of that distance there’s room to grow and reconsider. Absent pathos or compulsion, thoughts can be agile and changeable. Take Wittgenstein for instance, who makes some appearances in Simulacra. In 1921 while working under Bertrand Russell, he published Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which posited that truth comes from an accurate representation of reality. His second book, Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953, outright contradicted his original work. It was as if he were saying, “that was what I thought then, but this is what I believe now.” There’s a great deal of poetry in that shift.
I value philosophy, and certain philosophers, for their discomfort with dogma and certainty. There’s humble beauty in being an uncertain intellectual, in admitting deliberations are still in session, or straight up admitting previous error in thought or logic. And since I also have a deep admiration for the dialectic—uncertainty and opposing thoughts in discourse fuel my thinking and writing.
PM: Camus’s The Rebel appears as an epigraph, and is echoed in the titles of certain poems. In what ways does his portrayal of the rebel in that text relate to you as an artist?
ADM: So many ways…
Most days I’m a pendulum swinging between innumerable poles and that tendency influences my work. I live a life that requires quick fits of code switching—the domestic and naturally nomadic, the feral and tame, the white and the black, the ancient and the contemporary. I live and/or reimagine with great intensity, and because of this much of my life is predictably unpredictable. Some days, I’m impulsive and others highly restrained. I’m, at once, excitable and passionate and quiet and thoughtful. I am never any one thing but always many things. All of that shows in the work, and I’m not interested in disguising that part of myself. Nor am I interested in following prescribed rules, I’d rather know what they are so I can conscientiously break them. I resist many traditions and yet recognize their importance. I’ve come to fully acknowledge that rebellious side of myself.
Frankly, if accepting and staking out a space for ones’ myriad, problematic and complex self is not the ultimate act of rebellion then I don’t know what is.
PM: Did you begin as a performer and then shift toward writing for the page?
ADM: Yes, I started as a writer who drifted into performance and stayed there for some years and then drifted back to writing. The body is a critical instrument that is often overlooked in writing. In performance, of course, the body is useful to convey. But it’s equally useful in writing. To that end, I try to write and read with feeling. It can be tricky because some poems warrant a certain reading and, absent the author, how would one know how to read it? The key is to communicate feeling and allow the reader to do their own work.
In a 1970 interview, Gwendolyn Brooks instructed that “We Real Cool” was to be read a specific way—a pause after each “we” and the “we” was to be spoken softly to represent uncertainty. The interviewer then asked her if the poem was determined by a colloquial rhythm. Brooks responded that the poem was determined by “my feeling about these young men.” I get that.
PM: Coming to the title of your collection, Simulacra, in what ways does Baudrillard’s work, and his notions of representation, apply to your poem-making?
ADM: I think about image-making and patterning quite a bit. Then there’s mass consumption and media, which drastically changes our focus and the way we communicate with one another. I suppose, as a poet, I’m charged with finding a way to integrate those concerns.
Simulacra hold interest because they are established by some previous order—an object (or subject) is represented by a former object (or subject). Representation, or image-making, is fundamental to the process of poem-making. In many poems, something presents like something else—it’s the cornerstone of the simile and metaphor. These comparisons seem to be a way to reinforce an idea of culture, language and/or degrees of difference or similarity. But at the same time, the representation itself becomes a type of appropriation, or a shorthand method for absorbing the experiences/appearances of other objects (or subjects). The reader or cultural observer must distinguish between those images that are hyperreal or symbolic, fatal or banal, and those that appear to disappear or appear to remain.
One of the reasons I adore Baudrillard is because his work, his theory about the simulacrum, embraces a radical opposition in which reconciliation and synthesis are not goals. In my own view, I think healthy antagonism fuels a type of rigor in which the end goal is not to sing “Kumbaya” at the end of a disagreement but rather learn how to live with disagreements. I embrace the same notion in my poems.
PM: In what way is your lived experience represented in your poems? And is there a tension between your lived experience and how it is represented verse?
ADM: Everything I write is biographical though not necessarily (and technically) autobiographical. For those who are closest to me, I can feel their issues and problems as if they were my own. That level of empathy has led to psychiatric interventions and exposed my own inherited weaknesses. I’ve allowed my life in a lot of ways to become a simulation. My poems suggest that form and life are inextricable. And while I am certainly neo-confessional, the confession is not always my own. As I mentioned earlier, simulacra absorb the experience or appearances of other objects/subjects.
But I will disclose these three things: 1. I grew up with a heroin-addicted father. 2. I required psychiatric intervention and 3. Once upon a time, one of my psych nurses was named Anne Sexton.
As for everything else, I will let the gentle reader decide what truth is.
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Adult Book Sales Fell, Kids Books Rose in October
Sales of adult trade books fell 13.1% in October compared to October 2015, while sales in the children’s/young adult segment rose 1.9%, according to figures released Wednesday morning by the AAP as part of its StatShot program.
The decline in adult trade was led by a 24.1% drop in hardcover sales, the biggest trade format, as well as a 21.0% decline in mass market paperback and a 31.9% drop in the sale of physical audiobooks. Sales of digital audiobooks rose 7.6% in the month over October 2015, and e-book sales were up 2.6%. For the first 10 months of 2016, sales in the adult trade category were down 3.2% compared to the same period a year ago.
The 1.9% increase in the children’s/young adult category was led by a 14.4% gain in board book sales plus a 4.2% rise in paperback. Hardcover sales fell 1.8% compared to a year earlier and e-book sales were off 17.7%. For the first 10 months of 2016, sales in the category were up 4.4% over the January-October span in 2015.
Total October sales of the 1,207 publishers that report to the AAP fell 9.3% in October, and were down 6.4% in the year-to-date.
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5 Reasons Fellow Writers Are Essential to Your Writing Life
We writers are often advised to “find our tribe,” to reach out, to network, to put ourselves out there. But I sometimes get the sense that many aspiring and even published writers don’t fully understand why this is so important—both creatively and professionally—or why the earlier you start, the better off you’ll be.
Through my years at WD, I’ve championed the value of the writing community. Yet it’s taken on new meaning for me as I’ve added novelist to my resume, with my debut, Almost Missed You, set to release from St. Martin’s Press at the end of March.
Along the way, I’ve been sharing takeaways from my publishing journey (see also: How I Got My Agent—and Book Deal; 10 Lessons Learned Behind the Scenes of a Book Deal; What Every Writer Should Know About Book Covers; 5 Steps to Surviving Your Copy Edit; What No One Tells You About Page Proofs, Blurb Requests & More). But it’s been awhile since I’ve written such a post simply because a few months ago I entered the pre-pub waiting period: whereby, having signed off the book’s final pages, your attention is now split between writing your next manuscript, promoting your forthcoming release, and nursing a near-constant nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten something.
These have also been the months when the importance of fellow writers has become clearest to me. They’ve even reminded me of some of those things I might have otherwise forgotten—and I have no doubt that the right tribe at the right time will do it for you, too.
First, the basics:
Where might you find—or expand—your tribe?
Start with local writing groups/workshops, membership organizations for your genre (Romance Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, etc.), Facebook groups (we have a wonderful article devoted to these in the May/June 2017 Writer’s Digest), Twitter chats (hey, there’s one on these in there too!), bloggers you admire, and/or conferences/courses.
If you’re just starting out, don’t overwhelm yourself: Aim to make a few meaningful connections, and they’ll almost certainly lead to others.
What should a good tribe encompass?
Aim to connect with writers at your level (a group just for writers who are self-publishing can be a valuable place to share trial and error; a buddy who’s also querying agents can yield insight into response times and agent styles), above your level (you don’t want to fall into a trap of the blind leading the blind), and at a more beginner level (it’s nice to give as good as you get).
So what can fellow writers offer you, really, that your existing network of well-meaning family, friends and coworkers cannot?
1. Fellow writers know how awkward promoting yourself can feel.
We’re all supposed to be building platforms, right? Before we publish. While we publish. After we publish. But it’s easier said than done.
Did you know, for instance, that if you consign your authorial Facebook life to a public Page (as most authors do) rather than a personal profile, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms treat you as a business, making your posts visible to most of the people who follow your page only if those posts draw “likes” early on?
You find this out soon enough when you create an author page and get accustomed to the sound of crickets chirping. Fellow authors know this and have a tendency to be generous with their likes on one another’s page posts.
This isn’t just for Facebook, of course. Once someone knows how it feels to tweet into the abyss, they’re happier to dole out hearts and RTs for those in the same shoes.
2. Fellow writers share your questions.
Writer friends Brian A. Klems and Jessica Strawser
Does this pitch pull you in? Has anyone heard from an editor at this magazine? What the heck are bookplates, and should I order some? Even if you have a relationship with an agent or an editor, you’re not going to want to ask him everything. In fact, you might sometimes feel as if your questions are … well, not particularly smart. (Who, me?) And while resources like Writer’s Digest work hard to supply answers, some questions are subjective or specific.
In the Women’s Fiction Writers Association I belong to, members ask and answer on matters ranging from blog titles to experiences with freelance editors to the drawbacks of cursing in dialogue. Even when there is no right answer, the perspectives offered are food for thought. Sometimes knowing you’re not the only one who feels in the dark is enough.
3. Fellow writers do have some answers.
A lead on an affordable printer for bookmarks? Voila. Is that pricey conference worth the trip? Someone has been there, done that.
4. Fellow writers understand what kind of support is important.
Don’t get me wrong, I have wonderfully supportive friends, coworkers and family. But certain things, as The Fresh Prince so wisely said, parents just don’t understand. Your tribe, however, does.
What your friends & family say: When is your book coming out again?
What your fellow writers say: Saw you’re doing another Goodreads giveaway! I entered so everyone on my feed would see it, though of course I’ll preorder regardless. Two months to go! Your newsletter looks great, by the way. Got any tips for navigating Mailchimp?
What your friends & family say: Goodness, are you still editing that thing?
What your fellow writers say: How do your page proofs look? Mine just got here and I found the most horrifying typo on Page 1 (!). I’m not sure I’ll ever feel ready to sign off on this thing! But I promise I’ve spelled your name right in my acknowledgments.
What your friends & family say: Your book is almost out—are you excited? I bet you’re going to be famous!
What your fellow writers say: Your book is almost out—how are you holding up? I recommended you as a guest poster on this great blog I contribute to, so keep an eye out for an email from someone named Katie! I have my calendar marked for your release day and will post my review to your Amazon page first thing.
5. Fellow writers remind you that you are a part of something wonderful.
When I reached out to a certain bestseller who I’d only briefly met—quite nervously, I might add—to ask if he might consider reading a galley of my book and perhaps lending an endorsement blurb if he found it worthy, I wasn’t prepared for the sure grace of his response.
Not only did he say yes, but he included an assurance that the invitation to blurb a forthcoming book is not a thing to begrudgingly add to a to-do list, but instead a wonderful opportunity to read something great before the rest of the world gets to read it. When you feel as if you’re begging favors, to be told that it’s not a favor but an opportunity is both a kindness and a gift.
As a member of the 17Scribes group for authors debuting this year (which is open to anyone with a first novel publishing in 2017), I’ve been the lucky recipient of advance reading copies from a number of talented new authors. Every time I read one of their books, I marvel at what a talented group they are. And then I marvel that I can count myself among them.
Finding your tribe isn’t just about getting support when you need it. It’s about actively participating in a wonderful community to which you belong, sharing in one another’s successes, reading work that will share the shelf with yours, and making real friends in the process.
We’re all in this together. And thank goodness for that.
Yours in writing,
Jessica Strawser
Editorial Director, Writer’s Digest magazine
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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 389 | WritersDigest.com
Yesterday, I finally released the 2016 April PAD Challenge Results. Tomorrow, I’ll release the guidelines for the 2017 April PAD Challenge. But first, I know some people have been having trouble posting comments to the site. If you have (even if you’ve contacted me before), please contact me again at robert.brewer@fwmedia.com with information about what happens when it doesn’t work for you, how many times it can take before a comment finally takes (if it even takes), and what browser you use. There’s a new reporting system, and I want to get this issue front and center, but I need your help to make this happen.
For today’s prompt, write an improvement poem. It could be an improvement you’d like to see in yourself, in someone else, or in a machine, tool, or whatever else you can think to improve. (For instance, I’d like to see an improvement in how at least some folks are having to comment on this blog.)
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Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
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Here’s my attempt at an Improvement Poem:
“Never Ending”
i lose 20 pounds
so i can start running
& the more i run
the more i want to lose weight
& the more i want to improve
other things in my life
like my writing
which always requires more reading
& of course my kids
could always use a little more
of my time & attention
to details
& i’d like to volunteer
with the church & scouts
& the world in general
& it seems like i’m always
looking for the next way
to improve myself
& those around me
& i’ve given up on finding
my way to a finish line
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). And he believes in the process more than the result, whatever that means.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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