Roy Miller's Blog, page 257
March 3, 2017
How I Learned to Stop Worrying About the Market and Just Write
If I had to reduce to one word what caused me to leave book publishing, it would be this: Dread.
There were so many kinds of dread as an editor. Dread of the not-great cover that you’d have to try to convince your author to accept. Dread of the not-great manuscript that might never become as great as you’d hoped. Dread of the terrible sales results for even the books that you thought were great. Dread of the times your publisher would walk by your office door and glance in with a disgusted expression on her face that exuded, “You’re still here?” Dread of your days being numbered. Dread of the axe falling. Dread of trying to do anything else. So much dread.
I could handle most of the dread. I did my job well enough and for long enough to know what to say in most situations, to muddle through for another day. But the one type of exchange that always threw me more than any other involved the aspect of my job that was arguably most important to my publisher.
The context: I’d have gotten in a manuscript that I loved, and I’d have made a case for why we should acquire it that was largely focused on my passion for the book. And then, because publishing is a business, my editor-in-chief or publisher would ask me the inevitable question: “So how much should we pay for it?”
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I won’t say I was flummoxed every time. It was more that I was frustrated. Books saved my life as a child, an adolescent, a young adult, a no-longer-young adult. And now you want me to put a value on a book I love? Every time I was asked this question, it was all I could do not to reply, “How much have we got?”
This isn’t to say that I never managed to acquire books for the right price that made the publisher money. I did that enough times to keep my head above water for a few decades. I often said to friends that my acquisition ability could be illustrated in a Venn diagram. In the circle on the left is what the market wants. In the circle on the right is what I love. And there’s a little overlap between the two circles that is purely coincidental.
After I left publishing to become a freelance editor and ghostwriter, a number of people said to me, “Wow, you’re so brave.” I’m constitutionally incapable of taking a compliment I don’t think I deserve, so I’ve always responded thus: (1) I was about to be fired, and (2) I wasn’t brave enough to sit in my office waiting to be fired.
I’d always said I could never be a freelancer—I needed the stability of a paycheck. But what I lost in stability after I left publishing, I gained in dreadlessness. Sure, there was the dread of where the next paycheck was coming from, but it turned out this was nothing compared to the dread of being a terrible disappointment to my publisher. The one thing they wanted from me was the one thing I couldn’t give them, namely, to figure out what the market wanted. As a freelancer, that was no longer my responsibility; it was someone else’s decision to make. My only obligation now was to make each client’s manuscript better than it was before, and that is something I have always been able to do. If anyone tells me I’m a great editor, I don’t demur. I say thank you. I admire my friends who can do more than this, who can combine being excellent editors with having prescient taste and strong heads for business. But I admire them the same way I admire Beyoncé: from a respectful distance that I never in a million years would think I could build a bridge across.
After I became a freelancer, I also took on ghostwriting gigs. Ironically, there is possibly no more market-centric job than ghostwriting. I was hired to write something for someone with a platform—and that platform is the market. My responsibility was to please everyone but myself. I had to please the author, the literary agent, and the publisher, and often they’re pleased by different and conflicting things. For someone who lives in fear of disappointing anyone, this was not a recipe for peace of mind. I felt less dread than I had before—sure I could lose a gig, but that wasn’t the same as being fired—yet I was still aiming to meet a standard that wasn’t my own.
The ghostwriting gig that can really pay the bills involves a celebrity, and unfortunately, that was not my forté. I did work on some ghostwriting projects for authors I liked and admired who were doing excellent work. But I couldn’t create something from (almost) nothing, as many of the best and most successful ghostwriters can. I had to have something to start with. And most important, my heart had to be in it.
Meanwhile, I was trying to write my own novel, a process that began ten years ago. I wrote it with my then eight-year-old son in mind, having recently become aware of the astounding richness of middle grade and young adult literature. This was certainly not a thing that I grew up knowing about. I didn’t discover Madeleine L’Engle and Judy Blume until high school, long past the point when I might have become obsessed. Mostly I skipped from reading the Brothers Grimm to Roald Dahl to Bram Stoker to Jane Austen. After that, it was all 19th-century literature, all the time.
I sent my first attempt at a novel to an agent friend of mine who said a few nice things but mostly confirmed that it was a mess. Mollified, I stuck that manuscript in a drawer and minded my own business for a while.
When my son was a little older, I had an idea for another novel—a series, really (that’s what was selling at the time). It was a contemporary middle-grade fantasy. I went back to my friend with it, and he showed it to another agent who gave me some editorial feedback that I incorporated. I returned to the revision well a few more times, trying to draw out murky cups of inspiration that would transform that novel into something worth submitting. Finally, the agent said he wanted more backstory for the villains. I loved my villains with a passion, so I was more than happy to do this. I wrote a prologue, which to this day is the most fun I’ve ever had writing anything. It was everything that an inspired experience is supposed to be. I sat down, and out of my fingers grew vines from all the seeds that were planted in me as a child—the Brothers Grimm, Bram Stoker, Roald Dahl, plus all the years I’d spent in church.
I slapped that prologue on the novel I’d written, and since the first agent had now bowed out, my friend kindly sent it to yet another colleague. She said she loved the prologue, but not the following 95 percent, and might I be willing to write a novel—a dark fairytale—like the prologue? My friend’s comment when he forwarded me his colleague’s email was, “I’m sure you’re not going to want to do this, so probably we’ve come to the end of the road.”
My reply was, “She loved something I wrote? Of course I’ll dump the other 250 pages!”
It was as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from my shoulders. The voice that I found in that prologue was my voice. At no point was I thinking about anything other than the story that I wanted to make, and the characters who did things that were terrible and wonderful and scary and beautiful. This agent was asking me to pursue the book that I’d wanted to write but hadn’t allowed myself to dream that I could. Too bogged down with trying to please everyone else, I hadn’t even tried.
I’d like to say that after that the rest of the novel flowed as easily. It didn’t. There was draft after draft while I learned how to write a novel. As it turns out, being able to edit a novel is not the same thing as being able to write one. This was a constant source of heartbreak and self-loathing for me. But I never again felt that I was scraping the bottom of a dry well. Every time I got edits back with the unwelcome news that the novel wasn’t quite there yet, I’d mourn my failure then start in again. It took years. Years while I tried to please ghostwriting clients and edited lots of books and worried about money. Months would go by when I shoved the project aside to jump back on the market treadmill to crank out some pages for someone else. But whenever I returned to my novel, the well was full, because the well was me.
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WNBA Celebrates Its Centennial
The Women’s National Book Association is celebrating its centennial this year and has planned a raft of programs and events to mark the occasion.
While the WNBA held a few events so far this year—last week it announced plans to send a book a day to the Trump administration in March—its big push begins now to mark Women’s History Month. A centerpiece of its efforts in the release of Celebrating Women’s Voices, two lists of 100 fiction and 100 nonfiction books that are considered to be among the most influential works written by women.
Other Centennial year programs include:
WNBA Second Century Prize, supporting the power of reading past, present, and future.
Bookwomen Speak: The WNBA Visionaries Series, throughout 2017 in chapters across the country
WNBA Award, Centennial Edition, two outstanding women will be honored in the centennial year.
Women in the Book World: 100 Years of Leadership and the WNBA, a book exploring women’s leadership in the book world, to be published in the September 2017
The WNBA Turns 100!, a cocktail reception in NYC in October 2017, to be help at Pen + Brush, a WNBA partner, when we will award the Second Century Prize and WNBA Award, honor past recipients, and celebrate our partners and supporters across the years.
The WNBA was formed in November 1917 by a group of women booksellers who meet at Sherwood’s Bookstore in New York City to form a league of women active in all aspects of the book world. Having been shut out of the all-male American Booksellers Association and the Bookseller’s League, the women connected, educated, and advocated for themselves, and the Women’s National Book Association was born.
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March 2, 2017
Richard Holmes: By the Book
What makes for a good biography?
Call it the imaginative handshake. The power to transport the reader to another time, another place, and another identity with absolute conviction; and then make them come away with the sensation “I really met that person — and I know how they felt about the world — and it was worth it.” The first writer to show me how this could be done was Michael Holroyd, with his “Lytton Strachey” (1968) set in England mostly before and after the First World War, and recreating the whole lost world and sensibility of Bloomsbury. For me it has been done many times since, and in many different ways: by the big epic of Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson; or the vivid celebration of Hilary Spurling’s Matisse; or the exquisite intellectual portrait of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf; or the weird street encounter of Alexander Masters’s “Stuart: A Life Backwards”; or the airborne glamour of Stacy Schiff’s “Saint-Exupéry: A Biography”; or the zingy, sexy bohemian portrait of Edmund Gordon’s “The Invention of Angela Carter”; or the haunted journey into the labyrinthine inner world of an English opium eater recounted by Frances Wilson in “Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey.” The possibilities of good biography are so rich!
What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?
I seek escapism and refreshment in wild travel or vivid autobiography, expressing the strongest sense of individuality (not mine) both in style and content, even to the point of extreme eccentricity. I want voices that absolutely carry me away, and make me forget everything else, including punctuation. So Oliver Sacks’s brilliant, scatty scientific memoirs, “Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood,” can work the same clean-sweep magic as Joe Simpson’s grim, breathless mountaineering classic, “Touching the Void”; or the English singer Ian Bostridge’s deeply alienated “Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession,” a highly personal account of the German song cycle “Winterreise” (with all the lyrics translated); or John Carey’s clever, chippy, donnish “The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books”; or Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall’s truly haunting seafaring mystery “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst.” All these books have the necessary transportation powers. Right now I am being carried away all over America by Jonathan Raban’s brilliant bittersweet immigrant essays in “Driving Home.”
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Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?
I always come back to my first love, traditional rhyming lyric poetry (and still try to write it too). Reading Keats or Hardy, Emily Dickinson or John Crowe Ransom, sharpens my sense of language, its beauty and its hidden powers. And now there is the fascinating question of how far the modern song lyric has taken over from this traditional literary form: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Pete Seeger, Lennon and McCartney, Paul Simon, Stephen Sondheim, Bob Dylan or even that one-off country masterpiece by Roberta Lee Streeter, “Ode to Billie Joe.”
How do you organize your books?
There are now so many that I keep them in several different places (and usually, it turns out, in the wrong place). There are ever-shifting shelves in my snug study-room hidden away in Norfolk, U.K., which includes everything ongoing. There are immaculately labeled boxes of research books in a nearby Big Yellow Storage facility, which contains nothing else but a kitchen chair and a yellow duster. There is my beloved Romantic poets and scientists library in my London flat (including the complete works of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday and Mary Somerville). In our stone cottage in France there are all the short stories of Guy de Maupassant and a heap of popular French biographies (Jacques Brel, Honoré de Balzac, Françoise Hardy, Gérard de Nerval, Jean-Paul Sartre, Françoise Sagan, Juliette Gréco, Simone de Beauvoir . . . ). And I cannot omit the wonderful London Library, St. James’s Square, which allows you to borrow up to 40 books for a fortnight or a month or (dare I say it) for a year on end. This feels like an endless extension of my own book shelves, going on like something out of a Borges story, forever.
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What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
A graphic novel by Sydney Padua, “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.” Yes, I’m serious. This is an absolutely inspired creation: a cartoon story — “(Mostly) True” — about two real-life Victorian scientists (Ada L. and Charles B.) who invented and described the first-ever computer. It’s hilariously funny and alarmingly clever, and the author presented it at a packed-out lecture hall at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford University.
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?
The hero closest to my heart is the glorious and chaotic Sir Robert Merivel, royal physician to the king’s dogs, in the 17th-century court of the merry monarch Charles II. He appears in two of the historical novels of my beloved Rose Tremain, “Restoration” and “Merivel: A Man of His Time.” An inspired combustion of the witty, lascivious diarist Samuel Pepys and the passionate, self-questioning medical philosopher William Harvey, he is Tremain’s unique fictional creation. I feel I know him very well. So much so that Sir Robert somehow slipped into my strictly nonfiction book, “This Long Pursuit,” with one of his mischievous witticisms — though no one has noticed as yet.
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What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
I have no memory of actually reading my first and favorite book, but its images haunt me to this day, nearly 70 years later. It was Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” and it was always read to me — or rather gently chanted — in a soft, slightly husky voice by my adored mother (herself half-Scottish and a published poet), sitting neatly at the end of my bed in her flowery print dress, on what seemed to me then like endless summer evenings, with the curtains drawn against the light outside, and the birds still singing in the echoing garden beyond, a situation vividly recaptured in the very first poem of Stevenson’s collection, “Bed in Summer”: “In winter I get up at night / And dress by yellow candlelight. / In summer, quite the other way, / I have to go to bed by day.. . . ” Many of the pieces that follow — “The Lamplighter,” “Where Go the Boats?,” “The Land of Counterpane,” “Windy Nights” — still sound in my head like songs, the words known by heart and locked safely into place by their sure, perfect rhymes. Paradoxically, all of them were promising to take me far away to a quite different place, a glowing open-air world of excitement and adventure, as in the poem “Travel”: “I should like to rise and go / Where the golden apples grow; — / Where below another sky / Parrot islands anchored lie, / And, watched by cockatoos and goats, / Lonely Crusoes building boats.. . . ” Which is exactly where the adult Stevenson himself went, and where years later I tried to follow in his footsteps.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
I would be looking for some brilliant combination of intelligence, flirtation, scandal and intoxication. My first thought was the three Brontë sisters, but though Romantically fascinating, with haunting anecdotes of the real Heathcliff and the real Jane Eyre, this might be a rather grim, heartbreaking gathering in the end, and disturbed by the absent ghost of their tragic brother Branwell. My second thought was Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and their critical contemporary Edmund (Bunny) Wilson. This would be great fun, noisy, clever and argumentative, and certainly boozy enough, with lovely American memories of Paris in the 1920s, but it might end in fisticuffs, and again there would be the haunting absence of Zelda. My final choice settled on three reliable old Romantics. The first was my friend the mystic poet Coleridge, a talker extraordinaire, who would recite forgotten passages from “Kubla Khan” and tell us about his opium dreams, his difficult friend Wordsworth and his lost love Asra. He would be joined by his aristocratic contemporary Lord Byron, poet, wit, pinup and philanderer, the creator of “Don Juan,” who would embroider on his travels and his romances and tell us why Greece should still be free. The circle would be completed by the sparkling Germaine de Staël, the French beauty and bluestocking, who survived the French Revolution, defied that trumping political bully Napoleon, and wrote a glamorous European best seller, “Corinne.” All three did actually meet on at least one occasion and, with certain reservations, greatly admired each other, which would set a good tone as the first champagne was served. Although, it was said that Germaine shamefully outtalked the other two, and was inclined to set her cap alarmingly at her host.
Of your own books, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?
“Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer.”
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What do you plan to read next?
Andrew Motion’s new collection of poems, “Coming In to Land.” Motion was until recently the poet laureate of Great Britain, a close friend of Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, and famed for his readings in schools and universities. Now he has completed his tenure, married and moved to America, I am keen to see how his wonderful lyric and elegiac gift has crossed the Atlantic and made the touch-down.
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Happy 113th Birthday to Dr. Seuss!
In the WD backpage humor column Platforms of Yore, we dream up the social media accounts of classic authors desperate to build their online platforms. Today, March 2, 2017, prolific children’s author Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel would have celebrated his 113th birthday—so it only seems fitting that we remember him through his imagined tweets, Facebook posts and Instagram photos, courtesy of the February 2017 Writer’s Digest.
SHARE A LAUGH: Coming soon, the Official Online Home of GEORGE ORWELL. Have a funny idea for this author’s imagined social network? Email your tweets, Facebook posts/threads or Instagram pics to wdsubmissions@fwmedia.com with “Platforms of Yore” in the subject line, or tweet @WritersDigest using the hashtag #platformsofyore. You could see your post (and your name) in the next issue of Writer’s Digest!
PHOTO CREDITS: FISH © SHUTTERSTOCK: SEAPHOTOART; A CAT IN A HAT PHOTO © SHUTTERSTOCK: TYLER GENTRY
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Get Out of Here: Scientists Examine the Benefits of Forests, Birdsong and Running Water
Coast redwoods in Muir Woods National Park.
Credit
Thor Swift for The New York Times
THE NATURE FIX
Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative
By Florence Williams
Illustrated. 280 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
Imagine a miracle drug that could ease many of the stresses of modern life — a combination mood enhancer and smart pill that might even encourage the remission of cancer. Now imagine that this cure-all was an old-fashioned folk remedy: Just take a hike in the woods or a walk in the park. No prescription necessary.
That’s the proposition of Florence Williams’s fascinating “The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative.” We suffer from an “epidemic dislocation from the outdoors,” Williams writes, and it’s destructive to our mental and physical health. The therapy is straightforward. “The more nature, the better you feel.”
You’ve probably heard a version of this before. Two centuries ago, the Romantics trumpeted the virtues of nature as the antidote to the viciousness of industrialization. In 1984, the biologist Edward O. Wilson put a scientific spin on the idea with his book “Biophilia,” which posited that humans possess an innate love of nature.
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Wilson’s argument was persuasive, yet it was mostly an aspiration dressed up as a hypothesis. In the generation since, scientists have sought to confirm the biophilia hypothesis — and they’re starting to get results. As little as 15 minutes in the woods has been shown to reduce test subjects’ levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. Increase nature exposure to 45 minutes, and most individuals experience improvements in cognitive performance. There are society-scale benefits as well. Researchers in England have shown that access to green spaces reduces income-related mental health disparities.
It’s all very encouraging, but how exactly does nature have such an effect on people? To answer that question, Williams shadows researchers on three continents who are working on the frontiers of nature neuroscience.
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Maybe it’s the forest smells that turn us on; aerosols present in evergreen forests act as mild sedatives while also stimulating respiration. Perhaps it’s the soundscape, since water and, especially, birdsong have been proven to improve mood and alertness. Nature’s benefits might be due to something as simple as the fact that natural landscapes are, literally, easy on the eyes. Many of nature’s patterns — raindrops hitting a pool of water or the arrangement of leaves — are organized as fractals, and the human retina moves in a fractal pattern while taking in a view. Such congruence creates alpha waves in the brains — the neural resonance of relaxation.
Williams, a contributing editor at Outside magazine, presents all of this with the zip of a trail runner covering a lot of ground sure-footedly. She’s got the pop-sci presentation down pat — breezy enough to draw in the lay reader, thorough enough to satisfy the expert. She gamely volunteers to be researchers’ human guinea pig, including wearing a portable EEG unit in the woods and looking like a “shriveled sea urchin.” (At times, though, Williams’s writing pops a little too much for my taste; describing Frederick Law Olmsted as a “badass nature guru” is pushing it.)
Fortunately, getting a dose of nature doesn’t have to be hard. Most people get a lot of benefit from city parks and as little as five hours a month does the trick.
Awe, which many people experience in nature, is, according to one study, associated with increased generosity toward other people. Maybe what we get out of nature is a sense of connection to the larger community of life. I know how that sounds: at best like an aspiration dressed up as a hypothesis, at worst like woolly-headed romanticism. But here’s the thing — science is on its way to proving it.
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Everything Belongs to Us | Literary Hub
The following is from Yoojin Grace Wuertz’s novel, Everything Belongs to Us. Wuertz was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States at age six. She holds a BA in English from Yale University and an MFA in fiction from New York University. She lives in northern New Jersey with her husband and son.
Namin could not remember the first time she and Jisun noticed each other. All the girls were new to one another at the time, nervous to be starting at Kyungki Girls Middle School and anxious to prove they belonged there. They had all passed difficult exams in order to be admitted, but most of the girls were daughters of government officials and top businessmen. Girls who were used to enjoying elite privileges, unlike Namin, whose parents had barely been able to afford the black-and-white sailor uniform and matching coat that Kyungki required.
Far from scrambling to make friends like the other girls, Namin had kept to herself, unwilling to expose her poverty by getting close to anyone. She knew she could outperform the other girls academically, but no amount of hard work would make the things she needed to fit in materialize. Everyone else had new leather satchels and a wardrobe of expensive-looking shoes, compared with her dingy canvas bag and the scuffed black loafers she wore every day. Many of the girls were dropped off by their family’s chauffeurs each morning, while she had to take a bus that snaked through north and central Seoul, across the Han River, before it finally let her out in Gangnam; it was a ride that took more than fifty minutes and sometimes felt like a battle even before the day had begun. In bad weather, Namin wore triple layers of socks and stockings and arrived at school drenched while other girls barely had a drop on their heads from being ferried under umbrellas to the building’s threshold. During the warmer months, her desk mate made nasty comments about washing once in a while. Namin bit her tongue because she washed every day, twice a day; but not everyone on her bus did, and they were packed in like sardines by the bus attendants whose job it was to forcefully shove as many bodies as they could into the bus at every stop.
There were things the other girls at Kyungki seemed to know intuitively about one another’s families—what it meant to live in a certain neighborhood or own a particular make of car—that Namin could not grasp. But even she knew about Jisun, whose father was one of the most powerful chaebol leaders in the country. For that reason alone, Namin kept a wide berth, wanting nothing to do with her. But Jisun had pursued her friendship, drawn to her for reasons that were entirely unclear.
Namin remembered one day, a few weeks into the new school year. It was after lunch and she found herself standing alone with Jisun. A short distance away, the other girls were crowded around a classmate who was showing off a box of Swiss chocolates, a gift from her diplomat father. Namin had pretended not to care but mentally recorded every detail of the tiny chocolates, dark little bites drizzled with a slightly lighter shade of chocolate. They were shaped like hearts, each nestled in its own perfect compartment. The other girls, chattering and cooing in appreciation, reminded her of a well-groomed flock of birds. “Don’t be fooled by all that,” Jisun said in a low voice. “You aren’t, are you?”
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“Of course not. What’s there to be fooled by?” Namin said, pretending she understood what Jisun was talking about. In reality, she had no idea.
“That girl’s making a big deal out of those candies when they’re just cheap little things. You know, they sell them at the airport next to the aspirin and the chewing gum. No real Swiss person would think to make such a fuss. It would be like us singing hymns to a common steam bun. Actually I love steam buns, so forget that. It would be like us going crazy over any old plate of kimchi.”
“Well, maybe in Switzerland they would go crazy over kimchi,” Namin said doubtfully. The chocolates looked pretty special to her.
She wouldn’t mind trying one, even if it turned out to be as commonplace as kimchi—or airport chewing gum. Considering she’d never been on an airplane or even seen the airport in her own country, airport chewing gum sounded like a fantastic concept, like buying Juicy Fruit on the moon.
“The point is, she’s showing off like it’s a big deal,” Jisun said. “She just wants everyone to envy her. That’s why I can’t stand those girls, all they want is for people to follow them.” She looked at Namin. “And that’s why I like you. You don’t care what anyone thinks, do you?”
Namin thought about how ashamed she felt of her shoes and how she often wished some mysterious rich relative would show up with expensive gifts so she could be like the other girls at school. Despite what Jisun said, she envied those girls and wondered what it would be like to own something they would admire for once. But she would never admit such feelings to Jisun.
“But aren’t you just as bad,” Namin said, “bragging about how you know all about those chocolates? I suppose you have even better ones at home.”
Jisun glared at her. “The only reason I know about those stupid chocolates at all is because my father shoved us away to Switzerland so he could kick my mother out of the house while we were gone. She died last year, you know. Probably just to spite him. I would try the same if I thought he was worth the trouble.”
The revelation shocked Namin. Immediately she felt the need to lock down her own secrets, as if somehow Jisun could read her mind and discover what she was hiding.
“I don’t believe you,” Namin said.
“Well, it’s true,” Jisun said. “And I don’t care if you don’t believe me.”
They were eleven years old. Together, Jisun and Namin practiced the art of being unfazed. Each pretended not to be shocked by the other’s household, by the huge gap in their social and financial realities, which was so obvious that they could neither deny nor discuss them beyond the most superficial levels. Already, they knew much more about life than most girls their age, but they pretended to know even more than they did—about money, about families and death, friendship and betrayal. About love and lies.
Or perhaps only Namin was pretending and Jisun truly was as detached as she appeared.
The following year, when Jisun started receiving love notes from an older boy named Juno, a friend of her brother’s, Namin was stupefied. But Jisun barely glanced at the carefully folded stationery before tossing the sheets in the trash.
“Don’t you even want to know what it says?” Namin asked, fighting the impulse to fish them out. Jisun’s garbage was so clean that it wouldn’t have been a big deal, but her pride kept her in check. “At least see who it’s from.”
Receiving a love note seemed as marvelous and exotic as finding an uncut diamond in the gutter. Namin was appalled by Jisun’s carelessness. Boys and girls rarely mingled in middle or high school. They attended separate single-sex schools and socialized strictly within their gender. The only time they could even catch a glimpse of any boys was on the street or on Sunday afternoons. Under such circumstances, when would anyone even have the opportunity to develop any kind of serious crush or love interest? Of course, people still made eyes at each other, but it rarely went beyond that first nameless stage.
If anyone ever wrote her a love letter, she would certainly read it. Even if she decided she didn’t like the boy, she would save his letters as a memento, as evidence of having been admired.
“I know who it’s from,” Jisun said grimly. “This kid Juno. Family friend. He ’s been sucking up to us since we were babies. He already follows my brother around like an orphan duck, and now I guess he’s using me as insurance.”
“How are you insurance?”
“He probably has this stupid idea that if we get married one day, then he can get a part of my father’s company.” Jisun looked askance at her. “My father says people don’t get rich by accident. He says it takes ‘long-termplanning.’”
It was a stunning piece of information, and Namin packed it away to think about later. In the following years, she would return to this bit of inadvertent counsel again and again—it would become a kind of touchstone—but for now she had other questions and more pressing concerns. At their age, the idea of marriage seemed as impossible as it did inevitable, but she had never heard any girl discuss it so matter-of-factly. As if her future were already engraved in granite.
“Isn’t it possible that he actually just likes you?” Namin asked.
“Isn’t it more possible that I’m just right?” Jisun said. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“Yours, I guess,” said Namin. But sometimes it seemed Jisun went out of her way to make it hard to be on her side.
Jisun was as unimpressed with love letters as she was with Swiss chocolates, the grandeur of her family’s home, her wardrobe, which appeared magically stocked with new clothes each season, her driver, her housekeeper—her effortless life in general. She had everything, yet she refused to understand why someone else—someone like Namin, for example—might want a taste of that fantasy for herself.
“Trust me, you wouldn’t want this either,” Jisun said now, about the letters. She heaved a sigh, as if being admired were the heaviest burden in the world.
She always seemed to know what Namin was thinking yet still arrived at the wrong conclusion.
“You’re probably right,” Namin said.
* * * *
Later, when Jisun left her alone to use the bathroom, Namin poured out a bottle of Jisun’s red nail polish into the wastepaper basket, dripping the bright scarlet color over the pages. It was a childish, spiteful impulse, satisfying her need to waste something precious that they both enjoyed. The nail polish was not allowed at school, and they’d be scolded by any adult who saw them wearing it on the street. But they spent painstaking hours coloring their nails anyway, changing their minds, rubbing or peeling it off, choosing another color, and starting all over again. All the while knowing they could wear it only in Jisun’s bedroom and would have to remove all trace of it before they went out. Jisun owned three colors: red, pale pink, and clear. The cap of the nail polish was made of smooth black plastic and stamped with a logo of white interlocking Cs facing opposite directions. Jisun had once explained that the Cs stood for Chanel. From France.
Drizzling the polish in wide, lazy swoops over the ruined love notes, Namin inhaled the sharp fumes of the chemicals until her eyes started to water. She was careful not to get any drops on the white carpeting, which would have been a far more serious transgression—way beyond what she wanted to achieve. She wanted only to know what it was like to destroy something simply because she wanted to. The way Jisun did all the time, without considering the cost or consequences.
From EVERYTHING BELONGS TO US . Used with permission of Random House. Copyright © 2017 by Yoojin Grace Wuertz.
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Bookstore News: March 2, 2017
Dedham, Mass., bookseller vows to fight Amazon; ABA adds diversity programming to spring agenda; LA's Fashion Bookstore to close; and more.
Blue Bunny Bookstore Owner to Fight Off New Amazon Store: When the first Amazon Books location on the East coast opened this week in Dedham, Mass., the media took notice—and so did Peter Reynolds, owner of the town's other bookstore, The Blue Bunny, which has been opened for over a decade.
ABA CEO Teicher Announces Diversity Education at Spring Forums: Ten Spring Forums will take place through April 20, with the first next week in Atlanta. Teicher notes that beyond the traditional education sessions, the forums will include a new session born out of discussions as WI12: “Bookstores — An Inclusive Place for Dialogue and Discovery" with the goal of helping "booksellers collaboratively learn from their colleagues about how bookstores can fulfill their unique roles in communities."
Fashion Bookstore in LA to Close: Citing high rents,The Fashion Bookstore in Los Angeles announced it is closing March 31 after 25 years in business. The owners said there are no plans to move the store online.
Mountain View's Books Inc. Moving Down the Street: After 15 years in the same location, Mountain View, Cal. bookstore Books Inc. is moving 50 feet down the street into the space previously occupied by BookBuyers, a used bookstore.
Barnes & Noble Awards Discover New Writers Awards: The bookseller announced Abby Geni’s The Lightkeepers (Counterpoint Press), and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown Publishing Group) as the winners of this year's Discover New Writers Awards. The author of each book was awarded a cash prize of $30,000 and a full year of marketing and merchandising support from the bookseller.
Study Shows Gen Z Favors Real World Shopping: A study by IBM and the National Retail Federation (NRF) has found that Generation Z, members of which were born in the mid-1990s and later, prefers shopping in bricks-and-mortar stores, rather than online. “They appreciate the hands-on experience of shopping in a store. With technology constantly evolving but some shopping habits remaining the same, retailers need to be agile enough to serve both needs," said NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay.
Page 1 Books in Albuquerque Helps Local Schools: When a local schoolteacher couldn't get enough copies of Animal Farm for her class, the New Mexican bookseller stepped in to let customers donate or buy a copy for the class. Owner Morado Stout says the store has been running a similar program for schools and teachers for over 30 years.
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Poetry Hickory: Poetry Spotlight | WritersDigest.com
For this week’s poetry spotlight, we’re going to go off the beaten path a bit and focus on Scott Owens’ monthly Poetry Hickory events.
As always, I appreciate the poetry spotlight ideas people send my way. Keep them coming at robert.brewer@fwmedia.com with the subject line: Poetry Spotlight Idea.
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The 2017 Poet’s Market, edited by Robert Lee Brewer, includes hundreds of poetry markets, including listings for poetry publications, publishers, contests, and more! With names, contact information, and submission tips, poets can find the right markets for their poetry and achieve more publication success than ever before.
In addition to the listings, there are articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry–so that poets can learn the ins and outs of writing poetry and seeking publication. Plus, it includes a one-year subscription to the poetry-related information on WritersMarket.com. All in all, it’s the best resource for poets looking to secure publication.
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Located in downtown Hickory, North Carolina, Poetry Hickory is a reading series hosted by poet/coffee shop owner Scott Owens. On the second Tuesday of each month, poets and poetry lovers descend upon Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse to listen to a featured poet or two (or more) and even read their own work.
Robert Lee Brewer reading at Poetry Hickory.
Plus, there are times when the featured poet may lead a low-cost workshop prior to the reading. Topics range from getting your poetry published to crafting better images.
If it sounds like I have intimate knowledge of this reading series, it’s because I do. Tammy and I have both read at Poetry Hickory together, and I’ve been there solo as well. Each time, the town of Hickory is a treat, and the camaraderie of poets is always worth a road trip.
For Poetic Asides regulars, Poetry Hickory is home to Jane Shlensky and is the first place I’ve met several North Carolina poets, including Jessie Carty, Helen Losse, Nancy Posey, and so many, many others.
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Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Poet’s Market and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
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Walk on By: A Celebration of Women’s Pleasure in Wandering a City
Sometimes — often — the streets have a political function. Elkin talks about the short-lived Occupy movement in New York and revisits Mavis Gallant’s account of the riots in Paris in May 1968, still remembered by many of the French as the most fun they ever had: “And we look to 1968 for authenticity, just as they looked to the Communards. And to whom did the Communards look? To 1848.” Gallant’s great insight, Elkin realizes, was that the disturbances in Paris in 1968 were an early manifestation of the continuing immigration problems of today.
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Martha Gellhorn, one of Elkin’s more redoubtable subjects, “contradicts the solitary, disassociated image we have of the flâneur, and redefines it as oriented toward some goal, some revelation, some way of recording and sharing what she had seen. . . . In her dedication to exposing misery, Gellhorn turned flânerie into testimony.”
If Elkin’s capsule biographies can occasionally seem a bit potted, they are never uninteresting. Elkin has an eye for the unexpected detail, as befits a flâneuse. And so she’s able to inform us that Jean Rhys, the English writer born in the West Indies and associated with novels set in Paris, where she was so famously down and out, didn’t do well in drama school in London because of her Caribbean accent. And she reminds us that Rhys had an abandoned daughter who survived a concentration camp.
Elkin writes such things down in “smallish spiral notebooks, about the size of a paperback book, filled with unlined pages of a nice stock, not too hefty, not too light.” She “carried one, then the other all over Paris with me whenever I had a spare moment. I still carry a notebook with me everywhere I go. I learned to do that from Hemingway.”
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Following Elkin as she explores the city, we inch into memoir territory. Although she is a native of New York, she makes her first acquaintance with aimless urban walking in France. To her, the streets of Paris “seemed saturated with presence, even if there was no one there but me. These were places where something could happen, or had happened, or both, a feeling I could never have had at home in New York, where life is inflected with the future tense.”
Emboldened by her walking habits, she braves Tokyo with a fiancé. (They eventually break up, but not before she has conquered her initial depression and gotten to love Japan’s capital city.) She visits Venice and follows Virginia Woolf on her peregrinations around London. “To walk alone in London is the greatest rest,” Woolf wrote. “Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the city, and should still ask for more.” Later, during the Blitz, Woolf inspects the ruins of her bombed-out house: She could “just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties.” Elkin, looking for the spot, realizes it must be where the Tavistock Hotel now stands, an example of how the good flâneuse must bring to her peregrinations a mind furnished with history, literary and social, with a feeling for the people and places of the past.
To be as good a flâneuse as Elkin also requires strong legs, sturdy feet, erudition and, above all, imagination, a way of being in touch with the ghosts who linger in recently visited spots. It will be up to booksellers to figure out how to categorize her pastiche of travel writing, memoir, history and literary nonfiction. A reader, flaneusing along the bookshelves, will find in it some of the pleasures of each.
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Encountering Literary Bots in the Wilds of Twitter
“I don’t do Twitter,” the poet Anne Carson replied baldly to my request for a comment. No great surprise there, I guess: many people feel compelled to avoid the site and its multitude of abrupt publications. It’s a timesuck, and a cacophony, with few genuine bon mots amid a relentless volley of reaction gifs. And it appears Twitter may not be around forever. Now in its tenth year, the company reported on February 9th that it had missed its targets for the fourth quarter of 2016, and shares in the company fell 10 percent in response.
I had emailed Carson to ask about a Twitter account with over 6,000 followers that is tweeting her translation of Sappho’s fragments, published as If Not, Winter. It is one of several successful bots—some true robotic accounts, and some that are accounts run by humans—publishing works of literature 140 characters at a time.
Linguist and programmer Esther Seyffarth defined a bot in a Medium post last year as “a program or agent that generates content and posts it to Twitter automatically, following some schedule or reacting to some trigger.” In the case of Twitter’s literary bots, or “corpus-fed” bots, programmers take a body of work—for example, the text file of War & Peace as it stands at Project Gutenberg—and build a program that “reads” the novel, 140 character at a time, “aloud” by publishing sensible whole-word extracts as tweets from a dedicated Twitter account.
To give an example, the code behind one such bot begins by breaking the whole text up into sentences. If a sentence is
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@finnegansreader is a great introductory example of a literary bot on Twitter: it publishes extracts of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, 140 characters or shorter, in sequence. Liss Farrell was studying for a PhD at the Irish Institute of the University of Liverpool when she encouraged her friend Timo Koola to build the bot. She recalls: “I don’t think either myself nor Timo were expecting the Finnegans Wake bot to become so popular! I think I was doing my MA when I asked him about it on a whim—as he had set up the Ulysses bot, I guess there seemed to be an audience for it.”
What’s the appeal of a bot like @finnegansreader? Non-sequiturs, synchronicity, and the enduring Twitter-appropriate gift of brevity. Liss writes,
Finnegans Wake is hard enough to read in context, but I particularly appreciate when a tweet will encapsulate half a dozen or more of Joyce’s puns, neologisms, and portmanteaux. Joyce really rinses the character limit. […] There’s also a delicious satisfaction when a bot “gets it right”: when [former First Minister and Sinn Féin politician] Martin McGuinness stepped down, FW was tweeting about ‘angry scenes at Stormount’ [sic!]. On the night of the first episode of Bake Off the other year it was talking about cake.
Farrell also recommends @antainbot, which tweets the 1500-year-old Old Irish tale An Táin Bo Culaigne. Another appeal of literary bots is making something “new”; @antainbot maker Neal Ó Riain says: “Taking this thing that began life as a story told by druids and putting it on the internet next to tweets about news and pop culture is something that I find interesting.”
As well as building @finnegansreader, Koola also built @Ulyssesreader. The Finnish programmer initially intended it to set a pace for him as he attempted to read the quarter of a million-word novel. He explains: “I first tried to read Ulysses back when I was 17. I got stuck on page 512 of the old Finnish translation. When doing a serious attempt 23 years later, I coded a bot to keep my reading pace up. [The] bot reads through the book in bit more than three months, and I almost managed to match that. All of a sudden, I had read through Ulysses.”
The bot has been popular with followers from creative professions, literary students and teachers, and only had a bit of negative feedback, Koola reports, from people who thought @Ulyssesreader was someone commenting on a current topic, not realizing it was a bot. With his bot now on its tenth reading, Koola promises @Ulyssesreader will continue to run for an 11th and 12th cycle: “As long as there is Twitter or something of the kind there will be more readings.”
Looking beyond Irish literature, cult authors like JG Ballard and Lovecraft are also popular sources for bot-builders, and one account (@ballardbot) is tweeting a list of chapter titles from the bibliography of the former. English and Korean readers can follow @virginiawoolf7 for occasional quotes, but the selection repeats about once every ten days. In general, big books work best, as the 2013 creation @mobydickatsea demonstrates. Its pinned tweet—“Damn me, but all things are queer”—has so far resonated with the over 1,200 who’ve liked it. But, as Farrell pointed out to me, this account is not a true bot—rather, it’s run by a person who selects and publishes quotes from the book: “That gets tiresome after a while. Half the fun of the bots is seeing phrases you didn’t notice or appreciate before.” A new updated account, @jabtheperegine, tweets from J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, but again is not a true bot: the book’s in diary form and easy to tweet sporadically from TweetDeck.
Bot fans looking for more experimental examples can check out Mark Sample’s William Carlos Williams bots, @Justtosaybot and @dependsuponbot. Unlike the literary bots that tweet a whole book, bit by bit (referred to as corpus-fed bots), bots like Sample’s look at the patterning of language. @Justotosaybot, which apes WCW’s “This Is Just To Say,” has been the more popular of the two; its pinned tweet demonstrates the appeal of the gap between the bot and the original poem:
I have eaten
the horrors
that were in
the toilet
Forgive me
They were postmodern
so ornamented
and so unwavering
–This Is Just to Say (@JustToSayBot) November 23, 2016
But Twitter’s most popular poetry bot (@sextsbot aside) is @sapphobot, which has only been running since last April. Unlike most tweets, hypercompressed with information, tweets from If Not, Winter reflect the power of emptiness and brokenness that gives the fragments their essential power. Lines like “I simply want to be dead” draw a tender and funny link between your average self-indulgent social media update and the potential for language in erotic poetry, but the immediacy of Carson’s translation shines when the bot finds sections like:
you came and I was crazy for you
and you cooled my mind that burned with longing
–Sappho Bot (@sapphobot) February 4, 2017
The synchronicity that Farrell praised in @Ulyssesreader is also part of the bot’s appeal. An extract published hours before Trump’s travel ban was overruled, read simply:
]]doom
]
The irony is that like @ulyssesreader, @sapphobot is not making a single reading of If Not, Winter: the “doom” tweet has appeared repeatedly, and not just since the US elections. As one tweet puts it:
someone will remember us
I say
even in another time
–Sappho Bot (@sapphobot) February 5, 2017
The language is repeated, “remembered,” again and again, the repetition offering some relief from the news cycle.
Literature, in the manic context of Twitter, feels like a novelty—the joy of witnessing something, somewhere, committed publishing an entire work. But at times, the bots feels uncanny too. Coincidences that arise between their tweets and the memes, gifs and beef that frame them can be as disruptive as it is delightful. Novels, titles and poems “out of place” unsettle us: not amping our anxiety like the news does, but sounding through the fog to wake up something deeper. We double-take, re-read and find originality in repetition. After all, literature—if we can define it at all—must be whatever forces us to read or listen more closely. Part of me was relieved to find Anne Carson doesn’t use Twitter, but like Joyce she seems like the kind who’d be a natural. For now, though, the retweets will have to speak for themselves.
For more information on making your own random generation bot, see Allison Parrish’s tutorial for learning Tracery, a language created by Kate Compton, and you can see the scripts behind Timo Koola’s @ ulyssesreader and Neal Ó Riain’s @ antainbot on their respective GitHub sites.
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