Roy Miller's Blog, page 278
February 9, 2017
ComicBlitz Looks to Crowdfund Equity Investment Using WeFunder
In an unusual move, ComicBlitz, a startup digital comics subscription service offering access to comics and graphic novels for a monthly fee of $7.99, is looking to raise $1 million in new equity investment via WeFunder, an equity crowdfunding platform.
WeFunder is a crowdfunding platform that allows unaccredited investors—essentially anyone with at least $100 to invest—to make investments in new ventures. WeFunder was founded in 2011 and has been used to raise about $16 million for about 110 startups.
WeFunder investments are a bit different than using Kickstarter, where donors are essentially purchasing a service or product. WeFunder investors can’t resell their investments, and voting rights are unlikely. However, many WeFund campaigns offer direct communication with the company’s leadership.
As part of its WeFunder campaign, ComicBlitz has revealed that it has about 5,500 registered users, information usually considered proprietary. The company also has subscribers in 133 countries.,
Like other crowdfunding campaigns, ComicBlitz offers its investors a variety of rewards based on the size of their investments.
The ComicBlitz WeFunder campaign has a minimum investment of $250 (you'll receive a subscription to ComicBlitz) that escalates in steps to $2,500 (investors get a lifetime subscription and a 30 minute Skype call with the ComicBlitz cofounders). The rewards culminate at the $25,000 investment level (which gets you a lifetime ComicBlitz subscription and a 15 minute Skype call with acclaimed comics writer Mark Waid). If a company does go public, investors are then free to sell their shares.
ComicBlitz co-founder and CEO Jordan Plosky said, “We chose WeFunder due to its domination in the emerging trend of equity crowdfunding, and its ability to help our fans directly join in the future of our company’s growth." (PW interviewed Plosky about the growth of the startup subscription service at New York Comic Con in 2015).
The service plans to use the investment to add new features, new publishers, new content and to "streamline the user experience,” according to ComicBlitz CTO and cofounder Greg Weiss. ComicBlitz is also looking to debut a self-publishing portal for indie comics creators, allowing them upload new content available exclusively to ComicBlitz subscribers. Content, Weiss said, would be approved by ComicBlitz
ComicBlitz is an independent comics subscription service that launched in 2015. Its competitors include Amazon’s Comixology Unlimited subscription service, Marvel Unlimited and Archie Unlimited. Scribd, which also offered access to comics and graphic novels, discontinued the comics service in late 2016.
The service offers subscription access to about 5,000 digital comics and graphic novels from about 29 comics publishers, including such houses as IDW, Abrams ComicArts, Valiant, Dynamite, Lerner and Capstone . The site does not offer access to any content from Marvel or DC Entertainment, the Big Two of American superhero comics publishing.
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Judging a Book By Its Spine
By Carol B. Chittenden
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One great delight of bookstore work is seeing new cover designs. The mind boggles at the responsibilities those few square inches carry. And there’s so much to admire when they succeed: Look at how cleverly the art department has symbolized the content! What a fresh way to communicate to the intended audience! Such subtlety in layout—the way the art director pulls together the disparate components of a book... And what distinctive use of color to create a memorable image, making this book immediately unique from all others! Who could forget that celadon face with the delicate coral script? Don’t you wish you had time to read the black one with the foil lightning flash? Any way you could justify the purchase of the snappy red and gold one for Sean’s birthday?
Once booksellers have skimmed an ARC, they have a pretty good sense of which customers will be interested in a particular title, but can they find the specific book again, when it’s displayed spine-out?
If the spine doesn’t repeat major elements of the front cover, the book is almost as good as lost on overcrowded shelves. Only a tiny minority of new releases are purchased in multiple copies for face-up or face-out stacks. If a book joins the collection as a single copy, it will be shelved spine-out. If it’s a slim picture book among hundreds of competing titles, or if it belongs to a deep, slow-moving backlist, it will sit, sobbing quietly, lonely in the crowd. I could swear I’ve seen tear stains on paper jacket hems.
Mostly, though, front-line booksellers swear as they search for a book, making lame-sounding excuses: “[#!&!!$], I know it’s here somewhere; I saw it arrive yesterday.” Or, “Holy [#%&!], just a moment, I’ll check in the back to see if it’s hiding.” Or, “[%&$!!#], let me ask my colleague if she’s seen it.” Or “[F@$%#&]... Golly, I must be book blind today.” The customer wonders if the flailing bookseller is incompetent. Staff who should be attending to other duties are summoned to help with the search. Now everybody is annoyed—and the book sits there invisibly, camouflaged behind a spine that bears little resemblance to its front cover. The sale falls through, and two hours later someone shelving the day’s new books notices the fugitive, hiding in plain sight.
Online resources commonly show front covers, so even if the book is unfamiliar, the image is often available to the bookseller, even a rookie. And most bookstores try to keep the shelving in a defined order, so the bookseller knows where a given book should be. But there are so many exceptions: a customer mis-shelves the book, it’s part of a display at the moment, it’s been reassigned to a different section, or a hundred other scenarios.
A bookstore’s buyer is usually working from catalogues that show front covers. Long before the actual publication date, the front cover is doing its job, and it continues to do so even after the book is out of print. Yanking it back by using a contrasting spine design is marketing sabotage.
My own eye is particularly observant of color, but according to the article “What Makes an Image Memorable?,” by Phillip Isola, Jianxiong Xiao, Antonio Torralba, and Aude Oliva, there are other more memorable elements, especially images of humans. Of course the full front cover can’t be duplicated on a spine. But to have the spine echo the front cover is to make the best use of both. If the image on the front cover is worth a thousand words, why not keep a few hundred’s worth on the spine?
There are often long discussions among designers, art editors, publicists, sales reps, and marketers as a book is brought to fruition. One can imagine that there are egos, compromises, costs, deadlines, and internal politics to deal with, on top of color, layout, typeface, genre, content, etc. A further design criterion is probably not all that welcome. But what’s one more variable in this boatload of considerations, especially if it’s one that can make all the difference in getting the book into the customer’s hands at the right moment? Isn’t that the whole point?
Carol B. Chittenden is the recently retired owner of Eight Cousins Books, in Falmouth, Mass.
A version of this article appeared in the 04/27/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Judging a Book By Its Spine
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This Year’s Conference Will Be All About—and Against—Trump
When the Association of Writers and Writing Programs decided to hold its 2017 conference in Washington D.C., the planners could not have imagined the firestorm of political activity scheduled around this year’s conference. But that’s what happens when more than 10,000 free-speech-loving writers descend on a capital city newly occupied by an administration that has made consistent claims against the truthfulness of the media and disputed the nature of facts themselves, not to mention enacted a controversial travel ban barring entry into the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Trump will likely be the de-facto theme of this year’s conference.
In addition to panels whose conversations will necessarily veer toward the Trump administration, the travel ban, and what are viewed as Trump’s ongoing challenges to free speech, there are several major protests activities planned, unaffiliated with AWP itself.
Writers Resist Trump (unaffiliated with PEN’s Writer’s Resist events) is an action planned for Friday, February 10th. It was loosely organized in the weeks leading up to the conference by Robert Marshall, a New York City-based writer who teaches part time at the International Center for Photography. Marshall told PW, “I looked and didn’t see anything about people going to congress, and I thought that was a little weird." Marshall began talking to like-minded friends and then started a Facebook group to plan and gather participants.
Writers have been posting to the group page for weeks, with Marshall helping to organize groups of writers by state and congressional district and encouraging them to write and collect letters and other materials pertaining to the new administration and then make appointments with representatives to deliver and discuss them. “I thought there were a lot of people who use words and language and understand what is at stake here, and that it would be a really powerful thing, to get them speaking directly to people who have power,” Marshall said. The action will be followed by a rally at 4:30 outside the Jefferson building of the Library of Congress. As of this writing, almost 1,500 people had joined the Facebook group
The poet D.A. Powell, with the help of Erin Belieu, VIDA co-founder and organizer of the national Writer’s Resist group (now called Write Our Democracy) that sponsored dozens of protests in January, has organized a march that will begin at the Washington Marriott Marquis at 1:30 on Friday, and continue on to the Capitol, where the organizers have obtained a permit to hold a rally. In a statement sent to writers a week ago, Powell said "We've got about a thousand folks signed on…and a working motto that I think subtly pokes fun at Trump's anger-management style and also celebrates writing and its power to shape culture: 'Use Your Words.'"
Belieu told PW that, "over the course of the campaign season and with this horrible outcome, it’s been really meaningful and beautiful to watch all of these people emerge as writer-activists who might not have been moved at other times to action. Our writer community seems extremely lively and engaged and focused. So AWP seems like a perfect opportunity for writers to come together and voice their descent against this racist, misogynist, fascist administration."
Additionally, the D.C.-based poets’ activism organization Split This Rock is holding a candlelight vigil in front of the White House on Saturday, February 11 at 6:30 p.m.
The conference takes place at the Washington Convention Center and the Washington Marriott Marquis from February 8-11. The conference was last held in D.C. in 2012. PW will be covering the conference throughout.
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William Melvin Kelley, Who Explored Race in Experimental Novels, Is Dead at 79
In that book, a Harvard-educated black man, Chig Dunford, tours a mythical country where the apartheid system is based on clothing color. Along the way, he encounters an alter ego, the Harlem hustler Carlyle Bedlow, another of Mr. Kelley’s recurring characters, for whom Mr. Kelley invented a language blending Bantu, pidgin English and Harlem slang.
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Mr. Kelley’s first novel, published in 1962, revealed his fabulist bent.
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Anchor
“Perhaps I’m trying to follow the Faulknerian pattern, although I guess it’s really Balzacian when you connect everything,” Mr. Kelley was quoted as saying in “Conversations” (1967), a collection of author interviews conducted by Roy Newquist. “I’d like to be 80 years old and look up at the shelf and see that all of my books are really one big book.”
William Melvin Kelley Jr. was born on Nov. 1, 1937, on Staten Island. His father, who had been the editor of The Amsterdam News in the 1920s and early ’30s, worked as a civil servant for New York City after a series of unsuccessful attempts to start his own newspaper. His mother, the former Narcissa Garcia, was a homemaker.
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He grew up in a working-class area of the North Bronx, surrounded by Italian-Americans. After graduating from the private Fieldston School in Riverdale, he entered Harvard in 1956 with the idea of becoming a civil rights lawyer. Instead, he switched to English, taking seminars in fiction with John Hawkes and Archibald MacLeish.
In his senior year, his short story “The Poker Game,” published in The Harvard Advocate, won the Dana Reed Prize, awarded for the best work of fiction in an undergraduate publication. He left school before graduating to concentrate on writing and in 1962 published “A Different Drummer.” It was followed two years later by a short-story collection, “Dancers on the Shore,” which stamped his growing reputation as an original new voice in American fiction.
In 1962, Mr. Kelley married Karen Gibson, an art student at Sarah Lawrence College who later took the first name Aiki. She and his daughter Jessica survive him, as do another daughter, Cira Kelley; three grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
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Mr. Kelley in 2012.
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Jesi Kelley
Although racial politics suffused his fiction, Mr. Kelley resisted being categorized as a social commentator. “At this time, let me say for the record that I am not a sociologist or a politician or a spokesman,” he wrote in the introduction to “Dancers on the Shore.” “Such people try to give answers. A writer, I think, should ask questions. He should depict people, not symbols or ideas disguised as people.”
In “A Drop of Patience” (1965), Mr. Kelley told the story of a blind jazz musician, abandoned by his white mistress, who finds solace and meaning in music — his own country, separate and independent. The parable-like “Dem” (1967) — which begins “Lemme tellya how dem folks live” — took an absurdist premise for its journey into race relations.
In that book, a white woman gives birth to twins, one white and one black, after pursuing an affair with a black man out of boredom. Her husband, determined to find the second father, ventures into Harlem and discovers an unimagined new world.
After The Saturday Evening Post assigned him to cover the trial of the men accused of assassinating Malcolm X — the article was never published — Mr. Kelley became disillusioned with the American justice system and took his family to Paris. He later moved to Jamaica, before returning to the United States in 1977 and settling in Harlem. In 1989, he began teaching creative writing at Sarah Lawrence.
Mr. Kelley wrote, produced and starred in “Excavating Harlem in 2290,” an experimental film made with the video artist Steve Bull and released in 1988. His video diaries of Harlem were edited by Benjamin Oren Abrams into a short film, “The Beauty That I Saw,” which was shown at the Harlem International Film Festival in 2015.
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February 8, 2017
How Do We #GetKidsReading?
Bestselling author James Patterson wants to hear your ideas about how we can get more kids reading.
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Sign Up Now! “Your First Ten Pages” Boot Camp Starts February 9
As many writers know, agents and editors won’t give your work more than ten pages or so to make an impact. If you haven’t got them hooked by then, it’s a safe bet you won’t be asked for more material. Make sure you’ve got the kind of opening they’re looking for! In this invaluable weekend event, you’ll get to work with an agent online to review and refine the first ten pages of your novel. You’ll learn what keeps an agent reading, what are the most common mistakes that make them stop, and the steps you need to take to correct them. The best part is that you’ll be working directly with an agent, who will provide feedback specific to your work.
It’s all part of the recurring popular Agent One-on-One Boot Camp called “Your First 10 Pages.” Sign up by the end of the day, February 9,2017. It’s taught by the agents at Talcott Notch Literary.
Here’s how it works:
On Thursday morning, February 9, you will gain online access to a special 60-minute online tutorial presented by agent and editor Paula Munier. It will help you clarify what you should be looking for in your work. You will also be notified by email which agent you’ll be working with on the start date, 2/9, by 5pm ET. While we accept agent requests, we cannot guarantee that you’ll be assigned to that agent. All agents have the ability to provide feedback in all genres.
Students may take Thursday and Friday to revise their pages, which are due to be sent to their assigned agent no later than 10:00 am (ET) on Saturday morning, February 11. (The word count of submissions is strictly limited to 2500 words and it should be submitted in the body of their email, not as attachments). Participating agents from Talcott Notch Literary include Paula Munier, Gina Panettieri, Saba Sulaiman, and Mohamed Shalabi. (All times noted are Eastern Time). (Sign up for the boot camp here.)
All pages with notes will be returned to participants by 10:00 AM (ET) Sunday morning (February 12). You’ll work to revise your pages based on the agent’s specific feedback. From 1:00 to 4:00 PM on February 12, Paula, Gina, Saba, and Mohamed will be available to answer questions and provide additional feedback to their assigned students via the Writer’s Digest University discussion boards.
By 10:00 PM (ET) Sunday night on February 12, you’ll return your final revised pages to your assigned agent for review. Agents will spend the next week reading the revised submissions assigned to them, and will provide a final brief one-or-two sentence critique of your progress no later than February 19. Any one of them may ask for additional pages if the initial submission shows serious promise.
*All attendees should have the first 10 pages of their novel finished and ready to submit to the agent prior to the beginning of the event. (Sign up for the boot camp here.)
In addition to feedback from Paula, Gina, Saba, or Mohamed, attendees will have access to “An Agent’s Tips on Story Structures that Sell,” an on-demand webinar by Andrea Hurst.
All sales are final. No additional discounts can be applied.
About the Agents:
Gina Panettieri is President of Talcott Notch Literary Services, and has worked as an agent for more than 20 years. She currently represents a full range of adult and children’s fiction and nonfiction, with an emphasis in fiction on YA, MG, mystery, fantasy, women’s fiction, horror and paranormal. In nonfiction, she is particularly seeking memoir, business, cooking, health and fitness, pop science, medicine, true crime and current events. Some of her clients include Nancy Holzner, author of the new Deadtown urban fantasy series from Berkley/Ace Science Fiction, Annabella Bloom, author of the Wild and Wanton edition romance hybrid classics Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights (Adams Media), Dr. Karyn Purvis, author of the bestselling and multi-award winning adoption book, The Connected Child (McGraw-Hill), and author and media personality, Dr. Seth Meyers. She currently represents an eclectic range of writers, encompassing everyone from a former head of Security and Intelligence for NATO Europe, to CEOs of major corporations and Deans of major medical schools, to stay-at-home writer moms and amazingly talented teens. Gina speaks at many conferences and writing events throughout the country on the subjects of securing an agent and getting published. Her agency website is talcottnotch.net.
Paula Munier, Senior Literary Agent & Content Strategist at Talcott Notch Literary, has broad experience creating and marketing exceptional content in all formats across all markets for such media giants as Disney, Gannett, Greenspun Media Group, and Quayside. She began her career as a journalist, and along the way added editor, acquisitions specialist, digital content manager, and publishing executive to her repertoire. Before joining Talcott Notch, she served as the Director of Innovation and Acquisitions for Adams Media, a division of F&W Media, where she headed up the acquisitions team responsible for creating, curating, and producing both fiction and nonfiction for print, ebook, eshort, and direct-to-ebook formats. (Sign up for the boot camp here.)
Although she represents all kinds of projects, right now she’s looking for crime fiction, women’s fiction, romance, New Adult, YA, and middle grade fiction, as well as nonfiction in the areas of pop culture, health & wellness, cooking, self-help, pop psych, New Age, inspirational, technology, science, and writing. As a new agent she’s making her first deals now, including the New Adult trilogy, The Registry by Shannon Stoker, which sold for six figures to HarperCollins. She’s also just sold mystery, thriller, and self-help. Paula is very involved with the mystery community, having served four terms as President of the New England chapter of Mystery Writers of America as well as on the MWA board. (She’s currently VP of that organization.) She’s also served as both co-chair and Agents and Editors chair on the New England Crime Bake committee for seven years and counting. And she’s an active member of Sisters in Crime.
Saba Sulaiman is looking primarily to build her Middle Grade and Young Adult lists, and is particularly interested in contemporary realistic stories. Memoirs and humor are of interest to her as well. She’s also actively seeking category romance (all sub-genres except paranormal), literary, upmarket, and commercial fiction, tightly plotted, character-driven psychological thrillers, and cozy mysteries à la Agatha Christie. Saba is taking a limited number of students for this boot camp.
Mohamed Shalabi is a Junior Agent with Talcott Notch Literary. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Dallas and completed agency internships at Folio, Veritas and Talcott Notch Literary before joining the agency in November of 2016. His areas of specialization include adult upmarket literary and commercial fiction, as well as YA and MG fiction, and trade nonfiction with an emphasis on diverse cultures and history.
Sign up for the boot camp here.
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Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler Authority, Is Dead at 92
Professor de La Grange began earning his scholarly credentials in 1973 when, after 15 years of research, he published Volume I of his biography, simply titled “Gustav Mahler.” It became a heroic 3,600-page saga, still being revised, that distinguished him as the dean of Mahler biographers.
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He also went on to direct or collaborate on concerts, exhibitions, festivals, and film and television documentaries — including one in 2015 on his own obsession with Mahler — that prompted a critical rediscovery of the composer and a popular appreciation of his music by contemporary audiences.
The cultural historian Carl E. Schorske, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Volume I as “a massive chronicle” largely of facts rather than interpretation, in which the author’s “conscientious positivism opens new avenues to the understanding of Mahler and his time.”
Professor de La Grange might never have become a musicologist had his parents gotten their way. They wanted him to enter the family furniture business.
“My mother and father intended me for Harvard Business School,” he told The Times in 1974, “but someone there had the very good sense to turn me down.”
Instead he was educated in France and later in the United States, in New York City and at Yale, and frequently traveled between the countries.
He was in New York when he heard the symphony that piqued his infatuation with Mahler, an encounter that was completely by chance. He had decided to attend the Carnegie Hall concert — on Dec. 20, 1945, the day after he returned from France with his family following World War II — only because Bruno Walter, his favorite, was conducting.
He was unaware that Walter, a Mahler disciple, would open the New York Philharmonic’s program that evening with the composer’s Ninth Symphony in D major, which Mahler wrote after the death of his daughter and after he had learned that he had fatal cardiac disease.
Mahler died in 1911, a month after returning to Europe from New York and before the symphony’s first public performance.
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Leonard Bernstein once likened the Ninth’s nearly 90 minutes of mercurial music to an irregular heartbeat. He pronounced it “the greatest farewell symphony ever written by anybody.”
The day after the concert, the Times critic Olin Downes sanguinely concluded that “there is a degree of ostentation in this music which would be funny if it were not so vulgar.” But 21-year-old Henry-Louis was enraptured.
“His devotion to Mahler gradually grew into almost an obsession,” Sybille Werner, the editor who is completing the revised biography, wrote in an email.
In an interview on the website classicalsource.com in 2008, Professor de La Grange said that hearing the symphony for the first time had been a revelation. “I was extremely surprised, perhaps even shocked to hear a huge symphony in a style that was quite unknown to me,” he said. “I couldn’t understand how and why this music had been written in this way.”
He later wrote: “I believed in Mahler from the moment I heard his music. Something in me happened, and it made clear the fact that I work for him.”
Henry-Louis de La Grange was born in Paris on May 26, 1924. His father was Amaury de La Grange, a French nobleman, military aviation pioneer, senator and, in 1940, an under secretary in Premier Paul Reynaud’s cabinet. The Nazis held him prisoner for five years during World War II.
His mother was the former Emily Sloane, whose grandfather, William, founded W. & J. Sloane, the high-end Fifth Avenue household furnishings store, in the 1840s. (He had a box at the old Metropolitan Opera House, for which he had supplied the upholstery.)
Henry-Louis attended the Lycée Français in New York and, inspired by his sister’s piano playing and discovering that he had perfect pitch, began taking piano lessons when he was 18.
He graduated from the University of Provence in Aix-en-Provence and the Yale School of Music and studied piano in Paris under Nadia Boulanger and Yvonne Lefébure. Before embarking on his Mahler opus, he was a music critic for The Times and other publications in the early 1950s.
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Delving into Mahler’s final years in New York, after the composer had left Vienna, where his daughter died and where anti-Semitism was growing, Professor de La Grange was more forgiving than other Mahler authorities.
“Mahler was not the morbid, tormented neurotic he is so often depicted to have been,” he said at a 1994 symposium at Carnegie Hall — although he acknowledged that Mahler “was a difficult man” and later said that the composer had “made other people suffer as much as he suffered himself.”
Reviewing Volume IV of the biography in The Journal of the Society for American Music in 2009, Joseph Horowitz wrote, “The net effect is a vigorously positive assessment of what Mahler achieved in New York, and of what he might have further achieved had he not died at the age of 50.”
A revised English-language version of Volume I is still forthcoming, which means that the project will have taken nearly as long as Mahler’s life lasted — on the order of a prolonged excavation to unearth the ruins of some ancient city.
Indeed, his “first ambition had been to be an archaeologist,” Professor de La Grange said in 1974.
“Ultimately, though,” he said, “I found the job of reconstructing the life of a man more interesting than reconstructing a dead civilization.”
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MFA by the Numbers, on the Eve of AWP
Each year, thousands of writers, teachers, editors, and others in the publishing world gather for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, or, AWP. It’s a spirited reunion for some, a nerve-wracking hell for others (most). For a few blessed people, it’s a time and place where magic happens: a writer scores an agent, an editor finds just the writer she’s been looking for, a poet makes his first sale. Whatever your view of AWP, knowledge is power. Or at least good fodder for happy-hour conversation. To that end, here are some numbers to consider:
Number of MFA programs in 2008
156
In 2016
244
Number of creative writing PhD programs in 2008
37
In 2016
50
Estimated number of online MFA programs in 2016
8
Number of open tenure-track creative writing positions in 2015
171
In 2016
119
Estimated total number of applications submitted to MFA programs last year
20,000
Number of applicants the Iowa Writers’ Workshop received last year for fiction
1,041
Number of applicants for poetry
322
Total number of applicants accepted to both programs
50
Estimated number of newly minted MFA graduates each year in the United States
3,000
Estimated two-year cost to attend Columbia University’s MFA program (tuition and fees)
$124,000
Average cost to attend a full-residency MFA program (tuition and fees)
$20,180
To attend a low-residency MFA program (tuition and fees)
$31,184
Average salary of an assistant professor of English at a four-year institution in 2016
$58,242
Average number of tenure-track faculty per creative writing program in 2011
5.1
In 2016
4.9
Estimated number of books sold by Danielle Steel, best-selling author alive
800 million
Number of MFAs held by Ms. Steel
0
Estimated number of AWP attendees each year
12,000
Estimated number of people following AWP on Twitter at time of writing
26,600
Average number of new Twitter followers AWP gains per day
9
AWP’s worldwide Twitter ranking at time of writing
404,392
The writer of this piece’s worldwide Twitter ranking at time of writing
6,053,438
Year that Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win a Pulitzer, won her prize
1950
Amount awarded
$500
Prize amount awarded today
$10,000
Median age of among full-time residency MFA students
27.3
Among low-residency MFA students
35.4
Percentage of students across all American creative writing programs who self-identify as white
75
Percentage of full-residency MFA programs that use fellowships for minority recruitment
67
Minimum number of pages a prose thesis must have to satisfy MFA graduation requirements at Columbia University
90
At the University of Minnesota
120
Percentage of fiction writers with books on this week’s New York Times hardcover bestseller list who hold MFAs
7
Percentage of winners of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize from the last six years who hold MFAs
100
Total number of literary magazines listed in Poets & Writers
1,152
Number that publish in print
609
Number that publish in print and are looking for “literary fiction”
211
For “commercial fiction”
22
For “micro-poetry”
82
Percentage of women with by-lines in The Paris Review in 2015
34
Percentage of women with by-lines in Pleiades in 2015
50
George R. R. Martin’s total earnings in 2016
$9.5 million
J.K. Rowling’s
$19 million
Number of Stephen King’s sons who have published novels
2
Percentage of those sons who hold MFAs
50
Sources: (1,2,3,4) AWP Career Center · (5) Poets & Writers · (6,7) AWP Career Center · (8) The Atlantic (9,10,11) University of Iowa representative · (12) Inside Higher Ed · (13) Columbia University · (14,15) AWP survey · (16) AWP Career Center · (17,18) AWP survey · (19) Forbes · (20) Wikipedia · (21) AWP Conference · (22) Twitter · (23,24,25) Twitter Counter · (26,27) Pulitzer winners · (28) Pulitzer FAQ · (29,30,31,32) AWP survey · (33) Columbia University · (34) University of Minnesota · (35) New York Times · (36) The Honickman Foundation · (37,38,39,40,41) Poets & Writers · (42,43) Vida · (44,45) Forbes · (46,47) Owen King & Joe Hill
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Philip Roth Saved My Life
Philip Roth, with his focus on the male libido and the testosterone-driven lust of red-blooded American men, saved my life.
When I discovered I had a large prostate tumor—a highly malignant cancer—back in 1984, at the ripe young age of 35, I went through the typical treatments available then, including a nerve-sparing surgical removal of my prostate—nerve-sparing in order to retain my potency—and subsequent radiation. Five years later, there was clear-cut evidence of metastasis, with a rising prostate-specific antigen (PSA). The only explanation was a recurrence; the only treatment, insisted upon by every specialist I consulted, was immediate and permanent surgical castration. Since prostate cancer is fueled by testosterone, the elimination of testosterone could stop the cancer in its tracks, at least temporarily.
Given the steady chorus of prominent physicians calling for my castration, I desperately needed someone to offer a contradictory point of view. The writing and work of Roth fit the bill. In my early 30s, I had taught an honors course at the University of Maryland on psychiatry and literature, as a college-health psychiatrist. The course, titled “The Inner Life: The Nature of Dreams and Passions,” was simply an excuse to teach Roth novels. Sure, we started with a bit of Franz Kafka and even John Updike, but we finished with Portnoy’s Complaint, The Professor of Desire, and The Breast.
Through Roth I was able to stay in touch with my inner skirt chaser. In the face of permanent castration, I refused to become a eunuch or a walking parody of the professor of desire. My life as a man was not going to be cut short by castration, even if my forgoing treatment was going to cut short my actual life. Because of Roth, my mantra became, “Give me libido, or give me death.”
Ultimately my persistence in avoiding castration paid off. Through luck and persistence, I found out about Nicholas Bruchovsky, a doctor in Vancouver who was working on an intermittent chemical castration rather than a permanent one. He had realized that less is more—that permanent castration is counterproductive.
So, it has been win-win: I still have my life as a man, with lust in my heart, as well as lust in action. I also have my life. I now have lived 25 years with intermittent castration. I have learned that I can live reasonably well as an asexual being for a time, as long as I know that I can eventually recapture my capacity for dreams and passions.
Ironically, one of Roth’s few blind spots in his writing is his lack of understanding of prostate cancer. One of his narrators, Nathan Zuckerman, is diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he undergoes treatment for it. But nary a word about the impact on one’s inner life from Zuckerman in Roth’s trilogy of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Even Roth’s considerable imagination could not come up with a way to comprehend the impact of prostate cancer on a man’s inner life.
We men are generally not comfortable talking about prostate cancer, especially if it involves castration. The sense of shame and vulnerability can be overwhelming. No wonder Roth never figured out how to describe the prostate cancer experience of Nathan Zuckerman.
To combat the silence associated with prostate cancer—and to educate Mr. Roth—I have fashioned a work of creative nonfiction, A Salamander’s Tale: My Story of Regeneration—Surviving 30 years with Prostate Cancer. Wit and humor can carry the day, even when we face metastatic prostate cancer. This disease forces us to confront virtually every aspect of the human condition, whether it is sex and lust, or time, death, and the gods.
Roth once pointed out that “nothing that befalls anyone is ever too senseless to have happened.” Who would have believed that a novelist’s focus on the testosterone-driven passions in a man’s life —with all the humor and pathos that come from those passions—would ultimately save a man’s life? And who would have thought that the senselessness of human existence, as reflected in prostate cancer, could not be imagined by arguably America’s finest living novelist?
But who cares about Roth’s blind spot? The Talmud tells us that to save a life is to save the world. Roth saved my life. His writings drowned out an onslaught of demands for my castration—an intervention that would have led to my premature death, not to mention the death of my spirit and passions. Pretty darn good for a novelist.
Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist, is the author of A Salamander’s Tale (Skyhorse).
A version of this article appeared in the 05/11/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Philip Roth Saved My Life
The post Philip Roth Saved My Life appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Harvard Book Store uses ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ meme to feature books on disinformation
Kellyanne Conway, a top advisor to President Donald Trump, has had a tough time playing it straight with the truth over the last few weeks.
From “alternative facts” to her repeated false claims of a “Bowling Green massacre,” some of Conway’s statements have been turned into memes as quickly as they have been debunked.
But Harvard Book Store is hoping to capitalize on the recent trend to provoke a discussion that goes beyond 140-character missives on Twitter — even if it isn’t perhaps in the most diplomatic way.
The 85-year-old independent book store — which is not affiliated with the prestigious, eponymous university — put up a new featured book display Wednesday morning “Commemorating the Victims of The Bowling Green Massacre.”
A photo posted by Harvard Book Store (@harvardbookstore) on Feb 8, 2017 at 6:30am PST
“We’re intending to provide deeper resources to think, read, and explore both the current events around this idea of disinformation but also exploring the history of it,” store marketing and events manager Alex Meriwether told Boston.com.
The display includes 15 books ranging from classics, like George Orwell’s 1984 and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, to newer releases, like Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough and Cass Sunstein’s Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas. The collection, which can also be viewed online, hits on ideas of propaganda and post-truth societies, which have returned to focus since Trump’s election.
Meriwether says the store, located in Harvard Square, has several rotating book displays responding to current events. The store also has displays up for Black History Month and the upcoming Academy Awards.
“For a store like ours, there are a lot of opportunities to present our customers with serious books,” he said Wednesday afternoon, adding that the response to their latest display, which achieved a degree of internet virality Wednesday, has been generally positive.
According to Meriwether, the “Bowling Green Massacre” display isn’t meant to pile on the mockery of Conway, but to prompt a deeper discussion that goes past the meme.
“A little snark can help get us there,” he said.
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The post Harvard Book Store uses ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ meme to feature books on disinformation appeared first on Art of Conversation.
