Roy Miller's Blog, page 292
January 24, 2017
Reidy Explains Decision Behind Yiannopoulos Deal
In a letter sent to employees and some authors, Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy looked to assure those concerned about the signing of controversial author Milo Yiannopoulos by S&S imprint Threshold Editions that the company will not publish books that contain hate speech.
The letter comes partly in response to a letter delivered to Reidy earlier this month, signed by a number of S&S children’s authors, protesting the signing of Yiannopoulos for his book Dangerous, which will publish on March 14, and for which Yiannopoulos reportedly received a $250,000 advance.
In her note to employees introducing the letter, Reidy said she had heard from many of them as well as from some authors, bookselling accounts, and “members of the reading public” about the decision to sign Dangerous. She also noted that the letter was being distributed to authors who had contacted the company and is posted on the publisher’s author portal.
In the letter, Reidy said, S&S had taken all the comments it received about the deal seriously and then stated “I want to make clear that we do not support or condone, nor will we publish hate speech. Noting that Threshold, like all S&S imprints, is editorially independent, Reidy said Yiannopoulos’s proposal was to write a book “that would be a substantive examination of the issues of political correctness and free speech.”
In making the deal, Threshold editors, Reidy wrote, “believed that an articulate discussion of these issues, coming from an unconventional source like Mr. Yiannopoulos, could become an incisive commentary on today’s social discourse that would sit well within its scope and mission, which is to publish works for a conservative audience.”
Reidy said she understood that there could be a debate about who should be awarded a book contract, but that for S&S “it ultimately comes down to the text that is written. And here I must reiterate that neither Threshold Editions nor any other of our imprints will publish books that we think will incite hatred, discrimination, or bullying.”
Download the complete letter here.
The post Reidy Explains Decision Behind Yiannopoulos Deal appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Donald Illich: Poet Interview | WritersDigest.com
I’m happy to introduce our first poet interview of 2017: Donald Illich!
Donald Illich
Donald Illich’s work has appeared in literary journals such as Iowa Review, LIT, Nimrod, Passages North, Rattle, and Sixth Finch. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received a scholarship from the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference. Washington Writers Publishing House and Gold Wake Press named his full-length manuscript a finalist during their open readings. He self-published a chapbook, Rocket Children, in 2012, and he published another chapbook, The Art of Dissolving (Finishing Line Press), in 2016. He lives in Rockville, Maryland.
Here’s a poem I really enjoyed from his chapbook The Art of Dissolving:
Gravity, by Donald Illich
My parents used to tell me
that gravity turned off at night.
That everyone floated
in their nightclothes, bouncing
against the walls of their rooms,
sometimes flying out a window.
When someone woke up, like me,
everyone returned to their original
positions, snoring as if nothing
had happened. I don’t know why
they told me this, except to screw
around with my imagination, to keep it
working in a useless direction.
Even now, at three in the morning,
I try to catch my wife hovering
near me, with the books and shelves
above us, bobbing near the ceiling.
I sometimes have the feeling
I was the one whom gravity abandoned.
That I’m the loose person, who will
stick to neither a job or a life.
No one tells me, though. They
watch me rise like a balloon,
sending darts toward me, waiting.
*****
Forget Revision, Learn How to Re-create Your Poems!
Do you find first drafts the easy part and revision kind of intimidating? If so, you’re not alone, and it’s common for writers to think the revision process is boring–but it doesn’t have to be!
In the 48-minute tutorial Re-Creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will learn how to go about re-creating their poems with the use of 7 revision filters that can help poets more effectively play with their poems after the first draft. Plus, it helps poets see how they make revision–gasp–fun!
*****
What are you currently up to?
I am working on creating two chapbooks, “City Waltz” and “Fear Avenue.” “City Waltz” is a surreal chapbook, with a basic theme about the city and city life. “Fear Avenue” is an autobiographical book with lots of old and new poems. I am also revising my full-length manuscript, “Temporarily Human.”
The Art of Dissolving, by Donald Illich
I loved reading The Art of Dissolving. How did you go about putting this collection together? And then, getting it published?
I basically took the best work I had at the moment and put them all together in a chapbook. There was no theme, really, though I tried to use published pieces mostly. I did try to place my most accessible work at either the front or the back. Finishing Line had a call for manuscripts, and I sent in my manuscript, and they accepted it. It was relatively easy.
Were there any surprises in the publishing process?
I think the big surprise was how long the process took. I expected things to rush along, after providing cover art and then proofing the proofs, but to create a good product it took weeks longer than I thought. In the end, though, I’m very happy with the way it turned out.
Your bio mentions you’re a technical writer-editor for the Federal government. What is involved with that job? And a follow up, do the poetry and technical writing ever influence each other?
As a technical writer I do various things, such as write replies to letters from the public, create outside articles in health publications, and participate in events/conferences, including publicity for them. Technical writing has helped me become more exact with my language in poetry, and poetry has provided me with the creativity to come up with solutions to writing conundrums in my job.
You’ve been published in several publications. Do you have a submission routine?
I wish I was more organized in submitting my poetry. I tend to submit a lot in bunches, then only sporadically submit between them. There are lots of good places to find markets, such as Poet’s Market, and I use them. I also have several publications I enjoy and read, and I keep submitting to them. I think since it’s so common to get rejections, it’s best to submit as much as you can, within reason.
Your bio mentions you’re the President of The Federal Poets. Could you explain who The Federal Poets are and what you do as President?
The Federal Poets is a workshop group in the D.C. area that meets once a month to critique each other’s poems. We also put out a journal for the members called “The Federal Poet.” As president, I lead the meetings, and I also am in charge of reserving the rooms at the library. I also arrange readings and try to publicize what The Federal Poets do as much as possible. The Federal Poets, in one form or another, has been around since the 1940s.
A poet no one’s heard of but should. Who is it?
Mathias Svalina. His work is weird and profound. I especially love his book, “Destruction Myth.”
If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?
Be patient. Rejections will come and go, but the important thing to do is keep reading and keep writing. And enjoy the process of getting where you want to be.
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Poet’s Market and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
*****
Check out these other poetic posts:
You might also like:
The post Donald Illich: Poet Interview | WritersDigest.com appeared first on Art of Conversation.
On Taiwan and Refusing to Stay Silent
The artist comes next She waits for
the listeners too What if they’re all dead or
deafened by grief or in prison Then
there’s no way out of it She will listen
It’s her work She will be the listener
in the story of the stories
–Grace Paley, “A Poem about Storytelling”
“A dumbness—a shame—still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say ‘hello’ casually, or ask an easy question in front of the check-out counter, or ask directions of a bus driver.”
–Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
Article continues after advertisement
*
I recall to you the words of Apollonius of Tyana, speaking of fable-master Aesop: “But he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events.”
*
Once upon a time, an island formed. Thousands of years passed in which grass grew, died, grew; water flowed, froze, melted; animals were born, mated, birthed, died.
However, some argue, the place did not really exist until people arrived, scattered across its plains, settled in mountains, and called the island by a dozen-and-a-half names.
Some argue the island did not exist until it was made useful in the 1500s when the Chinese, in junks, crossed the strait and built an outpost away from the iron fist of the Emperor and called the place Taiwan and sometimes Greater Loochoo.
Others argue the island did not exist until the name was recorded in the salty, damp logs of Portuguese ships by men who glimpsed it through spyglasses and, dazed by the garlands of soft fog around the lush jade peaks, murmured Ihla Formosa, Beautiful Island.
Then came the Spanish, and then the Dutch, hoping to expand the Dutch East Indies north. Between the Europeans and the Chinese, there were two islands, Formosa and Taiwan, setting a precedent—the island would never be a place of single, fixed appellation.
*
After Trump’s call with the president of Taiwan last month, I feel a frustration that keeps me up at night tweeting (and then deleting) sarcastic and outraged comments about the mainstream media accounts that persist in misrepresenting Taiwan’s history. Though I am glad for some attention on Taiwan, I worry that Trump had stumbled onto territory that would put the country in danger. I worry that Taiwan, where half my family lives, would be treated as nothing more than a pawn in America’s dance with China. And I am exasperated by the language the western media uses to talk about Taiwan—language so clearly vested in China’s version of Taiwan’s history.
I had just returned home from Taiwan the week before. My first visit in a year-and-a-half, and I am in love with Taiwan all over again. Clean and efficient subways. Fresh hot soy milk every morning. Convenience stores where every conceivable need could be fulfilled. The chaos of 2.7 million people packed into the 104 square miles of Taipei. This country where my mother was born, and then raised in a ramshackle house with moldering walls and a leaking roof. I am supposed to be teaching my last classes of the semester—on Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese for my American Lit class—but I can barely concentrate on Yang’s graphic novel. Instead, I am thinking of Audre Lorde, whom I taught earlier the semester. I am thinking of her statement that anger can be used for growth, and I am thinking of how long I have feared my anger.
I have been trained well. I have stifled my anger with the desire to be a good filial daughter: say nothing, be obedient, smile and bite my leashed tongue. When I am talked over or down to, I just sigh and relent, unable to muster the will to fight my way into a conversation. On a panel, a male colleague verbally manspreads until there’s just space enough for me to make a two-sentence comment. It is rude to interrupt. I smile, and even invite him to grab a drink later, although I’m seething. I direct my anger at myself. On book tour, I share space with a man who is to be the host, but who goes on for long stretches about his own book, standing up and shaking it at the crowd, then leaving our table to wander the room when it’s my turn to speak. And still I smile. I write a kind inscription in his book.
I am polite and inoffensive.
I fear that I have turned myself into a stereotype.
*
In Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston’s narrator’s frenum is cut by her mother in attempt to free her to speak: “I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You’ll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another. You’ll be able to pronounce anything. Your frenum looked too tight to do those things, so I cut it.”
My mother never cut my tongue.
*
When Trump calls Taiwan and I watch a flood of misinformation about the country wash over the newspapers, I’m angry for the woman I met in Taipei who told me how her whole career had been driven by the search for the truth behind her grandfather’s death years ago, and how the documents the government finally released to her had his killers’ names redacted to “protect their privacy.” I’m angry for the retired professor who silently hands me a slim volume he has written about the murder of his father during Taiwan’s White Terror. For the daughter who receives an unsent letter from her imprisoned father 60 years after his execution. For the high school student who asks how he and his generation can know the hidden history of their country if it isn’t taught to them.
For the erasures of life and history by all-knowing white men who claim to be authorities on an island they haven’t even bothered to find out the history of.
*
In fiction, I can cut my frenum and free my tongue. My characters can be angry, critical, impolite in the ways I can’t bring myself to be.
*
I look through old drafts of my novel, versions of the book that I discarded. I’m surprised at how unencumbered they are. In one version, I narrate Taiwan’s history through the goddess Mazu who inhabits various characters—including a fly that feasts on the corpse of Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese Nationalists, ally of the United States, and dictator of Taiwan:
My friends, in the end, it is the Generalissimo’s heart that kills him, near midnight on April Fifth, 1975. He is 87 years old.
His kidneys fail and then his heart. The catheter bag flat as his urine dribbles to nothing and the fluid accumulates inside him, his body and organs swollen with dropsy, skin waxy. His heart seizes and stops. Everything loosens and the sheets, already damp with his death sweat, are now stained. His mouth falls open.
Before the screaming machines can alert the nurses and doctors (and even then, what point is there in revival? Nothing left to do but read the charts and note the time), I make my move. I go to his still-warm tongue and probe the soft, moist tissue. A fly’s dream.
Don’t worry—I will relieve you of the details. What is delectable to me is to you terror: the frozen face of your most terrible nightmare: your inevitable future.
The fly describes the taste of a dictator: the mix of power, desire, and “the bitter finish, the lingering vinegar. Perhaps this is the girding of all power—sweeping through me, knowledge that every decision has been tainted by fear.”
*
I am fascinated by Taiwan’s invisibility, about the willful silence from nearly every government (save 21) in the world, averting their eyes, pursing their lips like some patrician lady who has detected a foul smell and is too polite to comment.
Does Taiwan exist? Is it a country? What makes a country? As if 23 million people with their own land, history, passport, and constitution can be erased by saying so—or by silence.
As if enough people consenting to a fiction can make it truth.
*
In the 17th century, as the Manchu Tartars took over China, one of the palaces they besieged housed a Japanese woman who killed herself rather than surrendering. Her grieving son vowed revenge. He, like the island to which he eventually retreated, hoping to regroup his forces to retake China from the Tartars, went by many names: Cheng Gong, Tei-seiko, Koxinga.
The pirate-warrior Koxinga, with 25,000 soldiers, claimed Taiwan as his kingdom and demanded that the Red Hairs, as they called the Dutch, leave. Fort Provintia surrendered while Fort Zeelandia resisted, and Koxinga began his blockade, intending on drawing thirsty, starving Dutch from the fort. Meanwhile, those unlucky enough to be caught outside the fort, in the villages they had inhabited for years and years, were beheaded or crucified—nailed through wrist, ankle, and torso on crosses in the pirate-warrior’s response to these Christian colonialists. The Dutch eventually yielded, the Dutch East India Company left, and Koxinga and his heirs reigned for 20 years.
For almost 200 years, the island was Taiwan to one half of the world and Formosa to the other. Foreigners knew it on one hand as a barbaric island with treacherous shores where ships were wrecked and survivors beheaded or enslaved and, on the other hand, as a critical link in a trading network—the Americans nursed colonial hopes until the Civil War drew their attentions away, and the British and French made liberal use of Formosa’s treaty ports. As it was between the Qing Dynasty and Japan in 1895 in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, it was a game chip to be traded at the whim of others.
People should have become suspicious as early as 1904 when the Japanese colonizers began dismantling the Taipei city wall, turning 30,000 Mt. Beishihu stones into prisons and drainage ditches. This was no ordinary city wall—this was the last city wall built in the last planned city construction of the last Chinese dynasty. The un-building of the city was, by all appearances, practical, but I don’t need to explain to you the symbolism of the act.
*
“I did not speak and felt bad each time that I did not speak,” Kingston’s narrator says.
At what point does silence shift to a burden, cracking the shoulders and bending the back? I am bearing that weight, I realize, in my polite, closed-mouth smile. I seek the knife to unleash my tongue.
*
Because Taiwan was Japan’s “Crown Jewel” colony in their 1912 Colonial Exposition, what happened in 1937 surely was not a surprise. The Sino-Japanese War had broken out and the Empire made a frantic attempt to finally assimilate the subjects they had kept at bay for over 40 years. They initiated the “Japanization” movement, quite cunningly placing the burden of becoming Japanese on the colony itself—insinuating that it was a matter of desire. Japan stood at the finish line, urging their pets toward them with strings of sausages and the promise that these panting dogs could themselves become men if they trod the correct path. Being was not being, but performance. Walk on two legs and eat at the table and we will call you “brother.”
To further encourage assimilation, the Japanese outlawed the burning of paper money offerings to ancestors and deities, and new rules regulated home altars under the guise of “thrift.” Temples were demolished and statues of gods and goddesses were incinerated. Without offerings, immortals and ancestors starved. Heaven was thick with hungry ghosts.
Not only goddesses were excised—tongues too. Reward heaped upon reward—the family that assumed Japanese names and spoke Japanese would receive a plaque on the door: National Language Family. And the helpmeet to reward—punishment—was on hand with rolled shirtsleeves and paddle for those who spoke Taiwanese in public.
If there was one moment when the island felt the most entwined in the fate of the Japanese Empire, one morning when terror alerted them to the fact that, yes, they were indeed now part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, it had to be May 31, 1945.
Fires—seething, spitting, roaring—burned in random pockets as far as one could see. Dogs sat down in the middle of the streets and howled. Rickshaw men raced to and fro carrying the injured while ambulances stuttered down streets, only to be blocked by piles of rubble. People ran into the streets, some wearing nothing but a sheath of charred skin.
The city burned for three days.
The Americans had dropped 3,800 bombs, for which some might have been grateful, because it is when the Americans come bearing only a single bomb that one should be very scared, as they did a little over two months later in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, turning sand into glass and people to ash.
*
After the Japanese left their colony in the defeat of World War II, the island was, for a brief, uncertain moment, again Formosa, and then the Kuomintang, losing the Chinese Civil War and reasoning that the Communists had no navy, fled to the island and it became the new home of the Republic of China.
Yet it wasn’t enough for the West, locked into its own Cold War, to distinguish between the ROC (Republic of China) and the PRC (People’s Republic of China)—China had been one monolithic place for 5,000 continuous years, as the story went, so how could it suddenly be two?—and ROC and PRC were clarified into Free China and Red China and any red-blooded American knew immediately which China to love, even though the closest thing to a panda that Taiwan could boast was a moon bear.
*
Humans are fickle. As the 20th century went on, the West came to love Red China as much as Red China loved the red bottles of cola sent by their new admirers, renminbi twinkling in their eyes, and Red China received the privilege of being just China. Since there could be only one China, the little sweet-potato-shaped island was left an orphan, nose pressed to the bakery shop window.
Though an orphan may remake and rename herself, the truth of her birth usually lies on a yellowing slip of paper in some drawer that sticks at the corners. It is always at the denouement that the maid runs into the room waving this piece of paper. So too with this island, a volcanic little Cinderella country which could come to the few world events to which it was invited bearing only a name decided by others: Chinese Taipei.
I don’t have to tell you how the name—not even a country but an adjective describing a city!—burned upon the breast, borne with a clenched smile while the stomach roiled.
*
I’ve written a novel about Taiwan nearly 400 pages and 14 years in the making. After Trump’s call, in an opinion piece for a major newspaper, I make the simple and completely reasonable argument that Taiwan is a country with its own history, that it’s more than just some invention created to keep things interesting between America and China. The piece is reposted here and there. In comments across the internet, I am called ignorant, a privileged American, white-washed. I am even called a whore.
I wonder when it became no longer the morally correct stance to defend a country’s right to self-determination against a larger authoritarian power.
*
If I cut my tongue free, I may find I like the taste of blood. I may find that I can negotiate around the words that have eluded me.
I may find that I can turn my anger into strength and state, loudly and firmly: Listen. We are here too. Listen.
The post On Taiwan and Refusing to Stay Silent appeared first on Art of Conversation.
January 23, 2017
My Life In Books
I do not remember the first book that I read or the first book that was read to me, but I do remember books always being a part of my life—trusty friends and allies to provide comfort or enjoyment whenever needed.
My dad had an enormous library, and some of my earliest memories are of sitting in his armchair, admiring the spines of the books that lined the shelves of our living room, memorizing their locations, and choosing my favorites based on, yes, their covers. For virtually any question that my sister and I have asked throughout our lives, his response has been, “I have a book on that!”
Getting a library card was paramount to getting a driver’s license in my family, and I took to this new world with gusto. Very rarely did a trip to the library with my mother end with any fewer than 20 books in my bag. I also stalked all of the local bookstores in Silver Spring, Md.—originally just Crown Books and Walden Books, later Borders and Barnes & Noble, of course. Used bookstores seemed like little corners of paradise to be explored as well.
When I got older, I discovered book series and flew through those as quickly as I could read them. At one point, I was reading two to three Baby-Sitters Club books per week. I exhausted the lists of favorite childhood authors (Mary Downing Hahn, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor). I got hooked on mystery and crime writers as well, beginning with Mary Higgins Clark and Lillian Jackson Braun, and then continuing on into my love affair with John D. McDonald and Ross Macdonald. Nonfiction work by authors such as Erik Larsen, Bill Bryson, and Joan Didion began to fill my bookshelves.
Because books were such a magical, sacred world to me, I never imagined that there could be a place for me in the publishing business. Surely there had to be people making decisions behind the scenes, but it seemed as if books just miraculously appeared on bookstore shelves, waiting to be purchased.
My love of storytelling also attracted me to the movie business. I made the mandatory trek out to Los Angeles, where I worked for several years in production legal in television and film. The luster of working in the entertainment industry eventually faded, and I found myself at a crossroads. I was single, broke, and 30, but I knew that I was being given an opportunity to start doing what I really wanted to do.
I took a year off to clear my head and traveled throughout Southeast Asia. I went in every English-language bookstore I found, cramming my backpack with books as I explored places like Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal.
I had already spent years working freelance jobs in my spare time, reading and evaluating screenplays and book manuscripts for studios, agencies, production companies, and writing contests. Having spent the entirety of my adult life reading the good, the bad, and the ugly, I knew two things for certain: that I loved reading and that I loved working with writers. When I returned home (schlepping at least two suitcases filled with reading material), I was determined to break into publishing.
After lots of pounding the pavement, fate stepped in and I started as an editorial assistant at Keller Media, a literary agency. Within hours of working here, I knew I had found my calling. Before long I became an agent, and now I work with authors (primarily in nonfiction) and read for a living, pitching and selling projects that I believe in to editors whom I respect.
I finally caved and started using an e-reader last year, though I remain fiercely partial to books that I can hold and cherish. The business has changed so much over the past several years, and continues to do so, and it can be difficult to keep up. There are downs to go with the ups—a book I feel strongly about doesn’t sell, an author is difficult to work with—but for the most part I am excited to go into work every day (how many people get to feel like that?). I feel as if, in our own small way, we are doing our part to create new books for fellow bibliophiles to enjoy, whether on their Kindles, at the library, or maybe even curled up on their fathers’ chairs.
Megan Close Zavala is a literary agent based in Marina del Rey, Calif.
A version of this article appeared in the 02/29/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: A Life in Books
The post My Life In Books appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Christine Ball Named Publisher at Putnam, Dutton, Berkley
Christine Ball, formerly v-p and deputy publisher at Putnam, Dutton, and Berkley, has been promoted to senior v-p and publisher of the three imprints. Ball will continue to report to Ivan Held, president of the three units. The move follows the departure of Ben Sevier, as v-p and publisher of Dutton, as publisher of Grand Central Publishing on February 27.
Ball's promotion is, Penguin Publishing Group president Madeline McIntosh wrote in a letter to staff, the "natural step" following two years of unifying leadership across the three imprints under Held and Ball.
"Moving Christine in as a direct replacement for Ben would have been an easy, natural choice, but moving her out of Putnam and Berkley would have been a loss for them and for the group," McIntosh wrote. "I also have noted how much the group has benefited from the strong and complementary partnership between Ivan and Christine."
Ball will head all three individual marketing and publicity teams, and "will continue to take a lead with sales," Mcintosh continued. Ball will also work more directly with the editorial teams under Held, each of which will continue to consider acquisitions and buy them independently of each other.
The post appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Hir a Thoddaid: Poetic Form
Last week, we looked at ottava rima. This week, let’s tackle hir a thoddaid.
Hir a Thoddaid Poems
Some of you may have already guessed, but the hir a thoddaid is a Welsh form. They’ve got the coolest names, right?
And this form is like other Welsh forms in regards to a slight variation in line length and some complexity in the rhyme scheme. Here’s the structure of this six-line form (with the letters acting as syllables and the a’s and b’s signifying rhymes:
1-xxxxxxxxa
2-xxxxxxxxa
3-xxxxxxxxa
4-xxxxxxxxa
5-xxxxxxxbxx
6-xxbxxxxxa
So line 5 is 10 syllables in length; the other 5 lines are 9 syllables. Also, the “b” rhyme is somewhere near the end of line 5 and somewhere in the first half of line 6–so those rhymes could move back and forth to suit your needs.
*****
Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.
This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!
*****
Here’s my attempt at a Hir a Thoddaid:
Ace, by Robert Lee Brewer
This is the year I really need space
to figure myself out and save face
from those who are always on my case
about how I don’t know how to grace
a room without dominating the scene
while demonstrating my sense of place.
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
*****
Find more poetic posts here:
You might also like:
The post Hir a Thoddaid: Poetic Form appeared first on Art of Conversation.
My Writer’s Idyll is Busy, Messy, Full Life
A truism long held in the literary world is that the greatest gift you can give a writer is time: to daydream, to wander, to write. Every writer thinks about what their career might look like if only life’s ordinary restrictions were lifted. In my twenties, after finishing an MFA in fiction, I was lucky enough—for seven months at least—to find out. I won one of those contests you read about in the classifieds of Poets & Writers. The PEN/Northwest Wilderness Writing Residency. In exchange for an hour-a-day of routine caretaking, I got to live rent-free and alone on a 95-acre off-the-grid homestead along the Rogue National Wild and Scenic River in Oregon. There were no neighbors, just stands of Douglas fir and madrone, a logging road, a footpath to the river.
From my writing table, I had a postcard view. A pair of apple trees framed the gate of a garden, and beyond loomed a steep, forested ridge that turned from black to palest blue in the morning sun. I had a typewriter and its satisfying clack-clack-clack-ding. I had notebooks, pens, pencils. I had an idea for a novel and all the time in the world to write. The writing should have been easy.
In my first month at the homestead, however, nothing worked. My idea for a novel suddenly seemed dumb. I wrote and scratched out paragraph after paragraph. I threw my pencil across the room.
I couldn’t understand it—my plan had seemed fool-proof. I’d retreat to the woods, dash off my novel, and return triumphant with a manuscript that would sell for enough money to bankroll the next one. It never occurred to me, I guess, that an ideal writing situation might not produce ideal writing, or that too much free time was as bad, if not worse, than none at all. In life as I’d known it before traveling to backcountry Oregon my writing time had been a contrast to the distraction of family and friends and work, a kind of oasis of dreaming. In life before, I’d only needed a few hours of quiet here and there in order to listen to myself, sort out my ideas, get words down in the shape of a story. I savored my time apart and guarded it jealously against intrusion. In Oregon, that contrast fell away. It was all dreaming, all the time, and the only distraction was me, the swirl of my thoughts against a quiet so unremitting that a Columbia black-tailed deer chewing grass outside the bedroom window could rouse me from sleep.
Article continues after advertisement
To keep from feeling like a total fraud and a failure, I shouldered into work projects around the homestead. I reclaimed a big meadow fir saplings had invaded, dismantled an old corral fence, cleared weeds and brush from miles of mountain trail. I took long hikes to the river, stopping to watch birds and insects, and to look for black bear sign. I planted a meager garden, dug bull thistles, taught myself how to fly fish, swam naked in a pond teeming with rough-skinned newts. At night, under the flicker and hiss of a propane lamp, I tapped out letters to friends back home.
Stunned by the beauty and loneliness I encountered at the homestead, the stories in my letters were more than stories—they were my life. Taking a cue from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which struck me like a revelation, I wrote with abandon about what I saw and felt and thought, as though the first person to ever do so. I didn’t think about getting published, just telling the truth.
Rilke’s famed injunction: Ask yourself—must you write? Those letters became my answer, an emphatic yes.
To this day I remember in my body how it felt to sit at my little writing table in that cabin along the Rogue, in a pool of lamplight, surrounded by the homestead’s utter dark and quiet, tapping away at a manual typewriter. It was freedom, pure and unencumbered, delivered to me by the gift of time. The time to write, and the time fail miserably. The time to fail miserably, and the time to discover a place of necessity from which to begin again. In those letters, in the typewriter’s smeary stamped ink, in wild and rough-hewn sentences, I discovered with clarity what Rilke meant when he said: “Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.” Such a beautiful, simple equation. Holy almost. I remember the care I took in folding those letters, sealing them, addressing and stamping them. The joy of my two-hour drive to the post office.
If I have an inner barometer about the worth of something I’m writing today, 15 years out from my time at the homestead, it’s how it felt to write those letters. Does what I’m working on now feel as urgent? As true? Am I merely writing about my life, or am I writing from it in some integral way?
It’s not always easy to tell, and sometimes months pass on a project before I realize I’ve been faking it, indulging myself with pretty sentences, ignoring mistakes, writing out of habit rather than necessity. And now that I’m a dad and a husband and hold down a full-time job (all things I’m utterly grateful for and humbled by), I don’t have as much time to write. I don’t have time for indulgences and mistakes. If I’m going to have a successful career as a writer, I have to make use of every spare minute and hour. Guilt eats my lunch otherwise. Self-loathing descends.
The kid I used to be, who set off for the wilds of Oregon with dreams of overnight success—he still lurks within. His fears and doubts are my fears and doubts, and I’m no closer than ever to understanding why success at writing is the chief means by which I assign value to my existence. Just that it is. Maybe because of the value I’ve found in reading books and the desire to save someone else the way books have saved me. I don’t know. What I do know is that my time at the homestead—and especially the writing I did there with no thought of publication—is what has made possible even the modest success I’ve known as a writer. I had to lose my writing to gain it back. And what I know now that I had only just begun to learn 15 years ago is that perfectionism and ambition and self-pity are far more damaging to my work (and to my life) than any time constraint. In moments of self-loathing I return to this idea the way students of Zen return to the breath: gently, with forgiveness. If I don’t have as much time as I’d like to write right now, I most certainly don’t have the time to beat myself up about it.
At the homestead I remember feeling very conscious of the gift I’d been given—all that time and space and freedom. I remember wanting only to prove myself worthy of it. Maybe my official writing wasn’t working out but I was seeing things: a black bear with cubs, mountain lion prints in a dusty driveway, an osprey soaring over the river canyon with a flailing steelhead in its talons.
Every day, right out my front door, the wild Klamath mountains gave themselves up without apology or explanation.
Without restraint.
With whatever time is available to me now—even if it’s just a few days here and there, and even if I fuck it up—I want to write like that. Not to somehow prove myself worthy but to be the gift.
I remember how one day, on my way home from a late afternoon hike, sunlight hit a cloud hovering on the far ridge. The sunlight turned the cloud pink, and the cloud turned the Douglas firs and madrones pink, and turned the long grasses in the meadow pink, turned the red-dirt logging road pink, turned my hands and arms and skin pink. The whole world glowed like breeze-brightened ember. I stopped and stood there a second, gob-smacked, gawking, wondering many scenes just as mighty I had already witnessed and forgotten, and pitying myself for being alone, for having nobody with whom to share such transcendence. Then I heard a voice—an inner voice, like the one I listen to when I’m writing—and it said that the point wasn’t to remember any of this vision but live a life as beautiful. If I could do that, the voice reasoned, I would share this moment with everyone I met. And if I could do that, I was never really alone.
The post My Writer’s Idyll is Busy, Messy, Full Life appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Ever Try to Sell a Book? It’s Not Easy
As an independent book publisher for the past 24 years, I’m often asked to participate in Small Business Saturday, that counterpart to Black Friday and Cyber Monday that encourages holiday shoppers to patronize small and local stores.
When I agreed last year to set up at an author fair in a local shopping mall, it seemed like a good idea. What could be better than putting a table of books for sale inside a full-size shopping mall? I told one person a few days ahead of time about the event, and he said, “Good luck; that mall is empty.” Huh, I thought. This is the U.S. of A., where shopping is a way of life.
Upon arrival, I was slightly surprised to find a parking spot near a main entrance. And I noted that there were no banners displaying Small Business Saturday Book Fair. I found the group of participating authors huddled quietly at their tables, each of them with nice displays. Everyone was full of smiles, their books ready to be sold.
At 1 p.m., our official start time, nothing happened. Perhaps, I thought, our event didn’t actually exist? No one was there promptly to see, purchase, or ask about books.
My booth was across from a jewelry store. Thinking of a well-crafted novel with smooth chapter transitions, I raised my voice and announced, to no one in particular, “Buy a book and get a free diamond ring.” Two authors heard me and chuckled.
Still no one in the mall approached. Oh, wait, someone was walking by; I jovially said to the well-dressed woman, “You might not have heard, but for the next five seconds, if you buy a book, you get a free diamond ring.” Puzzlement. I start counting down: “Four.”
“Huh?”
“Three.”
“A what?”
“Two.”
“A book. One.”
Dead stop. No comment from the woman. I say, “Well, the sale is over now. Sorry.” She walks off, staring straight ahead, no smile, no scorn, no nothing. I smile to myself. Honestly, I thought it was a clever conversation starter.
Never fear, I tell myself. Another person is walking by: “Hello, do you like to read?” I ask.
“What?”
“Do you like to read?”
“No.”
With the next person, I try something different. I ask, “Have you ever thought of writing a book?”
“Writing a book?”
“Yes,” I hold up a book. Perhaps a visual aid is needed. “Oh, no,” he says.
And that was the end of that. A few more minutes pass, and another person comes by. “Hello,” I say. “Do you...”
“Not today.”
“...like to read?”
“Not today.”
This person didn’t even break stride. I was impressed.
Next up, two mall security guards appear. Perfect. I have just released a crime fiction murder mystery. “It’s your lucky day,” I tell them. “I have just the book for you guys, a novel about a private detective solving a murder right here in the Quad Cities.” They reply in slow motion, “Uh... we’re... not... into... that... sort... of... thing.”
“What do you mean you aren’t into this sort of thing?” I ask. “You’re both practically in the detective business.” They smile and move along. I look around: the other authors are at their booths sitting politely behind their tables, books well organized in clean formations.
I notice two kids waiting for their mother by the jewelry store. I ask, “You two like books?” They reply, “Our mom’s buying a $1,000 ring right now.”
“Wow, think she’d buy each of you a book?” They laugh as though I’m a stand-up comedian.
Things continue like this for the next three hours. Somehow, I do sell five books. You could say I never fully lose hope.
At 4 p.m., everyone packs up. I only made a few sales, but even so, I can say I enjoyed being out in public engaging people about books. Many of us in the publishing industry know the feelings of being isolated—of working day after day on writing, design, editing. Of those five people who purchased books, who knows, maybe they belong to a book group, or will suggest the book to their friends, who might purchase a copy, too.
At the very least, I can dream these dreams. And honestly, that’s one of the requirements of publishing: the ability to dream big, even on Small Business Saturday.
Steven Semken began the Ice Cube Press, now located just outside Iowa City, in 1993.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/07/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Small Business Saturday
The post Ever Try to Sell a Book? It’s Not Easy appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Colson Whitehead, Matthew Desmond Win ALA Carnegie Medals
The American Library Association has awarded the 2017 Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction to Colson Whitehead for The Underground Railroad,” and Matthew Desmond for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The selections were announced on Sunday, January 22, at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Atlanta, with an official award ceremony to come this summer, at the ALA annual conference, set for Chicago.
On the fiction side, Whitehead’s, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday) tells the story of a young third-generation slave who escapes the brutality of a Georgia cotton plantation and seeks sanctuary throughout the terrorized South. A starred PW review called the book “literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric, and “required reading for every American citizen.”
On the nonfiction side, Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City shares the stories of eight families who find themselves facing home evictions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A starred PW review call the book an “outstanding ethnographic study” girded by “gripping storytelling and meticulous research.”
The post Colson Whitehead, Matthew Desmond Win ALA Carnegie Medals appeared first on Art of Conversation.
What to Read If You Care About Access to Abortion in Trump’s America
The sick knot in my gut has not relaxed at all since November 8th. It tightens. The sterilizing knots in my Fallopian tubes, which were tied and cauterized eight years ago, hold firm, for which I am often but now especially thankful. It is an abomination that we must have such thoughts as: I am grateful that is scientifically impossible for me to become pregnant under this administration. That I can use the phrase “pregnant under this administration” indicates to me that we live in a time when there is no denying that the state seeks to—and often does—control and oppress our bodies.
Here’s where it becomes diabolically obvious: if you’re gonna grab em by the pussy, you have to also be militant about free abortion on demand. A gestating pussy, a birthing pussy, a postpartum pussy, a pushed-out-a-couple-of-kids pussy, these are all pussies you have at times found repulsive, or at least had no interest in grabbing. And why do you grab the pussy? So you can fuck it. So you can rape it. To keep the most pussies available for the most grab time, you have to deal with pregnancy. You have to eliminate it.
Unrestrained unapologetic full-of-rapacious-pride pussy-grabbing that is not zealously managed through free abortion on demand—and is instead paired explicitly with aggressive restrictions on abortion—is therefore intended to impregnate and discard. Intended to impregnate. And discard. (Discard what? I include no direct object because it doesn’t matter. The transitive purpose of the grab, the fuck, the rape is to discard whatever surrounds the pussy. A child, a family, a future, a life, a body, a person, a will, a woman. Anything, everything.)
So what can we do? What can we read? Under this administration.
Article continues after advertisement
First, gear up with Octavia Butler’s affirmations. The legendary sci-fi writer predicted, with clarion accuracy, this presidency; her entire oeuvre is worth reading, to understand how a democracy breaks and births its own dystopian end, and how people survive oppression and cultivate humanity. But I draw attention instead to the message she wrote to herself, about making it as a writer, inside a notebook: “I will find the way to do this. So be it. See to it!” We must realize that we invent the world we intend to; we must, as Butler did, call ourselves up and out. We must be specific about the rights we want and we must see to it.
[image error]
Next, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, by Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutiérrez. This book is the primer for understanding the intersectional work of the reproductive justice movement in America: “The radical agenda that women of color pursue has its roots in other progressive social movements… women of color are not the subjects of a single experience or history of racism. Each group had to address its particular history of reproductive oppression and to articulate its particular positive vision and agenda for reproductive freedom, which included demanding the right to have children free from coercion, either by the state or through community pressure. Claiming reproductive rights in a culturally specific and meaningful way was essential to developing a political agenda and a constituency base.”
[image error]
Then: “What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?,” Alice Walker’s address in support of the National March for Women’s Equality and Women’s Lives in Washington D.C., in May of 1989. Read this to understand how little has changed, and let Walker’s fury take hold in you:
What has the white, male lawgiver to say to any of us? To those of us who love life too much to willingly bring more children into a world saturated with death? […] To make abortion illegal again is to sentence millions of women and children to miserable lives and even more miserable deaths.
[image error]
When Walker delivered that address, abortion had been legal for 16 years—but read The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service to learn the remarkable history of how a group of women in Chicago did for themselves while abortion was still illegal. The hundred members of the Jane collective taught one another how to perform safe abortions and provided services to 11,000 women during the four years preceding Roe. We must be bold and do what we have to do to protect ourselves from a hostile government.
[image error]
Finally, and to go back to the future, read “Keesha and Joanie and JANE,” a zine by Judith Arcana. Arcana worked for the Jane collective, and was arrested when it was shut down; in “Keesha” she imagines a near future in which young women respond to the elimination of access to abortion in the US: “So, what is it, really, that makes them hate abortion so much? I’m serious—what is it? This drives me crazy! And besides, I have to know what to tell my daughter.”
The post What to Read If You Care About Access to Abortion in Trump’s America appeared first on Art of Conversation.
