John Edgar Wideman's Blog
March 13, 2010
An Interview about Self-Publishing
Jonathan's Introduction:
Our press release said it best: John Edgar Wideman is a literary lion. He has more than 20 traditionally published works to his name and a catalog of accolades — including two Faulkner Awards for Fiction. He has received much critical acclaim in his career and can command significant royalty advances.
But he’s not satisfied with where the traditional publishing model has taken him. He doesn’t know his readers. And too often he’s been left in the shadow of blockbuster titles that get publishers’ attention.
So, for his latest work, Briefs, Stories for the Palm of the Mind, he decided to experiment. He published the book, which goes on sale today, exclusively on Lulu as our inaugural VIP Service client. I talked to him recently about his decision to publish with Lulu, what he makes of the current state of the industry and what his goals are for this project. An edited transcript follows.
Wideman on the publishing industry:
I’ve been in the business for many decades. I’ve been very lucky. On the other hand, there are a lot of changes in the industry that have affected me personally. I have a very personal distaste for the blockbuster syndrome. I think in movies and books, drinks and food, the blockbuster syndrome is a feature of our social landscape that has gotten out of hand.
Unless you become a blockbuster your book disappears quickly. That’s a pretty unsettling situation. It means also you have no control over your next publication. Unless you rise to the level of a certain number of copies, publishers lose interest in your work.
It becomes not only publish or perish, but sell or perish. The publisher's list gets shorter and shorter, and that’s destructive of quality and variety. I think the American imagination has been impoverished by the choices that have been offered as a substitute for what was once real selection.
Wideman on coming to Lulu:
I've been thinking about alternatives for a long time. And Lulu seems to represent a very live possibility as the publishing industry mutates. My son works at Lulu, and I’ve had a chance to look over his shoulder and learn about Lulu and Lulu’s ambitions. It was all quite fascinating to me.
I’m very, very attracted to a situation where I have more control over what happens to my book, where I have more control over who I reach. I like the idea of being in charge. I like the idea of being able to speak to people, have a conversation even as the book enters the world.
I also like to think that going with Lulu is almost an environmental choice, a green choice. Instead of being part of a process that overproduces 50,000 copies of a book that sit in a warehouse somewhere, we’re talking about a kind of environmentalism that uses our resources wisely. Give people something good rather than making a promise to stockholders that there’s a blockbuster on the horizon.
Wideman on his goals for Lulu:
I hope Lulu will sell a bunch of books, but it’s the readers I want. There’s a funny phenomena. I’ve had tremendous critical success, but not the readers one would think would follow. I’m not crying the blues because of my particular case, but I think that can easily happen.
My books suffer because there’s an African American category and they’re sold on a particular shelf. That shelf can become a kind of prison. Readers get into the habit of going to a shelf and thinking that literature is divided in that way. You miss the opportunity to reach new readers.
The goal for me is always to write a decent book. Success with Lulu means a book that I write gets into many people’s normal information flow. Lulu would give me that kind of personal outreach to an audience. I decided to take some time and energy and give it to this project. If it works for me, I know there are other folks who could profit from this model.
And certainly the public could profit from this model.
Introducing Briefs
Briefly, since these remarks introduce a book titled Briefs, I'd like to share a few thoughts about why and how I've been working the past three years on a volume of very short stories. My first novel was published in 1967 and I've been in print since, so my writing career's far from brief, but brief an accurate, merciful word to describe a parcel of time which has rushed past so swiftly, stealthily, brutally, it feels some days like I just got here and it's nearly time to go already. The micro-fictions in my collection are about losing time, saving time, enduring time, fearing and escaping time.
About the ubiquitous, silent pulse of time and how people learn to dance to it or not, to stumble through or find themselves graced by time or ignored or get their asses kicked.
Time, the immaterial medium nobody can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, a vast neutral sea containing all creatures living and dead, a mysterious presence allowing us to move and speak and suffer our collective being.
Time-out. For a brief fifty years, longer than I've written fiction, I played basketball. Loved hoop so much I anticipated the end of my playing days would be a kind of death. In a hoop game a player can call time-out and stop the action. Refresh. Recoup. Rethink. Briefs is meant to perform something like that. Its stories are designed to be read in brief swatches of time. They freeze, review, highlight the action. As if you can press a pause button and be released temporarily from the game's intensity, from time. Each story an artifice allowing a player the luxury, for a minute or two, of being somebody else watching the game, observing the action from a great, quiet distance, through simultaneously enmeshed, implicated within it, just sitting still awhile, long enough to take account of things impossible to see or reflect upon in the hurry of the action. Imagine inhabiting an imaginary parenthesis, an arc of safety without confining brackets that nevertheless holds back threatening vastness always surrounding you. Not extinguishing the game, but time-out. The play escaped for a secure instant or two, allowing you to measure the toll of participating in the game’s unrelenting pressure. Time out to check the score, your condition, the hour, think about everything that's ever happened before and what might come next.
Next. When you holler next to fellow players on a playground court, it means you want part of the action, the play, the game. Next shouted because you have just arrived on the scene or because your squad got whipped by another squad and was forced to sit or you won till you got tired and needed a rest. Anyway you're in line again and next expresses your determination to try your luck when your turn comes round. Next is challenge, plea, hope, offer, demand. In this sense, Briefs claims next. If Brief’s short shorts are successful, they should provide, one by one, or in sequence, respites outside the game, not exactly ruptures in the action, but moments disciplined, crystallized like intervals of silence in music that revive, pace and extenuate music. Small stories can offer quick exit and re-entry into the immensity surrounding them. Represent in miniature the complex negotiations, the meticulous elaborations of the best work on any scale. Holes, spaces, reminders, mirrors, the unheard pattern of silences that organizes a composition's meaning and moves its audience.
The last project of Briefs I'm going to mention is its attempt to celebrate fiction's enormous range. Prose fiction's history and development remain open-ended, never stand still. Each time a writer essays the first tentative steps of a new work, he or she may discover possibilities for re-inventing the medium. I've learned that such possibilities, usually considered the fruit of whole books or whole careers, are recognizable also (if writers teach readers how to look) at the smaller level of single words, sentences, and minimalist forms. After all, writing is present and accessible only in the word by word flow, the stop time of small parts colliding, combining, evolving in novel, intriguing ways. Ways demanding and fun to watch whatever the scale.
