M. Allen Cunningham's Blog, page 20

Hating on the Story: an American Tradition

I've got a short story collection on the way in the next month or so. Like every fiction writer, I'd heard rumors about the reading public's distaste for short stories. I had no idea, however, the deep and historical extent of our loathing till I read Seth Fried's historical analysis, which begins by citing a strangely compelling recent study:

According to the study, when a sample of readers were asked whether they would rather read a novel or a short story collection, 100% of participants barfed at the mention of a short story collection. When asked whether they would rather read a short story collection or have a hardcover copy of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom thrown at each of their heads in such a way as to cause the corner of the book to strike them sharply in the temple, 90% of participants said they would prefer to have the novel thrown at them. The remaining 10% hastily took out their own copies of Freedom and began flagellating themselves about the temples, as if they now believed that doing so would help ward off short stories in general. To summarize the results of this study in the words of your average publishing professional, short story collections are a "tough sell."

Read the rest at the Tin House blog here. And note the historical illustrations!

Sherlock's Caution for the Google Age

"I consider that man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

--Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)

There's a little Q&A with me up now at Paper Fort, th...

There's a little Q&A with me up now at Paper Fort, the blog of Literary Arts, those excellent folks who awarded me an Oregon Literary Fellowship.

Ten Days Left to Support M. Allen Cunningham's Illustrated Limited Edition

Art by N. Shields, from Date of DisappearanceTen days and $324 left to go in the Date of Disappearance fundraiser at United States Artists. If the deadline arrives, and we're shy of one hundred percent, the project is off.

But I know we can make it! Remember, this is "micro-philanthropy," meaning you can pledge one dollar, five dollars, whatever you wish -- it's a no-risk deal, you get to write it off, you can pledge to receive gifts, and you're supporting the arts.

I like to think that the project is kinda special: Date of Disappearance is a limited edition, every copy numbered and signed and illuminated beautifully with ten ink-and-charcoal images by Portland artist Nathan Shields. The book will launch a micro-press,and I want to put it out there in a special way -- exclusively through our country's fabulous indie bookstores (i.e., not Amazon or the chains).

During this final lap of fundraising, I've had the honor of being interviewed by fellow author Victoria Patterson ( Drift, This Vacant Paradise ). Not only is she an extremely gifted fiction writer -- she asks very smart interview questions. A snippet:

VP: You're a true champion of independent booksellers. Do you see the plight of the artist and the independent bookseller as similar?

MAC: I love this question. Yes, yes. Alfred Kazin characterized modern American writers as being steeped — unavoidably and necessarily — in all the little, often superficial details of life in America, and yet as being at the same time deeply, subtly alienated from all of that. The same could be said of many great booksellers, I think. Both artist and bookseller stand at the vanguard of culture. Both struggle for something essentially impractical, unlucrative, and yet unspeakably necessary. Both have labored to build a life in accordance with a passionate vision. Both accumulate intangible rewards, usually in the absence of lower gratifications (prestige, affluence, vacations). Both are cursed and blessed to live in the conviction that what they do has relevance and worth in this world — to spend their days in service to something they love unreasonably and irredeemably. And strangely, mysteriously, the artist and bookseller alike are also (though each is much more than this too) perpetuators and guardians of community — the writer as observer, voice, empathetic being, the bookstore as megaphone, nexus, flashpoint. ...

Visit Three Guys One Book for the whole interview:
http://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-m-allen-cunningham

Join 68 Date of Disappearance supporters at: http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

Writer's Statement

The following was written a few years ago for an application I submitted to an institution which shall remain nameless...
I've traveled my path as a writer a little bit backwards and now come to this application from an unusual place. I studied literature in college, but at twenty I went off to begin writing seriously on my own. In the years since then I've released two novels and published numerous short stories in national literary magazines. Meanwhile I've worked various jobs, among them flower delivery driver, bookstore clerk, hospital purchasing agent, house-painter, newspaper delivery agent, and ranch caretaker. In all candor I've reached a very difficult moment in my writing and in my life. I hope to make it a turning point, and this is why I'm submitting this application.
I've done my best alone. I've strained my eyes with deep reading. I've labored, as Wallace Stegner advised, to take charge of my material, filling crates with drafts before each story or novel was finished. I've grown a trusty shell against the sidelong looks of those who would question the validity of my vocation. I've even accepted the relative insignificance of this work in the larger world (does the world need me to write another book?) and kept working anyhow.
What I have never done is plug into a community of mutual support. I've never benefited from – or had the opportunity to contribute to – the seriousness and shared aims of a body of advanced writers. Now, thanks to this painful absence in my life, I've realized late and hard how crucial such community is. I've been a sort of closet writer all these years, but it turns out you can't do this thing all by yourself, alone in a room, forever.
I've known of [your institution's] existence for a long time. What draws me to apply now is my wish to work alongside serious, developed writers like me, all of us primed to better our craft, undistracted and unashamed. After long seclusion I can't possibly express how timely, how instrumental for my work, such an environment would be. Beyond the literary gods in books, nobody has ever assured me daily and at length that to live as I have – to view writing as serious work – is not shameful or socially suspect, but maybe legitimate and honest (yes, even when it doesn't pay). Getting published is a form of assurance, but publication is not community. The world of print can be curiously cold, and after years and years at the desk sharing your work with the stern dead walls, you realize print alone will not warm your room. You realize you need a real and breathing community: a gang of believers to be inspired by, to inspire.
I wish to continue writing, but I can't go it all alone anymore. I need to share myself. I'm ready.
My application was passed over and I persevered alone, managing somehow to complete a new novel and then turn my attention to Date of Disappearance, my illustrated limited edition book of stories now accumulating support on USA Projects.
Having launched this fundraiser, I'm amazed to see (in a form I never anticipated) that "gang of believers" cohering around me after all. Turns out they were there all the time. I thank each and every one of them for their support, their community, their belief. If you'd care to join them, the fundraiser runs until two weeks from today. Any support is deeply appreciated -- and can earn you unique gifts!  http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance  

A Victory for the Small!

As reported by the New York Times today, St. Mark's Bookshop in New York has struck a deal with its landlord which will allow the store to stay open for business!
After many months of stalled negotiations and uncertainty about the bookshop's future, this is happy news. Independent bookstores like St. Mark's promise to quietly save our country from spiritual and municipal ruin, because the booksellers, at their best, are proponents of the most civilizing things in life: art, education, civic involvement, and the meaningful wasting of time (which can foment genius).
Yet independent bookselling is an enterprise fraught with risk, and at our present historical moment the systemic atmosphere in America is one almost entirely contemptuous of significant cultural undertakings like this. The corporate and online book-vendors can be boarish, destructive entities, with little or no accountability to communities, and fidelity to nothing but the dollar and whatever dross will stimulate its multiplication. By contrast, independent booksellers are in the business of knowing their neighborhoods, their clientele, and the clientele's particular tastes. They thereby do a profound service to their communities — and, by ripple effect, to the larger culture.
Vitality of the independents — of St. Mark's at this moment — means vitality for democratic culture itself, which begins in and consists of (what else?) neighborhoods!

Illustrated Story Collection News: Help Still Needed

The Date of Disappearance percentage bar held steady most of last week. Then within a single twenty-four-hour period it leapt seven percentage points! That was something to see, let me tell you, and it brought the remaining funds-to-raise down to the three-figure range!

-- GONNA BE CLOSE! --In a matter of days we will enter the final two weeks before United States Artists pulls the plug on this fundraiser. As fundraising goes, that is an extremely short period of time, which means help getting the word out and encouraging continued support is as critical as ever to this project's success.
Please make liberal use of the "Share" and "Embed" links beside my videos, the pass-along message included in my 10/16 update, and the Date of Disappearance Facebook page.
And buckle your seatbelts, it's gonna be close!!
-- OUR NEXT PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --Anyone who has pledged in the time between this fundraiser's launch and the close of next Saturday, November 5th will be eligible to receive …

A downloadable audio version of my short story "Windmills" in its entirety, including my personal audio greeting and dedication to YOU. Listen on your bike, in the car, or at the gym! This is story #3 in the collection. Here's a snippet:
"I came inside and I realized the whole drive home was a blank. Like it didn't happen. I couldn't remember starting the car, changing highways, listening to the radio, nothing. Have you ever had a feeling like that?"

  MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Nov. 5th
PLEDGE AT: http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance
Congrats to our latest Patron Extraordinaire, Taniya, whose name was just drawn from the hat! Taniya receives a spiffy and durable pocket journal by Moleskine. Look for it soon, Taniya, and enjoy!
With enduring gratitude, and with good hopes,—M
-- THE STATS -- Date of Disappearance Project Goal:             $4,760Amount Raised as of Today:             $3,928 (or 83%!)Remaining Amount to Raise:            $832Fundraising Days Remaining:            17

Pearlman Stories Stun

[image error] I can hardly express the joy -- and the renewed sense of literary justice -- that came to me upon learning that Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision made the National Book Award shortlist. It's an astonishing book, and deserves this recognition and more.

Here's my Oregonian review of Binocular Vision from last April:

"I never figured out how to forget," a narrator observes at the close of one of Edith Pearlman's masterful stories. The comment refers to the character's youth; it would also aptly describe what makes this story writer exquisite. Binocular Vision, the volume of new and selected Pearlman stories published by Lookout Books, graces readers with a near-dizzying range of people, eras, locales and situations -- a cornucopia so variegated yet consistently authentic that one can only deem it the result of decades spent observing and absorbing -- patient years of unforgetting.

Pearlman's attentions rove from a rabbinical poker group to an impulsive act of generosity in a riven Latin American country to the existential dilemmas of an aristocratic tomboy ("androgynous beyond repair"); from the international hodgepodge of a Jerusalem apartment complex to the thoughts of an executive toy manufacturer afloat in the Old World. One senses in literary work of this scope a quality of beautiful yearning, as if the author's expansive reach itself acknowledges impossibility: whoever observes so much so well can never get it all down.

Alfred Kazin once wrote, "Literature seeks to reclaim the world that is constantly receding from us ... to reconcile us to life by showing that it is not limited to the actual data of existence." Pearlman's individual stories, in their variousness -- with nary a false note -- stay what normally streams away, showing us life with virtuosic subtly and effect. As for that knee-jerk complaint against story collections -- "Uneven!" -- let nobody file it here. These stories rise to cumulative impact as Pearlman furnishes vision after unified vision of persons adrift each in his or her discrete selfhood. Which is not to call her characters self-absorbed -- only to note that Pearlman's is a world of wanderers, floaters, individuals incontrovertibly aloof, whatever their entanglements, and that all of her people are spookily awake to the inescapable and isolating vulnerabilities of life.

In "Inbound" a child momentarily loses her parents on a busy Boston street. "Her life would be lived in the world ... She foresaw that. She foresaw also that as she became strong her parents would dare to weaken. They too might tug at her clothing, not meaning to annoy." In "The Non-Combatant," about a terminally ill doctor vacationing with family on Cape Cod in the final days of World War II, repeated references to "the pain" of his cancer -- always obscure, nonlocalized -- seem meant to suggest the pains of living, and when we read the following: "How lucky he had been in her, and in their children, and in his work -- and yet how willingly he would trade the pleasures of this particular life for life itself," we find something far more identifiable -- because more fundamental -- than mere selfishness. In "Mates" a couple mysteriously arrive in a town, quietly raise a family for years and leave without warning or goodbye once their children have grown. "None of us knew them well. They didn't become intimates of anyone. And when they vanished, they vanished in a wink." And in "How to Fall," about a silent straight man to a wisecracking TV personality, we see the mute comic's glum face isolated night after night in the black-and-white screen, abstracted from his fellow humans who tune in at home -- though never for him.

Every Pearlman story gives us moments observed with profound attentiveness, each so scrupulously rendered they induce a readerly state analogous to the ideal writerly one described by Henry James: "The condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it." That, as literary production goes, is surpassingly rare. Call it a blessing and start reading Binocular Vision. --M. Allen Cunningham

"Pleased to Meet You" -- M. Allen Cunningham's Video Ice-Breaker

My illustrated limited edition story collection, Date of Disappearance, is currently 74% funded with 26 funding days remaining.

To offer prospective supporters some getting-to-know-you time, I made this short video. I answer four basic questions, and you get a peek at my writing studio, my bookshelf, and a thing I like to call my "valuable downgrade."

The fundraiser has come this far thanks to 47 generous supporters. But this is a fund or bust deal. If the goal is not reached by the deadline, the project receives no aid. I'd love to have your support (and send you some special gifts!). It's a no-risk proposition, it's tax-deductible, and you get something unique in return (autographed books, in some cases).

For more about Date of Disappearance and how you can help, please see my project video: www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance.

Thanks for your consideration.
-- M. Allen Cunningham

From a Letter to a Fellow Writer Who "Hit it Big" and Got Worried About Authenticity

Dear ______,
I live by the belief that we artists have got to stick together, and I admire anybody like yourself who would devote so many years, paid or not, to the production of something as invaluable — if unquantifiable and increasingly anachronistic — as a serious literary work.
I have no doubt that your new book is well worth reading, and well worth the astronomical sum paid for it. I take no issue with writers being well-paid. I'm all for that! What's troublesome, to you and me both, is the conventional logic of big publishing we're already seeing at work here: a logic which holds that to discuss books in terms of the author's payment is a valid or worthwhile way to talk about literature. Culture, according to such logic, is little more than a byproduct of commerce — the better-paid the book, the more worthy of attention.
We object to this. It is success-cult nonsense, long obtaining in society rags and in those Manhattan cocktail parties we read about in the New Yorker, and it spills more and more into respected literary discourse and threatens to become a lingua franca.
"How big was the advance?""Seven figures.""Well! I should read it, shouldn't I?""Oh, you will. Like every other reader in the Western Hemisphere."
In reality, as experience has taught you and me well, literature flowers and fructifies under a different sun. Its servants toil alone, usually at the edge of things. Most of the world's deserving works are fated to exist in undeserved obscurity while the authors do wage-labor in factories, retail stores, or academe — or simply scrounge for food. You and I both recognize that 99.8 percent of all worthy literary creators live by this truth, a truth existent through the ages.
And you believe as passionately as I do, I know, that young writers — or old, still struggling ones — ought to be championed in their wildly impractical, unlucrative pursuits, even if the dominant discourse is all about cash, film deals, and bestseller lists.
Our art lives nowhere but in the work itself, the words on the page. The art surely does not live in whatever gross sum may be paid for it by the hit-hungry New York publishers.
You know this, and that's why you're worrying. Be comforted that you know it. Knowing it, you'll stay the course.
Yours,—M  http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance