Emily M. Danforth's Blog, page 63
January 4, 2013
The B Word
Me and Gin decided it ain’t cool to call each other bitch. I nod and nod at her, I want her to know I agree, but inside I am forlorn, I will have to find another word that sounds so powerful. Bitch like a bull stamping its hooves, bitch like a broom after a crow.
From “Me and Gin,” by Lindsay Hunter, in her forthcoming collection, Don’t Kiss Me (FSG, July ‘13)
January 3, 2013
My Debut Year of Novel Publication: On Luck and Gratitude. (Luckitude? Gratiluck? Nah.)
Probably most of you reading this know by now that my novel—my debut novel— The Miseducation of Cameron Post, came out in 2012. Which is now officially (if somewhat unbelievably) last year. It still amuses me to say that it came out, not that it was published, because it’s a great big coming-of-GAYge story, so I often conjure this image of my hardcover book opening a closet door and saying I’m here, I’m queer, world: now read me. (But then you know me: easily amused.)
Given that just one year ago, at the bright-eyed beginning of 2012, I was no more than 6 months out of one graduate program in creative writing (and several years more out of another), I knew a helluva lot of talented and dedicated writers with novels or memoirs or story collections in various states of completion, and many of these writers were actively pursuing some piece of the publishing process—revising a final draft for submission; landing an agent; actually selling their books or winning book contests. Because I knew so many of these “early-career” writers so intimately, called lots of them friends, I felt all the more lucky to have my own novel coming out with much support from a fantastic imprint. And really, I mean that, I felt lucky—as in here’s me acknowledging some pretty incredible great good fortune.
Don’t misunderstand me: I worked hard on my novel for a long time (years of research and drafting, workshopping and revising), and before I’d even started writing it I had dedicated even more years to reading and writing and studying fiction in general. And during that time lots of people encouraged and supported me. And what’s more, I had writtena novel that I truly cared about, a novel that attempted to get at different pieces of the muck and matter of human existence that baffle or enchant me. I had followed Toni Morrison’s sage advice to the letter—“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet,” she said, “then you must write it.” So I did. I wrote, for me, that book.
But here’s the thing: it’s not like anyone really deserves a book deal, not ever. Even if you’ve worked hard on a project, and even if lots of knowledgeable people think that project has lots of worth, even then: deserve is a tricky word. People deserve all kinds of things—life, liberty, security. But book deals? There’s no such thing as deserving something that’s so privileged an endeavor in the first place. Roxane Gay has written smart things about this several times on her blog and tumblr. Here’s one of those times: http://roxanegay.tumblr.com/post/33168431829/we-are-all-going-to-be-okay)
Or, perhaps you object to that definition of deserve as too reductive, and you believe, instead, that rather than no one really deserving publication, lots and lots of writers deserve it, are “worthy” of it (a gross word, to be sure), many more so than it will ever happen for through traditional means (which perhaps helps to explain why so many writers are pursuing other paths to publication). But however you choose to look at the matter, getting each Lego in the “traditional path to publication” (we would probably have to talk about what that looks like, anyway) to click into place to build to the day when you can walk into a bookstore or a library and see your book on a shelf (if that day even matters to you—and maybe it doesn’t, but it did to me) requires a frack ton of serendipity—and just talent or even dogged perseverance and talent probably aren’t enough to make those Legos to fit together, not always, not usually—not without luck, anyway.
I’m absolutely a member of the camp that thinks you can make some of your good luck through various means—usually just knowing people, really, is what it comes down to: having relationships with lots of different people who are interested in different things. Surrounding yourself with people who are actually invested in the world, and who are, you know, doing something interesting with their days: never a bad place to start. You really can’t overvalue the benefits of “knowing some folks,” and clearly I’m saying nothing new here. There are buckets of examples of now successful (depending on how you define that) or known artists who began by making art and talking about art with friends who were also making and talking about art. And often these people were pretty young when all of this was happening and maybe they were sharing an apartment somewhere or living on the same floor in some dorm, going to each other’s shows and readings and openings. And this is true for filmmakers and writers, visual artists and dancers. You get to know somebody, y’all like some of the same shit, this person knows these other people, and now you’re one person removed from Kevin Bacon. That’s how it works.
And then hopefully whatever art it is that you’re making keeps getting better, while at the same time the number of people you know keeps increasing, and boom, soon enough: good things come clicking along.
But even so: you’d have to be very foolish indeed not to recognize and be immensely thankful for the great good luck of getting a book deal (or whatever is the equivalent to a book deal in your field), and to recognize that good luck PDQ, and then also to recognize fortuity in any related successes to come; all the more so if you’re surrounded by writers who haven’t had such good fortune. Well, not yet, anyway. I have this feeling that 2013 is going to be a very, very lucky year for some of my writer friends, perhaps partly as a cosmic eff you to the cliché of its unlucky numerical status. Nothing better than a cosmic eff you.
Of course, even if you do get your book on the shelf in that store or library, well but that’ll be just enough to satisfy you for that week, right? Maybe even only that day. As a good friend and fellow novelist (many times over) once put it to me (much more elegantly than I’m about to paraphrase)—You spend the weeks leading up to your publication worrying about the critical reviews, any actual or even just potential unhappy or unsatisfied readers. You worry over the kinds of “talking” about your novel that you imagine taking place, and how you can’t, of course, even know about all that talking, let alone have any control over it. It’s very unsettling to think of these strangers just, you know, having strong and possibly negative opinions about this thing you created (and loved in solitude for so long), and you can drive yourself crazy thinking about any of that too much, especially when people are drawing your attention to some of those instances—to a blog post or a book review from some professional outlet, or even just linking to you in a tweet. But, here’s the thing: pretty soon after your book comes out, maybe one month, maybe a few, but soon enough, those thoughts will be replaced by these thoughts—Hey, I published a novel. Doesn’t anybody care? Why isn’t anyone talking about this novel I published? I PUBLISHED A NOVEL! And that very unhappy and unfulfilling place is pretty much where you’ll stay unless you focus on the next book, which is what you should be doing, anyway.
So, of course the other thing you have to realize in regard to luck and book publication is, is that no matter how crazy-making worrying about what people might be saying about your book might be, you’re damned lucky if anyone anywhere is talking about your it at all—ever. Really. Ever. Whether that talk lasts for just its release month or for the whole year after: we humans find plenty of things to occupy our talk time, and one debut novel by a virtual unknown probably isn’t going to garner the rapt attention of the masses for very long. Or, you know, forget rapt attention of the masses—let’s start with being thankful for even the someone sparing your book the span of attention necessary to peruse a five sentence synopsis. Given all of this: Holy Crisco have I had more than my share of good fortune when it comes to people paying attention to my book this year. The amount of “talk” about tMoCP has been pretty astounding to me, and I’m endlessly grateful for it (I’ll be more specific about my gratitude in a minute), and, frankly, every last bit of it has the golden glint of serendipity about it.
Since my novel was officially released on February 7th of last year, and since that wasn’t a “hard pub-date” (oh the terminology one picks up), and so there were copies of my book—galleys and otherwise—out in the world weeks before that, from the shiny first day of January 2012, I was hearing from various folks—friends and family and perfect strangers—through various means—status updates and emails and tweets and blog posts—about my book. And what’s more: I continued to hear from more people about my book for the rest of the year. And I felt incredibly lucky about that each and every single time it happened. I really did: I don’t know how else to say it. Sure, like all years anyone has ever had, ever, my 2012 had its ups and downs, but in terms of book publication, what that looked like, what that felt like? A year awash in magnificent good fortune—fortune that I was, that I am, keenly aware of and so, so grateful for. It’s head-scratchingly wonderful. It makes me shrug my shoulders and grin pretty stupidly.
I heard another novelist recently talk about the publication process as being an endless series of mile markers, the vast majority of which you can’t even see, you don’t even realize that you want to get to, until you’ve made it down the road to what you originally thought was your destination. You know, so if your destination, you thought, was “book deal,” well it’s only from there that all these other destinations come into focus—and then, so very quickly, start to seem really, really important. Which is nuts, because you didn’t even know they were there until you crested that hill and pulled in for a rest and now—what, wait a minute: there’s this new thing that I should be trying to get or hoping that I get or working to make happen. (And, disconcertingly, while “write next book” is undoubtedly among those mile markers, it’s typically not the only one. It wasn’t for me, nor for most of the debut novelists I’ve gotten to know this year.) This is an apt metaphor for life in general, I know, for our perpetual striving as humans, reaching for the next rung and all that. And I suppose it’s true for any moment of career advancement, really, or artistic endeavor, any process that’s supposed to have some tangible and final outcome, some moment of: “Here it is! This is the thing! Ta-DA!” What the reveal reveals, I suppose, for the writer or artist, is that such things rarely feel final at all. We imagine, I think, or I imagined, anyway—even dreamed of—some satisfying sense of finality, of completion, of ending that would come when I published my book—accomplishment is maybe the word I’m looking for. And it’s there, sort of, a sense of having “done this thing,” but it doesn’t feel at all final, mostly because there’s now those other mile markers off in the distance, the ones I hadn’t thought about, hadn’t even known about, before—and it’s already time to get to driving toward them. But you know, even that feels pretty lucky to me. It’s lucky to have somewhere to drive to, isn’t it—something to move you forward? Heck, to move you anywhere? Isn’t this what we do? Not just to combat stasis, but to live, dammit, to live. And what’s more—to stretch this metaphor beyond what it can bear, surely, but I’ll do it—I feel like the great good fortune of this year has left me with a very full tank for getting there. Oh, you know there’s gonna be some detours and some crappy roads and probably a flat tire, maybe a smoking engine, the long muddle of road construction (as you can see I am just owning this metaphor now, taking it to the bitter end), but no matter—I’ve got destinations ahead, my friends, and it seems to me that once I’ve arrived at them there’ll be others further on up the road.
Do you remember that fairly annoying Geggy Tah song from some years back? “Whoever You Are?” You know, that really ear-wormy one that you’ll be singing for days—days—if you click this link (and make it through the old school traffic movie that opens the video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2UUvG-XuQs ?
Well maybe you should click it, friends, and just embrace the ear-worm like me, because I was singing some version of that song for pretty much the entirety of 2012. Sometimes I sang it silently, sometimes I belted it out, humming while sitting at my computer, whistling while walking across campus, but oh I’ve been singing it. I’ve been singing it lots. The lyrics regarding changing lanes while driving in my car, less applicable to my book publication (unless you want me to stretch the road metaphor even more, here, and I don’t think you do), but All I want to do is to thank you… And Whoever you are—I want to thank you—oooh, whoever you are: I want to thank you. Those lyrics work—those are wholly apt.
There are lots and lots and lots and lots (I can do this all day) and lots of people I want to thank for being a part of my debut year. I’ve pretty much just been holed up all year here in Gratitude Cavern—it’s roomy and temperate and quite lovely in general. And I’ve been singing that song in here, day after day—sometimes many times a day. But I’ve mostly just been singing it to me. I mean, the printed acknowledgments in the back of tMoCP are unforgivably long (no worries—I acknowledged that fact), but to quote Lydia from God’s Promise, they’re “just the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to people I need to thank. The people mentioned on those pages were all the people I wanted to thank before the book came out, but a year into its life: forget about putting all my additional thanks into a few typed pages. Like I said: Gratitude Cavern over here.
The thing is, unlike the person mentioned in the song lyrics, I don’t have to wonder about the identity of some of y’all who I’d like to formally thank for being so wonderful and supportive, so encouraging, so endlessly enthusiastic this year. And for not just doing it once, but for keeping it up, for continuing to share in my excitement and surprise, my continued debut year reverie. I know you—maybe I know you very well, maybe just a little bit—but you’re not a stranger letting me change lanes on the highway. Rather, you’re former school chums and new colleagues, past teachers and past drinking buddies, old swim teammates and family members, too. And all year you’ve done things like share status updates about reviews or book news, post photos of places you spotted CAM POST “in the wild;” send me emails or handwritten notes (on such classy stationery!) offering congratulations and best wishes—so often telling me that I’d made you proud. Truth is, of course, y’all have made me proud—proud to know you, to have you in my life—even if it’s so often just my online life these days. And since so many of you folks in my life are writers, too—awesome, fantastic, wonderfully talented writers (and/or artists of other kinds)—I’m sure that sometimes this year of head-scratchingly good fortune for tMoCP was occasionally kind of annoying to hear about. Maybe you think it’s embarrassing or even obnoxious for me to admit that, but I was a writer without a published novel for much longer than I’ve been one with, and I want you to know that it means a lot—a whole lot—for y’all to have celebrated with me this once-in-a-lifetime year, be it occasionally annoying to you or not. Y’all are good people and don’t I know it.
However, like the song lyrics—just like them (except for, again, the driving part) there are also lots of people I don’t know at all who have been completely wonderful about my book this year. Before the book came out, when I thought of awesome things that might potentially happen after it did, never once did I anticipate that I’d hear personally from so many readers. I never expected that at all, and it’s happened time and again this year. I’ve laughed over emails from readers, gotten teary over them, shrugged my shoulders and grinned that stupid grin again. It’s been pretty fantastic. And there are many incredibly dedicated book bloggers to thank. And there are the people who have come to readings and events, the students I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with, the members of various book clubs who’ve hosted me and the professional folks at conferences and bookstores. There are the people of the great land of twitter, and the people who’ve “liked” the CAM POST facebook page, and then there are, well, the readers. Yes, those people: the people who’ve simply read the book—which, you know, to the author, isn’t a simple thing at all. It’s a monumental thing. It’s the stuff of fantasy, right there, the notion of someone actually reading your book. It’s really the thing. The only thing.
There just isn’t any possible way for me to do all this thanking personally and individually, not properly, anyway—not in a way that would satisfy me. I didn’t get my novel out into the world by myself, and I certainly haven’t watched it find its readers this year by myself. In short: y’all have been wonderful. The definition, really, of that word, in that you’ve left me full of wonder and admiration for your generosity and support and continued goodwill. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. I’ll never have another debut year, but I don’t think another could ever live up to 2012 anyway. Thanks so much for sharing it with me.
December 28, 2012
I make no secret of being fairly cheese obsessed; and clearly,...
I make no secret of being fairly cheese obsessed; and clearly, as a novelist, I’m rather book obsessed as well. So, when #bookcheese was trending on twitter earlier today, I couldn’t help but join in the book title/cheese name mashup fun. And it was fun. (The Old Man and the Brie was my personal best entry, I think.) And then the most incredible thing happened and Tillamook Cheddar favorited my #bookcheese take on the Italo Calvino classic If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler. And I thought that was the best thing that could ever happen on twitter ever, basically, to a cheese-lover like me, so I mentioned as much. But then, well, something even more incredible happened (see above photoset.) I think Tillamook Cheddar and I may actually be dating at this point. We’re courting each other, at the very least.
December 27, 2012
Some favorite bits from my annual (or almost annual) reading of...
Some favorite bits from my annual (or almost annual) reading of Patricia Highsmith’s classic THE PRICE OF SALT. Ugh: aren’t we all a little in love with Carol?
December 26, 2012
likeafieldmouse:
Tsuneaki Hiramatsu - Firefly Road (2012) -...
Tsuneaki Hiramatsu - Firefly Road (2012) - Slow-shutter photographs capturing fireflies in flight in a forest in Japan
December 22, 2012
"I spend seven or eight hours… each time I try to write. Most of that time is spent stalling, which..."
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Dave Eggers (via austinkleon)
This quote’s going around a lot, and I like it, but… who imagines writing on horseback? Camelback? Convertibles, windswept cliffs, lighthouses?
(via hobartpulp)
Hey, hey: some excellent holiday break reading picks, including...
Hey, hey: some excellent holiday break reading picks, including tMoCP! Woo-hoo!
(Click image for link to slideshow)
