Michael Lieberman's Blog: Mike Lieberman's take on reading and writing, page 5

Gabriel García Márquez: NOTAS DE PRENSA

Every reader must have a favorite story about an encounter with the books of the Colombian writer who died yesterday. Mine is not with A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLUTIDE or LOVE IN A TIME OF CHOLERA — though I loved them both — but with a collection of his newspaper columns NOTAS DE PRENSA. For many years García Márquez made his living as a journalist, and NOTAS is a collection of his reportage of political and social life in his native country. I remember a wonderful column about a visit paid him by the then Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme in which García Márquez wryly explained that what readers and critics thought of as magical realism was nothing more than his appropriation of everyday life on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. His conceit was that magical realism was a variant of realism — and who's to say he isn't right?

A.E., a character from THE LOBSTERMAN'S DAUGHTER

Here is a link to me reading a three minute short story about A.E., who appears in TLD and, along with Henrietta Markham, in another novel to be released in the fall: http://youtu.be/rUHqQrQSbvI This story is completely independent of TLD, but it will give you a sense of the many facets of A.E.

THE LOBSTERMAN'S DAUGHTER has (finally) gone to the printer's

Amazon says the book will be released tomorrow, April 15, 2014, which it will. The catch is that it has no books, and the Kindle version is not yet listed. And the posted description is incomplete. A shout out to Paul RUFFIN, director of the press, Ruthie IRVIN who has worked incredibly hard managing this project, and Nancy PARSONS, who did the cover and the interior drawings. I'm grateful to Brian Kenneth SWAIN, who read the ms and found a ton of typos that everyone else missed, and to Charles JOHNSON, who did the graphics for the family tree. Thank you, more to follow.

I'm getting organized for a Goodreads giveaway.

CHOOSING A GEORGES SIMENON MYSTERY

I confess to not being much of a mystery reader — a few Donna Leon novels, mostly at my wife's suggestion, over the past decade, and that's about it. But I did enjoy the diversion of Olen Steinhauer's spy novel THE TOURIST, and goaded by a recent NYT Book Review piece by retired supreme court justice John Paul Stevens which praised Simenon's mysteries and the vague memory of a piece about him in an old New Yorker, I decided to take the plunge. For those in the know Simenon's novels are the sliced bread of mysteries. The problem is that Simenon (1903-1989) wrote almost two hundred mysteries and a handful of literary (please don't ask me to define that word) novels. Where to begin? Call it the Ben and Jerry's syndrome — the classic dilemma of optimizers versus satisficers. Mostly by luck and instinct, I ended up with MY FRIEND MAIGRET, which features Maigret, his most famous detective. I have no idea where this one ranks in the pecking order. I'm about a quarter of the way through. So far it is interesting, but I'm not on the edge of my seat, not yet at least. Stay tuned, more to follow.

SHORT STORY BOOK CLUB

I belong to a monthly short story book club. It's been a great experience to learn from bright readers and to see how they approach short fiction. One can learn directly from experts and aspiring writers in workshops, courses and even MFA programs—and I don't deny the value of these—but it is a marvel to see the variety of nuanced interpretation of devoted, nonprofessional readers. Participation has helped me approach my own writing: there can be clarity without loss of subtlety, informality without clunkiness, wit without condescension.

We have devoted the last two months to our own short fiction and that too has been a revelation: such variety and imagination, not to mention sympathetic character development. And if all the stories weren't polished pieces "The New Yorker" would kill for, they were great attempts, many of them first attempts, to write what felt true to the author. There were lessons here too: good fiction is heavily dependent on patience, craft, attention to detail, and rewriting (and rewriting and rewriting).

WHEN THE MUSE DEMANDS TO BE HEARD: WHERE NOVEL IDEAS COME FROM

Surely there are as many ideas about inspiration as there are poets and writers. Poets, I think, learn to trust their intuition: they often talk about "received gifts" and report that they are no more than a scribe for an inner voice, the amanuensis of the heart. I have certainly had this experience with my own poetry.

Over time I have come to value and recognize the importance of the unconscious. What stirs beneath the surface and always out of reach feels to me like the source of all poetry and fiction — like the raw material that the conscious act of writing, the craft of writing, shapes (with more unconscious input) into a finished piece.

I mention all this because of a recent, almost surreal experience. I woke up at about four Sunday morning with a character in my head who needed to be heard. Pretty soon he was joined my another. The two forced me out of the sack and to my laptop (but not without an intermediate stop at the coffee pot). By midmorning the two characters had been joined by four others. They had decided on a locale and a venue and began to interact.

The experience was a totally unearned gift from the Muse, one for which I am grateful and over which I continue to puzzle: why me? why now? what is my obligation to the muse and to myself? Am I being asked to set aside my ongoing projects? All questions which bless me.

Self-Publishing — I've had a lot of queries about this.

Other than the role of ebooks in the publishing industry, nothing stokes the passion of bookies of every stripe (Meyer Lansky's ilk excluded) than self-publishing. Loved or loathed, it's here to stay. And done well, it's great.

First a little historical prospective: our greatest poet Walt Whitman self-published LEAVES OF GRASS. Not only did he set the type, he wrote his own reviews, sent out promo copies (the one to Emerson is the most famous), and remained his own best promoter. So there you have it.

Like everything else, from bit coins to YouTube do-it-yourself videos to creating your own photo album online to global warming, self-published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are here to stay. The book market, like every other market, is a messy, unruly, unpredictable affair with winners and losers. It involves luck (lots of it), imaginative marketing, and patience. And BTW, the internet is your friend.

But it also involves good books: books that are imaginative, well written, well edited, proofread, and—oh, how I hate to mention this—spell-checked.

The indie/small press world is a great place to be. Without it, talented writers might spend years simply trying to find an agent. So, go ahead, break a leg, wait a decent period, and write your memoir: HOW I BROKE MY LEG AND BROKE INTO PUBLISHING.